Recent declarations by the Swedish government, the British parliament, and the Irish senate recognizing a fictive Palestinian state complement an ongoing campaign by Mahmoud Abbas to obtain recognition of a Palestinian state from international bodies, writes John Bolton. This move is simply the resurrection of a similar campaign launched by Arafat in 1989. That plan achieved negligible success, thanks to U.S. efforts to foil it:

Twenty-five years ago, President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker conveyed their determination to squelch fanciful maneuverings in the international system, rather than addressing the Arab-Israeli conflict through direct negotiations between the parties themselves. United States resolve prevailed.

Under President Obama, by contrast, we saw American weakness. . . . Sensing that weakness, the Palestinians and their supporters struck, something they had feared to do for over 20 years. Accordingly, today’s Palestinian gambit will turn not on what happens in Stockholm, London, or UN headquarters in Turtle Bay. It will turn on how officials in Washington decide to react.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.