President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January will come with profound implications for the future of Washington’s foreign policy in the Middle East.
Following 13 months of intensifying, and expanding, conflicts, there are many open questions about how the next US administration will approach the region. Trump is an unpredictable wildcard, and forecasting how he will take on foreign policy challenges is not easy.
But there is much to look at from his first term - the Abraham Accords, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) pull-out, “maximum pressure” on Tehran, the killing of Iran’s Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani, recognition of Israeli sovereignty over Syria’s Golan Heights, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, increased arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the response to Jamal Khashoggi's murder, and so on.
However, Trump will not have the luxury of picking up where he left off in January 2021 given how much the Middle East has greatly changed since the 2017-21 period. He will face new realities in the region after returning to the Oval Office on 20 January 2025.
At the same time, it is worth noting that Joe Biden’s administration maintained much continuity in US foreign policy in the Middle East from Trump’s first term.
Despite blasting Trump for sabotaging the JCPOA in May 2018, calling the move a “profound mistake” and “unnecessary crisis”, Biden did not take the steps necessary to reconstitute that multilateral nuclear accord during his presidency.
He did not reverse Trump’s decisions to move the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognise Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Biden also put enormous amounts of diplomatic energy into seeking to build on Trump’s Abraham Accords legacy by trying to bring more Arab states into the Israeli normalisation camp.
“We are not likely to see a shift in substance, but rather in style. It is worth noticing that - although Biden criticised Trump’s actions - he did not fundamentally change US foreign policy toward the Middle East,” said Dr Marina Calculli, a research fellow at Columbia University, in a The New Arab interview.
“Biden worked very much within Trump’s legacy of substituting international law with US decrees and we can expect Trump to take it from there only in a more aggressive and explicit way,” she added
The Hamas-led incursion into southern Israel on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent Israeli war on Gaza laid to waste the idea that the Palestinian issue ceases to matter to Arab states and societies and can be simply buried under diplomatic deals with Israel.
Therefore, while Trump might continue his first administration and Biden’s efforts to expand the scope of the Abraham Accords, the Arab world’s current political and social dynamics will make that far more challenging.
Regardless of who is in the Oval Office, the past 13 months of Israeli barbarism in Gaza and, more recently, in Lebanon have made talk of normalisation more toxic than ever in the Arab world. For Arab states, the political risks associated with entering the Abraham Accords have drastically increased. Fears of domestic and regional backlash leave Arab regimes unwilling to even touch normalisation as a topic.
Yet, Trump’s team (like Biden’s) might be indifferent to these factors, which Arab leaders and policymakers can’t ignore, and continue trying to bring more regional states into the normalisation camp.
“With the Republicans taking the Senate and possibly holding the House, Trump could deliver on the incentives the Biden administration offered Saudi Arabia in exchange for normalising relations with Israel. However, the Saudis will likely insist on an irreversible commitment to a two-state solution as a condition for full normalisation,” explained Ferial Saeed, a former senior American diplomat, in an interview with TNA.
“That will remain a non-starter with the Israelis, and the absence of such a commitment will remain a non-starter with Arab publics.”
The ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon are likely to consume much of the Trump administration’s foreign policy energy in the Middle East early on. While Trump will likely be supportive of Israel, it’s unclear whether the free hand that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received from Biden will continue under Trump.
Speaking to TNA nine days before the election, Dr Steven Wright, an associate professor of International Relations at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, said, “Trump, in particular, might position himself as a deal broker, seeing a peace settlement as a defining achievement. I believe that the key question is not just who wins, but how quickly the next administration can develop an effective regional policy”.
Since the Israeli war on Gaza began in October 2023, there has been an increased US military presence in the region, enabling Israel to carry on with its military operations. But, as Saeed noted, “Trump has long been critical of extended US deployments in the Middle East, and much of his base, though not all of it, would oppose a major military escalation that could draw the US into a full-scale war with Iran”.
The former senior American diplomat pointed to Trump’s victory speech in which he brought up the inclusion of Arab-American and Muslim-American voters in his coalition. “While this does not equate to a major policy shift, it is a shift in tone and bears watching,” she told TNA.
“One can only hope that Trump will be true to his public declarations during the campaign that he will swiftly move to end the war in Gaza, which can only mean forcing Israel to stop its bombardment and siege of Gaza’s population,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, the Executive Director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), in an interview with TNA.
“Trump has also expressed his opposition to any expanded war in the Middle East, so it is also hopeful that he will deter Israel from its efforts to further enlarge the war to engulf the US and Iran. With Trump, however, it’s hard to predict anything with certainty,” she added.
Other experts do not see much, if any, reason to be optimistic about Trump possibly reining in Israel’s war machine in Gaza and Lebanon. Yet, that is not to say that US policy would change much from the past 13 months in which the White House has not used Washington’s leverage to apply any real pressure on Tel Aviv to change its conduct, while instead only putting out vapid rhetoric and expressing opinions that are not tied to any concrete action.
“I expect Trump to continue fully supporting Israel and Netanyahu in his military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, with even fewer ‘redlines’ than Biden; he would seem to prefer a quick end to the fighting, but this means Israel will have carte blanche from the US to do whatever it needs to do militarily to accomplish this,” Charles Dunne, a former US diplomat who served in Cairo and Jerusalem, told TNA.
“Less emphasis will be put on meeting Palestinians' humanitarian needs and probably none at all on Gaza reconstruction and a political horizon based on a two-state solution,” he added.
“In the next few months, I think Israel will ignore any cautions from the Biden administration, knowing that it can count on Trump's full support when he enters office. This will not necessarily result in a major intensification of military actions but will mean that Israel will feel free to pursue its war aims however it defines them and sees fit. Not starkly different from today, it seems.”
Dr Nader Hashemi, director of Georgetown University's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, does not expect much change in Washington’s policies vis-à-vis Israel’s wars in the Levant after Trump returns to the White House in early 2025.
“I think the immediate impact of Trump’s presidency on the conflicts in Lebanon and Gaza will be quite muted and limited. That’s because both political parties have a shared vision for what US foreign policy should be toward those conflicts, and that is near total support for Israel and anything that it does, and any policy that it pursues,” he told TNA.
“We can expect the Gaza genocide and the ethnic cleansing of South Lebanon to continue, although Trump will probably urge Israel to close these fronts quickly, as he would be more reluctant to give Israel more military aid than Biden,” said Dr Calculli.
“This could result in even heavier and [more] aggressive military operations than what we are seeing now. What is more likely to change - definitely for the worse - is the type of diplomatic and legal shield the US provides Israel, although the Biden administration has already set the bar very low,” she added.
Assessing how the second Trump administration might approach Iran is not easy. A key question is, will Trump be open to diplomacy with the Islamic Republic or instead opt for a ‘maximum pressure 2.0’ campaign that does not include any dialogue with the leadership in Tehran?
As a candidate, Trump stated his openness to a grand deal with Iran. But whether those serving his second administration and authorities in Tehran would both be willing to take the necessary steps for such a sweeping deal are separate questions.
Most likely, Trump’s White House will maintain a public face of hostility toward Iran but privately be willing to negotiate a new deal with Tehran, basically guaranteeing a contradictory and dysfunctional Iran policy for the next four years.
Dr Hashemi fears that the risk of a US-Iran war will increase significantly after Trump returns to the Oval Office, largely due to “very hawkish, pro-Israel, Likudnik foreign policy advisors” who will potentially serve his administration.
“Recall in Trump’s first term in office, the US almost went to war with Iran on three occasions and I suspect this is going to be a leading goal for Trump’s foreign policy advisors, to try and pursue regime change in Iran in the naïve hope that if Iran can be invaded and the regime can be toppled peace can be brought to the Middle East. I think that’s very much now on the agenda, and it will have catastrophic consequences for the entire region,” he told TNA.
An important factor to consider is the extent to which leaders from some Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states - chiefly Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Qatar - might prove capable of influencing Trump during his second term.
After Trump’s first term began in 2017, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi lobbied the Trump team to support the blockade of Qatar and subject Iran to “maximum pressure”. But dynamics in the Gulf are significantly different today. If Trump seeks to intensify US aggression toward Tehran, it is doubtful that he will receive support from Gulf Arab monarchies that have taken a new approach to Iran since Trump left the White House in January 2021.
In the interest of achieving economic development and diversification, GCC states are focused on preserving security and stability in the Gulf above all else. In practice, this entails mitigating tensions within the GCC family and preserving the current détente with Iran through dialogue and diplomacy.
There is good reason to conclude that GCC members and their lobbyists in Washington will seek to convince Trump to avoid actions toward the Islamic Republic that could make the Gulf Arab states more vulnerable to a potential war involving Iran.
They also want the next administration to pressure Israel into winding down its wars in Gaza and Lebanon, which are major drivers of regional instability that threaten the interests of the US’s close allies and partners in the Gulf.
What could be an interesting dynamic in Washington after Trump returns to the White House in two-and-a-half months is a clash between the Gulf and pro-Israel lobbies with the former attempting to convince Trump to de-escalate conflicts in the Middle East and the latter seeking a ‘maximum pressure 2.0’ campaign against Iran and the ‘Axis of Resistance’.
Assuming Trump will again lead as a transactional president not guided by principles, but instead by a desire to strike lucrative deals, it will be important to see if/what Gulf Arab leaders can do to influence Trump in ways that can lead to significant shifts in Washington’s foreign policy in the region.
Giorgio Cafiero is the CEO of Gulf State Analytics
Follow him on Twitter: @GiorgioCafiero