The New York Times' Tom Friedman began his career reporting on the Middle East. He knows the region, follows its developments assiduously, and almost always makes sense when he writes about them. His insights about other matters, for instance domestic politics, are uniformly wrong.
So ... at COTTonLINE we ignore Friedman's other material and attend to his Middle East opinion. Today he writes in praise of the agreement President Trump orchestrated between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. As is sometimes possible, I've cited a source - The Economic Times - outside the NYT paywall.
About the agreement, in which the two nations have agreed to formal diplomatic relations, Friedman agrees with Trump's assessment of it being "Huge" and adds: "It’s a geopolitical earthquake." Friedman praising anything with Trump's fingerprints on it is itself an earthquake.
I particularly like Friedman's comparison of Netanyahu's actions here to Nixon's opening to China. In both cases a president under fire at home moved in a direction of which his base does not approve, perhaps as a distraction from his domestic difficulties.
Which doesn't mean Friedman believes this agreement solves the region's problems. He concludes:
I have followed the Middle East for too long to ever write the sentence “the region will never be the same again.” The forces of sectarianism, tribalism, corruption and anti-pluralism run deep there.
When I think of the Middle East, I remember the parable of the scorpion and the frog. Self-destructive behavior is the region's "factory setting."
