Team Trump has a stunningly upbeat Middle East 'vision.' Here's the problem.
What happened to Israeli-Saudi normalization?
» OPINION & ANALYSIS
Whatever your assessment of the Middle East, don’t worry. Donald Trump is going to fix the region. All those centuries of distrust and unrest? Fuggetaboutit! Just forget that he didn’t do so during his first term. Just trust us. He’s got this.
That was essentially the line line uttered from the White House briefing room lectern on Friday by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“President Trump will return to reemphasize his continued vision for a proud, prosperous and successful Middle East, where the United States and Middle Eastern nations are in cooperative relationships, and where extremism is defeated in the place of commerce and cultural exchanges.”
“This trip ultimately highlights how we stand on the brink of the ‘Golden Age’ for both America and the Middle East, united by a shared vision of stability, opportunity and mutual respect.”
Your correspondent spent some time this week preparing for the president’s upcoming Middle East trip by reading some recent expert analyses and scholarship on the state of the region. That research suggests it would be tough to find many regional experts who would say that stunningly upbeat vision is achievable right now — nor over the rest of Trump’s second term.
Certainly not one who has followed the situation in Gaza, and increasingly, in the West Bank.
Maybe not even the president of the United States himself, based on his recent comments about the region.
But to zero in on the main problem with the stunningly upbeat “vision”…
…The “cooperative relationships” part of the press secretary’s statement is easily and quickly undermined by the fact that Trump and his team are not, notably, going into his Middle East swing by talking about any tangible goals.
Nor are Trump administration officials raising the prospect of using the trip to convince senior Saudi leaders to move toward normalizing relations with Israel. In fact, they aren’t even saying that will be on the agenda while Trump holds a number of high-level meetings in Riyadh.
Trump and his aides once talked of normalization as the key to unlocking a different, more stable Middle East. So, if you take them at their word, nothing in Friday’s “vision” is: a) close to reality right now; nor b) possible without Israeli-Saudi normalization.
It’s often what elected officials — and their top aides — don’t say, rather than what they say, that speaks volumes.