Trump's Middle East mission impossible?

Washington

DURING the 2016 presidential election campaign, Candidate Donald Trump never stopped blasting US policy in the Middle East. He decried the costly military interventions in the region, including the Iraq War. Insisting that as president he would take steps to reduce American engagement in that part of the world, he was criticised as an "isolationist" by members of the foreign policy establishment, and raised the alarm among US allies in the Middle East worried that a President Trump would lessen, and perhaps even axe altogether, American security commitments to Saudi Arabia and the other Arab oil states as well as to Israel. That could leave them alone to face the challenge of a more assertive Iran.

But like much of what Candidate (and later on President)Trump has said and done, his Middle East policy agenda, assuming that one even existed, seemed to lack any coherence.