Trump’s diplomatic gambit in the Middle East at one month

The spotlight on the second Donald Trump administration’s foreign policy in its fourth week in office was on Europe, where talks around “ending” Russia’s war against Ukraine had a curious connection to the Middle East.

Top Trump diplomat Marco Rubio concluded his first visit to the Middle East as secretary of state, traveling to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. In this trip, Rubio tried hard to put the best face on Trump’s Gaza “plan” and sounded a hawkish tone on Iran; the latter stance has not yet been backed up by a strategic policy direction or synchronized with key partners of the United States in any clear way.

Rubio sat down with his Russian counterpart in Riyadh, a meeting that seemed to produce little more than the ire of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, upset that talks that could impact the fate of his country were taking place without him, even though he was actually in the same neighborhood. The meeting in the Middle East about Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine without Ukrainians present had echoes of some of Trump’s Middle East moves in his first term, like when he presented a “peace” plan involving Palestinians without any meaningful Palestinian involvement, or when he offered a set of tactics on Iran that lacked any significant conversation with America’s regional partners or Iranians and had no clear strategic end goal. These two examples are helpful reminders that provocative public statements or “out-of-the box” ideas are no substitute for actual diplomacy.

Consequently, Secretary Rubio comes home from his first trip to the Middle East just like his predecessor, Antony Blinken, did: mostly empty-handed. Time will tell if this opening diplomatic gambit is some shrewd, unprecedented re-writing of the conventional diplomatic playbook or if it reflects a new foreign policy team that is overwhelmed or simply improvising.

A month since his inauguration, media coverage of Trump’s foreign policy, particularly as it relates to the Middle East, has been dominated by two meta stories. First has been his unrealistic “plan “to have America take over the Gaza Strip and kick more than 2 million Palestinians out. And second have been the aggressive — and apparently not yet concluded — steps the Trump administration is taking to dismantle key parts of America’s own national security institutions.

This massive distraction of a Gaza non-plan and the even more serious move of dismantling America’s ability to shape and influence events abroad together carry three risks for the Middle East:

1. Damage to America’s standing from pushing unrealistic plans or making bad deals. The common textbook definition of diplomacy is the established method of influencing the decisions and behavior of foreign governments and peoples through dialogue, negotiation, and other measures short of war or violence.

This traditional method of diplomacy is not Trump’s style. Instead, Trump leans heavily on the use of “troll power,” a negative form of soft power that applies the slashing mockery and grandstanding rhetorical gamesmanship prevalent on X or 4Chan to interactions between states and world leaders. Troll power methods seek to knock friend and foe alike off balance with unexpected moves and statements in an effort to gain advantage or leverage. The problem is that troll power exacts a high diplomatic cost and often produces significant unintentional blowback or reactions that fail to produce progress or build coalitions.

It remains to be seen whether the current methods used by Team Trump 2.0 will pause the fighting in Ukraine or produce a new regional landscape in the Middle East, but cutting out key actors who are part of these conflicts is unlikely to produce lasting results. Like Trump’s summit meetings and friendly exchanges of letters in his first term with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un after initially threatening the country with “fire and fury” and calling Kim “rocket man,” all of the noise and maneuvering produced little more than photo opportunities and click bait.

In today’s Middle East, Trump’s initial gambit on Gaza is likely to spark a counter reaction from Arab states — one in which they restate many elements of the same plan they have advocated in broad strokes for years — centered on a two-state solution. Egypt plans to host a summit on March 4 with key Arab states to present the latest in a series of plans to support the idea of a two-state solution, which is at odds with what Trump and Israel’s current government are endorsing.

The practical impact of Trump’s moves on Gaza or initial steps on Ukraine could lead countries to essentially show a good face to the United States and tell Trump what he wants to hear while they re-organize themselves with alternative plans, under the assumption that America will not be the key diplomatic force it once was.

2. Threats from terrorist groups like the Islamic State, Hizballah, and Hamas. A second risk that remains present across the broader Middle East and parts of Africa is the threat of terrorism. Many have highlighted the self-inflicted wounds in the counterterrorism fight from Trump’s reckless and quite likely unconstitutional foreign aid freeze and gutting of key US national security institutions. These moves come at a time when experts are warning about the continued and growing threat from terrorist groups like the Islamic State.

Another flash point that could get worse due to Trump’s moves to unilaterally disarm America’s tools in the fight against terrorist groups: the Trump administration reportedly cut US funding for Palestinian Authority forces, which play a key role in combating terrorist groups in the West Bank at a time when threats there have increased.

Watch this space carefully: as Trump seeks to carve out an unconventional path for US statecraft, this is one of the practical areas that can impact regional and global security in an instant. Simply conducting retaliatory or preventative one-off strikes and touting those strikes aggressively over social media with press statements, as the Trump team did in Somalia earlier this month, is no real substitute for an actual counterterrorism approach that produces lasting stability — no more than provocative “peace” plan pronouncements are a formula for true peace. The terrorism problem in Somalia remains deeply worrisome, and no amount of public relations efforts will eliminate it without a comprehensive strategy that goes beyond sporadic bombs and missiles.

3. Perils of war breaking out in the Middle East again. Last but not least, the wars between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and between Israel and Hizballah in Lebanon are mostly quiet at the moment; but both cease-fires are very fragile, and, without a lasting settlement, each conflict could still reignite. This is in part because the terrorist groups that began and accelerated this conflict on Oct. 7, 2023, are down but not out. But it is also because of the lack of a clear, credible diplomatic strategy to build a bridge from the current tenuous cease-fires to a more secure environment. The clock is ticking in the Gaza Strip, where the first 42-day period of the three-phase agreement comes to a close in early March, and much of the diplomatic work needed to advance into the second phase remains incomplete.

In sum, the first month of the Trump administration’s second term in office has produced very few tangible gains for stability and progress in the region. The US president has voiced some provocative ideas in his own style of troll power, and he has deployed his diplomatic team on its first major trip to the region, where the main focus was on Russia’s war on Ukraine. At this early stage of Trump’s second term, the United States is navigating uncharted waters without a normal compass or a clear map.

 

Brian Katulis is a Senior Fellow at MEI. 

Photo by Russian Foreign Ministry / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images