How Biden Blew Up Middle East Peace
By moving from maximum pressure on Iran, to maximum pressure on Israel
Biden Administration Destabilized Middle East Peace
At RealClearPolitics, I write about how the Biden administration destabilized the Middle East — as foretold. A taste:
The Biden White House has sought to upend the Trump administration’s Middle East policy that had fostered the warming Israeli-Arab relations codified in the Abraham Accords; imperiled Iran’s mullahcracy through a maximum pressure campaign of which the Abraham Accords were one part, and overwhelming force, prudently applied, was another; and stood with the Jewish state against hostile and recalcitrant Palestinian Arab forces. The Trump administration rejected the idea that the conflict between the two sides was the key regional irritant, and that coddling the Palestinians while cudgeling the Israelis would produce peace.
The end result was that Iran and its proxies were deterred. There was regional stability. The benefits redounded to America’s national interest.
The billions in oil sales that Iran has raked in due to the Biden administration’s unwillingness to enforce sanctions, and the reward that it has provided the mullahs for their hostage-taking in still-more unfrozen billions, are but two indicators of a disastrous reversal in policy.
The administration has further empowered and emboldened Iran and its proxies through letting missile and drone sanctions lapse; de-designating the Houthis as a terrorist group; and lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars on Lebanese security forces flowing to Hezbollah, and to the Palestinian Authority and United Nations agencies like UNRWA – a portion of which flow, directly or indirectly, to Hamas in Gaza.
This is to say nothing of the Biden administration’s tapping of Qatar, which harbors Hamas’ leaders in luxury in Doha, as a major non-NATO ally, on par with Israel.
The Biden administration has lavished funds on, or partially supported, virtually all of the key actors whom the report cites as having contributed to Hamas’ attack.
These policies, which flow naturally from the administration’s radical national security and foreign policy personnel, are linked to its overarching ambition: to reprise the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a.k.a. the Iran nuclear deal, from which the Trump administration had withdrawn. The nuclear deal is seen as essential to making Iran the regional strong horse. Foreign policy analyst Michael Doran persuasively argues that the Israel-Saudi normalization that the Biden administration was pushing was designed to fail – it was a ruse aimed at boxing in Israel. Pursuing it in earnest would directly contradict the administration’s Iran policy. Meanwhile, from its start, the administration has shown itself to be hostile to the Abraham Accords.
This brings us to the White House’s hostility toward the Benjamin Netanyahu-led government in Israel.
Read the whole thing here.
Separately, Daniel Horowitz had me on his podcast for a long-form discussion on the Biden administration’s pro-Iran, punitive-to-Israel policy. Listen below: