The foreign policy establishment loves a predictable tragedy. For decades, the consensus on Middle East diplomacy operated like a secular religion: no progress could be made with Arab states until the Palestinian issue was solved. It was a beautiful, moral, and utterly failed framework. When the Trump administration bypassed this orthodoxy to broker the Abraham Accords, the traditional diplomatic corps did not just critique the strategy—they dismissed it as a dangerous, fleeting mirage.
The lazy consensus, peddled by legacy analysts and echoed in mainstream podcasts, paints these deals as superficial realpolitik, a case of crying "peace" where there is no peace. They claim that because the accords did not resolve the core structural conflicts of the region, they are structurally hollow.
They are wrong. They are misreading the entire mechanics of modern geopolitics.
The critics fail to understand that peace is not an emotional state of harmony; it is a cold, transactional calculation of mutual survival. By treating peace as a product of shared interests rather than shared values, the transactional approach achieved more in four months than the idealists achieved in four decades.
The Flaw of the Moral Grand Narrative
For thirty years, regional diplomacy was paralyzed by the veto of total consensus. The prevailing wisdom dictated that normalization between Israel and the Arab world must be the final step of a comprehensive regional settlement.
I watched the machinery of Washington and European think tanks burn hundreds of millions of dollars chasing this grand narrative. They organized endless symposia, drafted unreadable white papers, and insisted on a top-down, holistic resolution. The result? Total stagnation.
The Abraham Accords succeeded precisely because they abandoned the demand for moral alignment. They swapped grand narratives for hard bilateral transactions.
- The United Arab Emirates wanted access to advanced Western military hardware (like F-35 fighter jets) and a formalized security alignment against Iran.
- Israel wanted regional integration, direct flights, and commercial markets.
- Morocco wanted diplomatic recognition of its sovereignty over the Western Sahara.
This was not a diplomatic awakening; it was a trade floor. And that is exactly why it worked.
When you strip away the requirement that nations must love each other before they can trade with each other, you unlock pragmatic cooperation. The critics call this cynical. In the real world, cynicism that prevents conflict is infinitely superior to idealism that prolongs it.
Dismantling the "Pretenders of Peace" Premise
A common critique leveled by conventional analysts is that the Abraham Accords did not involve the nations actually fighting Israel, making them irrelevant to true regional stability. "How can you claim a peace breakthrough when you are normalizing relations with countries that were never at war?" the argument goes.
This question fundamentally misunderstands how modern proxy warfare operates.
Geopolitical stability is not governed by the formal declarations of state armies marching across borders; it is governed by containment networks. The primary driver of volatility in the region is the network of non-state actors funded by Tehran. By formalizing ties between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, the accords constructed a concrete, intelligence-sharing architecture designed to contain that specific threat.
Consider the mechanics of regional defense. Imagine a scenario where a state must defend against a saturation attack of low-cost drones and ballistic missiles. A localized defense system is inherently limited by geography. But an integrated regional radar network, stretching across the Gulf and cooperating with Mediterranean partners, expands early warning times exponentially.
This is not a symbolic handshake. It is a hard-nosed, operational defensive alignment. To dismiss it because it did not solve a separate, decades-old asymmetric conflict is like dismissing NATO because it failed to resolve border disputes in the Balkans. It misses the entire strategic point.
The Cost of the Transactional Model
To maintain credibility, we must acknowledge the inherent risks of this approach. Transactional diplomacy builds structures on shifting sand. When the transaction changes, the alliance strains.
The downside of this model is its reliance on specific political regimes rather than deep cultural integration. A peace built on economic and security calculus is highly vulnerable to domestic political shifts and changes in leadership priorities. If the United States hesitates to fulfill its side of the bargain—such as pausing arms sales or shifting its security commitments—the entire foundation experiences structural fatigue.
Furthermore, ignoring the underlying ideological grievances of the region does not make them vanish. It merely defers the bill. While the elites in Abu Dhabi and Jerusalem sign tech partnerships and tourism treaties, the street-level sentiment across the wider region remains volatile. If a transactional alliance cannot survive a systemic regional shock, it proves that the critics were right about its fragility, even if they were wrong about its utility.
But even with these vulnerabilities, the transactional model delivers a functional status quo that the old framework never could. It trades a romanticized, unattainable ideal for a messy, operational reality.
The Structural Illusion of the "People Also Ask" Consensus
When people search for answers regarding Middle East stability, the questions themselves betray a flawed premise. The internet continually asks variants of: Can there be peace without a two-state solution?
The brutal, honest answer is that the definition of "peace" has been hijacked. If your definition requires the total elimination of geopolitical friction, then the answer is no. But that definition exists nowhere else in international relations.
We do not look at the relationship between the United States and China and demand total harmony before establishing trade protocols. We do not freeze diplomatic recognition between historic adversaries globally because internal disputes remain unresolved.
The premise that regional normalization must be held hostage by a single conflict is a diplomatic anomaly. The Abraham Accords dismantled this premise by proving that parallel tracks are possible. A state can deepen economic and security ties with regional partners while simultaneously managing, or even failing to manage, its immediate territorial conflicts.
The traditionalist view insists this is a contradiction. The realist view recognizes it as standard statecraft.
Stop Demanding Ideological Purity in Geopolitics
The insistence that diplomatic breakthroughs must be accompanied by moral transformations is a luxury of commentators who do not have to manage real-world security risks. The critique that the accords were mere "theatrics" ignores the billions of dollars in non-oil trade, the joint ventures in water scarcity technology, and the direct intelligence pipelines that now exist between former adversaries.
These are tangible, measurable assets. They are not rhetorical devices used in a campaign speech.
The foreign policy establishment spent years arguing that the road to regional stability ran exclusively through a singular diplomatic path. When an alternative route was carved out through sheer transactional leverage, their reaction was not to analyze its mechanics, but to pray for its failure so their old textbooks would remain relevant.
Geopolitics is not a morality play. It is an arena of leverage, infrastructure, and cold national interest. The actors who brokered these deals did not do so out of a sudden burst of altruism; they did so because the cost of isolation became higher than the cost of normalization.
Stop judging international diplomacy by its ability to create a harmonious utopia. Judge it by its ability to create stable, self-interest-driven coalitions that raise the cost of aggression for common adversaries. By that metric, the transactional approach did not cry peace in a vacuum—it built a framework that rendered the old, stagnant consensus completely obsolete.
