Trump Bets on a Saudi Prince To Anchor His New Mideast Vision

President Trump’s Middle East do-over project is rife with opportunities, but it also contains pitfalls. Those can bury his vision of entering history as the man who fixed the region often considered the world’s most troubled. This week’s VIP visiting Washington has been the de-facto Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Mr. Trump treated him more like a king than a run of the mill foreign dignitary. The multi-day visit was complete with a state dinner featuring all the who-is-who in Mr. Trump’s circles. The pomp indicated the centrality of the desert kingdom to the president’s effort to rearrange the Mideast. Mr. Trump’s vision might go beyond the Abraham Accords of his first term, which saw peace treaties emerge between Israel and several Arab countries that had previously been hostile to the Jewish state. Those pacts were driven by the double threat of the Shiite Islamic Republic of Iran and the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. Now the president sees in the 40-year-old Saudi prince, widely known as MbS, a potential partner in confronting Islamist militancy and other world adversaries. While Mr. Trump endlessly praises the Saudi visitor, critics highlight the gruesome 2018 murder of the anti-regime activist and Washington Post contributor, Jamal Khashoggi. They also hark back to Saudi connections with the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.Ignoring them, Mr. Trump designated Riyadh a “special non-NATO” ally, promised to supply America’s advanced F-35 fighter jets to the kingdom, and threw in a civilian nuclear program as well. Yet unlike another American ally, Israel, the Saudi military has a poor battlefield record.Prince Mohammed is said to have smarted from his ill-fated near decade of war with the Houthis in Yemen. He is now reported to have become much more cautious than in the past about making large military moves. Nor is he quick to jump into diplomatic adventures, such as peace with Israel. As the custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, and as a top global oil producer, Saudi Arabia can alter the Arab and Muslim world. MbS seems mostly interested in the kingdom’s internal transformation, and his Vision 2030. Projecting regional power, though, is also important for the man who intends to rule Riyadh in decades to come. Mr. Trump’s eagerness to accommodate Prince Mohammed’s aspirations is part of an apparent strategy to weaken America’s chief Mideast enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran. “We want to help our allies” and “we want to change our enemies,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday alongside MbS. Perhaps even hinting at regime change at Tehran, he added, “if they don’t change, we’re going to be nasty, but hopefully we’re not going to have to be nasty.”Beyond the Mideast’s various pressure points, the region is part of a geopolitical chessboard. Russia and China are increasingly ignoring the recent United Nations Security Council resolution that revived mandatory global sanctions on Iran. Beijing buys Iranian oil in defiance of American sanctions, and Moscow hosts Iranian nuclear scientists. Mr. Trump insists that American-Israeli strikes in June completely erased the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. Tehran’s aspiration to become a nuclear-armed state was indeed set back significantly, but Iranian officials publicly say they plan to revive the program. They are also striving to replenish the arsenal and fighting spirits of proxies that were heavily damaged by Israel during the last two years. Buoyed by major successes, Mr. Trump is envisioning a new Mideast that would ally with America, rather than Communist China or Russia. Revamping the alliance that President Roosevelt forged with King Abdulaziz of the House of Saud in 1945 could become the cornerstone of that strategy. This week the president indicated to MbS that such an alliance would improve even further if Saudi Arabia normalizes relations with Israel. The Abraham Accords“What the Saudis did the last time around with normalization is what they’re doing now,” the executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Jonathan Schanzer, tells the Sun. In 2020, he explains, Riyadh encouraged its closest Gulf allies, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, to “take their first step. Once that was proven to not be a big risk to those countries, it signaled to the Saudis that they could do the same.”Riyadh was close to normalizing relations with Israel several times, but things got much more complicated after the attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Anger at Israel across the Arab world is stoked by a daily televised diet of Gaza misery, complicating any attempt at formalizing an alliance with the Jewish state.The Saudis now seem to encourage allies, including the world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia, to make peace with Israel. Riyadh could gauge reaction, and perhaps later add a diplomatic dimension to intelligence and other ties it already quietly maintains with Israel. “This process is only beginning,” the Arab world watcher at Israel’s Kan TV said Wednesday. Despite what MbS says, he added, “the Palestinians don’t top his agenda. But he has to listen to his public.” Mr. Trump says Riyadh will join the Abraham Accords before the end of the year. But first, apparently, the TV images of suffering Gazans need to fade from Riyadh’s television sets. GazaThis week the American-brokered cease-fire and Mr. Trump’s 20-point Gaza plan was endorsed by the UN Security Council. America’s ambassador at Turtle Bay, Mike Waltz, said the resolution represents “the first real step in generations towards forging a lasting peace for Gaza, for Palestinians, for Israelis, and for the entire region.”Russia and Communist China, which abstained in the vote, lamented that the resolution pushed the UN out of any Gaza role. The secretary general, Antonio Guterres, “is a big boy, he’s not one to feel slighted” by that nearly unprecedented council resolution, the UN chief’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, told the Sun. America quickly moved to establish a base to monitor the 20-point plan at the southern Israeli city of Kiryat Gat. There, troops from the United States Central Command hobnob with colleagues from Europe, Jordan, Egypt, and the UAE, as well as Israeli soldiers. The plan’s next stage, recruiting hundreds of troops from mostly Arab and Muslim countries to disarm Hamas, could prove to be tricky. At Gaza City and other areas that Israel withdrew from, Hamas is reestablishing its authority and is rearming. Fire exchanges occur almost daily as armed Palestinians attempt to challenge Israel Defense Force troops that remain behind a “yellow line” in half of Gaza’s territory. “There will be no future in Gaza as long as Hamas possesses weapons,” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, told reporters after the Monday vote at the Security Council. For Israel, the provision of Mr. Trump’s plan that calls for a demilitarized Gaza is crucial. The IDF is intent on enforcing it, even as Hamas officials make clear they would not disarm. Will the war be renewed? Lebanon and YemenA similar situation can be seen daily in Lebanon. One year after an American-brokered cease-fire, the IDF strikes daily at Hezbollah arms depots and kills top operatives. Once the jewel of all of Iran’s armed proxies, the Lebanese-based terror group lost much of its arsenal last November. Leaders, including its charismatic chief, Hasan Nasrallah, were killed. Many were injured in the now-famous beeper operation. Tehran, though, is eager to revive the Shiite organization’s military capabilities. According to American intelligence, Iran recently spent $1 billion on arms to Hezbollah, the Washington Post reported. Israel says it merely enforces the terms of the cease-fire. It called on the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah, but as yet it shows no sign of success in that mission. Instead Beirut, and a soon-to-be disbanded UN force in Lebanon, constantly denounce Israel for violating its neighbor’s sovereignty. Tehran is also refurnishing the Houthis’ ballistic missiles and drones arsenal. The Yemen-based group says it would cease attacking Israel and intercepting international shipping in the Red Sea while the Gaza cease-fire is maintained. Yet here, too, Israel is unlikely to tolerate the rearming of a terror group that can wreak havoc on its cities. SyriaPrime Minister Netanyahu and several top Israeli ministers and military leaders visited southern Syria on Wednesday with television cameras in tow. The visit was denounced by Damascus as a provocation. “Israel has an obligation to our Druze brothers and sisters,” Mr. Danon told the security council Wednesday, referring to recent Syrian army attacks on villages of the Druze and other minorities. He called on Damascus to show that it’s ready for a “real change, using action, not words.”While Mr. Netanyahu stepped on Syrian soil, Ankara named a top official, deputy foreign minister, Nuh Yilmaz, to be its ambassador to Damascus. Turkey was the power behind the overthrow of the former Syrian president, Bashar al Assad, and it now sees itself as patron of the current Damascus strongman, Ahmed al-Shara. Ankara’s hostility toward Israel raises concern at Jerusalem.Mr. Trump hosted Mr. Shara at the White House last week, signaling support for Syria’s acting president — as well as his backer at Ankara, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A member of the North Atlantic Treaty, Turkey is eager to buy the same American F-35s that Mr. Trump promised to Saudi Arabia this week. Unlike MbS, though, Mr. Erdogan is an avid supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and backs militant Sunni Islamists. Prince Mohammed introduced the new Syrian leader to Mr. Trump last winter during the president’s Riyadh visit. Now Mr. Shara’s Syria can become another flashpoint between Israel and a potentially hostile neighbor or, even worse, a clash with a NATO member.The American president will have his hands full as he attempts to douse all those potential fires. Mr. Trump, though, has reestablished America as the indispensable player in the Mideast. His bet on the reformist Saudi prince could deepen that status, and could become even more substantial if MbS cuts a peace deal with Israel.A formidable pro-U.S. regional alliance could well-serve America, and Mr. Trump might even win his coveted Nobel. Yet spoilers at Tehran — and as far as Beijing and Moscow — are seeking to undermine the president’s new Mideast swagger.

Trump Bets on a Saudi Prince To Anchor His New Mideast Vision

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