Earlier this month, I interviewed David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, for the Jewish Leadership Conference. It was a frank exchange, and I pressed him on the relationship between the “Deal of the Century” and the Abraham Accords. Was the deal conceived, at least at some levels and by some persons, as a throwaway for precisely something like the ice-breaker with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain? “We were triangulating towards an outcome,” he admitted, “either one of which would have been acceptable.” 

There will be many competing versions of what happened; Friedman’s deserves a thorough read. Go to this link, at Mosaic.