No. of Recommendations: 9
But is this really Trump's plan? Or others in his administration.
It's certainly both. I mean, even as a general matter no President ever acts alone (Phil Hartman's Ronald Reagan notwithstanding); diplomatic staff rarely acts on major issues like this without the involvement of the President. And specifically, the diplomatic push that resulted in the peace agreement was driven by the President reaching out directly to regional Arab leaders (the carrots) and squeezing Netanyahu (the sticks). No doubt the details, and very high-level details at that, were handled by the appropriate folks in State and Defense - but Trump almost certainly was key to it happening.
I don't entirely understand the reluctance to acknowledge that Trump actually had a major part in this happening. He's the one who decided to finally use the leverage that he had built up over Netanyahu, and decided to offer the other Sunni nations a deeper and more real partnership with the U.S. despite their rather bloodstained and oppressive human rights records. Those things are all completely consistent with everything we know about Trump: he likes to bully, he doesn't like to be balked by people acting as if they're more important or more powerful than him, he really seems to want a Nobel Peace Prize, and he's long been dazzled by the enormous opportunities to personally make a ton of money in the Middle East if it weren't so fraught to deal with the geopolitics of the situation.
All of that combined to have him hold out a compelling bargain to the Sunni states: stick your neck out and take a stand on the Palestinian conflict by publicly deciding against Hamas, and I'll reward you with a much tighter alliance with the U.S. without you having to do any of those human rights reforms (or disclaiming Sharia law or jihadism or anything else that's been a political problem in the past) that any other Administration would insist on. Trump doesn't care about their oppressive domestic governmental structures or persecution of opposition figures. For the first time, the Sunni states have an American President who is happy to embrace them without "spreading democracy" or "protecting human rights" to get in the way.
That was the deal. Because that's not the kind of deal you can put in a treaty that could pass the Senate, Trump's going to have to extend that embrace to the Sunni countries in other ways. I suspect that the air force base is a mechanism for doing that.
