Thus I Read (the other 98%)
Donald Trump launched a war in the Gulf, and it ended with Saudi Arabia signing itself under the protection of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal instead of America's. The only nuclear-armed nation in the Muslim world is now treaty-bound to defend the Saudis, and the United States is nowhere in the document.
As reported by the Washington Post, here is how Trump lost the room. The war with Iran that he launched in February has dragged on for nearly six months, pulling Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain into a fight they now feel was forced on them.
In June, Washington and Tehran reached a MOU, a Memorandum of Understanding meant to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
It did neither. The deal fell apart within weeks.
Last week Saudi Arabia signed a joint-defense agreement in Mecca with Turkey, which fields NATO's second-largest army, and Pakistan, the only nuclear-armed nation in the Muslim world. A senior European official told the Post the pact was "a signal to the U.S.," proof that three powerful states had concluded "the U.S. is not enough."
Some of the same governments that host American military bases are now debating whether to keep them.
Bader Al-Saif, a historian at Kuwait University, gave the Post his verdict on Trump's signature deal in four words: "The MOU was a joke."
Americans are absorbing the cost of the same war. It has drained the strategic petroleum reserve to its lowest level in forty years, the Energy Department reported this week, and gasoline now sits at $4.07 a gallon, the most any mid-August has ever cost, according to AAA.
Trump's team calls his Iran policy strength. In the region it carries a different reputation, one the Eurasia Group's Firas Maksad summarized as "erratic" and "unpredictable."
For a president who sold himself as the dealmaker the Middle East had waited for, the picture is unkind. His closest partners went looking for protection somewhere other than Washington, and they did it in the open.
Trump wanted the world to hear that the Gulf loves him. Instead his own allies signed their names to a pact built on the opposite conclusion, and told a newspaper his deal was a joke.
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