So far, it can be said that the path to the White House has become open for former President Donald Trump. He was nominated as the presidential candidate of the Republican Party in the conference held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The election is scheduled to be held on November 5. After the assassination attempt on him in Pennsylvania last Saturday, the look of the election campaigns changed for both candidates: President Joe Biden of Democratic Party and former President Donald Trump of the Republican Party.
The assassination attempt led to the unification of the ranks of the Republican Party as had not happened in the long time.
The Arab world is directly concerned with what might happen in the United States (US), particularly in terms of the possibility of a political transition from a Democratic administration to a Republican administration. Observers feel that the majority of the Arab public is inclined towards Trump as a direct reaction to the policies of the administrations of Barak Obama and Joe Biden. Their performance has led to creation of a huge gap with a large Arab public, as well as Arab countries and governments known as historical and strategic allies.
After tearing up the agreement in 2018, Trump practiced a strict policy with Iran, reinstating harsh sanctions which brought its oil exports to their lowest levels. Trump forced the world that day to respect the US sanctions to a large extent. In early 2020, Trump assassinated Iran’s strongman in the region, Qassem Soleimani who was the commander of the Quds Force in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
With the arrival of Joe Biden to the White House at the beginning of the year 2021, there was a complete revolution over the Trump era. It was also seen as a return to the Obama era, to the extent that President Biden’s first term was called President Obama’s third term. The US returned to tending to a policy of connection with Iran, starting with launching indirect negotiations in April 2021 to revive the nuclear agreement. This conciliatory policy with Iran opened the door for it to publicly evade its obligations stipulated in the nuclear agreement and its executive annexes. During the era of Biden, who was reconciled with Iran, it reinstalled hundreds of advanced centrifuges in its reactors and pushed towards enriching large quantities of uranium to levels exceeding 60 percent purity, which is, more than 20 to 25 times of what was allowed in the agreement. Sometimes the matter reached to the point of raising the enrichment rate to 85 percent, which is, to the level which would later allow the production of a nuclear bomb.
There is no doubt that the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation represented a major national threat to the Arab countries surrounding Iran. Regardless of the war and the massive bloody Israeli attack which followed the operation, large segments of the Arabs led to believe that the “Al-Aqsa Flood” was an Iranian attempt to achieve the largest Iranian penetration in the Arab world in four decades.
A significant part of the Arab world rightly believes that the greatest threat to stability and peace in the region comes from Iran’s expansionist project in the region. Therefore, Trump’s return to the White House – even if it is too early to predict his Middle East policy – will be less harmful to Arab interests in the face of the danger posed by the Iranian project.
[by Ali Hammuda in Annahar, Lebanon]
Compiled and translated by Faizul Haque