Same as the old boss
For almost two decades, there has been more consistency than change in America's Middle East policy
“Which America will show up?”
I’ve heard that phrase a lot over the past decade. It’s a lament about the state of America’s policies in the Middle East, which seem to turn on a dime every four years. At a conference in Abu Dhabi earlier this month, one speaker said it from the stage; several others asked it in private conversations. Donald Trump seems to have upended America’s approach to the region, much as Joe Biden did four years earlier.
And yet, if you listened to the American officials in attendance—both current and former—it was sometimes hard to find much daylight.
To be clear: this is not to repeat the well-worn fiction that there is no difference between Biden and Trump. On trade, immigration, civil liberties and a host of other issues, Trump represents a profound break with both his immediate predecessor and decades of bipartisan precedent.
There might be some common threads. You can draw a line from Barack Obama’s complaints about European “free riders” to Trump’s outright hostility toward NATO. Overall, though, Trump is sui generis in America’s post-war history—except, arguably, when it comes to the Middle East.
His tone is certainly different: it is hard to imagine Biden threatening to rain hellfire on Hamas or Iran. And there was a moment during the transition when it seemed as if Trump’s actual policies would diverge sharply from his predecessor’s. He pushed Israel to accept ceasefires, first in Lebanon and then in Gaza, and seemed bent on pursuing a big piece of regional diplomacy that might win him a Nobel Peace Prize. He used America’s leverage in a way that Biden was unable or unwilling to.
What has he done since then, though? He gave Binyamin Netanyahu a green light to resume Israel’s war in Gaza last month, over the objections of a large majority of Israelis. He is negotiating a new nuclear pact with Iran rather than pursuing regime change or a military strike against its nuclear facilities, as some of his supporters once hoped he would. He is bombing the Houthis in Yemen. And he is largely ignoring the rest of the region beyond the Gulf: I can’t tell you what Trump’s policy is in Egypt or Jordan or Tunisia, because he doesn’t have one.
All of this looks rather similar to his predecessor. Sure, there are differences in style and substance. Biden bombed the Houthis every few weeks; Trump has done so every day for more than a month. But in general the Trump policy outlined above is not dissimilar from Biden’s policy over the previous couple of years.
Nor is Trump the only example of continuity. If you think back to 2020, Biden made a few big promises as a candidate. He was going to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” in response to its assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. He was going to revive the JCPOA, the nuclear deal with Iran that Trump abandoned in 2018. And he was going to put human rights at the “center” of America’s foreign policy.
None of that happened. For the first 18 months of his term he petulantly refused to talk to Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince—but he never actually did anything to isolate Saudi Arabia. Then in the summer of 2022, with oil prices above $100 a barrel, he flew to Jeddah hat in hand and begged MbS to boost oil production (he was rebuffed). He made some half-hearted attempts to negotiate with Iran but never took it seriously. And the bit about centering human rights, well, I don’t need to tell you how that went.
Biden’s actual policies in the Middle East—as opposed to the rhetoric about his policies—were not much of a break with Trump’s first term.
Henry Kissinger famously quipped that Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics. That seems increasingly true of American policy in the Middle East. Take Biden’s “pariah” promise on the campaign trail. It was purely a sop to Democrats. Progressives were angry about the Khashoggi murder and the war in Yemen, while Democrats of all stripes were repulsed by the kingdom’s embrace of Trump during his first term. Threatening to downgrade ties with the Saudis played well with the base.
It was also, as I said at the time, an act of diplomatic malpractice. Saudi Arabia did a lot of awful and/or stupid stuff during the years after MbS became crown prince. But it was still one of America’s oldest Arab allies and the world’s swing oil producer. The idea that Biden could simply ostracize it—that he could go four years without needing anything from Saudi Arabia—was never serious. Yet it persisted until the moment when real-world interests trumped domestic politics.
They may now be doing the same with Iran. Trump spent his first term pursuing a maximalist deal at the urging of hawkish supporters in Washington and their Israeli allies. The effort was doomed from the start: None of the serious Iran-watchers I know thought Trump would get his way. Yet Biden went on to implicitly adopt the same concept at the start of his term. Antony Blinken, his secretary of state, promised to strike a “longer and stronger” deal with Iran. Predictably, he failed.
Trump may now be able to strike a deal. Many of my contacts think it is probable—certainly more probable than it looked a month ago. If he succeeds, it will be because he decided to ignore the hawks, embrace the art of the possible and negotiate an agreement that will look quite similar to the one he once called “the worst deal ever negotiated”.
George W. Bush was the last American president to have a comprehensive policy toward the Middle East. Unfortunately, the centerpiece of it was a disastrous invasion of Iraq. Since then the aim has been to disengage. Obama wanted to “pivot to Asia”; Biden’s aides were told to keep the Middle East “off the president’s desk”. Policy was consequently shaped by events and domestic politics: America reacted to short-term developments rather than pursue a long-term strategy.
But from the Arab spring to October 7th, events are outpacing America’s ability to react. The fall of the Assad regime in Syria last year caught the bureaucracy flat-footed. The unexpected weakness of Iran, and the comparative strength of Israel, has now forced Trump into early negotiations for which his team is plainly not yet prepared. That is the clearest continuity between three very different heads of state. Which America will show up? One that would prefer not to.