The Next Big Middle Eastern War: Saudi Arabia vs. Iran. By Daniel Greenfield.

The real war is the one that the Saudis and the Iranians have been maneuvering toward for years. Those maneuvers included everything from Iran’s nuke deal, the fighting in Yemen, the Syrian Civil War, the Iraqi suppression of Kurdish independence, the rise of ISIS, and the Qatari embargo. …

The Saudis and the Iranians are both assembling their coalitions. …

Israel is loosely aligned with the Saudis. That may sound strange, but Israel’s biggest threats, from Iran’s nukes to Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, can be traced back to Tehran. …

Obama aligned America with Iran and Qatar. The Arab Spring, Benghazi and the recent Iraqi attacks on the Kurds were all consequences of that disastrous policy. While Trump is hostile to Iran and Qatar, key foreign policy figures in his administration have been sending mixed signals on Iran’s nukes, the Qatari embargo and the Yemeni campaign. Some of this is due to the influence of Obama holdovers. …

Middle Eastern wars emerge from a combination of ancient tensions and modern policies. The tensions are the dynamite, but the modern policies light the fuse. The manifest destiny of Islam, its violent expansionism and throbbing xenophobia, are the dynamite. And the dynamite will always be there. …

Our foreign policy assumes that peace is the natural condition of mankind. But in the Islamic realms of the Middle East, conflict is the natural condition. And the more we try to reform the Middle East, the more explosive it becomes. Instead of managing the inevitable conflicts, we’ve tried to resolve them.

The instinct in Washington D.C. is to find a non-violent resolution. But that may not be realistic.

hat-tip Scott of the Pacific, Stephen Neil