Robert Charles O’Brien Jr. (born June 18, 1966) served as the 27th United States national security adviser from 2019 to 2021. He was the fourth and final person to hold the position during the first presidency of Donald Trump. During O’Brien’s time as national security adviser, the United States orchestrated the historic Abraham Accords, a series of treaties normalizing diplomatic relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. He is currently the chairman of American Global Strategies LLC, a boutique geopolitical advisory firm that he cofounded.
I don’t know if you remember that we spoke right after the signing of the Abraham Accords.
I recall that very well. You wrote a very nice piece.
I appreciate that. Have things changed much since then?
Things have obviously changed dramatically since the Accords were signed. First, we had a new American president who wasn’t able to expand the Accords, which was unfortunate. This was followed by the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust on October 7. Then Israel decided to go for victory in its wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and I’m glad they did. Through their various intelligence operations, as well as using pagers, walkie talkies and geolocating Hezbollah leaders and taking them out with bunker-buster bombs, the Israelis turned the tide of the war. Israel did something great for themselves when they took out the Hezbollah leaders, but they also did something great for the West.
Hezbollah literally means “the party of G-d.” It was founded in the early 1980s, and its coming-out party was the bombing of the US Embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut. Many of the leaders the Israelis recently killed with their strikes had American blood on their hands. Justice was finally brought to them, and it was brought to them by Israel, not America. We owe Israel a debt of gratitude for that. All of this occurred since the last time we spoke, and now we also have the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. We’ll have to wait and see what happens there, but it has certainly been a very eventful couple of years in the Middle East.
I think it was Lenin who said, “There are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen.” As Trump recently told Macron in Paris, “The world is going a little crazy right now.” Getting back to the Abraham Accords, it seemed as if they were going to expand to Saudi Arabia and other countries, something that was effectively nipped in the bud on October 7. My question for you is, do you think that the Accords are still relevant and having an impact on that part of the world despite all the recent upheaval?
Absolutely. In fact, one of the pleasant surprises after October 7 is how enduring the Abraham Accords have been. I’ll give you one example. Shortly after October 7, all of the commercial airliners, aside from EL AL, refused to fly in and out of Ben-Gurion Airport. The exceptions were Emirates and Etihad, the airlines of Dubai and Abu Dhabi respectively. They both kept flying, which allowed people to get in and out of Israel through the UAE and then take connecting flights to Europe or America. It’s astounding to think that the American and European airlines were too scared to do that, but MBZ kept his airlines flying to Israel as a lifeline to the Jewish people. The Iranians tried to delay the Saudi normalization deal to some extent, but they weren’t able to break the Accords themselves. Bahrain is pretty small, so I think getting a lot of commerce going there is still a nascent effort, but commerce and tourism with Morocco and the UAE are up. The Accords have been very durable.
It is said that we must learn from history to prevent us from repeating our mistakes. One thing we should have learned by now is that appeasement doesn’t work. Do you view the Biden administration as one that believes in appeasement?
Absolutely, both before and after October 7. But they don’t call it that; they call it “non-provocation” or “non-escalation.” They think that if they have tea with terrorists in Doha, they will somehow change their ways. That’s an extraordinarily naïve view of the world that has been disproved by history, but it’s much easier to appease than to stand firm.
This administration is very hesitant about doing anything to project American strength abroad, whether it was in Afghanistan, Ukraine or the Middle East. As a result, we had a catastrophe with the way the withdrawal from Afghanistan was handled; it was an utter humiliation. There was a direct line leading from Putin seeing that to deciding to go into Ukraine when Biden said, “Well, if you only take a little piece of Ukraine, if it’s only a minor incursion, then that’s probably okay.” You don’t give a dictator like Putin that kind of opening. As for the Middle East, the Iranians watched the weakness of the responses to what was happening in the Gaza Envelope and thought they could get away with it.
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