Stephen Kalin

United States now definitely completely observed by what's going on in the Middle East.

And in reality, the negotiations which were started by President Trump last year, they have no result for the moment.

Yeah, so the president made this demand to a number of Arab states as well as Pakistan and Turkey just over a week ago on a phone call that he had with the leaders from those countries.

He's brought it up a couple more times, most recently in a cabinet meeting, where he basically said that the deal with Iran was getting close to being finalized and he wanted to see...

the rest of the Arab countries and some others, Pakistan and Turkey, joined the Abraham Accords, which is basically a pact recognizing Israel as part of that deal, sort of as an acknowledgement and a vote of gratitude for the end of the Iran war.

That's right.

Saudi Arabia was actually getting really close to normalizing

back in 2023 under the Biden administration.

And that was literally weeks before the October 7th war began, the October 7th attack, and then the Gaza war.

And so Saudi paused all those conversations, and it's actually become much more difficult in the last few years.

for Arab governments and particularly unpopular among their populations.

The perspective from a lot of these capitals is that nothing's changed in terms of what their demands are for normalizing with Israel, which is progress and movement on establishing a Palestinian state and resolving the heart of that conflict.

Yeah, it seems like a complicating factor on an already very complex set of negotiations.

The Abraham Accords, which are the name that he gave to the normalization deals with Israel back in his first term, are really one of the

his biggest foreign policy achievements, and that's acknowledged pretty much across the board.

And so perhaps tying one of his greatest successes to what has become a foreign policy mess in the Iran war is an attempt to try to push the narrative beyond what the U.S.

is getting or isn't getting from the Iran deal to something, you know, a broader piece across the region.

Yeah, I mean, it might please some constituencies in Israel, but the Gulf states have a lot of those same concerns.

They're worried about the straits not being reopened fully, about Iran being emboldened and more likely to attack them in the future.

And a move like this, recognizing Israel, which has just participated in this massive war against Iran, would really only antagonize Iran further.