Of all the acts of political vandalism Donald Trump has committed during his first year in the White House, among the most gratuitous was his decision last month to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. It thereby foreclosed on any possible two-state outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the occupied Arab east of the holy city would become the capital of an independent Palestine.
East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 Six Day war and then illegally annexed, is at the religiously combustible core of a conflict that, although recently eclipsed by the ferocity of the civil war in Syria and the struggle against Isis, risks being reignited.
But President Trump’s Jerusalem decision also compromises a fragile western ally, Jordan, which has been a pivot of regional stability.