Trump Offers Carrot before the Stick

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unday afternoon is an unusual time — and that’s an understatement — to announce an important policy decision. After all, most of America is at the mall.

Eyebrows were raised, therefore, when a senior White House official chose that day and time to declare that the economic section of the long-awaited Middle Eastern peace plan would be unveiled on June 25, at a conference in Bahrain.

“When we shared our economic vision with people in the region, it was met with very good feedback,” the senior administration official told reporters on a conference call Sunday. “Everyone liked it, they asked that we come and present it in the region. We are grateful to Bahrain for the opportunity to do this. We are going to have foreign ministers and treasury ministers there. We are not looking to focus on the political plan at this forum — we really want to focus on the economic plan to show that you can’t have peace without economic stability.”

The economic aspect is important, of course, and there is no peace plan without it. But it remains an open question why the administration chose to split the rollout of the economic and political aspects of a plan, especially when its future is so uncertain. Only ten days ago, in a speech before the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Jared Kushner revealed that the plan would include dozens of pages covering every aspect of life, including the core subjects, in great detail. So how is it that within ten days, we’ve arrived at a situation in which the publication of a central part of the plan has been pushed off to an unknown date?