Foreign & Public Diplomacy

On Sept. 15, 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump presided over the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. Speaking on the White House lawn, amid a lavish signing ceremony, Trump announced “the dawn of a new Middle East” saying that “these agreements will serve as the foundation for a comprehensive peace across the entire region—something which nobody thought was possible, certainly not in this day and age.”

If Trump can sometimes be overly effusive in evaluating the impact of his own achievements, this time, he was not alone. Many mainstream foreign-policy commentators were quick to praise the Abraham Accords, which were subsequently expanded to include Morocco and Sudan, as one of the few unambiguously good foreign-policy achievements of Trump’s first term. Longtime Democratic Middle East hand Dennis Ross wrote that normalization was an “unexpectedly positive move” that represented an “important contribution to peace-building between Arabs and Israelis.”

On Sept. 15, 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump presided over the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. Speaking on the White House lawn, amid a lavish signing ceremony, Trump announced “the dawn of a new Middle East” saying that “these agreements will serve as the foundation for a comprehensive peace across the entire region—something which nobody thought was possible, certainly not in this day and age.”

If Trump can sometimes be overly effusive in evaluating the impact of his own achievements, this time, he was not alone. Many mainstream foreign-policy commentators were quick to praise the Abraham Accords, which were subsequently expanded to include Morocco and Sudan, as one of the few unambiguously good foreign-policy achievements of Trump’s first term. Longtime Democratic Middle East hand Dennis Ross wrote that normalization was an “unexpectedly positive move” that represented an “important contribution to peace-building between Arabs and Israelis.”

While the Biden administration initially held the accords at arm’s length, it soon embraced them as a formula for regional peacemaking. “The Abraham Accords are making the lives of people across your countries more peaceful, more prosperous, more vibrant, more integrated,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared at a March 2022 summit in Negev, Israel.

Such claims have now been revealed as fantasy. According to its proponents, the Abraham Accords were intended to strengthen military and economic cooperation between Israel and the Persian Gulf while also bringing a new “outside-in” approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In reality, the outside-in logic proved to be dangerously counterproductive, with Israeli-Gulf military cooperation leading to more risky and provocative behavior. Far from promoting peace and stability, the Abraham Accords laid the groundwork for a new era of violence, providing political cover for genocide in Gaza and enabling a reckless war against Iran.

When the text of the normalization agreements called for signatories to work toward regional security and stability, Iran was the implicit target. This was made more explicit in April 2021, when........

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