By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Trump’s Middle East Order

Despite U.S. President Donald Trump's display of bonhomie, a formal U.S.-Saudi civilian nuclear cooperation deal remains out of reach, with the two sides at odds over Riyadh’s continued insistence that it be allowed to domestically enrich uranium.

The Middle East is a place that most American presidents want to avoid. Yet inevitably, they find themselves mired in its quarrels. Despite periodic calls for a pivot toward other geostrategic challenges, the perception that its core interests are at stake in the region has kept the United States from leaving. The oil depositories of the Persian Gulf remain vital to the global economy. A menacing Iran sits near the nuclear threshold. The Arab world’s political dysfunction has produced generations of militants and terrorists, a collection of whom attacked the United States in 2001, resulting in the worst mass-casualty event it had suffered on its homeland since Pearl Harbor.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, U.S. presidents have tried to solve the Middle East’s conundrums through armed invasions, diplomacy, and limited humanitarian interventions. All have failed. Some of these efforts spawned even more pernicious phenomena. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example, gave rise to a new legion of terrorists. The limited 2011 military foray into Libya resulted in chaos across a large swath of North Africa. And yet administration after administration has remained, in some way, enchanted with the idea of imposing a regional vision.

That is, until Donald Trump. This president, like his predecessors, has not extricated Washington from the Middle East. But unlike them, Trump has approached the area with little idealism. His stances have instead been entirely driven by pragmatism and a preference for power politics. Like the Middle East’s own strongmen, Trump divides the world into winners and losers and steadfastly aligns himself with the former. Israel is strong, so he lets it do as it wishes. The Arab Gulf sheikhdoms have oil and make deals, so he engages with them. But the Palestinians are the region’s losers, and thus not worth much concern.

This approach is doubtless crude. But the results are clearly positive. During his five years in office, Trump has normalized ties between Israel and multiple Arab states. In October, he put a stop to the fighting between Israel and Hamas, sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, assault on Israel. He has ensured that American firms get preferential access to the Gulf’s oil and markets. And he has successfully attacked groups and governments that menace American interests, including the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Trump’s decisions have not made the Middle East more democratic. They have certainly not alleviated the region’s historical grievances. But they have kept it comparatively stable while advancing Washington’s positions. They have, in other words, helped Trump accomplish far more than his sophisticated and well-intentioned predecessors ever did.

 

Boulevard of Broken Dreams

To understand why Trump has succeeded where other presidents have failed, consider the United States’ approach to the Arab countries, which make up most of the Middle East. For decades, American presidents have tried to solve these states’ inherent tensions by attacking or otherwise prodding them. President George W. Bush stands out as his country’s most ambitious and humble politician in this regard. His initial response to the September 11 terrorist attack—invading Afghanistan to drive the Taliban from power and launching a “war on terror”—was reasonable. But then Bush and his seasoned advisers came to believe that the best way to stabilize the Middle East was to invade Iraq. Doing so, the theory went, would ultimately transform the region’s many authoritarian regimes into democratic, pro-Western ones. Instead, it sharpened the Middle East’s sectarian divide and empowered Iran. By the time Bush left office, the region was more unstable than when he arrived.

Bush’s Democratic successors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, were both determined not to get entangled in the Arab world’s messy politics. They sensed Americans’ exhaustion with endless wars and rightfully declared that it was time to rely less on armies and more on diplomats. But each was, in his own way, hopelessly afflicted by idealism. During the Arab Spring, Obama sided with the street, nudging Egypt’s U.S.-friendly president, Hosni Mubarak, out of power and staging a humanitarian military intervention in Libya that deposed Muammar al-Qaddafi. Neither was successful. Mubarak was replaced by a democratically elected Islamist who, after trying to concentrate power, was deposed by a new military dictator. Libya is fractured and now has two competing authoritarian governments. Biden never promoted regime change, but his hostility toward the region’s main monarchy—he called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of a dissident journalist—undercut his country’s regional interests. The royal families, for example, resisted Biden’s efforts to increase oil production and pressure Hamas into agreeing to a cease-fire.

Trump, by contrast, practices politics without judgment. He is happy, for example, to deal with the jihadi turned suited statesman, Ahmed al-Shara, the new president of Syria, if Shara joins his fight against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS). He is also deeply transactional. Trump supports Saudi Arabia and other Gulf sheikhdoms because they are a source of capital, an export market for semiconductors and weapons, and an important aspect of the global energy markets. These are people he can do business with.

The Arabs’ princes and kings have reciprocated. At Trump’s behest, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates signed the 2020 Abraham Accords, normalizing relations with Israel. Saudi Arabia remains outside the accords, but it has its own subtle partnership with Israel involving intelligence sharing and security cooperation. Qatar flirts with Islamist forces, but it continues to house a large U.S. military base and was instrumental in crafting the armistice in Gaza. All three countries are engaged in financial dealings with the Trump family. In that part of the world, personal fortunes are enmeshed with national ones, and the lines between commerce and diplomacy are frequently blurred. This is precisely how the Gulf elites like it.

 

Agents of Chaos

Trump has calmed the Middle East. But he has not fixed it. Despite his protestations, peace is not in hand in the Holy Land. The Iranian nuclear program has not been obliterated. And the Arab world remains plagued by political dysfunction. In a region where things frequently go wrong, much can still fall apart.

Consider, for example, the recent cease-fire. Armistices in the Middle East are always shaky, and the one worked out between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s aide Ron Dermer and Trump’s all-purpose envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner will be no exception. Both Hamas and Israel are still inclined to pressure each other militarily when convenient. The deal does not address the expansion of Israeli settlements. The 20-point plan for disarming Hamas, reconstructing Gaza, and creating a pathway for Palestinian statehood is therefore likely to remain dormant. It is hard, for example, to see a multinational force of Arab troops entering Gaza and finishing off the stubbornly violent remnants of Hamas, as the plan calls for. Instead, Gaza will likely remain a festering wound, a densely populated refugee camp subsisting on food aid from humanitarian relief agencies. The Israel Defense Forces will bear the brunt of the security responsibilities, patrolling demilitarized zones and occasionally bombing emerging threats.

The Iranian nuclear challenge, meanwhile, could again rear its ugly head. Iran’s clerical oligarchs are shaken and still sorting out how their defenses were compromised and their intelligence apparatus penetrated. They will want to settle internal scores and sideline Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who made catastrophic misjudgments about Israel’s power and is physically frail. Although the regime will lie low, it is waiting for the moment when the United States becomes distracted with other crises and Israel loses its focus. Then, it will resume its nuclear program with alacrity.

Washington must be ready to respond with attacks. The most important long-term consequence of the 12-day war between the Islamic Republic and Israel (and, later, the United States) is that military intervention is now the instrument of counterproliferation in Iran. It is hard to imagine the regime putting its trust in agreements that can be abrogated or international institutions, such as the UN Security Council, that can easily be bent to Washington’s will.

Israel seems to understand that this is the new normal. It knows that no victory in the Middle East is permanent; there is a reason its doctrine for handling adversaries is called “mowing the lawn.” But it is unclear whether Trump has the same grasp of the facts. Instead of continuing to menace Tehran, the president has declared victory and invited Iranians to talk. Trump may get away with this approach; his unpredictability and Netanyahu’s bellicosity will temper the mullahs’ atomic ambitions for now. But he has almost certainly saddled his successors with a vexing Iran challenge. They may have little choice but to bomb the country again.

Some analysts hope that Iran’s nuclear program will go away on its own when the regime finally collapses. But Iran’s war with Israel and the United States suggests that, despite its massive domestic failures, the Islamic Republic is far more resilient than many thought. Israel was able to quickly degrade Iran’s proxies, including the vaunted Hezbollah in Lebanon. Yet when Netanyahu called on the Iranians to rise up and overthrow their regime at a moment of profound vulnerability, not much happened. Iran’s cantankerous elite came together, and the public remained passive. The Islamic Republic is a problem to be managed, not wished away.

U.S. President Donald Trump, along with leaders from the Middle East and North Africa, at a summit on ending the Gaza war, Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, October 2025

 

Big Stick

Since the advent of the Islamic Republic in 1979, successive American administrations have treated the Iranian regime less like a unified entity and more like a collection of factions competing for political power, some of which are susceptible to U.S. influence. Many presidents have thus made supporting Iran’s moderates central to their agenda. The high point of such efforts came during the Obama administration, which pursued arms control diplomacy in hopes of empowering more reasonable actors. The result was the 2015 nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in which Iran agreed to limit its enrichment and accept increased international monitoring in exchange for sanctions relief.

But this approach is based on a faulty premise. Although Iranian officials may not all hold the same views, they do all share a hatred for the United States—anti-Americanism is the glue that binds the regime. As a result, Iran would only agree to a deal after Washington recognized its right to domestic enrichment and stipulated that Iran could move toward industrial-scale enrichment after various clauses expired. The regime’s powerbrokers, meanwhile, used the economic dividends from sanctions relief to fund terrorism abroad and repression at home.

Instead, the best way to get results with Tehran is through force. After storming the U.S. embassy in 1979, for example, Iran’s revolutionaries threatened to put captured American diplomats on trial. In response, U.S. President Jimmy Carter sent a private note to Iran saying that if Tehran harmed the hostages, Washington would retaliate. Soon, all the talk of public trials was shelved. Two decades later, after Bush had invaded Iraq and was menacing Iran, the Iranian regime suspended its nuclear program until the United States became bogged down in a quagmire in Iraq—at which point Iran resumed its nuclear program with greater vigor. When it comes to Iran, threats have been the exception, not the rule. The irony of the United States’ approach to Tehran is that Washington has not learned the lessons of its own success.

Except, again, for Trump. In his first term, he disposed of the nuclear deal and reimposed devastating sanctions on Iran. He sensed, correctly, that the agreement was not a sturdy barrier to Iranian proliferation and that the deal benefited Tehran more than Washington. Trump then ordered the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the legendary commander of Iran’s Quds Force, who had knit together a transnational army of proxies and terrorists that did Iran’s bidding across the region. Rather than sparking a larger war, as some analysts fretted, Soleimani’s assassination permanently set back Iran’s proxies. In 2011, when the Syrian civil war started, Soleimani was instrumental in organizing Syrian defenses and marshaling an auxiliary force of approximately 70,000 militiamen that rescued President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. But after Soleimani’s death, the Syrian army was hollowed out. Eventually, it lost its ability to fight altogether. When Shara’s rebel forces began their advance from the north in late November 2024, Syrian troops fled their posts, and Damascus fell in less than two weeks.

But perhaps Trump’s biggest accomplishment was the June 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites. For two decades, many policymakers and pundits had insisted that attacking Tehran’s nuclear program would provoke a regional conflagration. As a result, they not only forswore U.S. attacks; they also blocked Israeli ones. Israel wanted to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities during the Obama years, only to be rebuffed. But Trump gave the Israelis the green light—and then joined in when things appeared to go well. “No president was willing to do it, and I was willing to do it,” he later bragged.

 

The Two-State Delusion

For decades, American officials have pushed for an independent Palestinian state. A two-state solution, they declared, was essential to bringing peace to the Middle East and integrating Israel into the region. Bush became the first president to formally call for an independent Palestinian state, in June 2002, during the run-up to the Iraq war. Obama kept up these efforts, having his secretary of state, John Kerry, shuttle between Israel and the West Bank. Biden also championed this proposal, even after the October 7 attacks.

But these attempts went nowhere. Bush’s endeavors led to a summit, and little else. Obama was able to secure nothing more than temporary, partial freezes on settlements. Biden’s efforts were almost entirely rhetorical—designed, it seemed, to shield him from liberal backlash while he sold Israel every weapon he could and insulated the country from criticism and pressure at home and abroad. The sum total of Washington’s two-state endeavors is a sheaf of memoirs lamenting a lost peace.

There has always been something improbable about an independent Palestinian state. Palestinian leaders were trying to win at the negotiating table what they had lost in wars that they and their Arab allies had frequently started, and history rarely rewards such truculence. The Palestinians were still able to persuade Israel, at various times, to offer up Gaza and portions of the West Bank that it seized in 1967 in exchange for recognition and some territorial concessions. Yet these concessions were never enough for Palestinian leaders, and Israel’s position hardened as time wound on and terrorist attacks by Palestinian militants continued. The tragedy of the Palestinian people is that their leaders are too invested in their narrative of grief and loss to accept any compromise until their options have been even further eroded.

The chimera of a two-state solution still has widespread backing within Washington’s traditional foreign policy establishment. But not from Trump. This president cares little for subnational actors. He understands that Israel does not want to cede land and should not be asked to do so. And he realized that many Arab governments grasp this fact, as well. He was thus able to broker the Abraham Accords, to the shock of many analysts. The Arab signatories have stood by the agreements, even during Israel’s onslaught in Gaza.

Still, Trump knows better than to hand Israel a blank check. He has been sensitive to Arab leaders’ public relations concerns and has warned the Israelis not to annex the West Bank, although he allowed them to incrementally increase the size of their settlements. He also successfully pushed Israel into signing the October cease-fire. But Trump was able to exert this leverage because he is one of the most popular politicians in Israel and has solid relations with Arab monarchs, who could, in turn, pressure Hamas. Trump was also willing to break Washington’s unwritten rule against engaging directly with Hamas, which helped him secure the cease-fire.

 

The Middle East As It Is

None of this means the Middle East can’t be made better. Poor governance, institutional decay, and environmental degradation remain endemic problems in the region. The Arab ruling elites know they are presiding over a region marred by corruption and dysfunction. Their lust for power often blinds them to popular disaffection. The United States cannot persuade or compel these leaders to govern in a more enlightened fashion, but it can still encourage them to broaden political participation and reform their economies.

But any such conversations or efforts must be circumspect and limited. The Middle East is ultimately no place for idealism and lofty ambitions. It is, instead, a place for power and realism, which makes it perfect for this U.S. president. For now, oil continues to flow, the Iranian threat has been diminished, the fighting in Gaza has subsided, and there are no major upheavals. In a region known mostly for chaos, these are consequential achievements.

 

 

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