“This has been held back for so long by old thinking and by a stalled process, and we finally had a breakthrough four months ago, and we're continuing to push the region forward,” White House senior advisor Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and point-man for Middle East issues, explained.
The Abraham Accords have emerged as a legacy item in the last months of the Trump administration, as first the United Arab Emirates and then Bahrain joined to sign the deals notwithstanding decades of unrest related to the Israeli-Palestinian fights. The president declared Morocco’s decision to join the group in conjunction with U.S. acknowledgment of the monarchy’s sovereignty over Western Sahara, the formerly Mauritarian territory where an independence movement has attempted to establish a nation for decades.
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“The United States believes that an independent Sahrawi State is not a realistic option for resolving the conflict and that genuine autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty is the only feasible solution,” Trump said in a formal declaration released after his announcement of the Morocco-Israel agreement. “We urge the parties to engage in discussions without delay, using Morocco's autonomy plan as the only framework to negotiate a mutually acceptable solution.”
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A ceasefire in Western Sahara crashed last month after Moroccan troops cleared a road-closing demonstration started by the Polisario Front, which began in 1973 as a leftist insurgency against Spanish rule of the Sahara. Spain relinquished most of its Saharan territory to Morocco, leaving the rest for Mauritania. The Mauritanian government ceded the land to the Polisario effort to establish the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in Western Sahara, though Morocco replied by occupying the territory.
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“We urge the parties to engage in discussions without delay, using Morocco's autonomy plan as the only framework to negotiate a mutually acceptable solution,” Trump said.
The pairing of those declarations is consistent with Trump’s penchant for transactional foreign policy. The original Abraham Accords agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel opened the door to the UAE’s long-standing request to buy F-35s — a deal slated to get official approval this week after the Senate voted down an attempt to block it.
“We have peace sprouting in the Middle East,” Kushner said. "President Trump took a contrarian approach — one that was different than not just Democrat but also Republican administrations — just a different approach than the experts have been taking in the region and the fruits of these efforts have been very apparent.”
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Arab and Israeli officials have brought up the threat inflicted by Iran as a key driver of the geopolitical shift, along with the perception that U.S. strategists want to diminish American military involvement in the area.
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