By Noah Rothman
Monday, May 12, 2025
When Donald Trump made Saudi Arabia the destination for
his first trip abroad in 2017, the president went with the intention of selling
the Gulf States on his strategic vision for the region.
Trump planned to reorient America away from engaging with
and empowering Iran. Instead, the U.S and its allies would confront the Islamic
Republic. Additionally, the unsettled Palestinian issue would no longer
dominate the American approach to regional diplomacy. Trump would dispense with
the peace processor’s shibboleth that a permanent settlement in Gaza and the
West Bank was a prerequisite for regional stability. Instead of coming first,
the status of the Palestinian territories would come last.
Maybe it was that paradigmatic shift that produced the Abraham Accords. Perhaps it was the glowing orb that Trump and his
regional counterparts fatefully caressed. Either way, that meeting set the
stage for a successful reconceptualization of Middle Eastern politics.
This week, Trump is headed back to Saudi Arabia (as well
as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates) for the first major trip abroad of his
second term, but he will reportedly take a far different approach to diplomacy
when he arrives. The New York Times indicates that the president is far
less interested in promoting a foreign policy doctrine that resembles his first
term’s. Indeed, he’s not interested in promoting American diplomatic or
military initiatives at all. “President Trump will tour the Gulf this week in
search of one thing above all else: business deals,” the dispatch read. “Planes. Nuclear power. Artificial
intelligence investments. Arms. Anything that puts a signature on the bottom of
a page.”
The president may fancy himself America’s “shopkeeper,” but he will be unable to escape the fact that
he’s also the primary author and executor of U.S. foreign policy. And the
agenda he has overseen in the early months of his second term represents a
substantial departure from his first term.
It seems especially unlikely that Trump will be able to
avoid discussions with his regional counterparts about his administration’s
ongoing efforts to recapitulate the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal. Quite unlike
Trump 1.0, Trump 2.0 has taken a halting approach to reinstituting the
“maximum pressure” campaign over which he presided from 2017 to 2021. Trump is
also likely to have to explain his evolving views on Israel’s defensive war in
Gaza, which is set to expand in coming weeks. The president may have backed off
his plan to depopulate the Strip and turn it into a Mediterranean resort for
foreigners — at least, he doesn’t emphasize that as much as he once did. But
the president’s support for Israeli initiatives in Gaza complicate relations
with the Gulf States, which must keep their pro-Palestinian populations
pacified if they are to serve as stewards of U.S. interests in the region.
In Trump’s first term, the delicate ballet that produced
the Abraham Accords might have been easier to manage — not just because the
threat posed by Iran was rising and the Palestinian territories’ relevance was
fading. It was easier because the Trump administration’s commitment to its
strategic partnership with Israel was self-evident and non-negotiable. From the
outside looking in, the Gulf States may take a different measure of the Trump
administration’s current outlook toward Israel.
Americans were heartened to learn over the weekend that
the Trump administration had negotiated the release of the last living American
hostage in Hamas’s control. Twenty-one-year-old Edan Alexander was released Monday after 583 days in the
custody of terrorists. His liberation represents a victory for the Trump White
House as well as source of profound relief to Alexander’s family, friends, and
the Americans who poured into the streets of Tenafly, N.J., to celebrate his
release. But while Israelis are relieved, there is a palpable sense of anguish
and even some betrayal over the degree to which the Israelis who are still
Hamas’s hostages were overlooked.
The aggrieved Israelis who mourned this development don’t
blame Trump for privileging the status of Americans first. Who could? And yet,
the Israelis who were not moved to apoplexy were vocally wounded by the
decoupling of U.S. interests from Israel’s and embittered toward the Netanyahu government for
consenting to his own country’s sidelining. Some, including former Israeli
Prime Minister Yair Lapid, said reports of “direct talks between Hamas and the
United States are a disgraceful diplomatic failure.” Others mourned the extent
to which the accident of Alexander’s birth in the United States affords him
special status over the remaining hostages. “The message to the region was
clear,” Ynet diplomatic correspondent Itamar Eichner declared: “Israel is no
longer a top U.S. priority,”
Israelis can be forgiven for wondering whether the
Netanyahu government has overinvested in its relationship with the Trump
administration. They don’t have every reason to question the president’s
commitment to Israeli interests, but the stakes for the Israelis are too high
to take Trump’s faithfulness for granted. The same could be said of Israel’s
would be partners and adversaries in the Islamic world. They, too, might like
to test the president’s limits.
After all, this is only the most recent maneuver by the
Trump administration that appears to have cut the Netanyahu government out of
the loop. The Israelis were not informed in advance before
Trump announced that the Houthis had “capitulated” and would refrain from attacking U.S. maritime
assets — thus eliminating, in Trump’s mind, the need to pound that militant
rabble into genuine submission.
The truce Trump announced was publicly revealed just
after a Houthi ballistic missile struck perilously close to Tel Aviv’s primary
airport and within hours of an Israeli retaliatory strike that
disabled Yemen’s ports. In the interim, the Houthis seem to have kept their
word that they would refrain from targeting America, but the Iran-backed
terrorist cell has continued to fire rockets at Israel.
Trump may want to keep discussions with his Middle
Eastern counterparts limited to business interests. He may even define business
interests in ways that cannot be divorced from geostrategy (the prospect of a Saudi civilian nuclear program, for example) or domestic
politics (the scandalizing provision of a Qatari luxury airplane for Trump’s
use, as another). But geopolitics follows the president wherever he goes, and
Trump will find that his Middle Eastern counterparts have a more ambitious
agenda.
With so much of the region’s politics unsettled and
Trump’s outlook toward allies and adversaries undergoing a real-time
renovation, the region’s heavy hitters may be willing to test their luck in
pursuit of a better deal for themselves — even one that sidelines Israel in
ways that seemed unthinkable when Trump last occupied the Oval Office.
During his presidency, Barack Obama denied that there was
any “daylight” between his government and Israels — a denial
belied by ample evidence to the contrary. Trump is sure to issue similar denials, and,
on that score, he has earned the benefit of the doubt. But Trump has given his
counterparts in the Middle East reason to test that proposition. After all,
none of this is personal; it’s just business.
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