Trump Is Betting Everything In The Middle East On The Saudi Crown Prince

Already, Iran has become the dominant player in four key Arab capitals -- Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut and Sanaa. It is becoming a critical player in Egypt, where its proxies have carried out several key terrorist attacks that the Egyptian strongman and Trump friend, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is apparently powerless to prevent. Equally, Turkey is beginning to look to Tehran for some degree of comfort in its battle against its Kurdish foes, at the same time Trump has sought to schmooze its autocratic leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin, through his alliance with Syria's Bashar al-Assad, has become the Tehran-whisperer through whose antechambers all western nations apparently must pass if they want to do business in suppressing ISIS in Syria and its immediate neighbors. When negotiators arrived in Geneva on Tuesday for the latest round of UN-sponsored talks to broker a peace in Syria, Putin's specter was inevitably hanging over every discussion. After all, there will be no peace in Syria without a Russian buy-in as Syria's ruler holds office largely thanks to Russian military might.

Clearly, Saudi Arabia has seized on its own agenda. And without some strong pushback from a White House that is ill-inclined to question the royals' priorities, Saudi priorities will inevitably become America's as well. The Saudi agenda seems to be suppression of radical Islam within Saudi Arabia's own borders, and increasingly abroad. Such activities only seem to be accelerating under the nation's young Crown Prince and his father, who is increasingly turning a host of potentially dangerous initiatives over to his son. But it is far from clear if the Saudis have the kind of muscle or appetite to succeed.

Despite these risks, the US may be well on our way to backing the wrong horse in the world's most volatile region. Trump has agreed to sell the Saudis $350 billion in American arms over the next decade. Against whom will these weapons be trained and how certain can we be that they will be deployed judiciously and not in the interests of settling some millennium-old score? The US may soon find out the answer to this frightening reality.