ROGER SIMON: A President Biden Could Wreck Trump’s Historic Middle East Peace.
Trump labeled the JPCOA the worst deal ever, and he had a point since it didn’t even allow for inspections at Iranian military sites, the very place nuclear experiments would be conducted. One wonders what it really was intended for.
Trump’s withdrawing from this deal created a realignment of forces. It reassured the Muslim Sunni countries that America had their backs against imperialist Iran and led to rapprochements and mutual recognition between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, the Sudan and, supposedly to come, the big player Saudi Arabia and a host of others.
In other words, Trump, working with Jared Kushner, then-special envoy Jason Greenblatt, Ambassador David Friedman and others, convinced the Arab world—that Sunni part anyway, already frustrated by Palestinian intransigence—that endless opposition to Israel was pointless for all parties and being good neighbors would benefit all in a host of ways from technology to tourism.
They signed on the dotted line.
Trump was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by several people for this. He certainly deserved it, but of course he didn’t win because he was, well, Trump. The global elites would never allow it, even if he resolved every conflict on the planet for the next few centuries.
But that’s of small moment. Prizes are, in the end, mostly irrelevant. What matters is that this most contentious region of the globe, since literally time immemorial, was finally in the process of calming down.
People talk about presidential legacies. Think about that one!
Enter a potential President Joe Biden.
He claims to want to rejoin the JPCOA. If he does on anything even faintly resembling its original terms—and he well could because he always supported it—the peace will unravel, if not in the proverbial “New York minute,” at a somewhat more languid “Arabian Nights” pace, but the results will be the same.
It’s quite obvious why Saudi Arabia and several others were waiting for the election before they hopped on. They watch American politics as closely as we do. It’s a small world, after all.
Ben Rhodes’ “Blob” can’t wait to return to a destabilized Middle East.