The Normalization Distraction

The president’s attempt to get more states to establish diplomatic ties with Israel will be no more successful than the criminal war he started.

The Wall Street Journal published a rather credulous report on the president’s latest fantasy:

President Trump expanded the scope of his diplomatic ambition over the holiday weekend, seeking not only an end-of-war agreement with Iran but also a pact to normalize relations between Israel and the broader Middle East.

The normalization push could give Trump a way to cast any limited cease-fire and shipping pact as a larger regional success story instead of a climbdown, after defense hawks in his own party warned that a bad deal could tarnish his legacy. Trump also threatened to restart major hostilities.

The president’s attempt to get more states to establish diplomatic ties with Israel will be no more successful than the criminal war he started. To the extent that he really intends to pursue this course, it is wildly unrealistic. Except for the handful of governments that the U.S. has already bribed to do this, no regional governments want to be seen drawing closer to Israel while its forces continue to crush Gaza and wreck Lebanon. U.S.-Israeli aggression against Iran has made normalization with Israel that much more difficult. Normalizing with Israel under present circumstances would amount to rewarding them for genocide and aggressive warfare.

Trump is bringing up normalization with Israel partly as a distraction to satisfy hawks, and he likely also wants to use it as an excuse to blow up negotiations with Iran. If the president insists on making an agreement with Iran contingent on other states establishing ties with Israel, he is throwing up one more huge obstacle to prevent a diplomatic solution. If he imagines that he will be able to strongarm reluctant governments into agreeing to normalization, he is more deluded than we thought.

Public opinion in every Arab country has been and remains overwhelmingly opposed to normalization, and their authoritarian rulers ignore that at their own risk. For its part, the Saudi government has not budged from its position that normalization will only happen if Israel commits to a real path to Palestinian statehood. Since we know the Israeli government will not do that for the foreseeable future, there is no reason to expect the Saudis or any other government to participate in Trump’s farce.

The goal of Trump’s original normalization agreements was to sideline and bypass the Palestinians so that the Israeli government could enjoy the benefits of closer cooperation with certain Arab states without having to make any concessions of their own. Administration apologists spun this as part of a “peace” plan, but it was always intended to be the foundation of a coalition against Iran. Insofar as the normalization agreements gave the Israelis even more encouragement to continue their oppression of the Palestinians, they contributed to the tensions that led to the war in Gaza.

The existing normalization agreements have already been quite bad for regional peace and stability. Matt Duss and Zuri Linetsky explained this in an article for Foreign Policy earlier this month:

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.

These agreements were intended to solidify an anti-Iranian bloc under U.S. leadership. To the extent they succeeded in doing that, they paved the way for disastrous wars. The Iran war has exposed the deep divisions within this bloc and it has shown the Gulf states how foolish it is to hitch themselves to states that are bent on war with their neighbor. Trump thinks he can expand this bloc after the Iran war has revealed how worthless U.S. protection is. He is fooling himself. No one else in the region is going to fall for it.