Since the re-election of Donald Trump as US president in November, policymakers and analysts are returning to questions of what a second Trump administration’s diplomacy in the Middle East could look like.

With no great expectations of breakthroughs in key regional standoffs, there is the reasonable assumption that the return of Trump to the White House will stir political headwinds across the Middle East and beyond.

The incoming Trump administration has showed early signs that it does not have the policy bandwidth to fix the fundamentally broken US policies in the Middle East region, which has been in turmoil since Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and Hizbullah in Lebanon started last year.

Yet, the region may not be prepared for the challenges and risks of Trump’s unpredictability as Israel continues to escalate the conflict on several fronts and shows no appetite for peacemaking unless on its terms.

Events in the Middle East since 7 October 2023 have done untold damage to regional stability and to America’s much-vaunted plans for a final Middle East peace settlement that will end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

During his presidential election campaign, Trump did not spell out his position on the main Middle East foreign-policy issues. Trump has left open-ended what he will do if the Israel-Gaza war is still on when he becomes president for a second time in January.

He has described himself as the “best friend that Israel has ever had,” and while in office between 2016 and 2020 he sponsored the normalisation of relations between several Arab countries and Israel and ordered the moving of the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

In his election victory speech earlier this month, Trump promised to “end the world’s wars,” including the wars in the Middle East, though he has not provided any specifics on how he will do so.

However, as Trump’s Middle East policy takes shape there is increasing apprehension in many capitals that his presidency could be a decisive moment for the region.

Chief among regional worries is that Trump will continue to implement his predecessor’s pro-Israeli policies which have fallen short in bringing peace to the region.

Last time around, Trump put a pro-Israel spin on his administration’s Middle East policy through his “Deal of the Century” that he presented as an Arab-Israeli peace plan.

Trump also tore up the nuclear deal reached with Iran by a group of world powers in 2015. He imposed a “maximum pressure” policy of crippling sanctions on Tehran that was meant to compel Iran to agree to a stricter agreement.

The two steps were widely seen as contributing to triggering the Gaza conflict. While Hamas claimed it carried out the 7 October attacks because it saw the Palestinian cause slipping off the international agenda, Iran backed the attacks because it felt threatened by the Arab-Israeli thaw.

One of the worrying signs of Trump’s new presidency is that he has started compiling one of the most pro-Israel foreign policy teams of any US administration in history. This team is staking out hardline positions and is expected to give even more unfettered US support to Israel as a critical component of Trump’s Middle East agenda.

A major concern is that the Trump administration may give the green light to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to go ahead with plans to impose Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza, meaning virtually annexing the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

At a recently concluded summit of leaders from nearly 60 Arab and Muslim nations who met in Saudi Arabia, the participants called for the Israeli-Occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem to become a unified Palestinian state that would allow a “comprehensive” regional peace to take place.

Saudi Arabia has made it clear that without agreement on a Palestinian state it will not normalise relations with Israel. It has formed a global alliance to push for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that includes Arab, Muslim, and European partners.

Abundant speculation now suggests that Netanyahu will take advantage of his ally Trump’s return to the White House for the second and final time to implement his expansionist projects in the region and further escalate the war on Gaza and Lebanon.

While the Israeli army continues to displace civilians en masse in Gaza, Netanyahu’s far right government has made a major leap towards annexing the Occupied West Bank over the past year by creating new outposts and confiscating huge swathes of land.

Israel’s annexation is expected to trigger what is widely feared will be the deportation of the remaining Palestinians from the West Bank and Jerusalem to Jordan and of Gazans to Egypt, allowing Israel to take their land and kill the prospect of a Palestinian state.

Trump is not expected to stop Netanyahu’s plans. Days after he met Netanyahu in July, Trump announced that Israel’s area is “small on the map” and that Netanyahu must think about how to expand it.

Since the beginning of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza last year, Egypt has thwarted Israel’s attempts to push Gaza’s civilians to seek refuge in Egypt. Its leadership has repeatedly rejected Israeli plans calling for the forced displacement of millions of Palestinians in the Strip.

But the crux of the Israeli project lies in Jordan, as the ongoing conflict revives Jordan’s long-standing fear that Israel will create conditions to push a large number of Palestinians from the West Bank into its territory, a policy widely known as “the transfer.”

While Israel’s forced displacement of the Palestinians will end the prospect of a two-state solution, it will also have devastating effects on Middle East peace and stability. In Jordan, for example, any wave of migration from the West Bank will affect the sensitive demographic equation in the country and may cause popular unrest.

In Lebanon, Trump will face immense challenges as Israel continues its military and diplomatic campaign against Hizbullah. Netanyahu has declared that his main objective in Lebanon is to change “the strategic reality in the Middle East” and create “a new regional order.”

One possible interpretation of this is that Netanyahu will try to break the rising influence of the Shias in the region, which his allies now believe poses a threat to Israel and to the United States.

US Vice President-elect J D Vance has recently double-downed on the idea of an alliance of Israel and Sunni Muslim-led states backed by US military power to “police the region” against the Shias, while top Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has accused them of being “Jew killers.”

Coupled with its policy of massive destruction and displacement, Israel is also clearly trying to drive up tensions between Lebanon’s religious groups by turning the country’s Sunni and Christian populations against its Shia Muslims, who make up Hizbullah’s base of support.

Syria is another place where Iran and Israel are tussling over the Middle East’s regional order, and it could be another area for Trump’s attentions.

Israel has been stoking up the conflict with Syria with nearly daily attacks on targets in the country that it claims harbour pro-Iran militias. It is reportedly constructing developments in a critical buffer zone between the two countries in the Golan Heights, sparking fears of further escalation in the region.

Israel might also aim at destabilising the regime of Bashar Al-Assad further and unsettling Syria’s domestic political balance. Israel believes a Sunni-led regime in Syria could put an end to Iranian influence and the role of its proxies in Syria.

In 2019, Trump decided to withdraw US troops from northeastern Syria before changing his mind under pressure from his military advisers. He has also indicated as part of a number of expected foreign policy changes under his presidency that he wants to remove US troops from Syria.

It is unclear what he will do in Syria, where some US troops are posted to monitor and counter Iran and its proxies.

Iraq, where thousands of US soldiers are stationed to fight terrorism, is another flashpoint, as pro-Iran militias that claim to be part of the “Axis of Resistance” are continuing to carry out missile and drone attacks against Israel.

Israel has called on the UN Security Council to pressure Baghdad to end the militia attacks, warning that Tel Aviv has the “right to defend itself” under the UN Charter. If Israel attacks Iraq, the repercussions for the US troops in Iraq will be severe, and Trump will find himself in an awkward situation.

Another challenge that has prompted unease in the Middle East is Iran, particularly at a time when the region faces a potential expansion of Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon and efforts to end these hostilities falter.

During his first term as president, Trump abandoned the nuclear deal agreed on in 2015 by Iran and the world powers. He went on to pursue a “maximum pressure” policy of crippling sanctions meant to compel Iran to accept a stricter agreement.

Now all eyes are on the president-elect to see what his next move will be and sparking unease in the Middle East about a larger conflict.

These interconnected conflicts have promoted the idea that the next Trump administration may push for a “grand Middle East deal” that aims at advancing peace between Israel and the Arab world in a move reminiscent of the earlier policy of pushing for the normalisation of relations between Israel and some Arab states, the so-called “Abraham Accords.”

Many in the region fear that such a deal is not aimed at bringing the conflict triggered by the 7 October attacks to a close and clear the path for a Palestinian state. Instead, it is aimed to change “the strategic reality in the Middle East” and create “a new regional order” with Israel playing its bully.

Therefore, it will be a fatal flaw if Trump allows his foreign policy to be trapped by Netanyahu. That will certainly be a recipe for a Middle East in further turmoil and probably the onset of a geostrategic regional disorder.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 28 November, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly