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Trump’s Abraham Accords Fantasy Will Only Cause More Suffering

Any expansion of the alleged peace agreement would lock the Middle East into endless apartheid, despotism, and militarism.

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu during an Abraham Accords signing ceremony event on the South Lawn of the White House on September 15, 2020.

Donald Trump is caught in a trap of his own making. The US-Israeli war on Iran has gone so badly that even inveterate war hawks, like the neoconservative strategist Robert Kagan, admit that defeat is almost inevitable. Iran’s ability to choke off trade in the Strait of Hormuz has turned out to be a powerful weapon, one that has forced Trump to scale back his initial agenda of regime change. The current period of ceasefire and negotiations might more accurately be described as a holding action. In truth, the ceasefire is more nominal than real. On Monday, the United States resumed bombing Iranian naval bases and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to intensify the ongoing bombing campaign in Lebanon directed against Iran’s ally Hezbollah. Netanyahu’s bellicose words are a reminder of one major hurdle to ending the war: Israel has no problem with scuttling negotiations by escalating hostilities.

The prospects for long-term peace thus seem dim, and even if a negotiated settlement could be reached, Trump would face the political problem of dealing with the powerful bipartisan coalition of Iran hawks in Washington. The “bomb Iran” caucus has been strengthened in the Republican Party with the primary defeat last week of Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, a loud anti-war voice. Senators such as Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham have been stridently warning that a peace deal with Iran would be a disaster. Prominent Democrats such as Debbie Wasserman-Schultz are equally vociferous in decrying any concessions to Iran as an abject failure.

To placate the Iran hawks, Trump is trying to expand one of his signature foreign policy initiatives, the Abraham Accords. Originally signed in 2020, the agreement normalized relations between Israel and five Muslim nations: Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump pushed for a “mandatory” expansion of the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan. Trump even suggested that Iran could eventually join the Abraham Accords.

With typical braggadocio, Trump argued that the expanded Abraham Accords, which would be sealed as part of a peace agreement with Iran, would “bring true Power, Strength, and Peace to the Middle East for the first time in 5,000 years. It will be a Document respected like no other that has ever been signed, anywhere in the World. Its level of Importance and Prestige will be unparalleled!”

Even making allowances for Trump’s typically hyperventilating rhetoric, this is a crackpot scheme. Egypt and Jordan have no need to sign the accords, for the simple reason that they have had diplomatic........

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