US vice president debate hints at why some in Gulf may prefer Trump

US Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Democrat Party candidate for vice president, said during a debate with Mike Pence last week that pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal made the United States “less safe,” leaving “friends and allies” in the lurch, as Adam Lucente reports.

Can’t please everyone. Those “friends and allies” refer to France, the United Kingdom and Germany, the European signatories to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the formal name of the Iran nuclear deal struck in 2015 under former US President Barack Obama. Russia and China are also signatories to the JCPOA, but are not quite in the “friends and allies” camp.

There are some friends and allies, however, who weren’t so troubled by the Trump administration’s decision to step back from the JCPOA in May 2018: Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, to name four. They were not parties to the deal and were not consulted on it. Indeed, hostility to Iran has brought the countries together: Israel has signed normalization agreements with the UAE and Bahrain in recent months. 

‘A failed experiment.’ Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his opposition to the Iran deal known at the time. Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer told me in an Al-Monitor podcast in August that Israel had “been the guinea pigs in this failed experiment.” Netanyahu cheered US President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the deal.