The Last Days Of The Old Middle East

The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set newsroom policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com. President Donald Trump declared “the dawn of a new Middle East” in Washington last Tuesday as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed public agreements with Israel for the first time. The only thing that actually happened on Tuesday, however, was that two Gulf mini-states went public on ties with Israel, especially in the arms trade, that had previously been not actually secret, but at least discreet.