This article appears in the April 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Before President Trump even took office in January, his personal envoy delivered an unlikely win. Since last spring, President Biden’s diplomats had been unable to get Israel and Hamas to agree to a cease-fire. But Trump’s man, real estate billionaire Steve Witkoff, joined the Biden team’s effort weeks before the inauguration. Witkoff put immense pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly saying that his relationship with the incoming American president depended on him accepting the deal. After a 96-hour marathon of talks in Qatar, Witkoff clinched a cease-fire and hostage exchange.
In so doing, Trump appeared to make good on his robust outreach to Arab and Muslim voters, who had helped him carry swing states. The campaign promised that Trump would prioritize two things: “an end to the wars, and a lasting peace in the Middle East that is satisfactory to all parties,” Bishara Bahbah, chair of Arab Americans for Trump, told me. And he had already checked off item one.
But weeks into his second term, Trump suggested that the U.S. would forcibly displace Palestinians in Gaza, that the United States would occupy the territory as part of a “Gaza Riviera” plan, full of threats and ethnic cleansing. He doubled down on the idea in an outlandish AI-generated social media post, with him lying on the beach shirtless beside Netanyahu, and a song playing “no more tunnels, no more fear, Trump Gaza is finally here.”
The cease-fire did not hold beyond its first phase, amid Israel’s violations. Israel has also blocked all humanitarian transfers to Palestinians, in what is by any measure of international law a war crime. Among the other seemingly contradictory moves, Trump dismantled most international assistance with the exception of Israel, where he fast-tracked $12 billion of arms sales and military aid.
I asked Bahbah, who is Palestinian American, how he squares Trump’s cease-fire with the rest of it. “President Trump’s talk about a Riviera of the Middle East and displacement of Palestinians really, really upset the Arab American, Muslim American communities, but at the same time we know that the president was throwing this idea out as a negotiating tool.” It wasn’t offensive enough for him and his group to break with the president. “I don’t see them as really being serious policy statements,” Bahbah says.
Trump’s varied coalition of appointees, donors, and other informal advisers each want different things from him.
With Trump back in the White House, foreign-policy observers are again scrambling to make sense of his unconventional brand of statecraft: how much to take literally versus seriously, whether everything is transactional and personality-driven or whether a broader intent can be surmised. Middle East stakeholders are giving Trump the benefit of the doubt despite his aggressive and outrageous threats against Palestinians, a group that has been subject to what human rights groups call a genocide and of whom millions have already been internally displaced by Israel. There is no Trump doctrine to be gleaned, but there is a Trump factor: this president’s capacity, whether because world leaders fear him or trust him, to bring about definitive, comprehensive, and structural changes that have long-lasting policy effects.
This assessment of Trump is by no means an effort to wishcast him into being a president of peace, or obscure actions that are detrimental to American interests. Instead, this is an acknowledgment that Trump’s approach to Israel and Palestine, even in his first term, fundamentally reshaped American policy. He shattered taboos by moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, labeling products made in the occupied West Bank as Israeli, withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, and refocusing all U.S. diplomatic efforts on pushing forward normalization deals between Israel and Arab states that cut out Palestinians.
Biden took Trump’s policy and boxed himself in. There was no Trump-proofing of Middle East policy because Biden’s team had largely taken on its predecessor’s strategy. Trump, then, is a product, not a departure, from long-standing American policy.
What’s also clear is that Trump’s varied coalition of appointees, donors, and other informal advisers each want different things from him. Witkoff may be a pragmatist despite a staunch pro-Israel orientation, but Middle East policymaking will nonetheless be contested. Trump has elevated many pro-Israel stalwarts, alongside foreign-policy realists.
But will that mean that the president would stand by should Israel strike Iran’s nuclear program, or perhaps even enable such an escalatory attack? Will Trump facilitate Israel’s mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, or the further displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank? What will his emphasis on Israel and Saudi Arabia dealmaking mean for Palestinians, other Arab neighbors, and Americans?
There may be much to disagree with, sometimes vehemently so, about Trump in the Middle East. But as one career official who served during Trump’s first term put it, there’s validity to breaking with the Mideast policy of the establishment, which created an Israeli-Palestinian peace process that has long been on ice and deepened endless destructive wars. “A theme that is consistent between 45 and 47 is that the institutions and norms that we have built up and clung to for quite some time have not been working,” he told me. “They haven’t been working for American interests. They haven’t been working for global stability.”
EVERYONE IS TRYING TO MAKE SENSE of the gap between Trump’s words and actions. Those around him interpret his remarks with a generosity rarely afforded to any other politician. Witkoff has avoided discussing the Riviera plan and told the American Jewish Committee that Trump is talking this way about Gaza “because for the last four decades, the other ways of thinking have not worked.”
Many observers, particularly Republicans, have been working overtime to ascribe a degree of soundness or clarity to Trump’s often unhinged outbursts. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser from 2017 to 2018, laid out a framework for interpreting the president at the Council on Foreign Relations. In the Oval Office during his first term, Trump had suggested taking the curious step of bombing fentanyl labs in Mexico. “I don’t think he was really asking me for options to bomb the labs,” McMaster explained. But he was, in essence, saying, “What we’re doing right now is not working. Why don’t you bring me some options?” In other words, while Democrats, progressives, and others call out the dangerous, off-the-cuff remarks of the president, his supporters strain to find a kernel of actionable policy.
The only consistency, according to another former national security adviser, John Bolton, is that the president looks after his own interests and relationships. “His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern—or create—policy,” he writes in his White House memoir, The Room Where It Happened. “That had its pros and cons.” It gives room for advisers to advance their own pet projects and also leads to intense infighting, and often stagnation.
Still, many assessments of Trump’s governing style from the first term are pertinent. The wanton demolition of American foreign assistance worldwide will have major implications not only for Palestinians but also neighboring Middle East countries that have come to rely on American development and humanitarian programs. To understand it all, I keep coming back to the 2018 coinage of Prospect alum Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: The cruelty is the point.
Scenes from an AI-generated video released by the Trump administration imagining Gaza as a tourist destination
Going after the U.S. Agency for International Development shows an eagerness to punish agencies perceived to have a progressive bent. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has claimed, without evidence, that 98 percent of USAID staff had donated to Kamala Harris or another left-wing candidate. Beyond the effects on some 10,000 federal workers and contractors, the suffering outside the United States will be vast and unprecedented, and certainly detrimental to American soft power in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Note that the International Development Finance Corporation, another federal agency focused on foreign assistance, hasn’t been completely wiped out, likely because it helps companies rather than individuals. Trump’s appointee to run it is Benjamin Black, the son of private equity billionaire Leon Black.
The cruelty similarly seems to be the point of launching a crackdown on Palestine activists, especially on university campuses. ICE’s abduction of Columbia student protester and legal U.S. resident Mahmoud Khalil offers the most extreme example to date. The weaponization of antisemitism claims and the emphasis on law enforcement to limit speech and political activity mirrors Trump’s first-term policies like the so-called Muslim ban and the harsh response to Black Lives Matter protesters. It’s worth emphasizing, as the historian Ussama Makdisi has, that the casual racism against Palestinians, as epitomized by the Trump Gaza video, is the “culmination of a bipartisan U.S. consensus that for a century has waged war on the idea that Palestinians deserve equality and freedom.”
It’s no coincidence that one of Trump’s first major speeches of this term was at a Saudi investment summit in Miami, much like his first foreign visit, in 2017, was to Riyadh. In Miami, he told business titans that the kingdom is “a special place with special leaders,” and celebrated its hosting of a U.S.-Russia summit in Riyadh. He lambasted “the fake news media” to a crowd convened by the kingdom’s primary sovereign wealth fund, which Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud oversees.
It was all the more disturbing considering that the CIA determined that MBS had ordered the torture, killing, and disappearance of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Which is to say, forget human rights, press freedom, and accountability for transnational crimes—core tenets of American foreign policy across administrations of both parties. Elon Musk sat in the front row next to MBS confidant Yassir Al-Rumayyan, who runs the Saudi fund. Everything is business.
But that also means that Trump likes to throw fresh eyes on everything and explore risky avenues in the hopes of a good payout. “Well, this didn’t work. What about that? What’s the ultimate goal? The ultimate goal is to have a peaceful Middle East. How do we get there? And yeah, he doesn’t care what taboos may be broken,” a former Trump White House official told me. “Corporate America does that often, sometimes with good results and sometimes with awful results.”
Trump is willing to push the bounds of taste at every turn in order to stay in the spotlight, using racism and insult comedy to provoke. “There’s a real entertainment angle to everything he does,” a senior defense official from Trump’s first term told me. “He is super entertaining, and his base thinks he is hilarious. It’s not that deep.”
The unpredictability is constant. It’s hard to imagine any other president meeting in the Oval Office with freed Israeli hostages at the same time his envoy is engaging in direct talks with Hamas. “Release all of the Hostages now, not later, and immediately return all of the dead bodies of the people you murdered, or it is OVER for you,” Trump posted in early March on Truth Social. He’s all in on war crimes while being in direct talks with Hamas. He’s all over the place.
That unpredictability, as the former career official told me, has a certain methodology to it. “There’s a real art,” he explained, “keeping people off balance, and throwing out at times suggestions that just mix things up and cause people to lose their minds for a little bit, in hopes with following that up with a suggestion that is also really good for the United States.”
And it should be said that the most influential adviser is always the last person in the room with him.
AS PRESIDENT TRUMP WENT AROUND the chamber shouting out officials in his speech to Congress in early March, it became clear that Witkoff holds a stature in this administration on par with cabinet leaders. He’s Trump’s personal White House emissary and has his full faith, especially as compared to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Good luck, Marco,” Trump said in the speech. “Now we know who to blame if anything goes wrong.”
In contrast to setting Rubio up as the fall guy, Trump didn’t mention Witkoff by name but ticked off many of his accomplishments, including the release of American schoolteacher Marc Fogel from Russian prison and the return of Israeli hostages from Gaza, which are admittedly pretty remarkable wins for a first month of the presidency.
Witkoff brings the hard-nosed demeanor of a Harlem landlord who used to carry a sidearm and once kept a copy of the book Tough Jews on his desk. A 1999 New York Observer profile called him a “knifelike man.” Even the piece’s title was evocative: “Steve Witkoff’s Nine Lives: Tough Guys Don’t Fold—They Crawl Back From the Abyss.” He survived boom-and-bust cycles as he built a real estate empire in Manhattan. But though Witkoff emerges from a traditional pro-Israel background and Trump’s New York developer milieu, pragmatism so far is the defining feature of his diplomacy.
Several sources told me that Witkoff will be the main address for Israel policy, in contrast to Biden, who had several points of contact: Secretary of State Tony Blinken, CIA director Bill Burns, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk.
But beyond Witkoff running point, there’s not much cohesion to Trump’s Middle East policy—likely by design. “It’s a wide range of voices,” Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security adviser to Trump, said recently at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “That’s what he likes to have around him. He likes to hear from a lot of different people before he makes decisions.” The added caveat, as the writer Sam Adler-Bell recently argued in New York magazine, is that this leads to a Godfather-style model of various factions battling for power, none of them quite satisfied and all of them on edge.
There’s not much cohesion to Trump’s Middle East policy—likely by design.
Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, holds traditional pro-Israel views. A former representative to Florida and a Green Beret, he has assembled a team of career officials and Republican foreign-policy hands. Among them is longtime Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committee aide Eric Trager, who wrote a 2016 book on the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief stint in power in Egypt.
Iran will be a contentious fault line among Trump’s varied team. Waltz has expressed hawkish dogma on Iran, arguing that the U.S. ought not to stop Israel from launching attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities. This stands in immense contrast to Vice President JD Vance and his advisers, who trend toward realism and strike a different tone entirely.
One fulcrum point is the Defense Department’s number three appointee, who if confirmed will set policy for the entire Pentagon. Elbridge Colby represents the realist strand in Trumpworld. As a strategist, he has argued strongly against attacking Iran, a view he backtracked on in his recent confirmation hearing as pro-Israel hawks lined up against him. He prioritizes a defense architecture centered on Asia and countering China, and thus has downplayed the importance of the Middle East more broadly, questioning the value of maintaining U.S. military bases in Syria and Iraq.
The top Middle East civilian leader at the Pentagon, Michael Dimino, appears to hold a similar worldview. Dimino has written for the Quincy Institute’s web publication, Responsible Statecraft, on how bombing one’s way out of the Middle East won’t be productive and on the need to apply pressure on Israel to get more aid to Palestinians. “I do think international law has a role to play here,” Dimino told an interviewer about Gaza in November 2023. “I think that the importance of humanitarian aid getting into Gaza and holding our partners accountable, including Israel, on following the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions, all of that, is really important.”
Secretary of State Rubio has long been close to Republican donor and pro-Israel hawk Miriam Adelson. So far, he has focused on Latin America policy and less so on Israel and Palestine. But Adelson spent $100 million on Trump’s 2024 campaign, and at some point she may want a return on that investment.
Other State Department appointees will likely be more focused on the broader Middle East region, yet their roles may evolve. Ambassador-designate to the United Nations Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) has been one of the more militant vilifiers of pro-Palestinian speech, and she led the charge against university presidents last year. “Antisemitism and anti-Israel hate will not be tolerated on American campuses,” she posted when Trump announced federal funding would be withheld from universities that have protests. She is also a supporter of Israeli expansionism.
In Israel, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee embodies the evangelical view of Israel. Huckabee is a hardcore Christian Zionist who published a cartoonish The Kids Guide to Israel, which paints Arabs and Palestinians as anti-Israel. He has expressed support, if not enthusiasm, for the expansionist Greater Israel project, and dismissed the idea of Israel’s occupation outright.
But in recent weeks, Huckabee has toned down his rhetoric. “A lot of people don’t understand that there are many Palestinians who live within the boundaries of Israel,” Huckabee told the evangelical media broadcaster Joel Rosenberg in an interview, “who live quite successfully and who prosper, and they live in peace.” That hasn’t totally precluded Huckabee from saying somewhat scary things like “I think we will see something of biblical proportion happen with [Trump’s] leadership in the Middle East.”
Policy toward Syria and Lebanon remains a wild card. Joel Rayburn has been nominated to serve as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. A retired military officer shaped by the Iraq War who served in the previous Trump administration in a Syria envoy role, he will likely be leading on Trump’s approach to the post-Assad landscape, which will have major knock-on effects for Israelis and Palestinians, and which the administration has said precious little about so far. Witkoff’s deputy, Morgan Ortagus, is said to be handling Lebanon. She is a Republican operative who founded the Polaris National Security think tank and served in the State Department during Trump’s previous term. Her organization is very hawkish on Iran.
ALEX BRANDON/AP PHOTO
Real estate developer Steve Witkoff is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and his most valued adviser on the topic.
Pro-Israel voices are not just coming from the Adelson camp. “The hyper-online right,” as pundit Erick Erickson calls it, is another constituency on Israel policy. One influential figure may be Jacob Helberg, nominee for a senior economic post at the State Department who emerged from the military and surveillance tech company Palantir, which has been enthusiastically pro-Israel since the October 7 attacks. Helberg has disparaged Palestinian protesters, and played a big role in the campaign to mobilize Silicon Valley titans to support Trump.
Though Elon Musk appears largely focused on gutting government spending and regulations, one wonders whether he might end up playing an influential role on Israel policy. Over the years, he’s become a regular visitor to the country and its high-tech firms, which have played an integral role in the surveillance, targeting, and killing of Palestinians. Musk has also courted Gulf money—he spoke last year at the Saudi investment summit in Riyadh and sat in the front row of Trump’s Miami speech—and the potential business benefits of Trump’s policies may add more urgency to it as a priority. And Musk secretly met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations days after Trump won the election, which shows an interest in diplomatic action.
Also contributing to the conflicting range of views is Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has variously expressed hard-line pro-Israel stances and personally visited the now-ousted Syrian president in 2017 when he was widely considered a pariah and war criminal.
Son-in-law Jared Kushner has no formal role this term, and is just available as an adviser. But this time around, Trump’s kitchen cabinet is not strictly Zionist. Massad Boulos, a Lebanese American businessman and the father-in-law of daughter Tiffany Trump, helped deliver Arab American voters and claimed a senior adviser role.
Trump’s instincts on the Middle East, like everything, can be surprising, which means sometimes he is much more critical of Israel than the typical Republican. The author Peter Beinart pointed out in a recent essay for Jewish Currents that early in the last term, Trump sought concessions from Netanyahu and was not hesitant in criticizing the Israeli leader. (I recently worked as interim editor at Currents.) But ultra-pro-Israel advisers in Trump’s inner circle, most notably Kushner, found ways to outmaneuver the president and ensure that the White House’s approach benefited Israel. As Beinart put it, “Even though Trump at times campaigned as a peace candidate who would end Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, this growing team clearly signals that he’s likely to help Israel make them even more brutal.”
TRUMP BARELY TOUCHED ON the Middle East in his address to a joint session of Congress, perhaps because he wanted to keep expectations low after the first phase of the Israel-Hamas cease-fire. He briefly said his priority was bringing back the Israeli hostages from Gaza. That contrasts with Netanyahu, who has committed to continuing the war, as analysts point out, because it’s politically useful for an Israeli prime minister facing corruption charges. In his remarks, Trump also said he’s intent on expanding normalization deals for Israel in the Arab region. He didn’t name Saudi Arabia outright, but that’s very much the goal, and Palestinians stand to lose the most.
Five years on, the accomplishment of the so-called Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco that Trump’s team negotiated is that their diplomatic relations withstood Israel’s mass killing and war crimes. In lived experience for citizens of those three Arab states, the effects are rather limited. These countries were not at war with Israel, and already had many informal links. In a sense, they were more arms deals than peace deals; Israeli military contractors recently tabled at an arms expo in the UAE.
Some analysts have argued that ignoring Palestinians in the accords led to the October 7 attacks. The Biden administration overlooked the Palestinian issue from the outset and kept a single-minded focus on extending that normalization to Saudi Arabia. The Democratic president’s message for Palestinians was that of paltry economic peace for a people who, even before October 7, experienced in 2023 the most deaths of Palestinian children since the United Nations began counting, and no horizon for political change.
The enthusiasm for an Abraham Accord for Saudi Arabia has not dampened, despite the disastrous results in Gaza. Both the Trump I and Biden administrations floated unprecedented inducements for Saudi Arabia, including nuclear-enrichment technology for a civilian program and an extraordinary defense treaty that would offer the kingdom NATO-like protections. Now, Trump seems poised to offer these incentives and more in exchange for MBS establishing diplomatic relations with Israel.
Trump the bully, the strongman, may be able to achieve impressive ends through deplorable means.
Israeli tech ventures are particularly excited about doing more business in Saudi, but have already found ways to do just that, quietly developing extensive business and military ties: Israel has sold Saudi Arabia a dangerous cyber weapon; Saudi Arabia welcomed Israeli officials to visit the Kingdom. But I’ve been confused by how any of this would serve U.S. interests. Biden’s team said such an arrangement would firmly put Saudi Arabia in the U.S. camp and keep it away from partnering with Russia and China.
For what it’s worth, the great purveyor of foreign-policy realism, Henry Kissinger, wasn’t convinced the U.S. should offer Saudi Arabia so much. “I’m very uneasy,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations in early October 2023, in one of his last public appearances just days before the Hamas attack. “The idea that a third country should pay all the price, and another country should benefit, does not give you much hope for the sincerity” of the agreement.
The gold-standard offer, which for whatever reason has not been resuscitated two decades after its initial proposal, is the Arab Peace Initiative. The Saudi-backed opportunity would provide that all Arab states recognize Israel, in exchange for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state. Thomas Friedman previewed the idea from MBS’s predecessor in a New York Times column back in 2002, and it’s still one of the most sensible solutions to all this.
MBS did not set out to be the savior of Palestine, but he may decide that such a role would be in his own personal interest and a way to shore up support among his constituencies. He’s evolved on this issue and has called Israel’s offensive a “genocide.” That MBS hosted the first meeting between top Russian and American diplomats since the 2022 start of the Ukraine war suggests the crown prince prizes geopolitical power and maintains some leverage over Trump.
Avoiding another conflagration may make Trump willing to put pressure on Netanyahu to get some accommodation for Palestinians, though what MBS may be asking for—Palestinian statehood—is likely not on offer from the Israelis. But it’s an ill fit with Trump’s Gaza Riviera plan. If that was the opening salvo for Mr. Dealmaker, then what does it mean in practice? Bizarrely, it may be a call for the Palestinians to speak up. Coates, now the vice president of the Heritage Foundation, argued at the recent panel that the Palestinians excluded themselves in Trump’s first term; this time, she argued, they would be better served by coming to the table.
“The question about what we’re going to do about a one-state, a two-state, a three-state, a four-state solution is ultimately going to be up to the Palestinians,” Coates said. “I have said this to every Palestinian that will talk to me over the course of the last eight years: You have your most leverage now; you should use it. President Trump expects you to use it. He expects you to negotiate on your behalf, but you have to engage to get there.”
Somehow, optimism for a pragmatic approach remains despite the “crazy video,” according to an Arab American Republican in Trump’s orbit. His approach is “all about real estate, land, land swaps—land, land, and more land,” they told me. “And it’s about using the negotiation tactics that they’ve learned in their real estate deals to get a peace deal. Both sides have got to give up something to get something. No buyer’s remorse here, you know, haggle until you get to an agreement.”
I was frankly surprised by how sanguine this individual was, considering the brashness of Trump’s remarks, but they saw it as a positive development that the Gaza Riviera comments had already jolted the Arab League into action. Their expedited response to Trump reflected the real possibility of popular uprisings spreading across the region in response to the violent displacement of Palestinians and in solidarity with Palestinian rights. It’s not overstating the case to say that Trump could weaken the already brittle regimes in Egypt and Jordan simply by continuing to repeat his comments.
EVAN VUCCI/AP PHOTO
Both Joe Biden and Trump have sought a diplomatic accord between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and its crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Support for Israel, as evidenced by the rushed arms transfers, will continue, though that hasn’t yet alienated his high-level Arab American supporters. “I think in the president’s mind, he feels that a secure Israel is an Israel that is capable of making peace,” Bahbah, the Palestinian American campaigner for Trump, told me. But the Arab American base seems much less willing to put up with the president’s rhetoric.
The impact may be more visceral on the ground. “This was obviously one of Trump’s signature negotiating tactics. But that doesn’t mean Israel is walking it back,” explained Tariq Kenney-Shawa of the think tank Al-Shabaka. “Israel continues to telegraph their intentions to move forward with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza by ensuring that it remains unlivable.” The abysmal humanitarian situation demands our attention, all while the Gaza-fication of the occupied West Bank is ongoing, with intensive Israeli military operations and displacement of 40,000 Palestinians.
The failure of the peace process industry in Washington and the Democrats under Biden and Obama to make any significant progress on Israel-Palestine has created a remarkable opening for Trump, and one that he will likely exploit most of all on the proposed Saudi normalization deal. Of course, real estate is a factor as well, one that may work to Trump’s advantage. “They’re all trying to build up their wealth. Look at how, how far, the UAE has come. Saudi has these plans to have tourist resorts and that big city that they’re building, Neom. This all gets in the way,” the former Trump White House official told me. “The Palestinian issue mucks it all up for them, and so they just want it to go away.”
THE FOCUS ON MIDDLE EAST DIPLOMACY and stated commitment toward a Saudi-Israel deal doesn’t mean that the Trump administration won’t nonetheless turn toward militarism. Hard power appears all-important to the president; see his brazen comments on taking over the Panama Canal and Greenland. And though Trump paid lip service toward peace in the campaign, he has often suggested bombing as a solution, reaching for military answers to political problems. Contradictions abound: He may withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq or Syria while reaching for military options in other scenarios. He has already ordered airstrikes on Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.
Trump keeps coming back to “peace through strength,” which incidentally is also a favorite mantra of Netanyahu’s. Some Trump advisers may champion similar chest-thumping to Biden’s team on Israel, with its proclamations that Israel is in its best regional position ever, given the assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leadership. This has led to a new hubris around Israel being able to shape the whole Middle East through military outcomes.
But as analyst Omar Rahman of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs explains, Israel’s military strength is unlikely to translate into much. “Even the United States, with all its power, resources, money, and 20 years of occupation in Iraq and in Afghanistan, was unable to determine the outcomes it wanted to see in both of those countries, as the global superpower,” Rahman told me. “So how’s Israel just dropping American-made bombs going to do anything but engender more radicalism and extremism and hate for both Israel and the United States?”
A serious concern is whether Trump would be willing to blow up the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, or the treaty between Israel and Jordan. Rahman notes that Egypt continued its relations with Israel despite the Sabra and Shatila massacres during the Lebanese civil war, and both countries maintained relations throughout the second Intifada. Now, leaders of the UAE have indicated that none of Israel’s obliteration of Gaza has gotten in the way of their Abraham Accord with Israel.
Trump the bully, the strongman, the unpredictable leader who wants peace, perhaps only for his own benefit or for the glory of a Nobel Prize, may be able to achieve impressive ends through deplorable means. He may get countries to accommodate his desires, however irrational, because they don’t want to confront him. He may also leave Israel unrestrained, especially in its military campaigns in Syria and the West Bank.
All of this presents a strange opportunity to refocus on what American interests actually are in the Middle East. Though Trump himself is more Trump First than America First, some advisers are genuinely focused on advancing U.S. interests in the Middle East. There do seem to be enough realists and pragmatists in the administration that Trump may surprise, as he did with the short-lived Israel-Hamas cease-fire. There’s not really space for true optimism, but diplomacy and cease-fires are good things that serve American interests.
Even if Mideast diplomacy is centered in Witkoff’s office, there will be bigger arguments over the presence of American troops, how to engage with Iran, and what a future for Palestine might look like. Witkoff’s visit to Gaza and his colleague, hostage envoy Adam Boehler, talking directly with Hamas shows that his office has both the buy-in and the armor to engage in ways presidential envoys haven’t in recent memory. Beginning a conversation with Iran, for example, could open up further opportunities.
This isn’t to give the president the benefit of the doubt, as so many Republicans have as they trip over themselves to interpret his sometimes grotesque remarks through a policy lens. Progressives may find the administration’s occasional tendency toward realism in the Middle East to be advantageous to American interests, but that should not preclude criticism of policies that cause immense harm, like the immediate halt of humanitarian and development assistance, or the likely imminent implementation of a new Muslim ban.
One key lesson of both Trump’s first term and Biden’s time in the White House is that ignoring Palestine—disregarding the significance of Palestinian rights and its resonance throughout the Arab world—comes at everyone’s peril. Palestinians have to decide what happens to Gaza.
