It looks like the Biden administration is in the process of abandoning the chance to bring the world’s largest Muslim country — Indonesia — into the Abraham Accords. That’s the heartbreaking scoop in a column by Caroline Glick, writing in Israel Hayom. She reckons it’s part of the new administration’s goal of shifting America’s priorities toward the Palestinian Arabs and the regime in Iran. That, in our view, is a strategic blunder.

It’s part of the broad policy of appeasement that was begun during the Obama administration and that President Biden is in the process of resuming — at the expense of, between Israel and the Arabs, the most promising peace process that we’ve seen in years. For America, an Israeli deal with Indonesia would, in our view, be a coup in respect of not only the Mideast but also Asia, where war clouds are scudding out of Communist China.

Our sense of this was formed over years of covering Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation and a bulwark against communism in southeast Asia. Our own visits have given us an abiding regard its people. It has the world’s largest Muslim population. One would think that would spell trouble for the Jewish State, and it is true that there have been no formal diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Yet relations have been burbling quietly for some time. That was marked in 2015 by the Diplomat magazine, which noted that Indonesia and Israel began interacting not long after the establishment of the Jewish State. In 1993, Prime Minister Rabin, visited Indonesia, met with President Suharto, and reckoned it was “important” to alert the nonaligned states to “the opportunities of cooperation with Israel.”

That it took until the Trump administration to recognize the possibilities in Indonesia is a startling fact. In its final weeks in office, according to Ms. Glick’s column, the Trump administration was on the “verge of securing” an Israeli-Indonesian “peace agreement.” Ms. Glick quotes “a former senior Trump administration official involved in the efforts,” which were part of the push for the Abraham Accords.

Mr. Trump’s adviser, Jared Kushner, and Adam Boehler of America’s International Development Finance Corporation, were handling things for us. Ambassadors Ron Dermer of Israel and Mohamed Lutfi of Indonesia were representing their respective countries. In December, Bloomberg News quoted Mr. Boehler as saying the U.S. could put up as much as $2 billion in aid. Indonesia would end its boycott of Israel.

“The advantages of peace between Israel and Indonesia for both sides are self-evident,” Ms. Glick writes. She reckons such a pact would pay “a huge dividend” to us in our “burgeoning cold war” with China. “We got the ball on Indonesia and Israel to the first-yard line,” Ms. Glick quotes a former official as putting it. She characterizes the Biden administration as having “dropped the ball on the ground and walked off the field.”

One of the things that is so galling about this is that it puts the lie yet again to the Biden administration’s praise for the Abraham Accords. The new administration also put a hold on the $23 billion sale of F-35s that the Trump administration had cleared to the U.A.E. She lays the decision to the “hyper-partisan politics” that “are a function of the administration’s ideological radicalism” and drive it to empower the PLO and Iran.

It’s hard to think of a more myopic maneuver. By the new administration’s own logic, there was at least a fig leaf of idealism in its turn against the Saudis. What, other than the chimeras of appeasement, can account for abandoning the effort to bring Indonesia to the Abraham Accords. It would no doubt be harder for President Widodo, no monarch, to do what, say, the U.A.E. did. We can’t help wondering whether Indonesia might proceed to make peace with Israel on its own.

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Drawing by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the artist.