RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/amateur_jared_kushner_vs_pro_john_kerry.html

Donald Trump has outsourced his Middle East policy to his son-in-law Jared Kushner. At best, it would be a waste of time, as Kushner had no experience in foreign policy. At worst, he will use this opportunity to line his own pockets.

That was one of the many lines of attacks waged by the mainstream media on President Trump. Why is amateur Kushner in the White House at all, they asked indignantly? Then something unexpected happened: 

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain announced peace deals with Israel. This good news for the world was bad news for the media. The news was reported, well, kind of, but no one acknowledged that miserable failure of the media’s gloomy predictions.

Here is how John Kerry, a seasoned professional, lectured his audience in a professorial tone of voice in 2016:

“There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world,” Kerry began at a speaking engagement. “I want to make that very clear with all of you. I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, ‘Well, the Arab world is in a different place now. We just have to reach out to them. We can work some things with the Arab world and we’ll deal with the Palestinians.’ No. No, no, and no.”

He continued, “I can tell you that, reaffirmed within the last week because I’ve talked to the leaders of the Arab community, there will be no advanced and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace. Everybody needs to understand that. That is a hard reality.”

Apparently, Kushner did not receive Kerry’s memo, and borrowing from “Star Trek,” he boldly went where no man has gone before. Those who “have not gone there before” included other experienced Secretaries of State, such as Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton. It took amateur Kushner to succeed and that was a bitter pill for CNN and the Washington Post to swallow.

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.

https://spectator.us/bahrain-israel-peace-deal-trump-middle-east-iran/

On September 15, representatives from the oil-rich Kingdom of Bahrain will meet Israeli leaders at the White House to sign a historic peace deal. It will normalize relations between the Muslim state and the Jewish one, not long after the United Arab Emirates concluded a similar pact. Expect more such ‘normalization deals’. They supplement other White House initiatives, such as the deal it brokered between Serbia and Kosovo, which includes both countries establishing closer relations with Israel.

The deals are significant for several reasons. First, they represent a common regional front against the Iranian threat, which has been developing beneath the surface for some time. Their public expression sends a stronger signal to Iran and opens the door to greater cooperation between Arab states and Israel, the region’s most developed economy and the leader in advanced military technology.

These deals also signal that Arab-Muslim regimes are less concerned with domestic, Islamist opposition to their outreach to Israel. Equally important, they show that the Palestinian Authority no longer holds a veto over fellow Muslims’ relations with Israel. We saw another sign of Palestinian weakness last week when the Arab League refused to condemn the UAE for its accord with Israel.

What changed to prompt these deals? The answer is not a greater threat from Iran. The danger from the mullahs is no higher now than it was in 2005, 2010, or 2015. Iran’s Sunni neighbors and Israel have all been threatened by Tehran’s expansionism, aggressive religious ideology, and support for terrorist movements for years. Yet, until recently, Israel was the only country seeking normalization with its Arab neighbors. What finally convinced the Arab states to come to the table was actually a shift in US policy.