How the Abraham Accords Fueled a New Era of Conflict
Key takeaways
- President Donald Trump presided over the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.
- If Trump can sometimes be overly effusive in evaluating the impact of his own achievements, this time, he was not alone.
- While the Biden administration initially held the accords at arm’s length, it soon embraced them as a formula for regional peacemaking.
On Sept. 15, 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump presided over the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. Speaking on the White House lawn, amid a lavish signing ceremony, Trump announced “the dawn of a new Middle East” saying that “these agreements will serve as the foundation for a comprehensive peace across the entire region—something which nobody thought was possible, certainly not in this day and age.”
If Trump can sometimes be overly effusive in evaluating the impact of his own achievements, this time, he was not alone. Many mainstream foreign-policy commentators were quick to praise the Abraham Accords, which were subsequently expanded to include Morocco and Sudan, as one of the few unambiguously good foreign-policy achievements of Trump’s first term. Longtime Democratic Middle East hand Dennis Ross wrote that normalization was an “unexpectedly positive move” that represented an “important contribution to peace-building between Arabs and Israelis.”
On Sept. 15, 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump presided over the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. Speaking on the White House lawn, amid a lavish signing ceremony, Trump announced “the dawn of a new Middle East” saying that “these agreements will serve as the foundation for a comprehensive peace across the entire region—something which nobody thought was possible, certainly not in this day and age.”