OPINION:
The president’s envoy to the Middle East served up a rosy assessment of the troubled corner of the globe at the World Economic Forum’s annual confab in Davos, Switzerland, last week.
“There is a profound opportunity for regionalization in the Middle East, in the greater Middle East, that we have not had before,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an onstage interview. “The challenge is realizing it.” The key condition, America’s top diplomat said, is “a pathway to a Palestinian state.”
“Regionalization” is a vision of a historically fractured Middle East made whole through the establishment of a Palestinian state, which would supposedly engender a willingness of Arab nations to normalize relations with Israel. Enthralling though the scenario may appear on the surface, Iran’s proxy war against the Jewish state, combined with its incipient aggression against fellow Islamic neighbors, means current prospects for such a peace are little more than a dreamscape.
What appears as a profound opportunity to President Biden’s foreign policy team has the look of a holy war — the culmination of Iran’s 50-year struggle to purge the Middle East of unbelievers and reconstitute the Prophet Muhammad’s historical caliphate.
Mr. Blinken’s fantastical pronouncements can be explained only as an instinctual urge to follow the Obama-era principle of never letting a crisis go to waste. In the harsh light of 2024, though, suggesting that a modern Palestinian state can be erected atop the smoking wreckage of Gaza’s subterranean military installations — from which Hamas still vows to exterminate the Jews — is an insult to common sense.
It is particularly so since Iran is behind the unfolding turmoil, having spent years equipping Hamas for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Next have come dozens of drone and missile attacks launched by its Houthi co-religionists on shipping in the Red Sea, a critical chokepoint for global commerce. And in recent days, Iran has bombed targets in Iraq, Syria and Pakistan that it claims are havens for groups unfriendly to Tehran.
Moreover, the regime is reportedly accelerating its nuclear weapons program to where it can rapidly crank out enough enriched uranium to arm warheads.
“The unfortunate reality is that Iran already knows how to build nuclear weapons, although there are some unfinished tasks related to the actual construction of them,” writes David Albright, a former International Atomic Energy Agency inspector of Iran’s nuclear program. Only perfecting trigger and missile technology remains on the to-do list, he adds.
Most maddening for Americans, Mr. Biden’s foolish decision to return $6 billion in frozen funds to Iran, plus his annual $250 million aid packages to Palestinian organizations, mean U.S. dollars are helping to finance the escalating capacity for violence.
The insular Davos set may find merit in the establishment of a Palestinian state, partnered with Israel in a two-state solution, as a “regionalization” step toward the broader dream of globalization.
The Biden-Blinken dreamscape, however, is unlikely to survive a sobering collision with reality. Iran’s aim is a one-state solution — “Palestine” — in a Middle East expunged of Israel. It is a hellscape soon to be bolstered with nuclear weapons.
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