https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/with-the-military-attack-the-us-can-finally-start-to-get-it-right-in-syria-1.721308

After much argument and delay, American, British and French military strikes against Syrian regime targets were finally begun on Saturday morning. But the strikes will only be worthwhile if they are the forerunner of a coherent, integrated Syria policy and not a pointless repetition of the largely symbolic, one-off cruise missile attack in April 2017.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joseph Dunford urged caution while Donald Trump and John Bolton, his new national security adviser, allegedly pressed for quicker and wider action. Thus far, it seems the generals are winning out on the immediate action.

The military is not necessarily opposed to strong action but rather is averse to reckless and pointless ones. Their most important point was that any military action needs to be part of a cohesive and comprehensive Syria policy. It’s a valid and vital objection.

This military response to Bashar Al Assad’s latest chemical weapons atrocity should have not only been more robust, but also more focused and consequential, than it has been up until now to avoid repeating the 2017 scenario. An early strike shortly after the chemical attack could easily have symbolically “punished” Mr Al Assad for having made Mr Trump look ridiculous, and even complicit, by inflicting the atrocity soon after the US president’s vow to withdraw all American forces from Syria.

If it were just a matter of expunging any such impression, a quick US strike against largely symbolic targets could have been launched in short order. The delay should have meant, and could still mean, this time is different.

Given the time that passed after it was effectively announced, the strike won’t have much of a repudiating quality if it proves as limited and symbolic as last year’s. But the US actions so far are not vastly different, and leave almost all of the key regime targets, let along anything connected to Iran and Hezbollah, untouched.

That may not be the end of the story but if it is left at that it would look minimal and weak-willed rather than tough and determined.

Moreover, the delay, and Mr Trump’s inexplicable Twitter warnings, gave Syria and Russia ample opportunity to prepare, particularly by clustering Syrian government assets next to Russian ones or civilian “soft targets”.

In order to be consequential and worthwhile, this action must, at least for Washington, eventually be about more than just chemical weapons. Even if some early participants like UK Prime Minister Theresa May insist it is only that, for Washington it must be an opening salvo of a new US strategy for altering the balance of power in Syria and ensuring that Iran, in particular, does not emerge from the conflict as a huge victor.

Mr Trump was apparently dissatisfied with how limited the military action options the Pentagon presented to him appeared, though he was seemingly persuaded. The president reportedly wanted to strike harder and make sure that Russia and Iran also paid some costs. That hasn’t happened at all. Yet.

The military not only wanted to avoid an escalation, but complained that any major action is pointless outside a broader strategy.

Both sides made good points that should be seen as complementary rather than contradictory.

Mr Trump may prevail on the size and scope of the attack but only if there are additional salvos in the coming days. And the military and others can, and must, use this crucial opportunity to force Washington to make a set of difficult choices that Mr Trump and, for the most part, Mr Obama before him, studiously avoided.

The generals are right that they and others can’t create an effective strategy if they don’t know what the goals are. At long last Washington must now decide what it wants in Syria beyond obliterating ISIS.

That must begin with permanently denying Iran control of key areas along Syria’s border with Iraq, particularly in Al Bukamal and Al-Tanf, where land corridor routes from Tehran to the Mediterranean could be consolidated. Then, Iran and Hezbollah’s grip on Syria must be steadily weakened.

Washington must decide how much further it will let Turkey go in attacking Kurdish enclaves and find a modus vivendi between these two US allies.

And, finally, Washington and Moscow must come to terms about the endgame in Syria, which can’t be done if the United States continues to cede the field to Russia almost entirely while annually lobbing in a few meaningless bombs. The war in much of Syria may be effectively over, at least for now. But the post-conflict landscape is just starting to develop.

It would be bizarre for Washington to launch this military action and follow it with a total withdrawal from Syria, handing the country to Russia and Iran.

Mr Trump says his priorities in the Middle East are fighting terrorism and confronting Iran. Syria is the epicentre of both battles. He desperately needs a focused and coherent Syria strategy, having inherited an indescribable mess from Mr Obama.

This US military response in Syria presents a crucial opportunity for finally starting to get it right. But the highly limited action so far isn’t very encouraging.

http://www.agsiw.org/did-mbs-break-new-ground-on-israel-no-and-yes/

http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/06/the-non-violent-violence-of-hamas/

The unarmed protests at the Gaza-Israel border are a desperate bid to provoke a crisis.

The killing of at least 22 Palestinian demonstrators by Israeli troops at the March of Return demonstration at the Gaza border with Israel was the first good news Hamas has had in more than a year. Hamas has decided to champion a set of demonstrations — of which this was the first — that use mass public resistance, largely if not entirely unarmed, to challenge Israel’s occupation. Every Friday will see additional protests, and already eight more Palestinians have reportedly been killed this Friday. It culminates on May 14-15, which includes the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding, the Palestinian Nakba Day commemoration, and the scheduled opening of a U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem.

The prospects for unrest, and even chaos, are obvious, especially given Israel’s prevailing military strategy at the border. But tragedy and disorder are common in this region of the world. What’s new is Hamas’s apparent strategy. How have the ardent champions of heavily militarized armed struggle as the quintessence of resistance against Israel become the advocates of nonviolent people power?

The incongruity, however, doesn’t mark a contradiction, much less a moral reckoning.

There are several reasons for Hamas’s new approach. First, it is virtually out of options. The devastation in Gaza caused by the last full-blown war with Israel in 2014 was so extensive, with most of the damage still unrepaired, that it would be difficult to publicly explain to the group’s own constituents any choice to deliberately start another major conflict with Israel. The kind of scenario whereby Hamas has previously instigated or cooperated in the development of major armed battles with Israel would now be potentially politically disastrous in Gaza.

Yet Hamas is desperate. The situation in Gaza has become increasingly intolerable. Unemployment is widespread and chronic. Hunger is rampant. Water is undrinkable. Electricity is available for only two to four hours per day. Sewage treatment plants have failed, so the once-beautiful Mediterranean coast is now a repository of human waste. And there’s still no way in or out of the territory for almost all of Gaza’s close to 2 million people.

Since its violent takeover of Gaza and expulsion of the Palestinian Authority in 2007, Hamas has been adept at blaming others for the wretched conditions in the territory it controls. And because of repeated Israeli bombardments and other attacks, and the virtual lockdown imposed by both Israel and Egypt, finger-pointing at Jerusalem and Cairo has been somewhat effective. It has even been possible for Hamas to blame the Palestinian Authority — and especially President Mahmoud Abbas — for Gaza’s woes, particularly after he imposed considerable sanctions in the summer of 2017.

Abbas said he would no longer pay for many Gazan public employees hired after the expulsion of the Palestinian Authority from the territory and, among other things, would stop paying Hamas’s electric bill for the power the area received from Israeli grids. Abbas’s argument was, in effect, “You want to rule this territory alone? Fine. But we’re not subsidizing that anymore.” Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pressured Qatar to stop the aid and reconstruction projects that Doha had been providing specifically to benefit Hamas. And Israel and Egypt tightened the noose, strangling both Gazans and Hamas.

Yet the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Israel, and the others all understand that the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza is an unsustainable crisis. The question was, and still is, how to address that in a way that does not unduly strengthen or empower Hamas, especially given its recalcitrant attitudes. The answer arrived at last fall was to create the convenient fiction of political reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Egypt led the campaign to prod both sides together and get Hamas to weaken its grip on the territory and, especially, give up control of the network of tunnels it had created around the Egyptian border.

Hamas was so beleaguered that it embraced the idea and agreed to surrender administration in Gaza and control of checkpoints and crossing points to the Palestinian Authority’s Western-trained (and Israeli-trusted) security forces as the first step in a national reconciliation agreement. It was also hoping to secure a foothold back in the West Bank, the epicenter of Palestinian national politics, of which it had been frozen out since the Palestinian split in 2007. For Hamas, reconciliation was a bitter pill — but also badly needed medicine — and it was certainly willing to swallow a large amount of it.

The project, however, was sabotaged when Abbas overreached, perhaps deliberately, by conditioning additional progress on reconciliation on Hamas disarming. He made the plausible case that he wasn’t willing to allow a “Hezbollah-style situation” to exist among the Palestinians, where, as in Lebanon, an Islamist militia had enough power to effectively have its own foreign and defense policies, independent of the national government.

But Abbas knew that the very last thing, literally, Hamas would ever do was agree to disarm. The Palestinian president may have been less eager to reassume responsibility for administering Gaza than he appeared. To the great frustration of Egypt, the Gulf Arab countries, Jordan, and, presumably, Israel, Abbas’s disarmament demand essentially collapsed the project to weaken Hamas’s control of Gaza and get badly needed aid and reconstruction money into the strip in a way that did not strengthen the Islamist group.

So, Hamas found itself stuck with Gaza and no one else to convincingly blame anymore. Its popularity in the territory continued to sink to unprecedentedly low levels. And its hopes of regaining a foothold in the West Bank were thoroughly stymied. When Hamas allegedly attempted to assassinate Abbas’s prime minister, Rami Hamdallah, in March, the Palestinian president announced even stronger sanctions against Hamas. The situation in Gaza, already a full-blown crisis, was about to deteriorate even further.

It’s in this context that Hamas decided to embrace a campaign of public protests, demonstrations, and popular uprisings that, at first glance, appears far more modeled on the First Intifada than the militarized Second Intifada that propelled the organization to national leadership contender status. Hamas has always preached that armed struggle of a militarized variety is the only path to Palestinian liberation. So, these unarmed or, at most, lightly armed demonstrations, which are either nonviolent or only symbolically violent (throwing stones at troops is a far cry from firing rockets at cities, after all), represent a major shift in Hamas’s thinking.

It did not initiate the calls for the protests but rather seized on them and has effectively hijacked the movement, at least for now. But Hamas’s strategy is easy to discern. First, it relies on Israel’s long-established doctrine of disproportionate force. Particularly at the border, from its founding Israel has had only one main response to Palestinians seeking to go back to their former towns and villages, and the Israeli military announced before the March of Return protests that anyone approaching within 300 meters of the borderwould face the familiar shoot-to-kill policy.

It was entirely predictable that confronted with tens of thousands of Palestinian protesters, particularly at a border area, Israel would immediately resort to deadly force, even against unarmed persons. Israeli strategic and security thinking virtually guaranteed an effort to nip the protest movement in the bud by demonstrating the level of violence protesters, particularly those that challenge the border, can expect to face. Israel’s nightmare, and Hamas’s hope, is that during these protests, the border is somehow breached and large numbers of young men cross over into what used to be their country going toward their ancestral homes and villages. Israeli authorities speak in terms of a “bloodbath” even if such “infiltrators” are nonviolent and unarmed, and history strongly suggests that this is by no means hyperbole.

But even if the border isn’t breached, and Israel stops at almost nothing to ensure that doesn’t happen, Hamas stands to gain a great deal from this campaign of protests. Already Abbas is scrambling to not be outbid in terms of nationalistic rhetoric, commemorations, and anti-Israeli bluster. Hamas’s nationalist credibility is starting to be rejuvenated. It is attempting to connect with, and coopt, the deep-seated Palestinian public’s craving for a new politics, with popular agency and a new, grass roots-led drive to end the occupation and achieve national liberation.

Hamas doesn’t stand for any of that, of course. But it can pretend to, and its operatives are now fully engaged in this campaign, in a manner similar to the way in which the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt hopped right on the anti-Hosni Mubarak protests. The Brotherhood had done nothing to conceptualize or initiate those protests, but it usurped the movement and, ultimately, translated it into more than a year in the Egyptian presidency before it faced considerably larger public demonstrations against its own misrule.

Hamas now has found a way forward. And even if, ultimately, this process degenerates into another full-blown war with Israel, that may provide the group with a way out of the intolerable predicament that emerged in 2017, especially if it is not blamed for having wantonly initiated it. As always, Hamas and reactionary forces in Israel are reinforcing each other’s radicalism and playing a vicious, bloody game from which both benefit at the expense of the public at large. Whatever else happens, if Israel continues to use live ammunition against unarmed demonstrators, even at the border, Hamas will continue to reap the benefits.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-04/israel-palestine-gaza-violence-is-about-to-get-worse

Palestinians are angry at both Israel and their own leaders, and feel they have nothing to lose.

The violence last Friday in Gaza, in which 18 Palestinian protesters were killed by Israeli troops near the border, was the worst since the war of 2014. But everything is in place for a significant escalation in coming weeks, particularly in mid-May.

A series of major tripwires are clustered tightly together: commemorations of the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding on May 14-15; mourning by Palestinians who regard the same event as their “catastrophe” and observe May 15 as “Nakba Day”; and the scheduled opening of a U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem on May 14, courtesy of the administration of President Donald Trump.

Things are likely to get worse because Palestinians increasingly feel they have nothing left to lose. The “March of Return” last week drew unprecedented crowds of up to 30,000 Palestinians from all parts of Gaza society. In a festive and surreal atmosphere, vendors sold ice cream to picnicking families as young men risked their lives by approaching the border.

Over 90 percent of Gaza’s almost 2 million people are refugees from what is now southern Israel. Unlike most other Palestinians, they are still geographically close to the towns and villages from which they were displaced in 1947-48. Since its founding, Israel has had one primary response to Palestinians, armed or not, attempting to go home without permission. The Israeli military reiterated that anyone approaching within 300 meters of the border would face a shoot-to-kill policy.

But things are so bad in the wretched open-air prison of Gaza that the only surprise is that the death toll wasn’t even higher.

One of the most densely populated places on earth, Gaza is now barely habitable. Hunger is rampant. Water is undrinkable. Unemployment is close to 50 percent. Health-care is scanty at best. Electricity is available just two to four hours per day. The once-beautiful seacoast is now a giant sewer. And there’s virtually no way in or out of the territory which, since a violent takeover in 2007 by the Islamist faction Hamas, has been under a lockdown by Israel and Egypt.

For more than 10 years, the people of Gaza have been subjected to the misrule of Hamas, the heavily armed Muslim Brotherhood faction that exploits and intensifies their misery. Last summer, Hamas attempted to use a fictional “reconciliation” agreementwith its Fatah rivals, who control the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, to get out of this stranglehold. Hamas sought to get the Palestinian Authority to take up the burden of administration in Gaza, secure badly needed aid and reconstruction money, and, most importantly, win themselves a new foothold in the West Bank, where they have been frozen out since the Palestinian factions split in 2007.

But Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made reconciliation contingent on Hamas disarming, which the militant group won’t consider. Hamas was left virtually without options.

Abbas, too, is badly adrift. He staked his entire career on negotiations with Israel, brokered by the U.S. But that “peace process” has been frozen since the first term of President Barack Obama, and Israel is moving closer to annexing large chunks of the West Bank. Virtually no Palestinians believe anymore that Israel will ever agree to end the occupation and allow them to create their own state.

The Trump administration has reinforced this conviction by abandoning Washington’s long-standing commitment to a two-state outcome, and has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Abbas’s diplomatic strategy therefore now looks like the ultimate fiasco.

The last straw for Abbas came in March, when Hamas tried to assassinate his prime minister, Rami Hamdallah.

Enraged, Abbas has lashed out at all his antagonists in a recent series of unhinged speeches. He bitterly denounced Israel and castigated the Trump administration, describing its peace efforts as “the slap of the century” and calling the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, a “son of a dog.” He excoriated Hamas followers as terrorist “thugs and hooligans,” and said the only reason their operatives weren’t being killed all over the world in revenge is that he won’t sink to their murderous level.

Abbas announced a new series of harsh sanctions against Hamas and Gaza, and has been prodding Hamas and Israel toward another conflict, hoping to be the prime beneficiary as his two adversaries scorch each other while Washington scrambles to douse the flames.

With Hamas’s militancy and Abbas’s diplomacy both thoroughly discredited, Palestinian civilians are desperate for a new political dynamic. The recent “March of Return” protests originally promised that, but Hamas has thus far managed to hijack them. Yet if the protest movement leads to another war with Israel, the result could prove catastrophic for Hamas’s political viability. And if widespread unrest spreads to the West Bank, that could fatally undermine the Palestinian Authority.

Both Palestinian Islamists and nationalists are out of options, out of ideas, and out of luck. The Palestinian public is out of patience and nearly out of hope. That’s a combustible formula.

A series of demonstrations in the coming weeks has already been scheduled in Gaza, beginning next Friday. But the mid-May commemorations, set against this backdrop of frustration and despair, look incredibly dangerous.

When an entire people, at almost every level of society and across the political and religious spectrum, seem to have concluded they have nothing to hope for and nothing to lose — that all their dreams will remain deferred for the foreseeable future — an explosion may be inevitable.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/it-will-be-a-political-miracle-if-there-isn-t-a-major-uptick-of-violence-in-gaza-1.717429

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/trump-s-pick-of-hawkish-bolton-raises-old-ghosts-of-2003-iraq-invasion-1.715442

And then there was one. “Grown-up” left in the Trump White House, that is. National security advisor HR McMaster was living on borrowed time for months. He never clicked with Donald Trump and openly disagreed with the sudden opening to North Korea and ongoing appeasement of Russia. Now he’s gone, to be replaced at the National Security Council by the ultimate Washington hardliner, John Bolton.

From the outset of the Trump administration hopes were pinned on a group of experienced and sensible professionals, usually nicknamed “the grown-ups,” to restrain Mr Trump’s most reckless and disruptive impulses and impose some order and continuity, especially on foreign policy. The group was generally held to include Gen McMaster, outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and former economic advisor Gary Cohn, all recently removed in what looks like a purge of level-headed and independent-minded officials.

Some originally included John Kelly, now Mr Trump’s Chief of Staff, in the group, but everyone paying attention to how he led the Department of Homeland Security crossed him off the list in short order. Indeed, he increasingly looks like Mr Trump’s South Boston alter ego. Sad.

All this means we can no longer speak of “grown-ups,” but only “the grown-up,” singular.

Defence secretary Jim Mattis was always the most important and impressive of them, and if he’s the next to go, profound anxiety would be warranted. For now, he seems secure, in large measure because he has defended his strong grip on the Department of Defence by avoiding any public disagreements with the president, keeping a very low public profile, and interpreting his authority exceptionally narrowly while defending it extremely tenaciously. His tenure has been an object lesson in how to be a successful and dignified senior official under Mr Trump.

This purge is accompanied by the rise of ideologues who are much more hawkish and politically aligned with, and personally beholden to, Mr Trump. It does seem to signal that the president is growing more comfortable in his first political position, dispensing with people he didn’t like, agree with or trust much but were appointed to communicate something or reassure some constituency.

The myth of the “grown-ups” was, in fact, deliberately authored by Mr Trump himself through these appointments. And now he seems to feel no further need of it.

The replacement of Mr Tillerson with former CIA chief Mike Pompeo will be applauded in much of the Gulf, which felt he was unduly sympathetic to Qatar and insufficiently tough on Iran. The same logic might even welcome having Mr Bolton, rather than Gen McMaster, at NSC.

And, perhaps, these appointments are designed to make the administration look “tough” as a negotiating tactic and intimidate North Korea and China, or Iran and the European signatories to the nuclear agreement, in pursuit of the “art of the deal”. But it looks increasingly likely that, in a few weeks, Mr Trump will simply withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement.

If there is a realistic plan for what comes after that, it’s been concealed with an effectiveness rarely seen in Washington in general, and this administration in particular.

On Thursday, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir at the Brookings Institution encouraged Washington and the three European signatories to find a way to keep the agreement alive while dealing with Iran’s continued misbehaviour. His implicit point is that simply walking away from the deal would play directly into the hands of Iranian hardliners.

But Mr Trump has given no indication he understands that, and neither have Mr Pompeo or Mr Bolton, the latter of which recently made the legal as well as practical case for an attack on North Korea.

Toughness is a virtue. Recklessness is dangerous. Wars are best avoided. Hard-nosed negotiating and even psychological warfare can work, but, as recent American history has shown, bellicosity and impulsiveness can lead to miscalculations and colossal blunders.

If there is a serious plan for dealing with Iran in the aftermath of a deconstructed nuclear agreement, there’s been no hint of it. And, as the 2003 invasion of Iraq demonstrates, even when there is a clear plan, it’s not always a good one.

In a way, it’s useful that Mr Trump increasingly has the team he wants and is comfortable with. Hopefully, if nothing else, it will yield more policy clarity and predictability. And if belligerent rhetoric and bellicose advisers are all part of complex posturing by Mr Trump in preparation for getting “better deals” with Pyongyang and Tehran, that would be welcome. But the world and the region can’t afford another fiasco like the Iraq invasion.

The danger is that with Mr Trump growing in confidence and purging most of the somewhat independent and sober-minded “grown-ups” from his team he will be empowered to follow his instincts in situations where careful strategy and rational calculations based on fully-understood complex realities are indispensable. These instincts led many of his companies into bankruptcy.

Even those applauding now may one day miss the grown-ups more than they would imagine.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-20/saudi-prince-mbs-hits-the-road-in-america

For MbS to re-invent his economy, he needs help not just from Washington but also Wall Street, Silicon Valley and even Hollywood.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman arrived in Washington Monday for his first visit to the U.S. as presumptive heir to the throne. The trip comes at a crucial time in U.S.-Saudi relations, and a potential turning point in American policy toward the Middle East in general. But it is also telling that the visit won’t be confined to Washington: MbS, as the prince is known, will also be visiting Boston, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Houston.

The time-span and breadth of travel is a strong indication of how much is at stake for the brash 32-year-old national leader, and how central Saudi Arabia’s political and economic relationship with the U.S. is to his national, and personal, strategy.

The list of policy imperatives is extensive, but MbS also knows that, first and foremost, he needs to polish his image in the U.S. He’s been widely criticized as not merely brash and ambitious, but as impulsive and reckless by many American commentators. His personal efforts to counter this narrative began with a wide-ranging interview, aired on the eve of his arrival, with CBS’s “60 Minutes.” When discussing his reforms on women’s rights, such as allowing driving, and promising new “regulations ensuring equal pay for men and women,” he bluntly admits that, despite his efforts, “Saudi women still have not received their full rights.”

Such outreach was important because the detention of some 100 prominent Saudi citizens at the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton last year, ostensibly part of a corruption crackdown, was widely perceived as repressive and arbitrary. In addition, MbS, who also serves as defense minister, has been widely criticized for the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is leading an intervention against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.

In other words, the young prince has had some bad press, and he wants send a new message: that he is taking bold and decisive action because Saudi Arabia has no choice but to change quickly and radically — and that this requires determined, no-nonsense leadership. But he also wants to appear thoughtful, realistic and progressive.

MbS’ most important meeting, of course, will be with President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday. But he’s also due to spend time with many cabinet secretaries and other administration honchos. If he’s smart, he’ll pay due attention to Congress, and to Democrats who may again hold crucial leadership positions following the November midterms.

His Washington agenda will certainly include pushing forward a wide range of high-tech weapons purchases, most notably a $15 billion contract for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense antimissile system. Given a series of missile attacks on Saudi cities launched from Yemen by the Houthis, many of which were said to have been intercepted by American-supplied defense systems, Saudi interest in this technology is stronger than ever.

Both Saudi Arabia and the Trump administration insist that those missiles were provided to the Houthis by Iran, and coordinating policies toward Tehran will be high on the agenda. Beyond expanded American support for, and fending off criticism of, the war in Yemen, the Saudi and American teams will be hoping to forge common strategies on other regional hotspots where Iran is active, including Iraq and Syria. Washington and Riyadh have recently intensified pressure against Iran’s client in Lebanon, Hezbollah, through sanctions and other means.

But while they may share the broad goal of containing, and even rolling back, the expansion of Iran’s influence in the Arab world, it’s unclear how closely Riyadh and Washington are working together to achieve this. Indeed, one of MbS’s most important goals must be to ascertain what, exactly, the Trump administration hopes to achieve in regional battlegrounds like Syria and how, precisely, Washington intends to accomplish it.

Trump and his aides will almost certainly press MbS for a quick resolution of the Saudi-led boycott of Qatar, which Washington has come to regard as an unnecessary headache. Trump has made it clear he won’t go to a summit with Gulf Arab leaders until they resolve their differences. But MbS may be happy to stick to this week’s bilateral meetings for now, unless the American side can guarantee significant Qatari concessions to Saudi demands over ending support for Arab extremists and opposition groups, and curbing ties to Iran.

A trickier question involves Saudi Arabia’s nascent nuclear energy program. The country wants to build 16 reactors in the next couple of decades so its oil reserves can be largely devoted to export. Washington is asking Riyadh to agree to a “123” formula, whereby nonnuclear powers agreed to forgo uranium enrichment, plutonium reprocessing, and selling U.S. technology to others. But since Saudi Arabia will be largely mining its own uranium and has other potential suppliers — and given that Iran still has the right to enrich even under the nuclear agreement — Riyadh simply won’t accept such terms. Reaching a compromise could help U.S. companies, including Westinghouse’s bankruptcy issue, and bring the project under greater American supervision and away from any stealthy weapons component. It’s a conundrum tailor-made for the art of the deal, if such a thing actually exists.

The prince’s social and economic reform program, much of which is included in his “Vision 2030” agenda, seeks to modernize Saudi Arabia in a generation. Shifting from an oil-based economy to a diverse one is one of his most ambitious projects, and it involves vastly increasing his country’s infrastructure, technological and, especially, human capacity, (including Saudi women). The partnership with U.S. is central to all three pillars, which is why MbS is going to spend so much time in so many cities around the country in the coming days.

In Seattle, MbS will be hosted by Bill Gates in a meeting that, along with San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Boston, will focus on technology. In Houston, he will confer with energy industry honchos, and in New York City with financial industry and investment bigwigs. Perhaps his most intriguing stop is Los Angeles, the home of the entertainment industry. MbS is determined to introduce an element of public fun, heretofore banished to private spaces and in many cases forbidden outright in Saudi society. He just lifted a 35-year ban on cinemas, and unheard of mixed-gender public entertainments like concerts are cropping up around the country. He’s the first Saudi ruler with a lot to discuss with Hollywood.

The asks will flow in both directions. MbS is sure to be pressed on listing a proposed multibillion-dollar initial public offering for the state-own Saudi Aramco oil company on the New York Stock Exchange, rather than in London or another alternative. And Saudi Arabia has been urged by Washington to foot the bill for U.S. policies in Iraqand Syria that, among other things, counter Iran’s influence.

Few foreign leaders are this expansive in their U.S. outreach, because MbS has a focus not only on the diplomatic and military ties but also on investments, technology and even culture. It’s potentially the beginning of a much closer era in U.S.-Saudi relations, but MbS has to persuade his hosts that his plan to rapidly transform his society can succeed.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/gun-control-debate-shows-how-motivated-minorities-dominate-us-politics-and-policy-1.713752

After the recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida, teenagers throughout the United States are trying to seize the initiative on a major public policy matter. Anyone who wants to understand American politics should take a good look into this revealing window into the system’s internal mechanisms.

American governmental decision-making is, simultaneously, exceptionally straightforward and unbelievably complex. The secret of the American system is that there’s no secret. It’s pretty much all on TV. There’s no cabal or tiny ruling faction calling the shots, either overtly or behind-the-scenes.

Even the Trump administration, which is the executive branch of the federal government, doesn’t work like that – despite the enormous executive authority vested in the president ex officio and the fact that Mr Trump runs his White House like a kind of medieval court. But even there, decision-making is usually complex and practical authority is mostly diffused.

When the aperture is widened to include Congress, the courts and all state and local governments, the lines become even more blurred. And, in reality, the decision-making process includes innumerable additional inputs from corporate and other moneyed interests, think tanks and policy groups, ideological factions, civil society in all its forms, academia and dozens of other points of pressure on any set of issues.

Which brings us back to the uprising among millions of teenagers over gun safety. Simply put, American children are sick of being murdered in their schools and are literally demanding that the adults who run the country begin to restrict, even just a little bit, the virtually limitless access to military-style weapons that allows lunatics to routinely massacre scores of people in mere minutes.

They’ve certainly seized control of the debate, captured the public imagination and inspired the country through eloquent advocacy and stirring activism, including a mass walkout from the schools last week, which was the closest thing Americans have seen to a student strike in anyone’s memory.

Moreover, there is solid public support throughout the country for enhanced gun-control and overwhelming majorities back limited measures as universal background checks for buying assault weapons and limiting the access to the most potent instruments of death by convicted criminals, the mentally ill or those too young to drink alcohol (to mention just a few categories).

You’d be forgiven for expecting, therefore, that significantly strengthened gun-control measures are very likely, if not inevitable.

But you’d be wrong.

Just because the American system is open and there is no ruling clique doesn’t mean that strong majorities, even when led by an inspiring movement – in this case as compelling as children who don’t wish to be gunned down in their classrooms, no less – will get their way.

On the contrary, it is the very openness of the American system, particularly the First Amendment-guaranteed “right to petition the government for redress of grievances”, that results in hyper-motivated minorities, even relatively tiny ones, becoming hyper-empowered and, indeed, decisive on the very narrow issues to which they are devoted.

The National Rifle Association and the rest of the pro-gun lobby has consistently won the day and is likely to prevail again. They may make some trivial concessions about attachments that turn semiautomatic weapons into automatic ones and other minor tinkering. But they will circle the wagons, hunker down and wait for the storm to pass. Then, when most Americans, who will still be in favour of increased gun control, have moved on to other topics, they will remain focused on demonising and opposing even the most limited and sensible measures.

Not all sentiments are equally potent. Commitment and consistency are the keys for a determined minority to defeat a generalised majority. Most people favour sensible gun control measures, but they’re not going to give much of their money to achieve that or grant or withhold their votes to candidates on that issue alone. Obsessive, dedicated, single-issue donors and voters will. That’s how they consistently win over politicians.

Therefore, in the American system, the political influence of one gun fanatic can be greater than that of 10,000 sensible people. Only when the general public, or another hyper-empowered minority group (especially a wealthy one), becomes as determined to secure gun control as the gun lobby is to oppose it will any such legislation become practically possible.

There are analogous phenomena in foreign policy, of course. For decades, the Cuban-American lobby ensured Washington maintained an embargo on Cuba the general public knew was ridiculous. They were a tiny subset of the population, but they were, crucially, the only ones who really cared, so they got their way.

Jewish-American groups were so successful at supporting Israel, even before they were joined by the evangelical Christians, and so unopposed by effective rivals, that Israel became effectively a domestic, rather than a foreign policy, issue.

Will the Parkland shooting and student uprising result in meaningful gun control measures? Possible, but unlikely.

So, this gun control debate is a fascinating case study in American decision-making. There is no ruling faction simply deciding things. And majority public opinion is rarely decisive The pivotal factor in the American system, at least usually, is highly motivated minorities.

http://www.agsiw.org/mbs-trip-will-test-strength-resurgent-u-s-saudi-ties/

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-12/how-trump-could-restart-israel-palestinian-peace-talks

President Donald Trump’s plan for face-to-face nuclear weapons talks with North Korea’s dictator isn’t his only bid for a historic diplomatic breakthrough. His administration has also been signaling recently that it’s about to unveil a plan to revive peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

It’s certainly a worthy goal. But don’t get your hopes up. The barriers to success are so high, and the chance that Trump would be willing to surmount them so low, that it’s probably better not to even try. Decades of bitter history have demonstrated that a failed Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative is almost always worse than nothing at all.

Start with the easiest problem to solve: Jared Kushner. The president’s son-in-law and designated Middle East peacemaker just lost the top-secret security clearance he’d need for access to key intelligence. So he now lacks the tools needed to do the job, though that shouldn’t be too big a deal — there are obviously lots of better qualified negotiators who could lead a peace effort. For that to happen, though, Trump would have to acknowledge that putting Kushner in charge was a mistake.

Beyond that, even the shrewdest negotiator would need the chaotic Trump administration to settle on a single point of view about what sort of “peace” the two sides should be aiming for.

Is it the establishment of two states, the U.S. position since the end of the Cold War that was explicitly endorsed by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama? Maybe not, apparently. The Trump administration says it will support a two-state outcome only “if the parties want it.” Palestinian leaders largely still do, but many Israeli cabinet members are moving towards annexation, and even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is talking about a Palestinian “state-minus,” whatever that means.

If the parties don’t share the same definition of peace, what exactly will they be negotiating toward? What’s the alternative? The Trump administration hasn’t said.

Moreover, all Israeli-Palestinian negotiations since 1993 have been brokered by Washington and predicated on the idea that five sensitive issues should be resolved by the two sides in a “final status” agreement. But now, astonishingly, Washington has unilaterally changed the rules regarding the most sensitive of all the final status issues by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Jerusalem, in Trump’s phrase, has been “taken off the table.”

Without a two-state outcome as the goal and the final status issues defining the talks, the diplomatic scaffolding and logic of the peace process is shattered. Without them the Palestinians can’t and won’t return to the table.

If the administration really wants to restart talks, it would have to clarify that Washington still endorses a two-state outcome.

It should further clarify that Trump was referring to West Jerusalem, where the Israeli government has been located for decades, and not occupied East Jerusalem, the status of which will still have to be determined by negotiations. The administration can point to the line in Trump’s Jerusalem announcement that states, “We are not taking a position on any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, or the resolution of contested borders,” to explain that, since the American declaration applies to West Jerusalem, and not areas occupied in 1967, East Jerusalem is not, in fact, “off the table.”

That would go a long way to repairing the damage the Jerusalem announcement caused to prospects for the positive engagement of Arab countries such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The administration also needs to deal with more on-the-ground political realities.

Rhetorically, the Israeli-Palestinian relationship is at its lowest ebb in ages. But administratively, especially on security cooperation, it continues to function. That’s essential, since security is indispensable to both peace and effective Palestinian governance.

Washington should increase financing, training and political support for the Palestinian Authority Security Forces and pressure Israel to limit incursions into Palestinian-ruled areas of the West Bank, which exacerbate tensions. It should also tell Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to cease disingenuously threatening to end security cooperation with Israel or risk such increased support. And it should tell Israeli politicians that U.S. support for their own pet projects will cease until they stop blocking measures approved by their own military that would empower the Palestinian Authority and provide Palestinians expanded opportunities.

Serious work to stabilize the dire humanitarian and political situation in Gaza is also required. And the Palestinian Authority should be pressured to drop implausible demands for Hamas to disarm as a condition of working together on aid and reconstruction.

The Trump administration should follow a Bush, and not Obama, approach to the key issue of Israeli settlements. Obama damaged the peace process by demanding a total Israeli settlement freeze while doing nothing to enforce it. A preferable stratagem would begin by reviving President George W. Bush’s effort to secure informal understandings with Israel that it can only build in areas that aren’t controversial or strategically sensitive. But that needs to be augmented by George H.W. Bush’s willingness to withhold financial support from Israel if it is uncooperative.

Palestinian elections, and a renewal of the administrative reform pioneered under former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, are a must. Washington can reward and reinforce them with a range of financial and diplomatic inducements without which they probably won’t happen.

Finally, the Trump administration would have to secure greater international buy-in. The Middle East Quartet (the U.S., the European Union, Russia and the United Nations) once gave peace efforts an international imprimatur but essentially became dysfunctional during the Obama era. The Trump team doesn’t seem to get it, but Washington definitely needs such support again now.

And, crucially, Egypt, Jordan and Norway should join the group. Norway would represent the countries financially underwriting the Palestinian Authority, Egypt the Arab world, and Jordan can leverage its Israeli-acknowledged role as custodian of Muslim holy places in Jerusalem.

That’s all a tall order, and the Trump White House has offered little reason to think that it’s willing to undertake this kind of repair work, let alone correct its mistake on Jerusalem. The alternative, though, is a Trump peace effort that’s dead on arrival.