By Simon Watkins It is no coincidence that just over a month after Israel and the United Arab Emirates declared that they would normalise relations and Israel and Bahrain did the same, Iraq has announced that it has signed a contract with Jordan to connect the electric power grids of the two countries. By extension, this will provide a direct link between Jordan and Iraq’s key regional sponsor, Iran, which recently signed a two-year deal with Iraq to supply it with electricity, the longest such deal signed between the two countries. The last piece of this game-changing regional networking operation is that just before the announcement of the Iraq-Jordan network deal, Jordan also announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia to lay out the framework of joint cooperation to connect the electric power grids of these two countries.
