WARSAW, Poland — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is holding rare publicized meetings with Arab leaders on the sidelines of a conference organized by the United States and Poland that President Trump’s administration conceived as an attempt to increase international pressure on Iran.
“What is important about this meeting — and it is not in secret, because there are many of those — is that this is an open meeting with representatives of leading Arab countries, that are sitting down together with Israel in order to advance the common interest of combating Iran,” Netanyahu said in a statement Wednesday after meeting with the foreign minister of Oman. “It is cold in Warsaw right now, but Israel’s foreign relations are warming up, warming up for the better.”
Netanyahu’s talks with diplomats from Arab nations, of which all but Egypt and Jordan lack formal diplomatic ties with Israel due to their long-held opposition to the Jewish state, are the latest public example of a rapprochement the Trump team hopes will spawn a powerful regional coalition against Iran. The talks could lend diplomatic heft to a Middle East summit that has been derided as a watered-down version of the anti-Iran ministerial that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo intended when he scheduled the forum. The United States was “extremely supportive” of the effort to assemble Netanyahu and Arab leaders, one source familiar with the process said.
“It is smart policy to bring more countries on board to counter Iran,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies CEO Mark Dubowitz, who works regularly with the Trump administration to toughen U.S. policy toward Iran, told the Washington Examiner. “Why should only six countries be at the adult table and everybody else is at the kids’ table?”
That’s a reference to the P5+1: the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom) plus Iran, with whom the five negotiated on limits to the Iranian nuclear program. The six-party group signed the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which President Trump withdrew from last year. Key U.S. lawmakers in both parties believe that Russia helped Iranian negotiators throughout the process, while Western European powers and the European Union are seeking to undermine Trump’s decision to renew U.S. sanctions on the regime.
“We will be focusing on the most problematic horizontal issues rather than individual states,” Polish foreign minister Jacek Czaputowicz told reporters Tuesday evening. “Poland is a part of the EU, and hence, we are of the opinion and we accept the policy of JCPOA, the nuclear treaty with Iran. We consider this to be a valuable element on the international arena.”
That comment from the conference co-host was taken as public confirmation that Pompeo’s plan to rally world leaders against Iran in Warsaw had run aground. Pompeo touted the ministerial as “an important part of our coalition-building” against Iran when he put it on the calendar last month. But European proponents of the Iran nuclear deal sought to minimize the summit’s significance — German foreign minister Heiko Maas, French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, and European Union High Representative Federica Mogherini pointedly chose not to attend — which put pressure on the United States to stress a broader focus on regional security issues.
“We are going to gather up to talk about the future of Middle East stability and prosperity,” Pompeo told reporters alongside Czaputowicz. “We’ll have 60 countries, over 30 foreign ministers there from every continent save for Antarctica. This is a global coalition that is built to deliver on the important mission of reducing the risk that has emanated from the Middle East for far too long.”
Vice President Mike Pence and the White House’s Middle East team will attend the summit, which began Wednesday evening with a welcome dinner but won’t start in earnest until Thursday. The conference hosts also scheduled a meeting between four key countries to discuss the civil war in Yemen, in addition to a decision, announced just days ago, to invite representatives from the Palestinian Authority to the summit.
“So, we would very much welcome the Palestinian Authority’s perspectives during the discussion, but I do want to emphasize that this is not a negotiation but a discussion, and we look forward to fostering a constructive conversation in Warsaw,” a senior administration official told reporters last week.
Those two additions were widely perceived as extra inducements provided by a U.S. team nervous about a poor showing. “I’m not looking for the summit to accomplish much,” Barbara Slavin, director of the Atlantic Council’s Future of Iran Initiative, said Wednesday. “Secretary Pompeo has been forced to backtrack from initial comments suggesting that a more aggressive posture toward Iran would be the focus of the summit — otherwise, he would have faced a boycott from many European countries that are struggling to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal.”
Le Drian, in what might be more than a coincidence, aired the possibility of France renewing diplomatic ties with Iran on Wednesday, just as the Warsaw welcome dinner was set to begin.
“We protested vigorously against an attempted attack that was stopped in the Paris region which led us to suspend the nomination of our ambassador to Tehran and Tehran responded reciprocally,” Le Drian told French lawmakers, per Reuters. “But we are close to reaching a conclusion on this situation as long as [Iran] keeps to the 2015 [nuclear] deal.” Three people, including an Iranian diplomat, were arrested last year for plotting to bomb a Paris-area gathering of Iranian dissidents that was attended by a number of U.S. politicians, including President Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
The U.S. delegation didn’t lose sight of Iran in the context of the Yemen meeting. Those talks, featuring the United Kingdom, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, produced a joint statement condemning “Iran’s de-stabilizing effect” on Yemen, where Iranian-backed Houthi rebels are fighting a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states supporting former government forces. Cloaked in the acronyms of the United Nations, that statement affirmed that “Iran has provided advanced weaponry” to its proxies in Yemen “in violation of” the very U.N. Security Council resolution that affirmed the Iran nuclear deal in 2015.
In the statement, “the Ministers expressed full support for Saudi Arabia and its legitimate national security concerns” in the conflict, despite the recent international pressure on the Saudis over the killing of civilians throughout the Yemen war and the October murder of dissident Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi diplomatic facility in Turkey.
That concord could bring reprieve to Iran hawks within the administration and without who are chafing at the criticism of the Warsaw ministerial. “The Arab states and Israel are sitting down for the first time since the 1991 Madrid Conference,” Dubowitz told the Washington Examiner. “This is far more important, and historic, than whether Mogherini or the French and German [foreign ministers] show up.”
