Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet
Back in August, while standing alongside President Trump in Alaska, Russian President Vladimir Putin chuckled while glancing back at the B-2 stealth bomber flyover. He understood its messaging. Yet he failed fully to understand just how much meaning Trump’s show of force was meant to convey to Putin and the Kremlin.
Now, less than two months later, the full meaning of the B-2 flyover is clear. Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s three principal nuclear facilities — Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz — was aimed at transforming Eastern Europe as much as the Middle East. It was an inflection point in Putin’s and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s war against the West.
Trump himself made that clear in Egypt during the recent Israel-Hamas ceasefire signing. Trump argued that the impetus for the deal “really started when we took out the nuclear capability of Iran.”
Hamas, now lacking Iran’s active support and gradually abandoned by Turkey and Qatar, was fast running out of options. Israel threatened to retake all of Gaza City, and Trump made clear he was on board, absent a deal.
Moscow is now reeling. With his key ally Iran neutered and Syria’s pro-Russian regime overthrown, Putin finds himself on the outside looking in when it comes to the Middle East. Putin’s isolation was evinced by his canceling of an Oct. 15 Arab conference in Moscow. As Bloomberg put it, “There simply weren’t enough Arab leaders saying ‘yes’ to warrant holding a summit.”
Contrast that with Trump’s triumphant appearance with key Middle and Near East leaders in Egypt — of Egypt itself and of Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq and Pakistan. Flanking them were key NATO leaders from France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, plus six others. Trump, like him or not, was a global powerhouse magnet in Egypt. Putin has essentially been reduced to bug repellent in the Arab world.
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