There was a picture taken today that says more than just a thousand words. The photograph was snapped in Sharm el-Sheikh and shows Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett seated either side of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
According to the Egyptian president’s office, they met to discuss ‘the repercussions of global developments, especially with regard to energy, market stability, and food security’ but ‘they also exchanged visions and views on the latest developments of several international and regional issues’. That’s a very wordy way of saying ‘Iran’.
Iran is what this meeting was about and specifically about putting on a united front as Washington endeavours once more to reach a deal to prevent a nuclear Iran. Israel, Egypt and the Emiratis are alarmed because nothing that has been heard so far from these latest talks (and that is not very much at all) suggests the United States has learned its lesson from the initial Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
That agreement, struck in 2015, was hailed by the Obama administration as a victory for peace and stability. Obama assured Americans the deal would ‘make America and the world safer and more secure’ and that the alternative was ‘some sort of war’. But as I’ve noted previously on Coffee House, the original Iran deal was so weak that the Iranians boasted they could recover start building a bomb before the deal expired.
Read the article by Stephen Daisley in The Spectator.