What will Trump do about the Middle East crisis?

As speculation spreads regarding how Donald Trump’s second administration will impact global politics, the most clarity we have is regarding his policies towards West Asia (also commonly referred to as the Middle East). While all indications point to a very similar regional strategy as his predecessor, Joe Biden, there are a few differences to watch out for.

While much of the world braces for a second Trump presidency, due to the American president’s seemingly unpredictable nature, his first term in office informs much of what he is likely to do in West Asia.

To begin with, Trump’s support for Israel is ironclad, but how he will affect the ongoing wars that the Israelis are waging in Gaza and Lebanon has been a topic of much debate. While he criticized Biden on the campaign trail as having been “too tough” on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there have also been reports that Trump informed the Israeli premier that he wants the war over by January.

While the Republican Party leader had attacked Vice President Kamala Harris as being weak on the issue of Israeli security, he didn’t ever explain how this was the case and then when speaking at events in Michigan – home to many Arab and Muslim voters – spoke about ending the war in Gaza. Therefore, all this mixed rhetoric should be taken merely as campaign propaganda.

The top financial backer of the Trump 2024 campaign is a woman named Miriam Adelson, Israel’s richest billionaire, who donated $100 million with the understanding that Donald Trump would permit Israel to annex the illegally occupied West Bank. In 2016, the Trump campaign was bankrolled by Miriam Adelson and her now deceased husband Sheldon Adelson, who backed the Republican president on the condition that he move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem, a promise that he fulfilled in 2018.

While it appears as if Israel will struggle to immediately annex the West Bank due to the current circumstances on the ground, it will likely be an annexation of around 60% of the occupied territory, constituting what is known as Area C. If Trump permits his Israeli allies to go through with this, it will completely destroy any hope for a “Two-State solution.”

When it comes to the conflict in Gaza, assuming that the war continues into Trump's term in office, there’s very little different that his administration is likely to do, other than allowing Israel to completely cut off all aid from entering the Palestinian territory. In the event that Trump’s government allows the severing of all aid, which is only trickling in at this point anyway and doesn’t meet the required needs of Gaza’s population, then this would amount to the implementation of a full-scale genocide of 2 million people. It is more likely however, that Trump’s policy will be the same as Biden’s in this regard.

Biden’s regional policy was modeled on Trump’s

While Joe Biden took office with promises of ending the war in Yemen, taking a tougher stance against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and returning to the Iran Nuclear Deal, he failed on all accounts.

Instead, the Biden administration continued the maximum pressure sanctions campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran, even adding to the existing list of measures, as the Vienna-based negotiations to revive the Nuclear Deal faltered. Biden then followed through on a withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, which was already negotiated between the Taliban and the Trump administration before he took office.

As for ending the war in Yemen, the Biden administration failed to achieve anything on that front and, after initially taking Ansarallah [the Houthis] off of its list of terrorist groups, eventually decided to return the movement, which leads the Sana’a-based government, to the list. The temporary ceasefire between Riyadh and Sana’a was mediated by the United Nations and not the US government.

On top of this, instead of taking a tougher stance on Saudi Arabia, the Biden administration ended up making Riyadh the most important pillar in its overall West Asia strategy. Staking all his cards on a normalization agreement between the Saudis and Israelis, Biden sought to pave the way to the India-Middle East-Europe Trade Corridor, a project which he proudly announced during the G20 Summit in New Delhi in September 2023.

This vision for the region, which Netanyahu also outlined in September of 2023, in his UN general assembly address, was birthed by Donald Trump’s first administration with a series of normalization agreements between Israel and Arab nations. All Joe Biden had done was continue this policy and seek to bring all the Arab states together with the Israelis to form an “Arab NATO.”

Just like the former Trump administration, the Biden presidency sidelined the Palestinians and sought to look past them, assuming that they were only a minor factor in regional affairs. This kind of shortsighted and greedy policymaking is what led to the dramatic collapse of Washington’s entire West Asia strategy on October 7, when Hamas launched its surprise attack against Israel.

How aggressive Trump will choose to be with Iran is still an open question. Will he pursue the same policies as during his last term in office and take the same stances as Biden, or will he choose to launch a major war in an attempt to topple the government in Tehran? At this point it seems unlikely, looking at this using a realist framework, that any US administration would launch such an unwinnable and costly conflict. This is especially the case with Trump seeking to focus on improving the American economy.

It is clear that Trump has a more cordial working relationship with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which could pave the way to easier deals on that front, yet it is unclear how the American strategy for the region can even proceed while Israel continues its multi-front war.

The million-dollar question here is how Israel will handle a post-war setting, because this will greatly shape the way Washington implements its strategies. If the Israelis are battered by Iran and Hezbollah, after refusing to de-escalate and pursue diplomacy, we could be looking at a severely weakened regime that will be forced into making major concessions to the Palestinian people, or could even collapse. 

On the other hand, if the Israelis somehow manage to end the war through some kind of freak diplomatic shift, then the vision of an Israeli-Arab alliance could be worked on by the incoming Trump administration. Regardless, there are no indications that Trump will pursue a different strategy than his predecessor on many levels. It will likely be more of the same, perhaps with some rather aggressively pro-Israeli moves in between. The worst possible outcome would be a war with Iran.