Are the Israeli deals thanks to Trump?

On Tuesday at the White House, in Washington, the so-called “Abraham Accords” were signed, the agreements with which Israel normalized relations with two Arab Gulf countries, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The ceremony was also attended by President Donald Trump, who in recent weeks has made no secret of his satisfaction at having favored the agreement, which he defined “Dawn of a New Middle East”. Shortly before, his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, had described the accords as “a huge and historic step towards a stable and peaceful Middle East”, while Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and his senior adviser, had spoken of “a brilliant »For the peoples of the region.

The importance of the role of Trump and his administration in reaching the agreement has been at the center of a great debate for days: there are those who argue that Israel and the Arab Gulf countries have done it all alone, and there are those who believe that without Trump nothing would have been accomplished. This is an important issue, especially since there is a vote in the United States in November, and Trump is trying to show himself as a president capable of achieving important results in foreign policy, despite the disappointments of the last four years.

It is not easy to give a certain answer: the negotiations that led to the normalization of relations between Israel and the Emirates and Bahrain took place in secret.

It was known that the Israeli government had long ago initiated informal relations with the Arab Gulf countries – never formalized due to the Israeli refusal to allow the creation of a Palestinian state – but it did not imagine that the normalization announcement would arrive in the course. Of summer. The US government said the talks between the parties were accompanied by mediation by Jared Kushner, who deals with the Middle East for the Trump administration, but few details are yet known about how they have developed over time, such as is known. little about the role of Kushner and his associates in the negotiations.

Jared Kushner (AP Photo / Evan Vucci)

Starting from this premise, a few things can still be said.

The first is that the deals are clearly a victory for Trump. As Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator, also wrote, the Trump administration had aimed since 2017 to strengthen US relations with the Arab Gulf countries, despite their authoritarian regimes and crimes committed against dissidents. . like the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to many journalistic inquiries assassinated by order of the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a great ally of Trump. Likewise, Trump had always backed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, among other things, with his plans to annex part of the West Bank.

Both positions were motivated in part by the president’s desire to isolate and confront more harshly with Iran, a country that Trump’s United States had identified as its main enemy in the Middle East, and towards which they had initiated the policy of the call. “Maximum pressure” (that is, isolating Iran to the point of forcing its leaders to negotiate a new nuclear agreement, more favorable to the United States, to replace the one negotiated by Obama from which Trump had withdrawn).

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From this point of view, the conversations that led to the Abraham Accords may have been aided by Trump’s policies in recent years. By polarizing the confrontation with Iran – and at the same time regaining relations with Netanyahu and the Arab Gulf countries, which deteriorated during the last years of the Obama presidency – Trump may have brought the parties involved in the agreement closer together, making it more acceptable for all to make public. contacts that already existed.

From left to right: Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, United States President Donald Trump and United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, during the signing ceremony of the “Abrahamic Accords” at the White House on September 15, 2020 (AP Photo / Alex Brandon)

However, in order to assess the size of Trump’s victory and his merits in reaching the agreements, there are two other things to consider: understanding how important and historic the normalization of relations between Israel and the two Arab Gulf countries is, and how much The intervention of the Trump administration in the talks was the result of genuine diplomatic skill or the result of other events.

Regarding the first point, to get one big me important Diplomatic victory, as Trump has been suggesting for weeks, it is necessary that the solution found is really a solution to a relevant dispute: and not everyone agrees that this is the case.

The agreement, which many analysts more correctly define as “normalization of diplomatic relations”, is not a “peace agreement”, as Trump argued: the UAE and Bahrain have never fought a war with Israel, and for several years both they were very close to the Israeli anti-Iran government. The Abraham Accords are not comparable in importance to the peace agreements – this time, peace, and historical ones – that Israel signed with Egypt and Jordan in 1978 and 1994 respectively. And above all, they do not resolve the main dispute that until now had prevented normalization. relations, that is, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The text of the agreements, released only after the signing of Tuesday’s ceremony at the White House, does not even mention the point that had been the most discussed so far and that it was thought could end in the agreement: that is, the promise Israeli to give up annexation. of the West Bank (a subject on which, however, already in mid-August there were three different versions, one American, one Israeli and one Emirati).

Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator, wrote that assessing the significance of the agreement would be easier if the Trump administration “did not announce it as the most significant diplomatic achievement of the century.” With Trump’s re-election campaign in November, and amid a spate of bad news and even worse polls, it is clear why the administration felt it was worth inflating the meaning of the deal. “Things could change if Arabia joins in. Saudi, the most important and influential Arab country in the Persian Gulf, to normalize relations with Israel: for the moment, however, this scenario seems far away.

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Regarding the second point, that is, how much the Trump administration’s intervention in the talks was the result of true diplomatic skill or other facts, an interpretation given in recent days seems to downplay the role of the president as a determining factor to achieve of the agreements.

Journalists Michael Crowley and David Halbfinger argued about the New York Times That Trump’s presence at the signing ceremony of the agreement was a kind of favor that Netanyahu and the Emirati and Bahraini governments returned to the US president, as a kind of thanks for a series of previous decisions. Netanyahu had long been in debt to Trump, who had supported him during the last deep crises, both because of the precariousness of his governments and because of the ongoing corruption process against him in Israel. In recent years, among other things, Trump had recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, an area bordering Syria and disputed with the Syrian regime, and had presented a peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict heavily skewed in favor. . From Israel.

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Even the Arab Gulf countries, wrote the New York Times, they were in debt to Trump, especially for the decision to withdraw the United States from the nuclear agreement negotiated by Obama, which they had always opposed since it would have resulted in the reduction of sanctions on Iranian oil. Trump had also shown his almost unconditional support for the aggressive policies of the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which most likely on other occasions would have been criticized by the US government (for example, on the assassination of Khashoggi and the embargo against Qatar).

Trump together with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaz and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al Sisi in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 21, 2017, during the inauguration of a new “center for the fight against extreme ideologies”: the luminous sphere that Trump is playing with an absorbed expression is actually a kind of button used to symbolically turn on the screens of the new center (Saudi Press Agency via AP)

In addition to previous debts, Israel and the Arab Gulf countries may have agreed to exaggerate Trump’s role in the deals to secure him a diplomatic victory and try to favor his re-election in November. In fact, it is no mystery that these governments fear that a return to power by the Democrats could lead to a new rapprochement of the United States with Iran, as had happened during the Obama presidency. Joe Biden, a Democratic candidate, has publicly supported the Abraham Accords, but has never hidden his opposition to Trump’s Middle East policy, especially his strict closures on Iran.

Beyond all considerations, it is difficult to say whether Trump’s attempt to present himself as a skilled mediator will succeed in changing the votes before the November election. The impression is more than yes, especially taking into account the enormous internal problems that the United States is experiencing at the moment, and that have put the government in great difficulties, including the coronavirus epidemic and the protests of the “Black Lives” movement . To import “.