With or Without Bibi

When Donald Trump held a conference call with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Türkiye, Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, and Pakistan, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not listening in. Bibi has increasingly felt left out as the US president gives a uni­lateral push to diplomacy in the Middle East, demanding that countries sign on to the Abraham Accords and normalise relations with Israel as a precondition to a peace framework.

Trump is pursuing a Middle Eastern realignment with Israel at its centre without letting the Israelis have a say. Mean­while, the tenuous ceasefire with Iran shows signs of falling apart with the US carrying out “defensive” strikes on Iranian ships in the Strait of Hormuz and then bombing a military facility in Bandar Abbas— and the IRGC retaliating. Israel, on the other hand, has escalated its strikes on southern Lebanon and Netanyahu wouldn’t really want the Iran War to end yet, having little confidence in Tehran relinquishing its pursuit of nuclear weapons. For now, Trump seems de­termined to build a security architecture around Israel, with or without Bibi. But with Israeli elections due in a few months and given the expansive shadow of the war, no one is betting on a breakthrough anywhere.

Saudi Arabia Downsizes Its Dream

Every autocracy insists on paving a road to hell with good intentions—and traps would-be reformers. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 mega­projects have run into com­plex but predicted problems. They are being downsized, with the scaling down being justified as credible execu­tion. Foremost is the fate of The Line, a 170-km linear city, taller than the Empire State Building (ESB) at 500m, projected to house nine mil­lion people. Its cost estimate ballooned from $1.6 trillion to almost $9 trillion. Last year, construction was suspended after 2.4km of foundation-laying. The Cube, meant to house flats and offices and 20 times the size of ESB, has been abandoned after estimates touched $50 billion. A similar fate has befallen the winter resort in Trojena. Planning, engineering and fiscal man­agement underscore both the miscalculation and ongoing systemic reassessment, as a recent BBC investigation anal­ysed. The collapse in award­ing construction contracts shows that the problems are not isolated. Vision 2030 was Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s instrument of reforming the desert nation politically, economically and socially. Saudi Arabia will host the 2034 World Cup and stadia design is guaranteed to be visionary. But both the World Cup and the 2030 World Expo have pulled in­vestment away from longer-term construction.

The Stroke That Wasn’t

Former US First Lady Jill Biden recently told CBS she was afraid her husband Joe Biden was having a stroke as he faltered during the 2024 presidential debate: “I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never.” Democrats soon persuaded Biden to quit the race. The rest is still history in the unmaking. And Donald Trump just said, “I don’t care about the midterms,” condemning a GOP remade in his image to certain disaster. Only Trump could have destroyed Biden and then made him look good.