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WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump’s Middle East visit achieved a measure of foreign-policy success by shoring up U.S. alliances, distracting from the president’s domestic difficulties and sidestepping some of the thornier problems simmering in the region, according to lawmakers and Mideast experts.

In a speech in the Saudi Arabian capital, Mr. Trump challenged the heads of state in the region to help in “honestly confronting the crisis of Islamist extremism and the Islamist terror groups it inspires,” saying terrorists should be driven “out of this earth.” Mr. Trump also said “all nations of conscience must work together to isolate Iran, deny it funding for terrorism,” without providing concrete details of U.S. strategy toward Tehran.

“This is someone who is making it clear that we’re making common cause with those who are prepared to take on ISIS and the Iranians,” said Dennis Ross, a former U.S. envoy in the region and senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Mr. Trump’s messages were received warmly by the leaders in the region because their governments are some of the biggest targets for terrorism and are also under pressure from Iran, which supports militants in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

“It is to some extent preaching at the choir,” said Anthony Cordesman, strategy chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “All of this sends a kind of message about American resolve and American concern for its Arab allies.”

The visit served as reassurance for Saudi Arabia and allied nations after former President Barack Obama appeared to seek closer relations with Iran while negotiating a nuclear agreement with the country, and after the 2016 presidential campaign raised questions about the U.S. appetite for foreign entanglements.

Mr. Trump’s decision to visit Saudi Arabia and Israel before other countries—and his warm rhetoric for their leadership—signals a shift away from Mr. Obama’s policy in the region, which Mr. Trump has blamed for the turmoil there.

The trip also shows Mr. Trump appears eager to use his international authority to work with allies and court success on the global stage as he faces political headaches back home that may hamper his domestic goals, said Aaron David Miller, a former senior State Department official now at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump visited Saudi Arabia on his first trip abroad this weekend even as Iran re-elected Hassan Rouhani in a sham presidential vote. The timing may have been coincidental but the symbolism is potent. Mr. Trump is reviving the traditional U.S. alliance with the Sunni Arab states even as Tehran reaffirms its intentions to dominate the Middle East.

The timing comes full circle from the start of Barack Obama’s eight-year tilt toward Iran. That tilt began with Mr. Obama’s silence as Iranian leaders stole the 2009 presidential election while arresting and killing democratic protesters. He then spent two terms courting Iran in pursuit of his nuclear deal while downgrading relations with the Gulf Arabs, Israel and Egypt. Mr. Trump’s weekend meetings and Sunday speech show he is reversing that tilt as he tries to revive U.S. alliances and credibility in the Middle East.

Friday’s vote in Iran was more recoronation than re-election. The unelected Guardian Council of mullahs disqualified more than 1,600 candidates. The remaining six represented the narrow ideological spectrum approved by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards. That includes Mr. Rouhani, who is often called a moderate in the West but has presided over continuing domestic repression and regional aggression.

Mr. Rouhani will probably honor the broad terms of the 2015 nuclear deal, not least because it has provided the mullahs a much-needed financial reprieve from sanctions. The regime is likely to exploit the accord at the margins, however, including ballistic-missile launches and technical progress in secret that could allow a nuclear breakout when most of the accord’s major restrictions sunset in eight to 13 years.

Contrary to Mr. Obama’s hopes, there is no evidence that the nuclear deal has changed Iran’s hostility to the U.S. or its designs for regional dominance. The Revolutionary Guards continue to support Bashar Assad’s marauding in Syria, Shiite militias in Iraq, the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, and Houthis in Yemen. Tehran sees the Gulf states as a collection of illegitimate Sunni potentates who must bow before Shiite-Persian power—and the U.S. as the only power that can stop its ambitions.

This is the strategic backdrop for Mr. Trump’s visit to Riyadh, which was remarkable for the public display of support for the U.S. alliance. The Saudis have long preferred to cooperate with the U.S. in more low-key fashion. But they laid on a summit of regional Arab leaders, announced substantial ($110 billion) new arms purchases and investment in the U.S., and offered Mr. Trump the chance to deliver his first speech as President on U.S. relations with the Muslim world.

The two countries also issued a public “joint strategic vision declaration” that called for “a robust, integrated regional security architecture.” The test of this vision will come in places like Syria and Yemen, but one early sign was the weekend launch of Saudi Arabia’s new Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology. This is a welcome development in the heart of Wahhabi Islam that nurtured Osama bin Laden and other jihadists.

Mr. Trump’s speech on Sunday was notable for its conciliatory tone, calling for a “partnership” with moderate Muslim states. The arch rhetoric of his campaign was gone as he invoked the shared desire of Muslims, Christians and Jews to live without fear of religiously motivated violence.

He was also blunt in addressing Iran as “a government that speaks openly of mass murder, vowing the destruction of Israel, death to America, and ruin for many leaders and nations in this room.” Until Iran’s regime “is willing to be a partner for peace,” he added, “all nations of conscience must work together to isolate Iran, deny it funding for terrorism, and pray for the day when the Iranian people have the just and righteous government they deserve.”

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All of this will reassure the Gulf Arabs and other U.S. allies who questioned America’s commitment during the Obama years of retreat. The Saudis are imperfect allies, but they are linchpins of the U.S.-led order in the Middle East, and their assistance is essential to defeating Islamic State in Syria.

In 31-year-old Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia also finally has a serious modernizer who wants to diversify the economy from oil, expand the public space of women and ease other cultural strictures. The U.S. has a stake in his success and in particular should help him prevail as soon as possible against the Houthis in Yemen.

The eight-year decline of U.S. credibility in the Middle East can’t be reversed in a single summit, but Mr. Trump’s weekend in Riyadh is a promising start that will be noticed from Tehran to Damascus to Moscow.

I listened to the speech today, delivered to an assembly of tyrants and genocidal war lords…..but I was not as appalled as I expected…..I think Tillerson’s statements are worse and far more conciliatory , but this was better than Obama …..rsk

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia—President Donald Trump called on Muslim leaders across the globe Sunday to confront “the crisis of Islamic extremism” as he sought to rally Arab allies around a renewed, joint effort to combat terrorism and Iran’s influence in the Middle East.

Mr. Trump’s speech here set the tone for his first international trip as president, a nine-day journey that is putting him face-to-face with leaders across the Middle East and Europe. He said the U.S. global role should be guided by what he called a “principled realism” which appears to emphasize transactions on economic and security agreements over other issues such as human-rights abuses.

“We will make decisions based on real-world outcomes—not inflexible ideology,” he said in his remarks before several dozen Muslim leaders in the Saudi capital.

Mr. Trump urged other nations to share with the U.S. the moral and financial responsibility for global challenges. “Muslim-majority countries must take the lead in combating radicalization,” he said..

He sought to underpin his remarks with new security cooperation with America’s Arab allies. The measures include an agreement to target terrorism financing, with the U.S. and Saudi Arabia opening a center in Riyadh focused on the effort, and the formation of a military alliance in the Gulf that would coordinate with the U.S. to counter shared regional threats.

The U.S. and Saudi Arabia agreed during the weekend to a $109 billion arms package and a further $300 billion in other deals and potential investments.

“This agreement will help the Saudi military to take a far greater role in security and operations having to do with security,” Mr. Trump said.

Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who spoke at the summit alongside Mr. Trump, pledged that Muslim leaders will “not hesitate to prosecute anyone who supports or finances terrorism in any shape or form.” CONTINUE AT SITE

WASHINGTON—Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said changes in the fight against Islamic State that were approved by President Donald Trump have given the U.S. the ability to move more quickly and forcefully on the battlefield, though the overall strategy remains largely unchanged from the Obama era.

Mr. Mattis said the president had given U.S. military commanders more leeway to make battlefield decisions and approved a tactical shift that directs U.S.-backed troops to focus on annihilating Islamic State rather than waging a war of attrition.

“No longer will we have slowed decision cycles because Washington, D.C., has to authorize tactical movements on the ground,” Mr. Mattis said at a Pentagon news conference, where he appeared alongside Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joe Dunford and the State Department’s special envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition, Brett McGurk.

Mr. Mattis said U.S.-backed troops previously were surrounding Islamic State positions and allowing enemy fighters to escape through a designated exit route, because the goal was to oust them from occupied cities as quickly as possible and allow residents to return.

But the effect, the defense secretary said, was essentially to move Islamic State fighters around the area.

“We carry out the annihilation campaign so we don’t simply transplant this problem from one location to another,” Mr. Mattis said.

Mr. McGurk cited the recent capture of the Tabqa dam in Syria by a U.S.-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters as an example of the new battlefield leeway leading to quicker execution.

“Military people on the ground saw an opportunity to surprise ISIS,” he said. “That happened very fast.”

Apart from the modifications described by Mr. Mattis, the strategy to dislodge Islamic State from Iraq and Syria largely appears to be the same as under the Obama administration, despite Mr. Trump’s criticism of the approach during last year’s presidential campaign.

Gen. Dunford and Mr. McGurk, who both held their positions during the Obama administration, helped execute the original strategy.

Defense Secretary Mattis, right, was joined by the State Department’s special envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition, Brett McGurk, at the briefing. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

All three of the top U.S. officials emphasized the progress of the campaign since it began in mid-2014. Mr. McGurk said some 55,00 square kilometers (21,000 square miles) had been liberated and 4.1 million people freed from Islamic State control. CONTINUE AT SITE

ARLINGTON, Va. — As local forces have been squeezing ISIS toward defeat in the group’s Iraqi and Syrian capitals, the Pentagon announced a similar strategy for the U.S. to accelerate its campaign against the Islamic State.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford told reporters Friday that the flow of foreign fighters to the Islamic State that peaked at about 1,500 out-of-town volunteers per month in the caliphate’s heyday has gradually declined to fewer than 100 per month.

The Syrian Democratic Forces — an anti-ISIS, anti-Qaeda, anti-Assad coalition composed of more than 50,000 fighters, female and male commanders, Arabs, Assyrian Christians, Kurds, and other minority ethnic groups such as Circassians, Turkmen and Armenians — launched the Wrath of Euphrates operation at the beginning of November. Since then, the SDF has liberated more than 5,000 square miles of territory in the surgical advance to encircle and choke off Raqqa before moving in.

Last week, after fierce fighting with the SDF in which about 100 SDF fighters were killed, ISIS lost al-Tabqa, a city 35 miles west of ISIS’ capital Raqqa that includes a critical dam on the Euphrates.

Brett McGurk, the State Department’s special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition since 2015, said he recently met a leader from al-Tabqa, who “described to us the thousands of foreign fighters from as far away as Trinidad and Tobago who terrorize his community, enslaving women, brainwashing children and committing public executions.”

“He also said he believes that most of these foreign fighters are now dead. And he’s working to organize demining initiatives and ensure the streets are safe for people to return and enable the people of Tabqa — the local people of Tabqa to restore their community,” McGurk said, adding Raqqa “will be no different.”

More than 60 countries have been contributing to an INTERPOL database information about citizens known to have fought for ISIS. McGurk said the list is up to 14,000 names “and continues to grow.”

Defense Secretary James Mattis said the U.S. is going to focus on killing remaining foreign fighters in the Islamic State. “Because the foreign fighters are the strategic threat should they return home to Tunis, to Kuala Lumpur, to Paris, to Detroit, wherever. Those foreign fighters are a threat,” he said. “So by taking the time to deconflict, to surround and then attack, we carry out the annihilation campaign so we don’t simply transplant this problem from one location to another.”

“I’ll leave that to the generals who know how to do those kind of things. We don’t direct that from here,” he added. “They know our intent is the foreign fighters do not get out, I leave it to their skill, their cunning, to carry that out.”

The other policy change going into effect after defense officials presented recommendations to President Trump, Mattis said, is the president “delegated authority to the right level to aggressively and in a timely manner move against enemy vulnerabilities.” CONTINUE AT SITE