Dhaka, May 23 -- American President Donald Trump's recent trip to the Middle East, during which he visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, was a success. That is because he built on the status quo - existing good relations with those three trusted Arab partners - while reaching out to unlikely quarters. His surprise meeting in Riyadh with Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former jihadist, and his decision to lift sanctions on Syria revealed an intense degree of geopolitical realism at work. The new Syrian regime has an insurgent past, but that does not mean that the regime is bound to have an insurgent future as well. Having overthrown the Basher al-Assad regime, which was supported principally by Iran and Russia, the new...