Diplomatic paralysis is no longer an accident at the State Department — it is an addiction. For generations, professional American diplomats have treated Middle Eastern foreign policy as a group-hug exercise in consensus-building, submissively routing every possible regional realignment through Cairo or Riyadh. This institutional obsession with securing an Arab League quorum actively paralyzes the Abraham Accords. Hence, America’s regional geostrategic window slams shut.

History offers a brutal, realist corrective to this contemporary diplomatic timidity. Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, understood from the start that the newborn Jewish state could never survive by begging hostile neighbors for validation. Ben-Gurion proposed a bold “periphery alliance” to President Dwight Eisenhower in July 1958, aiming to bypass the Arab core by linking Israel with Turkey, Iran, and Ethiopia. By October that year, intelligence directors from Jerusalem, Ankara, and Tehran had already begun to weaponize the “Trident” — forging a functional, operational intelligence architecture built on shared warning and technical exchange. No Arab capitals signed the ledger, and no grand summits issued a useless communiqué; only hard-nosed strategy held this framework together until domestic revolutions and military coups tore out its eastern and southern anchors.