and actors that created chaos and repression on the ground. Compared to the aggressive gambles of Iran, Saudi Arabia—which led the other Middle Eastern bloc and was engaged in a canny balancing of its own radicals while assisting the United States’ war on terror— was a small-stakes player. […]
The human detritus of Malley’s subordinations piled up quickly. Four-hundred-thousand people died in Syria; 4 or 5 million more were refugeed. Iranian protesters were jailed; its women stoned; relatives of dissidents coerced into denouncing them on camera. Hamas and Hezbollah continued to receive funding from Iran as they inflicted terror on Israel and disorder on Lebanon.
Saudi Arabia responded to Iran’s expansion of influence with pivots of its own. Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, has now been raised to de facto kingship, and this crown prince, at 35, plays an aggressive game with ambiguous outcomes: domestic liberalization, a war in Yemen that has cost 100,000 lives and counting, the sharp curtailing of the kingdom’s old intrafamily governing approach in favor of something more centralized, and the ostentatious execution of the former Saudi intelligence officer Jamal Khashoggi. Almost the only beneficiary of the Malley-McGurk-Obama plan in this region, ironically enough, turned out to be Israel: The Gulf states and the conservative monarchies have rushed to ally with the Jewish state to stave off the challenge of Iran.
Not quite what the progressives had in mind. Nevertheless the policies must be continued, it seems, despite the continued suffering of the people of Iran and Syria, and despite the evidence that ordinary Iranians, desperate to be rid of the mullahs, actually preferred Trump's hardline strategy.
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