He’s Baaack

Just when we thought we’d escaped him, Jared Kushner has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advising the Biden Administration to capitalize on the strong hand they were dealt in the Middle East:

The geopolitical earthquake that began with the Abraham Accords hasn’t ended. More than 130,000 Israelis have visited Dubai since President Trump hosted the peace deal’s signing this past September, and air travel opened up for the first time in August. New, friendly relations are flowering—wait until direct flights get going between Israel and Morocco. We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict.

[…]

The Biden administration is making China a priority in its foreign policy, and rightly so—one of Mr. Trump’s greatest legacies will be changing the world’s view of China’s behavior. But it would be a mistake not to build on the progress in the Middle East. Eliminating the ISIS caliphate and bringing about six peace agreements—between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco and Kosovo, plus uniting the Gulf Cooperation Council—has changed the paradigm.

During his 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia, Mr. Trump called on Muslim-majority countries to root out extremist ideology. As the custodian of the two holiest sites in Islam, Saudi Arabia has made significant progress in combating extremism, which has greatly reduced America’s risk of attack and created the environment for today’s new partnerships. In Mr. Trump’s final deal before leaving office, he brokered the end of the diplomatic conflict between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, restoring an important alliance to counter Iran.

concluding:

The table is set. If it is smart, the Biden administration will seize this historic opportunity to unleash the Middle East’s potential, keep America safe, and help the region turn the page on a generation of conflict and instability. It is time to begin a new chapter of partnership, prosperity and peace.

Credit where credit is due. The Trump Administration made more progress in the Middle East than the previous ten administrations combined and I suspect a lot of that was due to Jared Kushner. Nonetheless I’m skeptical that the Biden Administration was actually left with a strong hand. I think it was left with a set of contradictions, a “wicked problem”. There is no actual solution to a wicked problem—the only hope is to set up a process that might ultimately lead to a solution.

IMO that’s the challenge that faces the Biden Administration: advocating a process in the Middle East that could ultimately improve the situation there. I don’t believe they’ll arrive at that through bilateral negotiations with Iran or by punishing MBS. I also don’t believe they can accomplish that and make the administration’s own caucus happy at the same time and they’re more likely to choose pacifying their caucus over pacifying the Middle East.

One more observation. I don’t think that the Abraham Accords revealed what Mr. Kushner says they did:

The Abraham Accords exposed the conflict as nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians that need not hold up Israel’s relations with the broader Arab world.

I think it revealed that the Palestinians just aren’t that important to the rest of the Arab world in the total scheme of things. That was just a ploy. Unfortunately, just as we have an internal constituency promoting Israel’s interests even when they conflict with our own or with an improved situation in the Middle East, we have an internal constituency promoting the Palestinians’ interests with similar short-sightedness. Those are among the reasons it’s a wicked problem.