Presidents like to say that their predecessors left them a mess. Yet in Middle East policy, President Donald Trump left his successor an extraordinary gift of peace and stability.
Peace agreements were emerging almost weekly between Israel and her Arab neighbors. Iran, struggling under the burden of U.S. sanctions, was isolated, broke, and wracked by internal turmoil. In Afghanistan, a tentative deal with the Taliban meant that U.S. troops could look forward to coming home.
Trump left the U.S. in a position of historic strategic advantage. But like President Barack Obama, who squandered the gains of the Iraq “surge” and withdrew before the country was stable enough to prevent the rise of the terrorist “Islamic State,” Biden is throwing away many of the gains Trump achieved in the region.
As a result, instead of peace, Biden may be putting the region back on a path to war.
