Reading Trumpian Tea Leaves

Even after four years, it was nearly impossible to discern a coherent Middle East policy under Donald Trump. He was mostly pro-Israel but also made damaging decisions. He was initially ambivalent about solving the Palestinian issue but ultimately offered the most detailed proposal of any president for the creation of a Palestinian state. He made an unprecedented breakthrough with the Abraham Accords but failed to secure Saudi Arabia’s participation. Trump castigated his predecessor but adhered to the foreign aid memorandum that President Barack Obama negotiated with Israel. He sanctioned and threatened Iran but didn’t use force against its nuclear program, leaving it closer to a bomb when he left office. Trump relished the fear his unpredictability created but failed to stabilize the region. Now, he has adopted a foreign policy blending Gandhi’s peace rhetoric and John Lennon’s idealism while retaining his trademark bombast.

In an interview with Time, the president-elect shared his new kumbaya spirit, saying, “I want everything to end. I don’t want people killed, you know? I don’t want people from either side killed, and that includes whether it’s Russia, Ukraine, or whether it’s the Palestinians and the Israelis.”

Expressing moral equivalence between the Russian aggressors, Palestinian terrorists, and their Ukrainian and Israeli victims would usually draw howls of criticism from right-wing Jews. Trump, however, is given a pass.

Trump, who is said by acolytes to have never pressured Israel – though he boasted of having forced Netanyahu to abandon his plan to annex the settlements – has been demanding that Israel end the war in Gaza. Critics of President Joe Biden have speciously accused him of trying to prevent Israel from defeating Hamas. Meanwhile, Trump has made clear his priority is to have peace by the time he is inaugurated, regardless of progress toward Israel’s war aims. Having claimed that the world was at peace during his first term, he wants to be able to say the same in his second.

Asked if Netanyahu gave him assurances about ending the war in Gaza, Trump said, “I don’t want to say that, but I think he feels…very confident in me, and I think he knows I want it to end.”

For Trump’s supporters, this does not constitute pressure.

Trump has spoken repeatedly about the hostages and seems to have an obsession with how many hostages are dead. He said in the interview, “I think Hamas is probably saying, ‘Wow, the hostages are gone.’ That’s what they want.”

In a digression from his message of peace, he posted on Truth Social days earlier that if the hostages were not released before his inauguration, “there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East.”

He didn’t explain how he would end the fighting, what sort of hell he planned, or what he would do if Netanyahu failed to meet his deadline.

Trump said Middle Eastern problems would be easier to solve than the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. This is an interesting perspective given that Russia and Ukraine have been fighting for three years and the people in the Middle East for centuries.

While Trump plans to cut off aid to Ukraine to force it to make a deal with Russia, his Jewish supporters don’t think he would ever use an arms embargo, as Biden has, to pressure the Israelis. Without such a threat, Netanyahu is expected to accede to Trump’s wishes to ensure he stays in the president’s good graces, a concern the Israeli prime minister rarely demonstrated with Biden.

As for the Palestinians, Trump equivocated on whether he supported the two-state solution he proposed in his first term. “I support whatever solution we can do to get peace. There are other ideas other than two-state, but I support whatever is necessary to get not just peace but a lasting peace. It can’t go on where every five years you end up in tragedy. There are other alternatives.”

He said much the same at the beginning of his first term before Jared Kushner laid out a plan for a Palestinian state. That plan was dead on arrival. Trump offered no idea of how he would prevent another “tragedy” and bring about “lasting peace.” Meanwhile, the silence over his failure to rule out a Palestinian state is another example of the double standard applied by his supporters to his views versus those of Democrats.

In the interview, Trump criticized the Biden administration for failing to bring any additional countries into the Abraham Accords. “They didn’t add one country to the Abraham Accords. We had the four countries, very important countries, but that should have been loaded up with Middle Eastern countries,” he said.

This was indeed a failure of the Biden administration, though it nurtured the relationship among the existing signatories. Biden appeared on the verge of accomplishing what Trump could not by bringing in the Saudis, but that was sabotaged by the Hamas attack and the subsequent involvement of Iranian proxies in attacking Israel.

The Saudis were loath to give Biden a foreign policy victory given his efforts to ostracize them at the beginning of his presidency, and now certainly won’t. The table has been set for Trump, whose solicitous attitude toward them will likely be rewarded. Trump just needs to deliver on their demand for security guarantees, weapons, and nuclear technology.

The Biden State Department did its best to sabotage the deal by encouraging the Saudis to condition normalization on Israel’s agreement to lay out a path for Palestinian statehood. A Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who has been remarkably silent) will surely abandon that effort to pressure Israel and likely convince the Saudis to sell out the Palestinians, as have all the other Arabs who made peace with Israel to satisfy their interests.

Trump was asked whether he would be willing to let Israel annex the West Bank or whether he would stop Netanyahu as he did in his first term. Trump said, “We’ll see what happens. Yeah, I did. I stopped him.”

It was actually the Emiratis who short-circuited the plan when they said the UAE would not agree to normalization if Netanyahu applied Israeli sovereignty to the settlements. The Saudis are likely to be just as hostile to the idea, which will likely lead to Trump disappointing members of Netanyahu’s coalition who believe he will rubber stamp their ambition to annex the West Bank and repopulate Gaza.

Interestingly, when asked if he trusted Netanyahu, the man conservatives refer to as the most pro-Israel president, said, “I don’t trust anybody.”

Apparently, their relationship hasn’t been fully repaired after Netanyahu showed what Trump considered disloyalty by congratulating Biden on his victory in the “rigged” election of 2020. In expressing distrust of Netanyahu, Trump sounds like every other president who has dealt with the Israeli prime minister. Further, it reflects the transactional nature of his foreign policy where loyalty is more important than broader diplomatic considerations.

When speaking about Iran, Trump has frequently offered a revisionist history of his record. He told Time that Iran “was not very threatening.” He said, “They had no money. They weren’t giving money to Hamas. They weren’t giving money to Hezbollah.”

Of course, Iran was financing both Hamas and Hezbollah during his term.

Furthermore, despite Trump’s claims about bankrupting Iran and Biden removing sanctions to give the country a windfall, Biden maintained the Trump sanctions (though they weren’t strictly enforced when he was seeking to persuade Iran to sign a new nuclear deal) and added additional ones. The problem is that Iran became adept, primarily with the help of the Chinese, at circumventing the sanctions.

Still, before Biden was elected, Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign had failed to prevent Iran from advancing its nuclear program, and he has not explained how his planned resumption of that approach will be any more successful, particularly given that Iran already has enough enriched uranium to build several bombs. This is perhaps why we are hearing public discussion of the possibility of Trump either green-lighting an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, after Biden had maintained a flashing red one, or deciding the US military should do the job.

Either option would seem to threaten his peace agenda.