Marc Lynch
This week, U.S. President Donald Trump is set to visit three key American partners in the Middle East: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It is not yet clear what he hopes to achieve. He may be seeking to secure arms deals and investments in the United States. He might hope to personally enrich himself through Gulf investments in Trump properties, investment funds, and cryptocurrencies. But many hope—and others worry—that he has larger ambitions. In particular, it seems possible that his trip is mostly about Iran, a country with which his administration has been conducting negotiations relating to its nuclear program. Because of the erratic nature of Trump’s administration and internal disagreement among his key advisers, however, his trip could just as easily set the stage for war with Iran as it could for signing a nuclear agreement.
Leaders in the Arab states of the Gulf had hoped for Trump’s reelection. They had done well during Trump’s first term and had little love for U.S. President Joe Biden. (The same was true of most ordinary people in their countries, who blamed Biden for enabling Israel’s destruction of Gaza.) Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, would never forgive Biden for calling Saudi Arabia a “pariah” because of its assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MBS maintained close relationships with Trump and his associates during the Biden years, and he strung Biden along with the prospect that Saudi Arabia might normalize relations with Israel, which, before October 7, 2023, was the single overriding goal of an administration that was otherwise disengaged from the Middle East.
But 100 days into the second Trump administration, those leaders are perplexed and concerned. Trump’s Middle East policies look similar to Biden’s, which is surprising considering how radically the new administration has moved to transform the federal government and alter core U.S. alliances. Trump’s policies toward war-torn Gaza and Yemen, for example, are essentially more brutal and less restrained versions of those Biden had pursued.
But perhaps that shouldn’t be so surprising. After replacing Trump in 2021, Biden had continued virtually all of Trump’s Middle East policies, focusing on extending Trump’s Abraham Accords (a set of normalization agreements between Israel and a number of Arab states) while not returning to the Iran nuclear agreement from which Trump had withdrawn, declining to pursue Israeli-Palestinian peace, and neglecting to prioritize human rights.
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