Trump dancing with wolves
Robert Fisk put it best: "
Trump Is About To Really Mess Up In The Middle East". Following his fantastically stupid decision to attack the Syrian military with cruise missiles, Trump or, should I say, the people who make decisions for him, probably realized that it was
"game over" for any US policy in the Middle-East so they did the only thing that they could do: they ran towards those few who were actually happy with this aggression against Syria: the Saudis and the Israelis. Needless to say, with these two "allies," what currently passes for some type of "US foreign policy" in the Middle-East will only go from bad to worse.
There are many ways in which Saudi Arabia and Israel are truly unique: they are both prime sponsors of terrorism, they are both nations deeply steeped in ideologies which can only be described as uncivilized (Wahabism and Jewish supremacism) and they both are armed to the teeth.
But they also have one other thing in common: in spite, or maybe because of, their immense military budgets, these two nations are also militarily very weak. Oh sure, they have lots of fancy military hardware and they like to throw their weight around and beat up some defenseless "enemy", but once you set aside all the propaganda you realize that the Saudis can't even deal with the Houthis in Yemen while the Israelis got comprehensively defeated by 2
nd rank Hezbollah forces in 2006 (the top of the line Hezbollah forces were concentrated along the Litani river and never saw direct combat): the entire Golani Brigade could not even take
Bint Jbeil under control even though that small town was only 1.5 miles away from the Israeli border.
This is also the reason why the Saudis and the Israelis try to limit themselves to airstrikes: because on the ground they simply suck. Here again the similarity is striking: the Saudis have become "experts" at terrorizing defenseless Shia (in the KSA
or in Bahrain) while the Israelis are the experts on how to terrorize Palestinian civilians.
Comment: Another way of looking at this is that they've never before 'had to' turn to face that thing called reality... until they came up against the rise of Russia, China and others. Rather than accept that their centuries-old reality-creating worldview has run its course, Western elites just continue to do what they've always done, 'creating reality' as they go along (a.k.a. 'making shit up'), completely oblivious to the fact that most people in the world, Westerners included, don't believe their lies. And yes, as the author suggests, the likely end result of this extreme disconnect between elites and masses is tragedy for everyone.