What did Donald Trump achieve in the Middle East?

AS DONALD TRUMP set off on his first foreign trip since taking office, to the world’s most unstable and dangerous region, some observers were worried. As it turned out, though, the Middle Eastern leg of Mr Trump’s nine-day maiden voyage was one of the less tumultuous periods of his presidency so far. Nonetheless, with a further tilt towards Saudi Arabia and the Sunnis, and against Iran and the Shias, the president has increased, not smoothed, the tensions that so bedevil the area.

In Riyadh, where he arrived on May 20th, Mr Trump attempted to reset his relationship with the Muslim world, strained by his own Islamophobic rhetoric. “I think Islam hates us,” he said last year, after calling for a blanket ban on Muslims entering America. But in a speech on May 21st he declared that the fight against extremism is “a battle between good and evil”, not “between different faiths”. Blaming most of the region’s problems on terrorism, he urged his audience of Sunni Muslim leaders to “drive out” extremists. “Drive them out,” he repeated, five times.