Op-Ed: Bonnie Glick: Five years later, President Trump's Abraham Accords show that peace really does lead to prosperity
Saudi Arabia with its dreams of modernization would have a great partner in the country across the Red Sea that literally made its own desert bloom, FDD's Bonnie Glick explains.
Five years ago, President Donald Trump made the historic announcement that Israel would normalize relations with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain. Thus two historic peace treaties were signed on the White House lawn with President Trump pulling off the master negotiation of peace between Arabs and Israelis at a scale never seen before.
But two countries at once was not enough for the president. He further brought Morocco to the peace table with Israel and, in an unimaginable move, he brokered peace between Israel and Sudan. Sadly, the price of peace may have been too much for Sudanese radicals, as the peace-making government in Khartoum was overthrown in a coup d’etat. But lasting peace between Israel and three Arab countries has stood the rocky test of time over the past five years.
There are two specific areas where the peace agreements have been most significant: economically and militarily.
The economic numbers of trade, cooperation, tourism, and development have been astounding. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs have visited Israel — while comparable numbers of Israelis have visited their “cousins” in the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco. Prior to the Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 projections for trade were sky high. Billions of dollars had already crossed borders.
The newfound Israel-UAE relationship alone came in at over $3 billion in bilateral trade in the first two years of the accords. The Emirates began to market itself as the scale-up nation to Israel’s start-up nation.
The energy and excitement around collaboration was the envy of other Muslim countries that had not yet normalized relations with the Jewish state. Joe Biden’s dream was to bring peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Of course his ability to execute was non-existent.
President Trump’s vision, on the other hand, as outlined in his first administration on his first overseas trip in Saudi Arabia, was of Peace Through Prosperity. It seemed, after the signing of the Abraham Accords, to be within reach with endless possibilities for growth.
October 7th transformed the primarily trade-based relations into more complicated military-based relations, and a lot more countries were pulled into the mix. The alignment of the Arab “peace players” in the aftermath of the brutal terrorist attacks was seen through universal condemnation of Hamas and support for Israel's just war. It helped, on many levels, that Hamas’s main backers are Iran, Qatar, and Turkey, none of whom are overly friendly toward the peacemakers nor, indeed, toward Saudi Arabia.
But geopolitics are unpredictable. After Israel targeted Hezbollah through the terrorists’ beepers and built a drone factory inside Iran, and after Israel began targeting Houthi pirates who were disrupting global trade, and after the U.S. and Israel obliterated Iran’s nuclear capabilities, verbal support for Israel from Saudi Arabia on the global stage has been noticeably silent. Following Israel’s recent strategic strikes on Hamas leaders who were being given safe harbor in Doha, the Gulf Arabs rallied around their erstwhile neighbor, Qatar. Saudi Arabia stopped making cryptic comments about how peace with Israel was almost at the finish line. Instead, the Kingdom and the Crown Prince have been quick to criticize Israel’s precise and targeted attacks on terrorists and terror cells. It’s almost as if Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman thinks that now that Israel has taken care of the mutual enemies of Saudi Arabia and of Israel, he no longer needs to play nice in the sandbox.
If Saudi Arabia is rethinking its long-term strategy of peace through prosperity with Jerusalem, that is a shame. MBS should take a page from the UAE and Bahrain notebooks: peace really does lead to prosperity. It leads to access to Israeli innovation. It leads to increases in tourism. It leads to military cooperation. It leads to technological and innovative breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, in agriculture, and in space. And it leads to political and economic stability. Five years later, the numbers don’t lie.
Israel has stood by its Abraham Accords allies in contests with the Houthis in Yemen, just as Arab peacemakers have cooperated with Israel in downing Iranian ICBMs headed toward Israel. There are bad actors in the Middle East, to be sure, and the old adage of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” holds true in the desert. Israel now has formal peace agreements with five Arab countries and, given President Trump’s extraordinary negotiating skills, more such peace agreements could emerge in the short term.
The world should expect new and interesting conversations on the margins of the UN General Assembly this month in New York between Israel and her neighbors including never-imagined efforts to broker agreements between Jerusalem and Damascus as well as between Jerusalem and Beirut.
MBS in Riyadh will surely be watching from the sidelines, but he would be wise to join the conversations directly as well — Saudi Arabia with its dreams of modernization would have a great partner in the country across the Red Sea that literally made its own desert bloom.
Bonnie Glick is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).