‘Daylight’ with Israel, Trump Style

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.