by James M Dorsey
The Middle East may not preoccupy Donald J. Trump. Still, the president-elect preoccupies the Middle East as it attempts to figure out how he will handle the wars ravaging Gaza and Lebanon and threatening to spark an all-out conflagration between Israel and Iran.
Middle Eastern views run the gamut from optimism that Mr. Trump will strengthen Arab autocracy and cut a deal with Iran to pessimism that he will give Israel carte blanche to do what it wants to suggestions that the president-elect could move the region away from the brink.
The truth is likely to be in the middle.
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“Trump’s overarching impulse towards the Middle East can be boiled down to: look strong, but don’t do too much… (Trump’s) dealmaking would likely stop at the most intractable regional conflict of all… the Israeli–Palestinian conflict,” said international affairs scholar Lydia Khalil.
If accurate, Ms. Khalil’s assessment could have far-reaching consequences. It likely ensures that Iran will be the Trump administration’s prime Middle East focus.
The problem is that the president-elect’s isolationist inclinations risk creating a regional power vacuum with US allies rejiggering their defence strategies and groping for ways to hedge their bets.
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Gulf states learned during Mr. Trump’s first presidency what his notion of a security relationship entailed when he described Iranian strikes at Saudi oil facilities in 2019 as attacks on the kingdom rather than the United States.
Mr. Trump was suggesting that the attacks were a Saudi, not a US problem. He said Saudi Arabia was welcome to hire US forces to retaliate on its behalf.
“That was an attack on Saudi Arabia, and that wasn’t an attack on us. But we would certainly help them… If we decide to do something, they’ll be very much involved, and that includes payment. And they understand that fully,” Mr. Trump said at the time.
Against the odds, some analysts with close ties to Gulf rulers hope Mr. Trump’s second term will be different.
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Amjad Taha
“A new era began yesterday. This is why the entire Middle East celebrated Trump as president. A strong America weakens Islamist radicals in Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan. By 2025, more normalization, like with Israel, will occur, and the Muslim Brotherhood will be banned worldwide,” predicted Emirati influencer Amjad Taha.
Some analysts suggest that after rejecting ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon with Joe Biden in office, Mr. Netanyahu may let Mr. Trump take credit for ending the wars in exchange for a free hand in Iran.
“If the new US leader decides that the wars in the Middle East must end, it will be very hard for Netanyahu to sideline him the way he did with his predecessor,” journalists Ben Caspit and Rina Bassist said in an email.
This week, 14 Republican senators asked the State Department to immediately freeze the assets of Hamas officials living in Qatar and request Qatar “to end its hospitality to Hamas” leaders and extradite some of them.
The senators’ request came as a senior Biden administration official said the United States had told Qatar it no longer wanted the Gulf state to host the group after Hamas rejected a proposal for a temporary ceasefire that would have enabled an exchange of Hamas-held hostages for Palestinians incarcerated in Israel.
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Credit: India.com
Hamas has consistently demanded that a ceasefire be permanent rather than temporary. Qatar has hosted the group for more than a decade at the request of the United States and with Mr. Netanyahu’s acquiescence.
In a twist of irony, Mr. Trump’s isolationism, unpredictability, and capriciousness could be short-term assets, but they are unlikely to help solve issues that threaten longer-term regional security.
In a first response to Mr. Trump’s electoral victory, Iran appears to be recalibrating how it will respond to last month’s Israeli tit-for-tat attack on Iranian military facilities.
“The ruling ayatollahs will have to tread far more carefully when planning any new attacks on Israel. They can expect full-throated White House support, and possibly American military support, for any further and more devastating Israeli retaliation in response to new Iranian missile and drone attacks on the Jewish State,” suggested Dov S. Zakheim, a former Pentagon official in the George W Bush and Ronald Reagan administrations.
If correct, Mr. Zakheim’s suggestion that Mr. Trump would respond more assertively to an attack on Israel compared to his attitude towards the targeting of Saudi Arabia would likely have much to do with the pro-Israel inclinations of his Evangelist voter base and influence of far-right donors such as Miriam Adelson, the largest contributor to his election campaign.
Evangelists account for 20 per cent of the American electorate. Four out of five white evangelical Christian voters voted for Mr. Trump, according to AP VoteCast.
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Iranian missiles on display: Credit Arab Center Washington DC
Mr. Trump’s return to the White House is a Catch-22 for Iran. With no immediate prospects for ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, Iran feels it has no choice but to respond to the Israeli attacks. It may want to do so before Mr. Trump takes office on January 20.
Yet, balancing a need to project strength while preserving Iran’s long-range ballistic missile arsenal, avoiding an all-out military conflagration with Israel, and keeping the door open to potentially renewed nuclear negotiations with the United States and others is no mean fete.
Maintaining a balance is complicated by Israel’s degradation of Hamas and Hezbollah’s military capabilities, which has collapsed what Iran conceived of as its forward defence line populated by armed non-state actors across the Middle East.
“Iran is desperate to find a new path toward restoring deterrence against Israel. Its main tool is the use of its missile and drone arsenal. But Israel, backed by the United States, has defenses against this tool, and the stockpile of Iranian missiles is limited, hence its deterrent power diminishes each time it uses another batch,” said Middle East Institute Vice President Paul Salem.
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Credit: Observerdiplomat.com
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian hopes that as a dealmaker, Mr. Trump may see an opportunity to negotiate the kind of deal he failed to secure with North Korea in his first term.
Mr. Pezeshkian was elected earlier this year on a promise to try to rebuild relations with the West and negotiate a nuclear deal that would grant Iran relief from crippling economic sanctions imposed by Mr. Trump during his first presidency.
Even so, Iranian leaders may not have the wherewithal to cater to Mr. Trump’s ego and narcissism.
“It’s hard to imagine Iranian Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or President Masoud Pezeshkian flying down to Trump Tower in New York City or Mar-o-Lago in Palm Beach, warmly congratulating Trump on his victory, and promising to put up a Trump Hotel in Tehran once the ink on a bilateral deal is dry,” quipped Middle East nuclear scholar Farzan Sabet.
Mr. Trump has not indicated whether he would be interested in a negotiation, but it is still early days. Similarly, it is unclear whether Mr. Netanyahu would be willing to give Mr. Trump a chance to negotiate.
“The real question…is whether Netanyahu decides to continue to try to expand that war, go after Iran, or do things that basically create an even greater concern about whether or not the Middle East is ever going to resolve itself or be in constant conflict,” said former CIA Director Leon Pancetta who has emerged as a harsh critic of the Israeli prime minister.
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J. D. Vance on The Tim Dillon Show
Mr. Trump and J. D. Vance, his vice-president-elect, indicated that that they may not favour regime change as advocated by Mr. Trump’s first term Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, neoconservatives, and Mr. Netanyahu.
“Our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country,” Mr. Vance recently said on The Tim Dillon Show.
Speaking with podcaster Patrick Bet-David, Mr. Trump ruled out pursuing regime change in Iran. “We can’t get totally involved in all that. We can’t run ourselves, let’s face it,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump’s first term Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt, suggested that the president elect’s “goal is to deter the Iranian regime, encourage those who reject the ayatollahs’ extremism and cause the regime to rethink its choices.”
To achieve that, Mr. Trump is likely to double down on sanctions on Iran and the curtailing of its oil exports by globally cracking down on ports, including in China, and traders who handle Iranian oil.
For Mr. Trump, the doubling down could be personal. This week, prosecutors charged an Afghan national with plotting on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to kill Mr. Trump, who survived two domestic assassination attempts during his election campaign.
In September, authorities charged three Iranians with hacking Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.
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Credit: COL Live
Mr. Pompeo was close to the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, a controversial Iranian exile group that seeks the overthrow of the Iranian regime. While in office, he favoured instigating unrest in Iran by supporting militant ethnic minority groups.
Mr. Pompeo is lobbying to be included in Mr. Trump’s second administration but is bumping up against resistance from Donald Trump Jr., the president-elect’s son, podcast host Tucker Carlson, and other conservatives.
With Israel potentially targeting nuclear facilities in any further strikes against Iran, Mr. Trump’s reluctance to be dragged into a military conflagration or engage in regime change may be reinforced by doubts about their likely effectiveness.
“An attack would not set the program back dramatically and would likely convince Iran that it needs nuclear weapons to be secure… Iran has hardened its nuclear facilities—with at least one buried so deep underground that even US airstrikes would be unlikely to destroy it,” said analyst Benjamin D. Giltner.
Iran’s tit-for-tat with Israel and Mr. Trump’s return to the White House has lent new urgency to a debate among Iranian officials on whether to drop the Islamic Republic’s insistence that it is not pursuing nuclear weapons and extend the range of its missiles beyond a self-imposed limit of 2,000 kilometres.
Brigadier General Ahmed Haq Talab, the commander of Iran’s Nuclear Centers Protection and Security Corps, recently warned that Iran could “revise” its nuclear doctrine that designates weapons of mass destruction as un-Islamic if Israel attacked the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities.
Mr. Trump’s rejection of regime change will likely go down well with the United States’ Gulf allies, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have sought in recent years to reduce tensions, rebuild relations with Iran, and create an environment conducive to foreign investment.
The Gulf states have reassured Iran that they would not take sides in an escalating conflict with Israel and would not allow the United States to use military bases on their soil or their airspace for operations against the Islamic Republic.
The reassurance takes on added significance with the imminent departure of the SS Abraham Lincoln, the sole US aircraft carrier in the region.
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An F-35 takes off from the SS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East. Credit: US Central Command
The Pentagon says the continued presence of one, if not two, aircraft carriers in the region since the Gaza war erupted last year helped contain the violence between Israel, Iran and its network of armed non-state actors.
Replacing the Lincoln is a mix of forces, including naval destroyers, B-52 bombers, and land-based fighter jets tasked with deterring Iran and its partners in an area stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Gulf and other volatile regional shipping routes.
If the Gulf states stick to their promise, the US would have to base the B-52s and fighter jets elsewhere in the region or beyond to employ them in missions against Iran.
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Even so, satellite images suggest that some nuclear-capable B-52H bombers were recently deployed to the Al Udaid Air Base in Qatar, the United States’ largest military installation in the region.
Some analysts suggest that Iran will tread carefully to ensure that escalating Middle East tensions do not spark domestic unrest.
“Due to his tough stance against the Islamic Republic, Trump enjoys a certain level of popularity among ordinary Iranians, thus worrying Iran’s rulers. A new Trump presidency could strengthen more members of the public to challenge the regime,” said Iran scholar Meir Javedanfar.
Iran’s balancing act becomes more precarious in the short term because the run-up to Mr. Trump’s inauguration is when there could be a vacuum in Washington with senior officials leaving the Biden administration to take up new jobs.
“The nightmare scenario is that a new or escalated Middle East crisis will erupt in the next few weeks. Trump will be powerless, and Biden/Harris will be weak and likely to be cautious on how to respond,” said Gulf scholar Simon Henderson.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.