Why Israel-UAE deal doesn't merit the hype
While many in the United States and Israel have celebrated the deal as a geopolitical "earthquake," it's unlikely to lead to transformational change.
Republicans and Democrats have hailed the Israel-UAE normalization agreement, with some observers going so far as to call it a geopolitical earthquake. But does the agreement merit the hype?
One way to look at the question is to consider what genuine regional shakeups have looked like in the past. An “earthquake” must involve some transformational regional or even global realignment. Consider the first earthquake in Arab-Israeli diplomacy. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s dramatic visit to Jerusalem in 1977 led not only to Israel’s first peace treaty with an Arab state, but it also caused Egypt to exit the Soviet orbit and join an American-backed axis. It also paved the way for a return of territory (the Sinai) and ended hostilities with Israel after fighting multiple regional wars, some of which risked direct conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Or consider the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, which led to the removal of Iran’s most formidable Arab adversary and a shifting balance in the sectarian leadership of the country. Iraq went from a Sunni-Arab balancer of Iran to a country whose new leadership had taken refuge in Iran. The ensuing wars provoked not only regional alarm about rising Iranian power but also, separately, civil strife that planted the seeds for the rise of the Islamic State.
So yes, the Middle East has faced transformative moments. But the Israel-UAE agreement is not one of them.
