Washington
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Israel Saturday as the Ukraine war rages, aiming to rally regional support for Kyiv and quell the Jewish state’s worries about a looming nuclear deal with Iran.
On the first stop of a tour that will include the West Bank, Morocco and Algeria, Blinken will join a mini-summit of counterparts from Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco, the so-called “Abraham Accords” countries that have normalized relations with Israel. He will fly in from Poland, where he accompanied President Joe Biden in meetings to shore up Western backing for Ukraine.
The top US diplomat aims to show that the United States still has a deep interest in the Middle East even as the region has dropped in importance for Washington as China, and now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have risen to the top of priorities.
He also hopes to rally support for the US and NATO effort to blunt the Russian aggression, amid heavy economic fallout from the war, including spiking energy prices and the threat of a wheat shortage that could hit Arab countries severely.
The trip comes as the United States and Iran are in the final stages of negotiating a revival of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which aimed to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapons capacity.
The administration of former US president Donald Trump quit the deal unilaterally in 2018, and since then Iran has advanced its nuclear programme to the point that Western experts think it is not far from the “break-out” stage of becoming a real nuclear threat.
