Donald Trump’s troubling Middle East fantasy

When Donald Trump won the US presidential election last year, many in Israel thought they’d dodged a bullet. The Democratic Party was viscerally hostile to Israel, while Trump was considered the greatest friend the Jewish state had ever had in the White House.

Now the Israelis are wondering whether they have escaped one nightmare to find themselves in another.

They were blindsided by the Trump administration’s decision last week to stop attacking the Houthis after the Islamist group promised to end its attacks on shipping in the Red Sea while continuing to fire missiles at Israel.

The Israelis were also cut out of the hostage deal that secured the release of 21-year-old American-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander. Of course, the release of any hostage is a source of profound relief. But many were shocked that the United States dealt with Hamas directly to get its citizen out, possibly at the cost of a broader hostage deal for Israel.

Moreover, if Qatar could get Hamas to release Alexander, then it could have got the other hostages released, too. Yet the Americans have fawned over the Gulf state and praised it to the skies.

In addition, Trump has accepted a luxury Boeing 747 jumbo jet from Qatar to serve as the next Air Force One; he is also building a new luxury golf resort near Doha in partnership with a Qatari company.

It’s hard to see these as anything other than inducements to persuade Trump to advance Qatar’s interests. Doha has other links to the Trump administration, of which the most egregious is that its Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, who has gushed over Qatar in cloying terms, has previous business dealings with it. In 2023, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund bought out his investment in New York’s Park Lane Hotel for $623 million.

The Free Press has reported that Qatar has spent almost $100 billion to advance its interests in Congress, American colleges and universities, U.S. newsrooms, think tanks and corporations—in other words, to suborn America.

In a similar vein, Syria’s president Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly wanted by the US for terrorism, has dangled the offer of a Trump Tower in Damascus as part of a full-on charm offensive to win over the president.

This week, Trump announced that America was lifting sanctions on Syria and met al-Sharaa, describing him as a “young, attractive, tough guy” with a “very strong” past – a stomach-turning way to describe his history.

Yet after announcing the end of sanctions against Syria, Trump remarked: “Oh, what I do for the crown prince!” This was a reference to Mohammed bin Salman, the effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, who, along with Turkey, is al-Sharaa’s firm ally.

Saudi support for al-Sharaa is doubtless to prevent Iran from again using Syria as its puppet. While Iran’s eclipse in Syria is welcome, its replacement by the Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as the resident strongman is hardly a cause for celebration.

And the idea that al-Sharaa has abandoned his Islamist past just because he’s trimmed his beard and now wears smart suits is, to me, implausible.

Trump’s negotiations with Iran are also spooking Israel. Although he previously said that if Iran didn’t dismantle its nuclear programme in a verifiable way, the United States would destroy it, he’s now saying that the Iran talks are going very well and that the Iranians are being “very intelligent.”

Indeed, they are. While continuing to work towards a bomb, they’re dangling Trump at the end of a string to buy time to rebuild the air defences that Israel destroyed last October. If Trump isn’t careful, he’s going to end up in exactly the same bad place as his left-wing foes, even though they start from opposite positions.

To the post-nation universalists of the left, everyone is governed by reason and self-interest; so all conflicts are amenable to negotiation and compromise. War, say these progressives, solves nothing. What matters is avoiding people being killed.

There’s no doubting Trump’s genuine commitment to Israel and the Jewish people. But it’s now clear that he has an almost messianic belief that he can end all wars and bring peace to the world through his ability to make deals. He thinks that he can make even the most bloodthirsty tyrants an offer they can’t refuse. He doesn’t care about the justice of a cause. He just wants to stop the killing.

Thus, he has bashed heads together in Pakistan and India to forge an uneasy peace. He believes he can do the same with Russia and Ukraine. And he’s now applying the same principle to the Middle East.

But just as the left – with their belief in some utopian nirvana of the brotherhood of man – have helped empower aggressors including some Palestinian Arabs and abandoned their Israeli victims, so Trump is in danger of doing the same thing. Like his foes on the left, he doesn’t seem to grasp that any negotiation with a non-negotiable agenda is inescapably an act of surrender.

In his consequential speech in Riyadh, Trump announced a total rupture with the “neo-conservative” aim of remaking the Middle East in the image of American democracy.

“In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins,” he said. “I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment; my job to defend America and to promote the fundamental interest of stability, prosperity and peace.”

Well, amen to that. However, the alternative to imposing Western values on the Arab world is not choosing to ignore the attempt by elements of that Arab world to impose Islam on the West. The correct course of action is, as it always has been, to fight and defeat these threats to Western interests.

Trump’s mantra of “peace through strength” is fine, but strength inescapably involves the credible threat of war. His Riyadh speech suggested instead that he’s using showers of money to tell those who threaten the West, as well as their putative victims, that all of them are now on their own. America won’t do war. There’s a peacenik of the right in the White House raining down gold instead of missiles.

Trump says he doesn’t have enemies. Where others see threats, he sees only financial opportunities.

The inconvenient truth, however, is that some people are out to destroy America and the West. If Trump doesn’t regard these as enemies, he will leave America and the West defenceless against attack.

It also puts him radically at odds with Israel, which views fighting and winning the war to defeat Iran as essential for its survival.

When Edan Alexander was released, the head of Qatar’s state-run Al Sharq News gloated that America had now been peeled away from Israel by “a move that constitutes implicit recognition of Hamas” and that would “deal a blow to Netanyahu and his Zionist team.”

It’s possible that Trump has a genius strategy that will cause lions to lie down with lambs. It’s possible that he will soon realize that his quest to bring peace on earth is hitting a dead end and that he will accordingly turn on a dime. But it’s also possible that he won’t realize that he’s been played for a sucker until it’s all far too late.