Big Joe reads the scripts wrong

When Joe Biden landed in Jeddah last July, Mecca governor Prince Khalid bin Faisal Al Saud received him.

- R. PRASANNAN

When Xi Jinping landed in Riyadh last December, there was the foreign minister, apart from the Riyadh governor, to receive him on the runway, and give him a gun salute later. Saudi military jets escorted Xi’s plane into their airpsace.

The writing was not on the wall, but writ large on the tarmac. Yet if Biden couldn’t read it from the air when he was coming in to land, he was probably reading Arabic script from left to right.

The Americans, who have been writing the scripts for all the Middle Eastern power plays and peace pacts in the post-World War age, are losing the script. Time was when even a ham-handed Jim Carter could get war-mongers Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin to Camp David and thrust a peace deal down their throats. Or an un-Christian street bully Donald Trump could make the Jews shake the hands of the Arab Muslims, and get them all to sign peace accords named after the common patriarch of the three faiths.