Trump’s diplomacy in the Middle East

Hussein Haridy
Tuesday 28 Jan 2025

The top priority of Trump administration diplomacy in the Middle East will be to advance the interests of Israel, writes Hussein Haridy

 

US President Donald Trump is no stranger to the Middle East, and consequential decisions concerning Middle Eastern affairs were adopted during his first term in office between 2017 and 2021.

Those decisions covered US-Israeli relations, US-Gulf relations, and US-Iranian relations. Their overall legacy was the cornerstone of US diplomacy in the Middle East during the next four years.

Trump’s decisions to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and Israeli sovereignty over the Occupied Golan Heights, relocate the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and state that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were not inconsistent with international law prepared the ground for later decisions concerning the future settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The resolution of this intractable conflict will come as a logical denouement of the aforementioned decisions. The possible annexation of the West Bank or major parts of it should not be ruled out.

Trump scored a diplomatic win in the troubled region by helping to elaborate a ceasefire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas that was announced on 15 January and went into effect on 19 January. At the time of writing, seven Israeli hostages have been freed, three last week and four on 25 January. The four are soldiers in the Israel Army, and as per the ceasefire agreement Israel is to set free 200 Palestinian detainees and prisoners of war.

With the ceasefire holding so far, more than 4,000 trucks carrying much-needed humanitarian assistance, including fuel, have entered Gaza, and there are hopes that the first phase of the agreement will be honoured. However, there are doubts as to whether the warring parties will have the political will to negotiate the details of the second phase – namely, an agreement on a complete ceasefire as well as the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip.

Sceptics in Israel believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has other plans that have to do with calculations concerning his own political survival. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has threatened to withdraw from the ruling Coalition Government if Netanyahu agrees to end the war without achieving the initial goal of “destroying Hamas.”

Other Israeli political commentators tend to believe that Netanyahu will have to weigh the benefits of listening to Trump or going along with the positions of his allies in the government, given the fact that the coalition has a razor-thin majority of just two seats in the Knesset.

Trump took everyone by surprise on 25 January when he told reporters on Air Force One that he had spoken on the telephone to King Abdallah of Jordan the same day and had told him that “I would love for you to take on more [Palestinian refugees] because I am looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it is a mess.”

He also said that he would call Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi to ask him to take in more Palestinians. Trump said that “you are talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out the whole thing.”

It remains to be seen whether these remarks were off-the-cuff or whether they were coordinated with Netanyahu. However, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority (PA) all reiterated, each one separately, their opposition to any attempt to relocate the people of Gaza. A statement by the Egyptian Foreign Ministry on 26 January expressed Egypt’s support for the “inalienable rights” of the Palestinian people.

One thing Trump will prioritise in the Middle East is the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Under his watch in his first term, so-called Abraham Accords were signed and diplomatic relations established between Israel and four Arab countries, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.

This is one of the reasons why I believe that one of the top priorities of the Trump administration in the region will be expanding US-Gulf relations, particularly with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, mainly in the economic, commercial, and military fields.

Addressing the recent World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos by videoconference, Trump said that Saudi Arabia would invest $600 billion in America and added that he hoped this would be raised to one trillion. He has made it clear that he expects Saudi Arabia to lower oil prices.

The third priority for the Trump administration in the Middle East will be Iran, especially its nuclear programme.

In his first term in office, Trump decided in May 2018 to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear accord signed between Iran and the 5 + 1 Group (the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council plus Germany). The Iranian government said it was open to negotiations without prior conditions.

In Trump’s first term, the US administration adopted a strategy of “maximum pressure” on Iran by slapping sanctions on its oil and financial sectors. The second Trump administration believes that Iran has been weakened militarily and geopolitically during the last 15 months and that it will thus be more willing to renegotiate the 2015 nuclear agreement in such a way as to make sure that Iran will never possess a nuclear weapon.

Another US objective in the region is the reining in of the Houthis in Yemen to stop their threats against international shipping lanes in the Red Sea.

The diplomatic agenda of Trump’s second term in the Middle East is a very ambitious one and not necessarily pro-Arab or pro-Palestinian. Its top priority is to advance Israeli interests, and this will not be easy to implement without causing tensions in US-Arab relations over the next four years, all the more so without a clear and unmistakable engagement on its part to the two-state solution in Israel and Palestine.

Without such an engagement, and without stating clearly that the US is committed to ending the war in Gaza, the expansion of the Abraham Accords will be problematic for Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries that could be interested in being part of them.

The Trump administration’s decision last week to revoke the hold, decided by the Biden administration, on the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel does not augur well for ending the war in Gaza anytime soon.

 

The writer is former assistant foreign minister.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 30 January, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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