Trump’s Iran strike opens the door to a new era of Mideast peace and prosperity

As the aftershocks of Operation Midnight Hammer play out, Arab nations have the chance for an entirely new Middle East — at peace and headed to mass prosperity.

Iran’s nuclear threat is off the table, its chief proxies devastated and its allies either out of power or conspicuously failing to offer the regime any concrete support in its hour of direst need.

And if the Islamic Republic should attempt any kind of retaliation, such as trying to close the Strait of Hormuz, it must expect a devastating US response that can only add to the risk that the Iranian people will rise up to dislodge the entire clerical regime.

This leaves the Arab world poised for a new future: The leftist vision of “pan-Arabism” bottomed out decades ago in the dead-end tyrannies of Moammar Khadafy and Saddam Hussein; the obsession with destroying Israel has only poured out lives and treasure on the sand while radicalizing populations that could be building prosperity.

And a century of Europeans’ advice and agendas for the Middle East has proved even less useful than the prior century of European imperialism.

Whereas the Abraham Accord approach — friendship with America and Israel — is already enriching the nations that have signed on, allowing investment and progress that builds peace and stability.

Rescued from the threat of Persian hegemony, Arab leaders could decide to fall back on the failed approaches of the past — but why repeat those tragedies?

It’s quite telling that Syria’s new leadership — with all their past ties to al Qaeda and its death-cult prescriptions — seems to have responded to President Donald Trump’s early outreach with interest and openness.

Added cause for hope is how they last week declared their airspace open to Israel’s defense against Iran’s missiles and drones: The greatest menace they now face comes from Turkey, whose ruler is still playing the “secure my power by blaming everything on the Jews” game.

Iran’s decision to give Hamas the green light for the Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities in Israel was plainly intended to both provide a distraction as Tehran made its final sprint to becoming a nuclear power and to head off any public Saudi-Israeli entente.

That move has now proved an utter disaster for Iran on the first front; the results now open the door to Riyadh joining the Abraham Accords.

If Democrats still held the White House, they’d side with the feckless Europeans in insisting that Middle East peace can’t come until the question of Palestinians’ future is completely resolved — when the truth has always been that those issues will only be settled by a region whose other powers can cooperate.

Team Trump moved to finish off Iran’s nuclear program purely to eliminate that one existential threat, not to force regime change there nor to remake the region’s balance of power.

But clarity about Washington’s intentions, with humility about what America can accomplish unilaterally and an unmistakable US policy of achieving peace through strength, are sure looking like a pretty good recipe for making the Middle East great again.