Abraham Accords: Trump's Role vs. Structural Changes in ME

Introduction

President Trump oversaw the Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 at the White House between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain. With Morocco and Sudan quietly signing on to the Accords weeks later, it appeared that a domino effect might take place, with more and more of the Arab world reaching normalization of relations agreements with Israel (Reuters, 2021). Trump hailed the agreement as the beginnings of a "new Middle East"—even though within a year of the signing, signs of conflict and threats of war persisted (Crowley, 2021).

Trump had been looking for a sign of victory in the Middle East ever since appointing his son-in-law Jared Kushner to a key position in Middle East negotiations. Kushner's family is well-connected to Prime Minister Netanyahu (Kampeas, 2017). The appointment was largely seen as an opportunity for a key ally of Netanyahu to negotiate on Israel's behalf with willing Arab states. The UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco all had pre-existing relationships with Israel in terms of sharing intelligence and engaging in trade, so the agreement signed in 2020 should not have come as a surprise to anyone. Indeed, as Harkov (2021) points out, the Moroccan government and Israel "had secret ties, including intelligence sharing, for decades, and partial diplomatic relations in the 1990s."

However, with respect to Sudan recognizing Israel, that is where Trump and Kushner likely exerted some pressure. Sudan had a new government and wanted to be removed from the US list of nations that allegedly sponsor terrorism. The deal was that if Sudan wanted off that list, it would have to normalize ties with Israel (Harkov, 2021). Thus, the shift in Arab-Israeli relations—although in some ways not entirely historic or monumental—can be characterized both as the outcome of larger structural developments decades in the making and as the work of President Trump.

President Trump's Role in the Abraham Accords

Trump's main role in brokering deals between Israel and the Arab states was to delegate authority to Kushner and to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the former CIA Director. Kushner was well-connected to Israeli leadership, and Pompeo, as former head of US intelligence, was well-connected to the major players who had shared intelligence with Israel for decades. Pompeo was also in a position to use leverage over Sudan to persuade the new Sudanese government to sign onto the Accords. Trump's personal role in comparison was minor, but his administration played a major part in bringing the Accords together, even if the underlying infrastructure was already in place. What the Trump Administration was able to do was assemble the pieces and smooth out the wrinkles.

For instance, one particular sticking point between the UAE and Israel was Israel's stated intention to annex the West Bank. The UAE wanted assurance from Israel that it would not do so, but would instead recognize the rights of the Palestinians there. Israel gave that assurance, thus opening the door to formal normalization of relations between the UAE and Israel (Alterman, 2020; Baker, Kershner, Kirkpatrick, & Bergman, 2020).

Trump had also floated a peace plan between Israel and Palestine in 2020, but the plan favored Israeli talking points and Palestine rejected it because it did not guarantee full sovereignty to Palestine (Fayyad, 2020). Trump's peace plan clearly favored Israeli interests, making it a non-starter for Palestinians. When it failed to gain momentum, Trump pivoted to the Sunni Arab world to try to normalize relations among states that already had a history of working closely with Israel. This included the UAE and Morocco. It was Trump's way of making good on a pledge to bring peace to the Middle East—if he could not achieve that with respect to Palestine, he could at least make it "happen" among states that were not fundamentally opposed to normalizing relations with Israel.

The problem is that this pivot was largely a political gambit that did little to change the actual nexus of variables affecting the Middle East. The recent flare-up in tensions between Israel and Palestine prompted the UAE and Bahrain to criticize Israel for its role in violence aimed at Palestinians (Crowley, 2021). The Trump Administration set the stage for this uneasy alliance between the Sunni Arab world and Israel partly by changing a long-held US policy with respect to the West Bank: the administration rejected the idea that Israel was illegally occupying and settling the West Bank (Jakes & Halbfinger, 2019). The normalization of relations with the UAE hinged upon Israel affirming that it would not annex the West Bank—a step that reveals the UAE still, as a matter of policy, wishes to express some form of solidarity with Palestine. The UAE's subsequent condemnation of violence against Palestinians confirmed that this remains the case.

The fact that the Trump Administration was able to bridge differences between the UAE, Bahrain, and other Arab states and Israel shows that the president was able to bring everyone to the table in a meaningful way. The central limitation, however, is that the states that signed onto the Accords were never really at war with Israel in the first place (Krauss, 2020). From this perspective, Trump may be seen as taking credit for something that had not actually been achieved: he did not establish peace in the Middle East but rather formalized a normalization of relationships that, by and large, were already in place informally.

Still, as Krauss (2020) explains, the prize in these negotiations is Saudi Arabia, and that prize remains elusive. Bahrain has strong ties with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), as both are Sunni strongholds. With Israel looking to cultivate ties with the Sunni Arab world in an implicit alliance against the Shia Arab world—Iran, Syria, and Iraq—it appears that a larger strategic game plan is at work. This plan has been in development for some time, and Trump simply helped it pick up speed. There are, however, larger structural changes in the Arab world that Trump had little to do with.

Larger Structural Changes Predicating Trump's Involvement in Middle East Politics

The larger structural change that predicated the shift in Arab-Israeli relations was the Sunni-Shia divide in the Arab world. Rather than ease tensions between Palestine and Israel, Trump focused on normalizing relations between Israel and the Sunni Arab states that view the Shia Arab states as adversaries. This rivalry is nationalistic in character, however, and not solely religious or cultural (Taspinar, 2018). As Taspinar (2018) states, "religion only is a small part of a much bigger and complex geostrategic and political picture. The bleeding in Syria or Yemen would not stop if Sunnis and Shiites would suddenly agree on who was the rightful successor of Muhammad. Looking at the sectarianized conflicts of the Middle East through the lens of a 7th century conflict is therefore both simplistic and misleading."

The issue of Middle East politics today is one of modern nationalism. The main actors are Iran and the KSA: each has a policy for power in the region, and the two states are in opposition. Various skirmishes, such as the war in Yemen, are proxy wars between Iran and the KSA. This is a regional rivalry, not a historically inevitable one (Taspinar, 2018). In the 1970s, the KSA and Iran were actually united against Nasser in Egypt. Today, the KSA and Iran are locked in a bid for control over Syria and Iraq, where destabilization has threatened the collapse of governmental authority. Iran has supported Assad in Syria, while Israel and the KSA have both held the view that Assad should be overthrown. Now that Assad's power has been secured thanks to interventions by Russia and Iran, the KSA is looking to work with Assad in order to shore up Saudi interests in the Levant (Alam, 2021). In Lebanon, Syria pursues its own interests, but Iran also has a stake there, and the KSA wants to prevent Iran from expanding its influence. It therefore makes geopolitical sense for the KSA to attempt to woo Assad away from Iran.

The UAE has also voiced its opinion on the matter by arguing that Syria should be readmitted to the Arab League. As Phillips (2021) reports, "Syria has been excluded from the Arab League for nearly a decade, but that may be about to change. Last week, the United Arab Emirates called for the war-torn country to be restored to the organisation it helped found in 1945, echoing similar calls by Iraq in January." Just ten years earlier, in 2011, nearly all of the 22 member states of the Arab League voted to remove Syria from the League. Today, the calls to return Syria show that the geopolitical and nationalist concerns of these states have shifted—particularly now that Syria is no longer vulnerable to outside attack, given the support of Russia and Iran.

The Arab world is thus rethinking its approach to Syria in the larger power play that ultimately comes back to Iran versus the KSA (Belbagi, 2021). It is no secret that the US favors the KSA over Iran, and having failed to topple Assad, the US has demonstrated that its prior strategy for control in the Middle East will not succeed if continued. The Arab world has therefore adopted a new perspective. Some states, like the UAE and Bahrain, are working a diplomatic angle to forge an alliance of power with Israel; others are calling for better relations among Arab states generally. Even Russia and Saudi Arabia have held talks about returning Syria to the Arab League (Belbagi, 2021). This alone illustrates how profoundly Middle East politics have changed in the past decade. The region is as fluid as ever in terms of political alliances and relationships—one key reason why the Accords are better understood as the outcome of long-developing structural changes rather than as solely the achievement of the Trump Administration, even though Trump's push was likely necessary for any formal agreement to materialize.

Conclusion

The normalization of relationships between Israel and the Arab states is partly the effect of intervention on the part of President Trump and partly the outcome of long-standing structural developments in the Middle East. The relationships of states in the region and the politics governing them are quite fluid but ultimately tend to revolve around the larger regional conflict between Iran and the KSA. Even though Iran and the KSA were united in the past, today they are at odds, and Israel in particular has been at odds with Iran since the Islamic Revolution of the late 1970s. Iran's growing influence in Syria and Lebanon is thus a concern for countries like Saudi Arabia, even as the UAE has restored its relationship with Syria.

Bahrain's relationship with Israel could be seen as a precursor to a future formal relationship between the KSA and Israel, but for that agreement to take place the KSA would likely have to abandon its principle of requiring a Palestinian peace settlement before any broader normalization. Trump was unable to bring about a Palestinian peace because his plan favored Israel too heavily. However, his administration's connections—through Kushner with Netanyahu, and through Pompeo with regional intelligence networks—contributed meaningfully to the brokering of the agreements between Israel and the Arab states that ultimately signed on to the Abraham Accords.