The Middle East doesn’t preoccupy Trump, but Trump preoccupies the Middle East
By James M. Dorsey
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The Middle East may not preoccupy Donald J. Trump. Still, the president-elect preoccupies the Middle East as it attempts to figure out how he will handle the wars ravaging Gaza and Lebanon and threatening to spark an all-out conflagration between Israel and Iran.
Middle Eastern views run the gamut from optimism that Mr.
Trump will strengthen Arab autocracy and cut a deal with Iran to pessimism that
he will give Israel carte blanche to do what it wants to suggestions that the
president-elect could move the region away from the brink.
The truth is likely to be in the middle.
“Trump’s overarching impulse towards the Middle East can be
boiled down to: look
strong, but don’t do too much… (Trump’s) dealmaking would likely stop at
the most intractable regional conflict of all… the Israeli–Palestinian conflict,”
said international affairs scholar Lydia Khalil.
If accurate, Ms. Khalil’s assessment could have far-reaching
consequences. It likely ensures that Iran will be the Trump administration’s
prime Middle East focus.
The problem is that the president-elect’s isolationist
inclinations risk creating a regional power vacuum with US allies rejiggering
their defence strategies and groping for ways to hedge their bets.
Gulf states learned during Mr. Trump’s first presidency what
his notion of a security relationship entailed when he described Iranian
strikes at Saudi oil facilities in 2019 as attacks on the kingdom rather than
the United States.
Mr. Trump was suggesting that the attacks were a Saudi, not
a US problem. He said Saudi Arabia was welcome to hire US forces to retaliate
on its behalf.
“That was an attack on Saudi Arabia, and that wasn’t an
attack on us. But we would certainly help them… If we decide to do something,
they’ll be very much involved, and that
includes payment. And they understand that fully,” Mr. Trump said at the
time.
Against the odds, some analysts with close ties to Gulf
rulers hope Mr. Trump’s second term will be different.
Amjad Taha
“A new era began yesterday. This is why the entire Middle
East celebrated Trump as president. A strong America
weakens Islamist radicals in Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan. By 2025, more
normalization, like with Israel, will occur, and the Muslim Brotherhood will be
banned worldwide,” predicted Emirati influencer Amjad Taha.
Some analysts suggest that after rejecting ceasefires in
Gaza and Lebanon with Joe Biden in office, Mr. Netanyahu may let Mr. Trump take
credit for ending the wars in exchange for a free hand in Iran.
“If the new US leader decides that the wars in the Middle
East must end, it will be very hard for Netanyahu to sideline him the way he
did with his predecessor,” journalists Ben Caspit and Rina Bassist said in an
email.
This week, 14 Republican senators asked the State Department
to immediately freeze the assets of Hamas officials living in Qatar and request
Qatar "to end its hospitality to Hamas" leaders and extradite
some of them.
The senators’ request came as a senior Biden administration
official said the United States had told Qatar it no longer wanted the Gulf
state to host the group after Hamas rejected a proposal for a temporary
ceasefire that would have enabled an exchange of Hamas-held hostages for
Palestinians incarcerated in Israel.
Credit:
India.com
Hamas has consistently demanded that a ceasefire be
permanent rather than temporary. Qatar has hosted the group for more than a
decade at the request of the United States and with Mr. Netanyahu’s
acquiescence.
In a twist of irony, Mr. Trump's isolationism,
unpredictability, and capriciousness could be short-term assets, but they are
unlikely to help solve issues that threaten longer-term regional security.
In a first response to Mr. Trump’s electoral victory, Iran
appears to be recalibrating how it will respond to last
month’s Israeli tit-for-tat attack on Iranian military facilities.
“The ruling ayatollahs will have to tread
far more carefully when planning any new attacks on Israel. They can expect
full-throated White House support, and possibly American military support, for
any further and more devastating Israeli retaliation in response to new Iranian
missile and drone attacks on the Jewish State,” suggested Dov S. Zakheim, a
former Pentagon official in the George W Bush and Ronald Reagan
administrations.
If correct, Mr. Zakheim’s suggestion that Mr. Trump would
respond more assertively to an attack on Israel compared to his attitude
towards the targeting of Saudi Arabia would likely have much to do with the
pro-Israel inclinations of his Evangelist voter base and influence of
far-right donors such as Miriam Adelson, the largest contributor to his
election campaign.
Evangelists account for 20 per cent of the American
electorate. Four
out of five white evangelical Christian voters voted for Mr. Trump, according
to AP VoteCast.
Iranian
missiles on display: Credit Arab Center Washington DC
Mr. Trump’s return to the White House is a Catch-22 for
Iran. With no immediate prospects for ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, Iran
feels it has no choice but to respond to the Israeli attacks. It may want to do
so before Mr. Trump takes office on January 20.
Yet, balancing a need to project strength while preserving
Iran’s long-range ballistic missile arsenal, avoiding an all-out military
conflagration with Israel, and keeping the door open to potentially
renewed nuclear negotiations with the United States and others is no mean
fete.
Maintaining a balance is complicated by Israel’s degradation
of Hamas and Hezbollah’s military capabilities, which has collapsed what Iran
conceived of as its forward defence line populated by armed non-state actors
across the Middle East.
“Iran is desperate
to find a new path toward restoring deterrence against Israel. Its main
tool is the use of its missile and drone arsenal. But Israel, backed by the
United States, has defenses against this tool, and the stockpile of Iranian
missiles is limited, hence its deterrent power diminishes each time it uses
another batch,” said Middle East Institute Vice President Paul Salem.
Credit:
Observerdiplomat.com
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian hopes that as a dealmaker, Mr. Trump may see an opportunity to negotiate the kind of
deal he failed to secure with North Korea in his first term.
Mr. Pezeshkian was elected earlier this year on a promise to
try to rebuild relations with the West and negotiate a nuclear deal that would
grant Iran relief from crippling economic sanctions imposed by Mr. Trump during
his first presidency.
Even so, Iranian leaders may not have the wherewithal to
cater to Mr. Trump’s ego and narcissism.
“It’s hard to imagine Iranian Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
or President Masoud Pezeshkian flying down to Trump Tower in New York City or
Mar-o-Lago in Palm Beach, warmly congratulating
Trump on his victory, and promising to put up a Trump Hotel in Tehran once
the ink on a bilateral deal is dry,” quipped Middle East nuclear scholar Farzan
Sabet.
Mr. Trump has not indicated whether he would be interested
in a negotiation, but it is still early days. Similarly, it is unclear whether
Mr. Netanyahu would be willing to give Mr. Trump a chance to negotiate.
“The real question…is whether
Netanyahu decides to continue to try to expand that war, go after Iran, or
do things that basically create an even greater concern about whether or not
the Middle East is ever going to resolve itself or be in constant conflict,”
said former CIA Director Leon Pancetta who has emerged as a harsh critic of the
Israeli prime minister.
J. D. Vance on The Tim Dillon Show
Mr. Trump and J. D. Vance, his vice-president-elect,
indicated that that they may not favour regime change as advocated by Mr.
Trump’s first term Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, neoconservatives, and Mr.
Netanyahu.
“Our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran. It
would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to
our country,” Mr. Vance recently said on The Tim Dillon Show.
Speaking with podcaster Patrick Bet-David, Mr. Trump ruled
out pursuing regime change in Iran. “We can't get totally
involved in all that. We can't run ourselves, let's face it,” Mr. Trump
said.
Mr. Trump’s first term Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt, suggested
that the president elect’s “goal is to deter the Iranian regime, encourage
those who reject the ayatollahs’ extremism and cause
the regime to rethink its choices.”
To achieve that, Mr. Trump is likely to double
down on sanctions on Iran and the curtailing of its oil exports by globally
cracking down on ports, including in China, and traders who handle Iranian oil.
For Mr. Trump, the doubling down could be personal. This
week, prosecutors charged an Afghan national with plotting
on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to kill Mr.
Trump, who survived two domestic assassination attempts during his election
campaign.
In September, authorities charged three Iranians
with hacking Mr. Trump's presidential campaign.
Credit: COL
Live
Mr. Pompeo was close to the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, a
controversial Iranian exile group that seeks the overthrow of the Iranian
regime. While in office, he favoured instigating unrest in Iran by supporting
militant ethnic minority groups.
Mr. Pompeo is lobbying to be included in Mr. Trump’s second
administration but is bumping up against resistance from Donald Trump Jr., the
president-elect’s son, podcast host Tucker Carlson, and other conservatives.
With Israel potentially targeting nuclear facilities in any
further strikes against Iran, Mr. Trump’s reluctance to be dragged into a
military conflagration or engage in regime change may be reinforced by doubts
about their likely effectiveness.
“An attack would not set the program back dramatically and
would likely convince Iran that it needs nuclear weapons to be secure… Iran has
hardened its nuclear facilities—with at least one buried so deep underground
that even
US airstrikes would be unlikely to destroy it,” said analyst Benjamin D.
Giltner.
Iran’s tit-for-tat with Israel and Mr. Trump’s return to the
White House has lent new urgency to a debate among Iranian officials on whether
to drop the Islamic Republic’s insistence that it is not pursuing nuclear
weapons and extend the range of its missiles beyond a self-imposed limit of
2,000 kilometres.
Brigadier
General Ahmed Haq Talab, the commander of Iran’s Nuclear Centers Protection
and Security Corps, recently warned that Iran could “revise” its nuclear
doctrine that designates weapons of mass destruction as un-Islamic
if Israel attacked the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities.
Mr. Trump’s rejection of regime change will likely go down
well with the United States’ Gulf allies, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which
have sought in recent years to reduce tensions, rebuild relations with Iran,
and create an environment conducive to foreign investment.
The Gulf states have reassured Iran that they would not take
sides in an escalating conflict with Israel and would not
allow the United States to use military bases on their soil or their airspace
for operations against the Islamic Republic.
The reassurance takes on added significance with the imminent departure of the SS Abraham Lincoln, the sole US aircraft carrier in the region.
An F-35
takes off from the SS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East. Credit: US Central
Command
The Pentagon says the continued presence of one, if not two,
aircraft carriers in the region since the Gaza war erupted last year helped contain
the violence between Israel, Iran and its network of armed non-state actors.
Replacing the Lincoln is a mix of forces, including naval
destroyers, B-52 bombers, and land-based fighter jets tasked with deterring
Iran and its partners in an area stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to
the Gulf and other volatile regional shipping routes.
If the Gulf states stick to their promise, the US would have
to base the B-52s and fighter jets elsewhere in the region or beyond to employ
them in missions against Iran.
Even so, satellite images suggest that some nuclear-capable B-52H
bombers were recently deployed to the Al Udaid Air Base in Qatar, the
United States’ largest military installation in the region.
Some analysts suggest that Iran will tread carefully to
ensure that escalating Middle East tensions do not spark domestic unrest.
“Due to his tough stance against the Islamic Republic, Trump
enjoys a certain level of popularity among ordinary Iranians, thus worrying
Iran's rulers. A new Trump presidency could strengthen more members of the
public to challenge the regime,” said Iran scholar Meir Javedanfar.
Iran's balancing act becomes more precarious in the short
term because the run-up to Mr. Trump's inauguration is when there could be a
vacuum in Washington with senior officials leaving the Biden administration to
take up new jobs.
“The nightmare
scenario is that a new or escalated Middle East crisis will erupt in the
next few weeks. Trump will be powerless, and Biden/Harris will be weak and
likely to be cautious on how to respond,” said Gulf scholar Simon Henderson.
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.
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