Henry Kissinger advises Joe Biden administration to continue with Trump's 'brilliant' Middle East policy
President Joe Biden has faced a challenging task in dealing with the Middle East, especially after the US’s relations with Iran plummeted. The new commander-in-chief has already found himself under the scanner for taking steps like pulling the US’s support for ally Saudi Arabia’s Yemen war or launching an airstrike against Iranian-backed militias in Syria. Tehran has also shown little willingness towards the Biden administration’s decision to return to the nuclear deal of 2015 and asked the US to lift sanctions imposed on it first.
Amid these challenges, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger has advised the Biden administration to continue with the policy that former president Donald Trump pursued in the Middle East, which he termed “brilliant”. In a speech on Tuesday, March 3, Kissinger, who had made remarkable contributions towards America’s rapprochement with China in the early 1970s, said, “I think that one of the great successes of the previous administration was... they had achieved two things in the Middle East. One, to separate the Palestinian problem from all of the other problems so that it did not become a veto over everything else.”
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He added, “Secondly, of lining up the Sunni states in actual or potential combination against the Shiite states, which is Iran, that was developing a capacity to threaten them. I think that this was a brilliant concept. We were just at the beginning of it.”
'It is important we didn't slip into diluting this pattern'
Kissinger, who is just two years short of centenary, spoke in his speech at the Nixon Seminar about the role he played in the transition from the Lyndon Johnson administration to the Richard Nixon administration. “So, in the current situation, it is important that we don’t slip into diluting this pattern that has been created and which... at an appropriate moment can even lead to discussions with Iran. We should not give up the pressures that exist on Iran until we know where they are heading,” he added.
He said it is something that Washington needs to carefully consider in the current situation. According to him, if the US broke out the Iranian issue from the overall Middle East problem, it faces the “risk of losing two achievements” -- separating the Palestinian issue which removes it as a veto over everything else and the Sunni cooperation with Israel.
The former Trump administration took a series of initiatives that saw Israel reconciling with a number of Arab nations like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan and these earned the former president nomination for the Peace Prize in Nobel, something Kissinger was honored within 1973.
Last November, just days after Biden won the presidential election, Kissinger said his administration should focus on restoring lines of communication with China fast or else Washington could risk a military conflict with Beijing.