Daily Times

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would hardly be the happiest man in international politics right about now. No doubt he must have been smiling ear to ear when President Trump announced the historic breakthrough between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi just a few days ago, since all that was basically his doing on the ground even if it was Trump’s idea, but it’s understandable what has happened to that smile now since the domino effect that USA, UAE and Israel were expecting hasn’t exactly materialised and it doesn’t seem that other Gulf states are itching to follow in the footsteps of the Emirates.

You can bet that the first thing he expected to hear when he jetted from Israel to Saudi Arabia a few days ago, on his so called landmark Middle East tour, was that Riyadh was ready to shake hands with Tel Aviv and get on with the trade deals, arms sales, intel sharing and all that. That is, after all, what pretty much everybody else in the world was thinking as well so he can be forgiven for going a step further. But the Saudis tied any movement on the matter of formally recognising Israel, even though they have maintained all sorts of covert contacts for years just like the Emiratis did ahead of their deal, to a final and peaceful settlement of the Palestinian problem Pompeo must have felt like he literally hit a brick wall. And, of course, the boss would not have taken it well back at the White House.

Bad as that was, there was still hope since the US secretary of state was headed to Bahrain next, the tiny country that was the first among the Arabs to welcome the UAE-Israel deal. Yet Manama, too, not just brought in the Palestinian question again but said in no uncertain terms that normal relations with the Jewish state would only come when the two-state solution is a reality and East Jerusalem is the capital of an independent Palestinian state. That, if anything, is one step forward to steps back for the US. And what seemed, from Washington’s point of view at least, like a major foreign policy scoring point so close to the election seems fast running out of steam. The reason is that the cleavage in the Middle East is very deep and it takes more than an erratic president with an unpredictable foreign policy and a son-in-law heading everything about the Arabs to settle the Israeli-Palestinian blood feud. Still, who knows, we might still be in for a few more surprises between now and the US election in November. *