What Would a Second Trump Administration Mean for the Middle East?
9 min read
International affairs rarely determine how Americans vote in presidential elections, but this year could be different. The Biden administration’s policies toward the war raging in the Middle East have divided Democrats and drawn criticism from Republicans. Whether the administration has supported Israel’s military response to last October’s Hamas attack too much or too little, how it has responded to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and whether it has done enough to broker an end to the fighting all may influence the decisions of some voters in swing states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Kamala Harris spoke out about the situation in the Middle East quickly upon becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and has been scrutinized continually since for daylight between her stance and Joe Biden’s. But what about Donald Trump? If he wins the presidency in November, how will he approach Israel, the war in Gaza, and the conflict now spreading to southern Lebanon and Iran?
Over the past several months, I have combed through the public record and spoken with former Trump-administration officials in search of the answer. What I learned is that, compared with the Biden administration, a second Trump administration would probably be more permissive toward the Israeli military campaign in Gaza and less inclined to bring U.S. leverage to bear in shaping Israeli conduct (as the U.S. government recently did by warning Israel that it could lose military assistance if it doesn’t provide more humanitarian aid to Gaza). In fact, a second Trump administration’s Middle East policies would likely focus more on confronting Iran and broadening Israeli-Arab diplomatic normalization than on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This approach would be in keeping with Trump’s policies as president and the views of many of his Middle East advisers.
The wild card in all of this, however, is Trump himself. On some issues, the former president has views that can be documented back to the 1980s—that the United States is getting a raw deal in free-trade agreements and alliances, for example—but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not one of them. And just how he will choose his policies, based on what concerns, is not entirely predictable.
“Trump does not think in policy terms,” even though “the people around him may,” John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, told me this past May. “I don’t think he has any philosophy at all.” Bolton, who has emerged as a critic of the former president, described Trump as “ad hoc and transactional,” drawn above all to the “idea of making the bigger deal.” And if these are the terms in which he sees his Middle East policies, rather than filtered through a particular outlook on geopolitics or national security, the old investment adage may apply: Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
When I reached out to the Trump campaign with direct questions about the candidate’s likely approach to the war in Gaza and the Middle East more broadly, I didn’t receive a response. And the Republican Party’s more than 5,000-word 2024 platform doesn’t offer many clues. It contains just one line on the conflict—“We will stand with Israel, and seek peace in the Middle East”—and makes no mention of Gaza or the Palestinians. So a look at Trump’s recent public statements seemed in order.
On the stump, Trump has boasted that he is “the best friend that Israel has ever had,” based on a record as president that includes imposing a “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and negotiating the Abraham Accords, whereby several Arab countries normalized diplomatic relations with Israel. With regard to Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, and the expanding regional conflagration, however, Trump’s most consistent remark is that none of it would have happened on his watch, because Iran was “broke” on account of sanctions he imposed and therefore couldn’t have funded terrorist groups.
What that line of argument has going for it is that it’s impossible to prove wrong. But it’s also impossible to prove right. The attack and the ensuing conflicts have happened. So what might Trump do about it? Here he has sent mixed messages, initially saying that the best course was to let this war “play out,” then pivoting to his now-frequent call for Israel to quickly finish it up. “I will give Israel the support that it needs to win, but I do want them to win fast,” Trump declared in August, criticizing what he described as the Biden administration’s demands for “an immediate cease-fire” that would “tie Israel’s hand behind its back” and “give Hamas time to regroup and launch a new October 7–style attack.”
Trump doesn’t want a cease-fire, he’s made clear, but he does want the fire to cease: “You have to have that ended, one way or the other,” he stated last month when asked about the war spreading from Gaza to Lebanon. “The whole thing over there is unacceptable.” In an April interview, he declined to say whether he’d consider withholding or conditioning military aid to Israel. Even regarding his personal relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump has demonstrated dueling impulses—airing grievances that could complicate their future relations, asserting that Netanyahu “rightfully has been criticized” for being unprepared for the October 7 attack, welcoming him to Mar-a-Lago in July while lauding their “great relationship,” and declaring that “Bibi has been very strong.”
As Bolton sees it, if a singular ideological purpose is hard to discern from this welter of signals, that may be because Trump’s posture toward Israel is driven more by self-interest than anything else. Trump has said “that he wished the Israelis would get it over with, which could be interpreted two ways: one, finish off Hamas, or two, withdraw from Gaza,” Bolton noted when we spoke earlier this year. “And I don’t think he really cares which one. He just knows that the Israelis are under criticism. He has defended Israel, and he’s worried he’s going to be under criticism for defending Israel. And he doesn’t want to be under criticism.”
Robert Greenway, who served on Trump’s National Security Council as senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs, told me this past spring that he believes a second Trump administration would have a strategy for the region—just not one that revolves around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Which is not to say that Trump would back away from supporting Israel’s war in Gaza or its defense against Iranian-sponsored groups; quite the contrary, Greenway made clear. But Greenway, who was one of the architects of the Abraham Accords, outlined U.S. national-security interests in the Middle East as follows: “Stability of global markets—that’s energy and trade—counterproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and counterterrorism, in that order. What I did not state in there as a vital national-security interest is the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Because it’s not.”
I asked Greenway whether a second Trump administration would have a plan to address the aftermath of the war in a devastated Gaza. He gestured toward a “collective, regional response to both security and reconstruction.” But to his mind, the effects of the war on energy and trade markets will be the more urgent American concerns.
Given these priorities, Trump and his advisers don’t necessarily believe that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a cornerstone of regional security, nor are they likely to press an unwilling Israel to embrace such an outcome. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner did characterize the Middle East peace plan that he rolled out during Trump’s presidency as an effort “to save the two-state solution,” but the proposal was widely viewed as favorable to Israel’s positions. When asked during the first presidential debate whether he would support establishing a Palestinian state, Trump equivocated. “I’d have to see,” he said.
In the Middle East, the focus of a second Trump administration, according to Greenway, would be on confronting threats from Iran and its proxies while improving relations between Israel and Arab states. Bolton predicted that Kuwait or Qatar could be among the next states to normalize relations with Israel. And then there’s Saudi Arabia. Biden-administration officials have so far unsuccessfully sought a grand bargain that would fold a Gaza cease-fire into an Israeli-Saudi normalization arrangement. The Biden proposals have included U.S.-Saudi security and nuclear pacts and an Israeli commitment to a pathway for a Palestinian state. But Bolton said he could envision a second Trump administration unbundling these items, particularly once the war in Gaza ends and there is less pressure on the Saudis to demand a commitment to a Palestinian state as part of a diplomatic deal with Israel. The Israelis and Saudis might pursue normalization without progress on a two-state solution, for instance, while the United States brokers a separate, bilateral defense deal with Saudi Arabia.
When Trump was president, his administration approached the Middle East in exactly this fashion. As Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s former Middle East envoy, reflected in a 2023 podcast regarding the genesis of the Abraham Accords, the administration deliberately “broke” apart the Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflicts to see if it could “solve” one or both of them that way. “I think we proved that separating the conflicts allows reality to set in and improves the lives of many people without holding them back by the Palestinian conflict,” he contended.
Bolton maintains that for Trump himself, a far more significant factor than any past policy position is the lure of the big deal. That might even extend to striking an agreement with Iran. Trump made his hard-line stance on Iran the signature element of his administration’s Middle East record. But during a podcast appearance in June, Trump mused, “I would have made a fair deal with Iran,” and “I was going to get along with Iran,” so long as Iran agreed to not develop a nuclear-weapons capability (by many assessments, Iran is now a threshold nuclear-weapons state). He added, remarkably, that “eventually Iran would have been in the Abraham Accords.”
Trump made these comments before reports emerged of Iranian efforts to assassinate him and hack his campaign. Yet even after all of that, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September, Trump expressed openness to striking a new nuclear agreement with Tehran. Just days later, after Iranian leaders walked right up to the brink of war with Israel with their second direct attack on the country, Trump criticized Biden for opposing Israeli retaliation against Iranian nuclear sites, underscoring just how wide Trump’s Overton window is when it comes to policy toward Iran and the Middle East more broadly.
“The idea that [Trump] will be ‘death to Iran’ when he takes office in the second term is not accurate,” Bolton told me in May. Trump is attracted to the notion of “being the guy who went to Tehran or Pyongyang,” he argued. “I’ll bet you a dollar right now, if he’s elected, he’ll end up in one or both of those places in his first year in office.”
Could the appeal of the deal overcome a Trump administration’s calculations about the importance of peace between Israelis and Palestinians relative to other U.S. interests in the region? During Trump’s first term, Kushner’s effort to broker a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians failed. Kushner has said that he does not expect to join a second Trump administration, but Bolton told me that he can imagine Trump dusting off those plans if Kushner has second thoughts: “Now, whether he would really get into it when he realizes what trying to make a deal in the Middle East is like is a different question.”
Trump casts himself as the consummate dealmaker no matter how daunting the deal, but even he seems to suspect that a solution between Israelis and Palestinians is beyond him. “There was a time when I thought two states could work,” he has noted, but “now I think two states is going to be very, very tough.” Given that assessment, the backdrop of a devastating and still-unfolding war, and the low priority that Greenway suggests a second Trump administration would place on the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace, the agreement that Trump once described as the “ultimate deal” would likely prove elusive, yet again.
