https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/donald-trumps-foreign-policy-successes-bruce-thornton/
The recent agreements between Israel and two Gulf states mark yet another foreign policy achievement by the Trump administration. Five years ago no one could have anticipated that two more Arab states would normalize relations with Israel, with others to follow, perhaps even Saudi Arabia, “The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.” The decrepit “peace process” was stalled, and Barack Obama’s appeasing nuclear deal with the mullahs had left the region to the tender mercies of Iran and Russia. America was, as Obama put it, just one nation among others, “mindful of its imperfections.”
Then came Donald Trump, the amateur outsider whom the foreign policy establishment, trapped like a fly in amber by stale, failed paradigms, mocked and dismissed with predictions of existential doom from his foreign policy ignorance and bumbling. Yet Trump, like the “amiable dunce” Ronald Reagan, understood that the establishment’s narratives were endangering our security and interests. He brought some practical wisdom, common sense about human nature, and real-world experience to foreign policy, and recalibrated it with a few simple, Reaganesque principles: We win, they lose; America’s interests are paramount; and we should always be “no better friend, no worse enemy,” a foundational principle of foreign relations that Obama had turned on its head.
Trump’s current successes, on top of the agreement he brokered between bitter historical enemies Serbia and Kosovo, show that his paradigm-shift must be followed by a new foreign policy that can end the long string of failures under both parties. The longest of these is the Israeli-Arab conflict. Resolving this dispute has been the greatest prize for the “rules-based global order” that believes brokered negotiations, treaties, summits, photo-ops, and copious foreign aid, are the only means of ending conflict.
In terms of the Israel-Arab conflict, the old approach favored––and worsened––by Barack Obama illustrates the revolutionary nature of Trump’s foreign policy shift. Obama, a product of the elite’s unexamined received foreign policy wisdom, accepted the State Department’s hoary nostrums and doctrines. Seventy years of wars and terrorist violence were thus explained by the Palestinian people’s unfulfilled nationalist aspirations and dreams of independence, unlike the old colonies of the Western nations who gained independence after World War II.