FPI / May 19, 2021
The future of Western influence in the Middle East is being played out amid “the pivotal new war against Israel,” an analysis said.
Turkey and Iran are moving to regain their influence and the war with Israel, by mid-May, is just the beginning, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs noted.
A catalyst may well be moves by Team Biden to reverse the Abraham Accords which were constructed by the foreign policy team of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“As a result, the war may shape up as a decisive event — albeit one conducted obliquely, often as proxy war,” the analysis said.
The Abraham Accords, brokered by the Trump Adminstration in late 2020 and early 2021, “changed the strategic balance in the Middle East, marginalizing the Palestinian issue, and diminishing the psychological leverage of Turkey, Iran, and Qatar,” the analysis said.
“In so doing, it undercut the momentum of the Turkish-dominated Muslim Brotherhood.
The Accords created mutual recognition, for the first time, between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.
Despite attempts by the Biden administration to downplay them, Turkey and Iran could not ignore what the Trump administration accomplished.
The Accords “had moved regional strategic relations away from a religious base and more toward a geopolitical one,” the analysis said. “This move toward secular relations between Muslim Arab states and Israel, begun with Egypt and Jordan, was moving the region further and further away from the religious dominance which was once the great tool of Turkey, and, in other aspects of Shi’ism, of Iran.”
The Palestinian Authority (PA) and its supporters — Turkey, Iran, and Qatar, in particular — as well as the Hamas terror organization in Gaza, “had no option but to return to a state of open warfare against Israel if they were to regain the strategic high ground,” the analysis said.
“The process toward war with Israel, which seemed to have elements of spontaneity resulting from community issues in Jerusalem (giving fuel to anti-Israeli politicians in the U.S. Congress), was strongly supported by the Iranian and Turkish governments in attempts by each to regain some semblance of religious authority over the region in the wake of the Abraham Accords,” the analysis said.
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