Daily Times

For all its unorthodox and unprecedented initiatives in foreign policy, the Trump administration is going to be remembered most for the advances it made in the Middle East regardless of how many terms it serves. It effectively killed the Two State Solution – the olive branch that had kept the Palestinians in their place all these decades – when it officially recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announced moving the US embassy there, engineered an even more special relationship with Saudi Arabia than America is used to by giving them cover for anything they want provided they keep spending hundreds of billions on American arms, its intervention has made the Syrian civil war even messier and uglier than it was, and it has brokered a historic embrace between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel.

Yet it has reserved its most potent diplomatic poison for Iran. For all throughout the last four years, it has seemed that the US was itching to open another war front in the Middle East, this time with Iran. And it’s not as if nobody knows that both the Israelis and friends in the Gulf have been trying as hard as they can to convince him to push the button. Things almost came to a head when Trump, for some reason, decided to take out respected senior Iranian General Solemani in Baghdad, even though the commander was supposedly on his way to Saudi Arabia to try and mend ties and bring some sort of sanity back to the region.

Now, in what could be his last few days as US president, Donald Trump is shocking friends and foes alike with his obsession with re-imposing sanctions against Iran under the 2015 nuclear deal. And who exactly has been left red faced now that 13 out of 15 UNSC members have reportedly opposed America’s move? It’s nobody in Washington, if you ask anybody in the White House, because Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused European allies of “siding with the ayatollahs.” Now, even if the US is able to muscle this thing through, and indeed have sanctions reimposed, Europeans will begrudgingly play along for the time being but in the long term an important dynamic of this relationship would be badly hurt. Right now they’re just trying to delay the matter and hoping that Trump would lose the White House in November. All in all, Washington is not scoring any points with all this ahead of the election, it is only isolating itself. *