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The diplomatic agreement between Israel and two Arab countries negotiated by the Trump administration, while not seismic, could help clarify the configuration of power in the Middle East.
Amining the diplomatic arrangements signed by Israel and two Persian Gulf states, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, was neither the dramatic political skill of the Egyptian Anwar Sadat, whose trip to Jerusalem in 1977 would bring historic peace, nor the harrowing commitments of 1993. affected by Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader. The agreements signed on Tuesday may contain the promise of a new Middle East, but could also be seen as a clarification of an existing power configuration.
The old Arab order from which Sadat broke ranks with his “separate peace”, and within which Arafat maneuvered his stateless nation, has been visited by a series of shocks from which it has not recovered, from the US invasion of Iraq to the Arab Spring and the conversion of once strong states into arenas of civil war, more acute problems in the time of Covid-19. Amid the ruins, Sunni leaders, anxious at their perception of Iran’s rise and the erosion of US interest in the region, have found in Israel a strategic ally, perhaps even a guarantor of security.
For many years, tacit understandings between Israel and the Sunni powers were based on a system of subtleties in which expressions of loyalty to the idea of Palestine as a legitimizing principle of the Arab order were balanced by considerations of national interest. At this less subtle moment, the Palestinian issue, its internal divisions, the quest for national dignity, settlements and territorial negotiations, could be shaped by an even more direct calculation of advantage among the states of the region.
With its ecumenical promise, the “Abraham Accords” also highlight the power of internal factors in US foreign policy. President Donald J. Trump has presented his pacification as a populist alternative to the “endless wars” written by American “globalists”, while affirming his Christian Zionist supporters and adding a profitable account to the art of government settlement book. in United States. These negotiations could not have been easy to conclude. And it will be the challenge for the Trump administration to convert what might seem like a transaction, a “hegemonic peace” or military alliance against Iran, into a broader regional design, aligning the arrangements of pure power with a principle of legitimacy upon which a new order could be defined.
It was under the Truman Balcony in the White House that the agreements were signed. Harry Truman was the president who recognized the new state of Israel in 1948. And despite all the evidence associated with Israel’s navigation throughout the decades since then, the formal recognition by these Persian Gulf states speaks of Israel’s perseverance, which it had been on, it incorrectly assumed that its definition of security would preclude regional acceptance. Also for the Gulf states, whose diplomatic flexibility has allowed these vulnerable countries to prosper, the agreements must bring a measure of historic satisfaction. Other Gulf states may recognize Israel, engaging in what promise to be mutually beneficial economic ties, and other countries in the Greater Middle East could follow.
For a region in twilight, with countries cascading between order and anarchy, a regional environment divided by the rival designs of its major powers, and an international system in crisis, the agreements could provide the merit of clarifying the landscape of power in the world. Middle East, itself a stabilization mechanism. However, without the “escape clauses” of a tacit system, the leaders of the region and those who seek the expansion of agreements in more distant places will have to take care that alliances of nuances, those that adapt to competing agendas that exist within the context of a general strategic consensus, Not to be replaced by rigid coalitions, self-propelled in the name of unity towards new forms of insecurity. On any reading, it seems likely that Israel’s integration into the security architecture of the Arab world will deepen.
Bradford R. McGuinn is a Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies in the Department of Political Science at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami..
