Trump’s Hail Mary on Abraham Accords falls flat

President Trump’s surprise demand for Gulf and Arab countries to normalize ties with Israel as part of Iran peace talks has run into a complicated reality in the Middle East. 

Pakistan, which has been mediating talks between the U.S. and Iran, outright rejected the idea of joining the Abraham Accords, while other countries have stayed notably silent. Experts say the demand is confusing and highly improbable given regional tensions. 

Trump is under pressure from Israel and his hawkish base of supporters pushing for a deal with Iran that goes farther than the 2015 Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran, called the JCPOA, which did not address Iran’s ballistic missile program, support for armed proxy groups across the region and terrorist attacks across the world. 

An expansion of the Abraham Accords could theoretically blunt Iran’s threat to the region by normalizing relations with its rivals — as well as achieving one of Trump’s main foreign policy priorities heading into his second term. 

“I think at least in part this war was pitched as an effort at regional transformation,” said David Schenker, senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs during Trump’s first term. 

“This ambitious transformational agenda has fallen short. The president is looking to make lemonade out of lemons.” 

Trump first made the pitch for expanding the Accords in a phone call about Iran negotiations with leaders of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain. Axios reported at the time that Trump’s pitch was initially met with silence, prompting the president to ask if the leaders were still on the call. 

The president’s allies and hawkish Israel supporters cheered the move. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) described Trump’s demands as “brilliant.”

“I expect our Arab allies to embrace this, as well as our friends in Israel, focusing on this task as failure is not an option — which would be a correct analysis,” he said in a post on X.

Rep. Abe Hamadeh (R-Ariz.) met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this week and published an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post calling for expanding the Abraham Accords into an “Alliance” to counter Iran. 

“Imagine an integrated regional air defense system connecting Israel and Gulf allies against  Iranian missiles and drones,” he wrote. “Imagine joint investment funds fueling AI, semiconductors, biotech, energy infrastructure, and next-generation defense systems.”

However, for Pakistan and Qatar,........

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