The Sherlock Holmes mystery Silver Blaze is best remembered for the dog that didn't bark. Arthur Conan Doyle's story centered on the disappearance of a priceless racehorse and its trainer's murder. But with no witnesses, no sign of forced entry, and no obvious suspects, Scotland Yard is stumped, so they call in Holmes.
Only Sherlock notices "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” When Inspector Gregory says, “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” Holmes responds, “That was the curious incident.”
There are two big dogs that didn't so much as whimper while President Donald Trump remade the Middle East (at least a little) in his own peace-loving image.
I'm looking at you, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Or I would be, if anybody knew where the hell you were.
I won't regale you again (reregale?) with all the glorious details from Trump's Big Beautiful Peace Agreement, but I would like to take a moment to express my appreciation for Trump's muscular and thoughtful foreign policy — and the chance for peace he and his team created in the Middle East.
Which brings us to the two men whose absence was as conspicuous as two empty seats at a crowded peace summit.
Let's step back a moment and try to glimpse the bigger picture as it must appear from Beijing and the Kremlin.
The so-called Axis of Resistance consists of a handful of badly run authoritarian nations of various stripes.
China is a weird communist-capitalist hybrid with a Commissar-for-Life reminiscent of late Wilhelmine Germany in his reckless determination to upset the global order. Russia, sad to say, pissed away its chance to join the First World, and is a brutally nationalistic, bitter-loser nation run along lines Vito Corleone would recognize. Iran is another weird hybrid — an Islamic theocracy with ambitions of reestablishing Xerxes's pre-Islamic Persian Empire. Then there's North Korea, the world's only dynastic Communist dictatorship, and purveyor of weapons, drugs, and counterfeit currency.
Anybody who finds much to admire in any of those "s***hole countries," to borrow Trump's colorful phrase, might want to stop reading right now because you're really not going to like anything that comes next.
It's hard to blame either Xi or Putin for taking advantage of American weakness in the last couple of decades. We frittered away six decades' worth of military and diplomatic standing in two increasingly pointless nation-building efforts. Let's not forget Joe Biden, much as we'd like to, whose weakness invited two wars of aggression — one in the Mideast and another in Europe. Don't even get me started on Congress and the Pentagon, and their criminal neglect of our Navy and nuclear forces.
I've already written extensively on the multiple wars fought (and largely, if incompletely) won since Oct 7, 2023, and it's safe to say that Putin and Xi are more frustrated than a 16-year-old boy trying to unclasp a bra for the first time.
Here's the big picture.
China is the Axis’s bright spot — cozying up to India and isolating Taiwan with a growing navy. Iran is defanged, at least for now. Russia is still stuck in Ukraine. Assad’s fall reduced Putin’s reach in the Mediterranean, and without Syria, Moscow has few diplomatic or economic cards to play. Trump’s pressure on Latin American fentanyl networks is reviving the long-neglected Monroe Doctrine. And while we’ve fallen behind in Africa, that could change if we start paying attention.
Trump and his team came in like a whirlwind nine months ago, and as I described yesterday, put his grand Middle East strategy into motion. Xi and Putin, who have benefited greatly in recent years from American weakness and the resulting chaos, could apparently do nothing to stop Trump from reasserting American strength and restoring some order.
Don't get me wrong. Both Beijing and Moscow are certainly trying to deal themselves back into the Middle East game — there's just too much energy wealth at stake there to ignore. But Trump didn't exactly sneak into the Middle East's stable.
Trump barged in with his trademark bombast. Yet neither dog dared bark.
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