Trump Can Transform Middle East Policy

President Donald Trump has entered the White House with an ambitious international agenda. Whether it’s expanding the 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel and the Arab world, ending the three-year-long war in Ukraine or pushing Europe to spend more on its own defense, Trump isn’t wasting any time outlining his expectations. 

Some of them, like taking over Gaza and turning the territory into a U.S.-administered haven for the “world’s people,” are downright bonkers. Others, like higher European defense budgets, are far more conventional and increasingly recognized as urgent and necessary. All of these items, however, are small ball compared to what has the potential to be a crowning accomplishment for the Trump administration: a total and complete reform of U.S. policy in the Middle East. 

Despite Trump’s reputation for unpredictability, his rhetoric on this region has been consistent since his first run for the White House nearly a decade ago. Then as now, Trump blasts U.S. regime change wars over the last two decades as a calamitous waste of U.S. resources, blames past presidents for foolishly sending the U.S. military on missions it shouldn’t have been asked to fight and laments the life-altering damage those wars inflicted on U.S. servicemembers.

After decades of foreign wars, many Americans share the president’s perspective. The conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya either lasted too long, destabilized the Middle East or created a host of additional security problems that the U.S. proved incapable of managing. Military operations in Iraq and Syria cost U.S. taxpayers nearly $3 trillion between 2003 and 2023, a period when U.S. deficits grew at a fast clip. In Afghanistan, U.S. troops were mired in a civil war against a resilient Taliban insurgency on behalf of a government in Kabul more skilled at corruption than governing. None of this made the United States safer or stronger—if anything, Washington’s adversaries were content with watching the Americans shoot themselves in the foot by plunging into never-ending black holes.

Trump, however, failed to match his clear-headed rhetoric with concrete action during his first term. By the time Trump left office in January 2021, there were more U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East than when he entered the White House. In Syria, a country he rightly wanted to withdraw troops from, Trump instead listened to hawkish advisers who argued that holding Syria’s meager oil fields was a prerequisite to stability. And on Iran, notwithstanding his dealmaking instincts—Trump was even prepared to talk with then-Iranian President Hassan Rouhani directly during the September 2019 U.N. meetings—the president catered to hardline policy advisers who believed that a “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran would compel Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to surrender on America’s terms. It didn’t happen. Today, the Iranian regime is closer than ever to producing nuclear-weapons-grade fuel. 

Fortunately, Trump doesn’t have to be as submissive to the foreign policy establishment in his second term as he was in his first. In terms of U.S. grand strategy, the Middle East is far less important than meets the eye. The historical and geopolitical arguments for downsizing the U.S. military presence and deprioritizing the region overall are persuasive though rarely acknowledged. 

First, recent history makes it abundantly obvious that interventionism in the Middle East is a fool’s errand. U.S. policymakers have frequently overstated America’s influence and under-appreciated the agency of local actors whose interests may not square with our own. Our good intentions often led to disastrous results, and our plans typically got torn apart by forces out of our control. 

Even worse, U.S. policymakers have demonstrated a lack of awareness of the big picture and a seemingly systemic inability to account for unintended consequences. Getting rid of a bloodthirsty dictator in Iraq gave us a sense of moral superiority but also produced a proliferation of terrorism, sectarian warfare and a years-long occupation that claimed the lives of thousands of Americans. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan 2001 was justified after 9/11 but soon degenerated into a social science experiment in a country with no history of democracy. Ridding Libya of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s four decades of brutal, uber-eccentric authoritarian rule provided Libyans with hope for a time, until the situation deteriorated into militia-infested anarchy that the country is still grappling with today. Trump understands all of this even if the so-called experts don’t.

From a geopolitical perspective, the Middle East is largely insignificant to taining U.S. power and influence around the world. This claim would undoubtedly elicit eyerolls from many Mideast hands who value the region as a center of energy production. But outside of natural resources, the region has very little to offer. According to the World Bank, it accounts for only four percent of the world’s entire gross domestic product, a consequence of ineffective governments, multiple wars, bloated public sectors and economies that re highly dependent on the extraction of natural resources. Of course, the United States can’t write off the region entirely, if only for the fact that crude oil and natural gas continue to power the global economy. But it’s a mistake to assume Washington needs to station a large, near-permanent U.S. force presence to ensure worldwide oil prices are stable. Indeed, there is no evidence that taining U.S. troops in the Middle East keeps the oil flowing at a reasonable cost—prices actually rose during the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

What about the prevalence of anti-U.S. terrorist groups in the Middle East? As long as such groups exist, they will of course re a threat to U.S. interests. This isn’t news to Trump; the counter-ISIS campaign in Iraq and Syria was at its most lethal during his first administration. Trump will want to ensure the ISIS territorial caliphate doesn’t regenerate on his watch. 

Yet this can be done without having a U.S. troop presence on the ground in perpetuity, which is essentially what U.S. policy calls for now. The U.S. intelligence community has decades of experience finding and neutralizing high-profile terrorists who seek to attack the United States directly, and they’ve been quite proficient in conducting these types of operations. The notion, so often argued in the months and years after 9/11, that terrorist groups need a safe haven abroad to orchestrate attacks against America is simply wrong. As we saw during the car ramming in New Orleans after New Year’s Eve celebrations, terrorism inside the U.S. is more likely to be perpetrated by lone wolves who self-radicalized and have no direct connection to a terrorist group overseas. Preventative measures on the home-front, not constant U.S. deployments in troubled spots in the Middle East, are a better strategy.

Donald Trump has good instincts on the Middle East. He didn’t follow them in his first term. But he has an opportunity to do so in his second.