by James M Dorsey
Predicting President Donald J. Trump’s Middle East policy and his attitude toward Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu amounts to reading tea leaves.
The leaves are the cast of characters included in Mr. Trump’s administration when he takes office and who he excluded.
Yet even that could prove to be misleading.
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“In the first Trump administration, there was that ‘tyranny of the final briefer’—the last person he talks to can be extraordinarily influential on issues he cares less about. So I think one of the most important people in a Trump administration is going to be whoever controls his White House schedule, which may mean the White House chief of staff will have an outsized role compared to other administrations,” said foreign and defence policy analyst Kori Schake.
Mr. Trump’ first appointment was Susie Wiles, the architect of his comeback, as chief-of-staff.
Even so, at the core of Mr. Trump’s foreign and defense policy choices is a Republican divide between interventionists and isolationists that could come to haunt the president-elect with opposition to some of his policies from within his party.
At the core of Mr. Trump’s foreign and defense policy choices is a Republican divide between interventionists and isolationists that could come to haunt the president-elect with opposition to some of his policies from within his party.
Interventionists backed by neo-conservatives, who were the backbone of the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, propagate the principle of “peace through strength.”
America First isolationists want to steer clear of US involvement in foreign conflicts.
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Credit: The Dong-A Ilbo
The divide gives Mr. Netanyahu room to manoeuvre with Israel constituting a middle ground and Mr. Trump the joker, even if the prime minister may prefer the interventionists, fearing that America First isolationists may see US and Israeli interests diverge.
“Look, Iran’s a bad regime. We don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon. We don’t want to support groups attacking Israel etc., etc. But haven’t we learned the lesson over the last 25 years about the ill-advised nature of very significant conflicts in the Middle East that don’t have clear goals and connection to American interests?” said former Trump official Elbridge Colby in an interview on former Fox News host Tucket Carlson’s podcast.
Speaking to Politico, Mr. Colby argued that the United States “should be having a smaller footprint in the Middle East,” adding that “it would be a mistake if we fritter away our resources on peripheral conflicts.”
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A potential deputy defence secretary or deputy national security advisor in the forthcoming administration, Mr. Colby served as deputy assistant secretary of defence in Mr. Trump’s first administration. He played a key role in putting challenges posed by China’s rise at the core of the United States’ national defence strategy.
Mr. Colby’s entertainment of the notion of a divergence of US and Israeli interests runs counter to Mr. Trump’s repeated campaign promises to evangelical Christians to align US Middle East policy more closely with Israel’s priorities.
How Mr. Netanyahu interprets Mr. Trump’s appointments will likely be one factor in the prime minister’s decision whether to escalate Israel’s tit-for-tat attacks with Iran to limit the president-elect’s options once he takes office.
Even so, Mr. Netanyahu has reason to rejoice despite Mr. Trump wanting the prime minister to end his Gaza and Lebanon wars by the time the president-elect takes office.
While Mr. Netanyahu would likely favour interventionists dominating the Trump administration’s Middle East, foreign, and defence policies, he can live with the isolationists.
Irrespective of who gains the upper hand, Mr. Netanyahu will take heart from an expected return to Mr. Trump’s first-term ‘maximum pressure’ approach to Iran.
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In an indication of the new administration’s policy, Mr. Trump asked Brian Hook to manage the State Department’s transition from the Biden to the Trump administration.
Mr. Hook was a key player in Mr. Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the 2015 international agreement that curbed Iran’s nuclear programme and ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against the Islamic Republic.
Speaking on CNN, Mr. Hook had much to say that would have been music in Mr. Netanyahu’s ears.
While insisting that Mr. Trump had “no interest in regime change” in Iran, Mr. Hook suggested that the president-elect would seek to isolate and weaken the Islamic Republic.
Mr. Hook predicted that Mr. Trump’s first term “deal of the century” plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would return to the table.
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Rejected by the Palestinians as well as Israeli settlers, the 180-page plan envisioned a state made up of a series of enclaves surrounded by an enlarged Israel. The Palestinian state would be demilitarised, agree to abandon international legal action against Israel and accept an area on the outskirts of Jerusalem rather than the occupied Eastern part of the city as its capital.
An ultra-nationalist and settler, Bezalel Smotrich, Mr. Netanyahu’s finance minister who holds a ministerial post in the defence ministry where he oversees the administration of the occupied West Bank that Mr. Trump’s return to the presidency “brings an important opportunity (that) 2025 is the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” the Biblical reference to the West Bank.
Mr. Smotrich said he had instructed the Defense Ministry’s settlement administration division and the military’s Civil Administration in the West Bank to begin preparing the infrastructure for applying Israeli sovereignty to the occupied territory.
The minister asserted that during Mr. Trump’s first term, “we were just a step away from applying sovereignty over the settlements in Judea and Samaria, and now the time has come to do it.”
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In Mr. Smotrich’s vein, Mr. Netanyahu appointed Yechiel Leiter, a former settler leader who has advocated for annexing large parts of the West Bank and against the establishment of a Palestinian state, as his new ambassador to the United States.
Mr. Leiter is matched by former Arkansas Governor and Baptist minister, Mike Huckabee, Mr. Trump’s choice for US ambassador to Israel. Mr. Netanyahu will be encouraged by Mr. Trump making good on his promise to evangelists to align US policy with Israel’s interests with the appointment of Mr. Huckabee, who once said, “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”
Years later, Mr. Huckabee declared on a visit to Israel, “There is no such thing as a West Bank, it’s Judea and Samaria. There is no such thing as a settlement. . They’re communities, they’re neighbourhoods, they’re cities. There is no such thing as an occupation.”
If Mr. Trump’s first administration is anything to go by, Mr. Huckabee’s selection is no guarantee that the US and Israel will align on the future of the West Bank. Like Mr. Huckabee, Mr. Trump’s first-term ambassador, David Friedman, was in bed with Mr. Netanyahu and the settlers.
Backed by Mr. Friedman, Mr. Netanyahu’s projection of Mr. Trump’s 2020 ‘deal of the century’ proposal as a plan for West Bank annexation rather than Israeli-Palestinian peace sparked nasty confrontations between Israeli and US leaders.
“This is not the plan. There’s no way you are doing this,” Mr. Trump’s Middle East negotiator and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, told Mr. Netanyhau immediately after the unveiling of the plan at the White House.
At the time, Avi Berkowitz, a Trump Middle East envoy told former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer, “The president doesn’t like you guys now,” when he requested a meeting with Mr. Trump to repair relations.
Responding to Mr. Dermer’s assertion that he doubted the trustworthiness of the Trump administration, Mr. Kushner reportedly screamed, “Don’t be mistaken to think that everything that happened in the past three years was for you. We did it because we were serious about peace. To say such a thing about us is disgusting. Get out.”
In a meeting with Mr. Netanyahu months later, Mr. Berkovitz warned that “You will take your best friend and turn him into an enemy” if Israel pushed ahead with annexation.
“It’s almost certain Trump will tweet against you,” Mr. Berkovitz said, adding the administration would also refrain from helping Israel at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
One reason Israel may constitute a middle ground is that interventionists and isolationists backed by the evangelist segment of Mr. Trump’s support base fundamentally agree with Israel’s territorial claims.
Even so, Mr. Trump may be caught in the contradictions of his Middle East policy, particularly regarding Saudi Arabia, a key player in his thinking.
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Mr. Trump’s deal of the century is dead in the water more than a year into the Gaza war. Saudi Arabia will need a Palestinian state rather than a Bantustan to justify recognising Israel. That may be a hard sell for the president-elect’s evangelist supporters and many in his Republican Party.
Similarly, Saudi Arabia’s price tag for establishing diplomatic relations, a legally binding defence agreement with the United States, is anathema for the isolationists and likely to be a hard sell among interventionists.
While it’s too early to draw conclusions from Mr. Trump’s personnel decisions to date, he appeared to signal his preference for isolationists by saying first-term Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley would not be part of his new administration.
Mr. Pompeo and Ms. Haley believe in the United States’ robust international role, including support for Ukraine, NATO, and alliances in the Pacific, and regime change in Iran.
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Donald Trump Jr (left), J. D. Vance (center), and Tucker Carlson (right). Credit: MEGA
Two of Mr. Trump’s most trusted advisors, his son, Donald Trump Jr. and Mr. Carlson, the former Fox News host, are prominent isolationists. Similarly, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance is a long-standing opponent of US entanglement in foreign conflicts.
“”Agreed
!!! I’m on it,” Mr. Trump Jr. said in response to a tweet by Trump supporter Dave Smith asserting that “The ‘stop Pompeo’ movement is great, but it’s not enough. Right now, we need maximum pressure to keep all neocons and war hawks out of the Trump administration. They have had their time at the table and brought nothing but disaster to the world and this country. America First: screw the war machine!”
At the same time, Mr. Trump’s nomination of New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik as United Nations ambassador suggested he seeks to keep both foreign policy camps on board.
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Elisa Stefanik
A hardline supporter of Israel respected by both interventionists and isolationists, Ms. Stefanik shares Mr. Netanyahu’s view of the UN as an anti-Semitic cesspool.
Ms. Stefanic reinvented herself as a staunch opponent of anti-Semitism during this year’s Congressional grilling of American university presidents. In doing so, she brushed aside her own history of anti-Semitism, including her propagation as recently as two years ago of the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory.
The theory asserts that America’s elite, at times manipulated by Jews, aims to replace and disempower white Americans. The theory sparked mass shootings in the United States, New Zealand, and elsewhere.
Mr. Trump opted for an America Firster, who favours bringing US troops home and has energetically defended combat veterans accused of war crimes with his choice of Fox News host and war veteran Pete Hegseth as defence secretary.
Who Mr. Trump nominates as his secretary of state will likely determine the balance in his administration. What is increasingly clear is that Mr. Trump, while leaning towards the isolationists, wants to keep the interventionists on board.
Mr. Trump’s reported nomination of Florida Congressman Michael Waltz, a combat-decorated Green Beret who served in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa, and former George W. Bush administration official, highlights Mr. Trump walking a fine line between the foreign policy factions.
Analysts expect Mr. Waltz, a favourite of the Republican Jewish Coalition and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the influential pro-Israel lobby in the United States, to veer towards the interventionists.
The emergence of Florida senator Marco Rubio as a front-runner for the job, despite his long-standing support for a robust US role on the international stage, would point in the same direction.
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Recently, Mr. Rubio echoed Mr. Trump on issues like Russia’s war against Ukraine, saying that the conflict has reached a stalemate and “needs to be brought to a conclusion.”
Mr. Rubio, who displays an Israeli flag alongside the US and Florida flags outside his Congressional office, agrees with Mr. Waltz that “the next administration should, as Mr. Trump argued, ‘let Israel finish the job’ and ‘get it over with fast’ against Hamas. They should put a credible military option on the table to make clear to the Iranians that America would stop them building nuclear weapons and reinstate a diplomatic and economic pressure campaign to stop them and to constrain their support for terror proxies.”
Writing in The Economist, Mr. Waltz added that the United States should “maintain a military presence in the region.”
Mr. Netanyahu may find Mr. Rubio’s choice worrisome, despite the Florida lawmaker’s hard line on Iran.
In April, Mr. Rubio voted against a US$95 billion military aid bill that included US$14 billion for Israel, alongside funding for Ukraine and Taiwan. Mr. Rubio deemed the bill “moral extortion” and “legislative blackmail.”
That has not stopped Mr. Rubio from supporting Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah and describing the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s leader, as “a service to humanity.”
For his part, Mr. Trump is widely believed to want to end, not escalate wars.
Yet, taking Joe Biden to task for pressuring Israel to refrain from attacking Iranian nuclear and oil facilities in last month’s retaliatory strike against the Islamic Republic, Mr. Trump said at a campaign rally, “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to hit? I mean, it’s the biggest risk we have, nuclear weapons. Hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later.”
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.