Victories do give way to ‘solutions’ to foreign crises. We may be witnessing one right now.
Joe Biden did seem earnest in his efforts to build upon Donald Trump’s successes with the Abraham Accords. When his administration wasn’t gratuitously antagonizing Saudi Arabia, for example — a campaign that resulted in more humiliations for Washington than Riyadh — the former president courted and coaxed the Kingdom. It was a half-hearted initiative, though, and the Middle East knew it.
“In practice, the biggest problem the administration has had is persuading its partners of its commitment,” the geostrategic Jon Alterman wrote for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Many factors led the region’s actors toward that sort of trepidation, but none more so than the administration’s efforts to resurrect the Iran nuclear deal.
Barack Obama only ever wanted a nuclear accord so he could engineer America’s exit from the region. Why wouldn’t Biden pursue a similar strategy? So, the Middle East’s cagey operators hedged their bets. The Middle East started to welcome Iran back in from the cold, and Israeli-Arab normalization initiatives stalled.
For a while, it seemed as though Trump would fail to heed the lessons of his own first term as he, too, pursued what looked like an endless diplomatic dance with Iran’s danseuses. In addition, the president’s drive to revise the status of the Palestinians in Gaza — a project he talked about loudly enough that it was inconveniently heard on the so-called “Arab Street” — limited the region’s aspiring liberalizers’ freedom of action. Politics happens in the Arab world, too.
In the early months of the Trump administration, Israel’s war in Gaza appeared stalemated. It would not result in Hamas’s extirpation from the Strip while returning the thorny question of Palestinian sovereignty to the region’s front burner. Iran seemed the likely imminent beneficiary of sanctions relief, which it would swiftly commit to rebuilding its terrorist proxies. So, the Abraham Accords looked set to muddle along with little hope of expansion. If these conditions prevailed, the fragile edifice might come apart entirely.
It was then that the “12-day war” broke out. Operation Rising Lion took the fight Israel waged against Iran’s “six armies” to the head of the snake. The war culminated in American airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear targets, setting the program back by some significant measure. The war ended in an unambiguous defeat for the mullahs. It took the prospects of a nuclear accord that would have awarded Iran with the kind of power and regional influence it enjoyed at the end of Obama’s term off the table. The war served as evidence that the de facto U.S.-Israel alliance was durable. Thus, the region concluded that Jerusalem could count on Washington’s patience to do what it must do inside the Gaza Strip.
Israel is arguably the region’s dominant military power today, and the United States isn’t going anywhere. With that, Trump restored the conditions that produced the Abraham Accords in the first place.
As a consequence, the diplomatic concordat is growing once again. On Wednesday, Semafor’s Ben Smith broke the news that West Africa’s Islamic Republic of Mauritania is “signing onto Abraham Accords with Israel.” Rather, it seems like the country is “taking a step” toward normalization with Israel for the first time since 2010, when the government in Nouakchott cut off relations with Jerusalem in response to a ground incursion into Gaza. But Mauritanian is taking these steps alongside “four other western African countries: Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, and Senegal.”
West Africa doesn’t seem to be alone. The post-Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria has broken entirely from its history as an Iranian vassal state. Interim Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa is expected to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House when Syria attends the U.N. General Assembly this September for the first time in decades. Given Trump’s fondness for ceremony, we can assume that it is there that the president would like to formalize Damascus’s ascension into the Abraham club.
The big prize is still the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Many dominoes must fall before Riyadh will formally drop its longstanding hostility toward the Jewish state, but Mohammed bin Salman’s regime shows few signs that he’s lost his taste for normalization. The larger the Abrahamic coalition grows, and the more battlefield successes Israel and the U.S. enjoy, the easier it will be for the Kingdom to side with the region’s strong horses.
If nothing else, the events of the last month have proved many a doomsayer wrong. Israel’s robust offensive operations against Iran’s terrorist guerrilla groups have not rendered it a pariah in its own neighborhood. Washington’s support for Israeli actions has not relegated it to backbencher status in its negotiations with its Middle Eastern counterparts. The attack on Iran’s nuclear program did not unleash an eschatological conflict in the region. Just the opposite, in fact; the judicious application of force against the true sources of regional instability is yielding to greater regional stability.
For those who believe that there is no role for hard power in the diplomatic process, that is an inconceivable outcome. The rest of us should have the courage to acknowledge the evidence before us. The shibboleth that maintains there are “no military solutions” to this or the other conundrum rests on the presumption that “military solutions” no longer beget victories. But victories do give way to “solutions” to foreign crises. We may be witnessing one right now.