What challenges has Donald Trump faced during his Middle East tour?
As Donald Trump parades through the Middle East this week, he will encounter a very different region than the one he experienced during his first term.
True, the Israeli-Palestinian problem remains unresolved, as do the challenges emanating from Iran’s much-advanced nuclear program and the instability and dysfunction in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen.
But this old wine is now packaged in new bottles.
Read more about the new trends reshaping the region and complicating US policy goals in the column by Aaron David Miller and Lauren Morganbesser of the Carnegie Endowment: Trump's Middle East challenges: how US policy in the region could shift.
According to the authors, perhaps the most striking is Israel’s emergence as a regional powerhouse.
The representavies of the Carnegie Endowment remind us that Israel devastated Hamas and Hezbollah as military organizations, killing much of their senior leadership.Israel then delivered its own strike, reportedly destroying much of Iran’s ballistic missile production and air defenses. In short, Israel has achieved escalation dominance: the capacity to escalate (or not) as it sees fit, and to deter its adversaries from doing so.
"Converting Israel’s military power into political arrangements, even peace accords, would seem like a reasonable next step. But the right-wing government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu seems uninterested in such options and is unlikely to be induced to change its outlook," Miller and Morganbesser believe.
But the Arab world remains in serious disarray. At least five Arab states are dealing with profound internal challenges, leaving them in various degrees of dysfunction and state failure.
Amid this power vacuum, two alternative power centers have emerged, the authors state.
The first are the states of the Persian Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Relatively unscathed by the Arab Spring and blessed with sovereign wealth funds, oil, and natural gas, these stable authoritarian powers, particularly Saudi Arabia, have begun to play an outsized role in the region.
The second category comprises non-Arab states: Israel, Turkey, and Iran.
"The only states in the region with the capacity to project military power beyond their borders," the authors write.
According to them, in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack, it seemed that the Palestinian issue was once again front and center, not just in the Arab world, but internationally.
The authors claim that the international community appears too fragmented, distracted, and self-interested to act in any concerted way in defense of Palestine.
"Meanwhile, the Palestinian national movement remains divided and dysfunctional, giving Palestinians an unpalatable choice between Hamas and the aging president of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas," Miller and Morganbesser write.
How the Trump administration will process these developments remains to be seen.
Clearly, it has adopted a pro-Israel view, with Trump musing about turning Gaza into a Riviera-style resort. Yet Trump is nothing if not unpredictable, the authors state.
They remind us that Trump announced new US negotiations with Iran in the presence of Netanyahu, who himself has tried to persuade the president that the only solution to Iran’s nuclear program is military action.
But if US-Iranian negotiations do advance, or if Trump’s interest in Israeli-Saudi normalization intensifies, he may find himself drawn into the Middle East negotiating bazaar, dealing with the intricacies of day-after planning in Gaza and a political horizon for Palestinians.
"These paths are already fomenting tension between Trump, who will not be visiting Israel on his Middle East trip, and a recalcitrant Netanyahu," the authors conclude.
This article originally appeared on Project Syndicate and is republished with permission from the copyright holder.