Columnist

Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of Donald Trump’s latest Gaza plan has done something useful: it has stripped the Board of Peace of its ceremony and exposed the question at its core.

Not long ago, a Gulf state signing a regional defense pact that does not involve the US would have been seen in Washington as diplomatic theater — a reluctant hedge, even a strategic miscalculation, but nothing more. That era is coming to an end.

The eyes of much of the world have been on the Iran crisis in recent months. However, a very different development in the Middle East, also with international implications, arrived recently with the landmark UK-Gulf Cooperation Council trade deal.