Things finally looked like they were settling down in the Middle East. Oh, sure. There was a lot of conflict and confusion, but when you stepped back and looked at the big picture, things seemed to finally be going our way.

ISIS was being rolled up, the Caliphate was practically overrun. Sure, the terrorists were metastatizing all over Asia and Africa, but now they were just terrorists, not a rising nation-state. More important, the big Arab military powers were now neutralized: Egypt by revolution, Syria by civil war, and Iraq by military defeat and US occupation and financial support. Iran and Saudi Arabia are locked in an indefinite religious proxy war that is rapidly bogging both of them down in Yemen. Libya, for all its problems, isn’t going to be invading anybody any time soon.

But most important, the major potential for war in the Middle East, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, although by no means resolved, was simply being ignored by everybody else. There was too much else going on for anybody in the region to really care what happened to the Palestinians. And the Israelis were even making discreet connections with the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Turks and the Saudis. The US is heavily involved (still) in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has a close eye on Iran. The Israelis are making out like bandits: in spite of all the alleged chaos and unrest in the region, the Israelis don’t seem to be on anybody’s shit list. The major scapegoat for everybody’s trouble these days is the Kurds, and the US has just thrown them under the bus, now that we don’t need them to fight ISIS any more.

And now comes Trump and his bold declaration on Jerusalem. WHAAAAAT? Where did that come from? One stroke of the pen and Donald has got the whole Muslim world pissed off at us again.

For starters, I don’t have any ideological axes to grind here. I don’t have a dog in this fight. Jerusalem IS the capital of Israel, not for any religious or historical or ideological reason, but because they have their troops all over it. Right of Conquest. Morality aside, that is logic everyone in the MidEast understands, and now that the Palestinian issue isn’t being exploited by Arab dictators in order to keep their populations fired up, and the Israelis aren’t using it as cover for their Lebensraum settlement land grabs, nobody anywhere really gives a damn what happens in Gaza or the West Bank. Today, the Sunni/Shia split is the major dynamic driving Geopolitik in the desert. No body cares what happens to the Palestinians, not us, not the Arabs, not the Israelis, not anybody.

But now, with Trump’s latest move, this old issue is back on the table again, even if no one over there, on either side, wants anything to do with it. The American refusal to give the Israelis everything they wanted on Jerusalem was the only thing that kept the Arabs coming back to us as negotiators and intermediaries. If nothing else, it was a bargaining chip we held in reserve we could always play, or threaten to play, one way or the other, if things ever got sticky. Every American President, Republican or Democrat, has understood this since the days the IDF occupied the city. And lately, it has kept the Muslim world divided against itself rather than menacing the US and its only true ally in the region. The Israelis controlled Jerusalem in everything but name. And that, was negotiable.

So why did Trump play this card? And why did he play it so prematurely, getting nothing for it in return? Because he owed his Bible-banging redneck constituency a favor, his “base” was in danger of crumbling and needed propping up (probably due to the groping scandals coming out of Washington). He can’t blame all of it on the Liberals, too many Republicans (including himself) are implicated. The Evangelicals, in spite of their long history of bigotry and anti-Semitism, need the Israeli connection, it is essential to their Apocalyptic fantasies and their wet dreams of Armageddon. This is just a sop to keep them happy.