A much-changed Middle East prepares for Trump 2.0
BEIRUT — During his first term as president, Donald Trump took a bold if controversial approach to the Middle East.
He moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, forged landmark deals between Israel and some Arab states and tore up the international nuclear deal with Iran.
He imposed his will using a transactional style of diplomacy and the muscle of American power, even when it meant defying international consensus and brushing aside Palestinian concerns.
But experts say that blunt strategy may not work this time around, particularly as international attention has refocused on the plight of Palestinians and criticism of Israel is rising.
For those determined to stay out of the fight between Hezbollah and Israel, the war in Lebanon can feel at a remove.
The Middle East is a vastly different place since Trump left office in 2021. Wars are now raging in Gaza and Lebanon as Israel presses on with its attempts to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah. Those conflicts are threatening to trigger a wider war that would pit the United States and Israel against Iran and its proxies. Israel and Iran have fired rockets into each other’s territory in recent months amid a buildup of U.S. troops in the region.
The multitude of crises proved too thorny for President Biden to resolve. His diplomatic ineffectiveness has led some Middle East countries to find room for solace in a Trump Presidency 2.0.
“For the Gulf, everybody is saying ‘Welcome back, Trump. We’ve been waiting for you for the past four years,’ ” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political scientist from the United Arab Emirates. He added that Biden’s inability to contain and stop the war in Gaza and now Lebanon made Gulf governments see him as weak.
“They want a strong president in Washington whom they can trust, and who can deliver,” he said. “The feeling here is ‘We know who Trump is, we know how to deal with him. And he knows us.’”
As president the first time, Trump found common cause with many Middle Eastern potentates, forgoing criticism of their human rights records. He and his family members have also deepened business ties with the Gulf, sometimes through real estate deals. Saudi Arabia has invested $2 billion into Affinity Partners, a private equity firm run by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The centerpiece of Trump’s foreign policy achievements in the Middle East is the Abraham Accords, the historic agreement he brokered in 2020 that established diplomatic relations between Israel and the Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan — without conditioning them on Palestinian statehood or Israeli concessions to the Palestinians.
Trump has said he intends to expand the accords, and the main prize would be Saudi Arabia, which at one time appeared open to a deal with Israel that would also include a defense pact with the U.S. and support for the oil-rich kingdom to build a civilian-use nuclear reactor.
But then on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas militants attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and spurring an Israeli invasion of Gaza that authorities there say has killed nearly 44,000 people. The war has made the prospect of a deal considerably harder. Though Saudi Arabia is not a democracy, its leaders cannot afford to ignore public sentiment, which has turned sharply against Israel.
“The horror of Gaza and Lebanon has inflamed public opinion, and made any normalization much more difficult,” said Ali Shihabi, a Saudi commentator close to the royal court.
Saudi Arabia now insists that any agreement would be contingent on “an irreversible track” toward the creation of a Palestinian state.
“The kingdom will not cease its tireless efforts to establish an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and we affirm that the kingdom will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel without one,” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is viewed as the country’s de facto ruler, said in an address to his advisory council in September.
In a speech during a summit of Arab and Islamic nations this month in Riyadh, Bin Salman delivered his harshest remarks yet about the Gaza war, castigating Israel for what he described as its “collective genocide” against “the brotherly Palestinian people.”
At the same time, Israel may be less willing to bargain, especially with Trump in the White House, if his first time is any indication. Besides moving the U.S. Embassy and recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, he pushed for the so-called “Deal of the Century,” a peace plan that would have left the Palestinians without a state and allowed Israel to annex wide swaths of the occupied West Bank. He also took a more belligerent tack with Israel’s regional nemesis Iran, pulling out of the 2015 nuclear deal, levying wide-ranging sanctions and assassinating the country’s top general, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
Israeli leaders appeared jubilant when Trump won the U.S. election this month.
World leaders swiftly weighed in, from enthusiastic congratulations to more somber and circumspect assurances of continuity in the relationship with Trump.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who dismisses the notion of a Palestinian state, now appears poised to consolidate control over Palestinian territory. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich celebrated Trump’s win and ordered preparations for the annexation of the West Bank, declaring on X that 2025 would be “the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria” — the biblical name Israel uses for the occupied territory.
Meanwhile, Trump has chosen hard-line pro-Israel figures to key diplomatic posts that would deal with the Middle East. His pick for ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, rejects Palestinian claims to land and sovereignty.
Nevertheless, Palestinians may have room for hope compared with Biden, said Mouin Rabbani, an analyst and fellow at the Doha, Qatar-based Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. He pointed out that Biden didn’t reverse any of Trump’s Israel policies or manage to bring about a lasting cease-fire — and that Trump might try to wield his leverage with Netanyahu in a more forceful fashion to bring an end to the fighting.
A peace deal with the Palestinians would go some way in undercutting the influence of Iran, which has funded and armed groups in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen while competing for regional supremacy with Saudi Arabia.
Hoping for an end to the war with Israel, many Lebanese are putting their faith in a Lebanese American billionaire whose son is married to Trump’s daughter Tiffany.
The equation, however, has changed in another important way. Arab leaders once welcomed Trump’s more aggressive stance toward Iran. But China recently brokered detente between Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Iran. Bin Salman — in the same speech in which he condemned Israel’s war on Gaza — called on the international community to “compel Israel to respect Iran’s sovereignty and not to attack [Iranian] territories.”
Gulf leaders are also wary of relying too much on the U.S. to defend against any Iranian attack. Paramount in their thinking is Iran’s 2019 drone and missile attack on Abqaiq, the Saudi oil refinery complex. The Trump administration responded by increasing economic sanctions on Iran but did little else.
“Nobody minds American pressure to make Iran give up its nuclear weapons,” Shihabi said. “But they don’t want America to provoke Iran and then lose interest.”
Trump has repeatedly expressed his aversion to foreign adventures, claiming that his first administration did not embroil the U.S. in conflicts abroad and that neither the war in Ukraine nor Gaza would have started under his watch.
Experts said he will be reluctant to enter an all-out conflagration in the region.
“Yes, he has donors from Israel and an evangelical constituency,” Rabbani said. “But he doesn’t want to be the president who — after Iraq and Afghanistan — is the one who gets the U.S. involved in another land war in the Middle East with Iran.”
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