While the president’s Middle East tour might not have been a snub to Israel, that doesn’t place it beyond criticism. One disturbing point was his speech in Riyadh on Tuesday, in which he seemed to argue that the U.S. should cease paying attention to human rights or to the forms of government of the various states in the region. Not only, writes Elliott Abrams, did the speech present a false picture of the past several decades of American Middle East policy, but it also failed to understand the realities of the region. Take, for instance, President Trump’s claim that the “great transformation” in the Persian Gulf and “gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi” owe nothing to American busybodies:

This is wrong in very many ways, but one might start with the UAE—whose success stems from a highly successful combination of embracing both their heritage and modernity. Trump himself visited their Abrahamic House, where a mosque, church, and synagogue share quarters, and had he visited their beaches he’d have seen some very fashionable and quite tiny bikinis. And that is a model of balancing heritage and change that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman seems to be trying to follow.

And there is much at stake here:

President Trump, Vice-President Vance, and others in the administration may believe that unconditionally embracing rulers who repress human rights has no effect on our country’s reputation and believe that even if it does, that does not matter. That is certainly not the view of our enemies, who have built vast propaganda machines to blacken the reputation of the United States every day. They wish to destroy that association with liberty and substitute a picture of the United States as an aggressor whose policies create human misery across the globe. They think it matters. It is a mystery why officials in the Trump administration are blind to this.

The support of the United States for liberty and human rights isn’t a problem that needs to be solved or a weakness in our relations with other nations. It’s an asset, and so understood by our enemies as well as our friends.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.