Trump and the Middle East: What lies ahead?

First published in Arabic at Al-Quds al-Arabi. Translation from Gilbert Achcar's blog.

Trump’s victory in the US presidency race is a major catastrophe for the peoples of the region, on top of the huge Nakba that has been raging since the Hamas-led “Al-Aqsa Flood”. Benjamin Netanyahu had been eagerly hoping for this victory and did everything he could to contribute to its achievement, whether by inciting his right-wing US allies or by refusing to grant Joe Biden and the Democratic presidential campaign the Gaza truce they had been hoping for in order to provide them with an electoral argument they desperately needed. So, what awaits us now that Trump’s return to the White House is confirmed?

The available information — considering Trump’s behaviour during his first presidential term, the positions he expressed during his recent campaign, and what has leaked from his circles — indicate that he is keen to appear as a leader who achieves “peace” in contrast to his portrayal of Biden as a perpetuator of war unable to resolve it. While Trump seeks to end wars in which he does not see America’s interest, he remains keen to achieve his goals in cases where he sees a definite interest. Thus, while he negotiated with the Taliban during his previous term in preparation for the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan and wanted to withdraw the US military cover for the Kurds in Syria at the request of Turkish President Erdogan, he supported the continued presence of his country’s forces in Iraq, brazenly expressing his interest in that country’s oil wealth.

And while he expressed his ambition to conclude the “deal of the century” on Palestine, the “peace” he proposed was so unfair that Mahmoud Abbas himself rejected it, while Netanyahu welcomed it, realizing that no Palestinian side was capable of accepting the terms of such a “deal”. Netanyahu hence hoped that the Palestinian rejection of that “generous” offer would legitimize the Zionist state’s further grabbing of the land of Palestine west of the Jordan River. This was in addition to the fact that Trump discarded long-standing official US policy positions regarding the regional conflict in favour of Israel, from his official approval of the latter's annexation of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights to his transfer of the US embassy to Jerusalem and his closure of the US consulate for the 1967 occupied territories, all of which indicate support for Zionist expansionism. Let alone Trump’s espousal of Israel’s position towards Iran, his tearing up of the nuclear agreement that his predecessor Barack Obama’s administration had concluded with Tehran after long and difficult negotiations, and his escalation of military provocation by assassinating the commander of the Quds Force in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani, and so on.

Trump has no interest in supporting Ukraine and would rather reach an agreement with Vladimir Putin that would satisfy the Russian president, whom he admires for his reactionary personality while desiring to invest in his country. He sees no interest in the alliance with European countries unless they make more economic concessions to the United States and augment their military efforts to get increasingly involved in the US confrontation with China, which Trump sees as America’s main competitor (while hostility to China is a fundamental pillar of the ideology of the US imperialist right that he leads). At the same time, it is no secret that Trump sees the Arab Gulf monarchies’ oil and oil money as a supreme US interest and the Zionist state as an invaluable ally for its role as watchdog of that supreme interest. For interest in its crudest sense — in which personal and family self-interest prevails over any other consideration, and in which “America’s interest” is conceived in its narrowest and most short-sighted sense, inseparably from the desire to tickle the public’s most primitive instincts (a behaviour often called “populist” or “demagogic”) — this interest is what governs Donald Trump’s behaviour, and nothing else.

It is therefore expected that, on Lebanon, he will adopt the Biden administration’s position seeking to end the ongoing war on terms that satisfy Israel, based on the withdrawal of Hezbollah forces to the north of the area stipulated in UN Security Council Resolution 1701 of 2006, and the gradual replacement of the party’s forces there as well as of Israel's occupying forces by the regular Lebanese army, provided that guarantees are provided under US supervision regarding the party’s non-return to the aforementioned area and the non-replenishing of its arsenal of missiles by Iran via Syrian territory. This would be accompanied by a reinforcement of the Lebanese army such as the balance of power in Lebanon might change, allowing the US-dominated state to prevail over the Iran-dominated party. Of course, reaching this agreement is currently subject to Iran’s approval, which is still denied, as Tehran prefers to keep Hezbollah in the fray rather than to allow it to exit from it and thus be prevented from taking part in the upcoming confrontation between Iran and the US-Israeli alliance.

Netanyahu is confident that Trump will be more willing than Biden to engage in this confrontation. He has already sent a representative to negotiate with the president-elect on the next steps towards Iran. Trump will also consult his Arab Gulf friends, who hope that Iran will be dealt a decisive blow no matter how much they show courtship to Tehran and empathy for the people of Gaza. With such positions, they try to counter Iranian outbidding regarding Palestine and convince Tehran to spare their oil facilities, which it threatened to strike at if its nuclear facilities are attacked. The likelihood of a joint US-Israeli attack on Iran has become very high indeed with Trump’s return to the White House. He will certainly seek to re-establish firm US hegemony over the Gulf region after it was weakened during the Obama and Biden eras.

As for Palestine, Trump is likely to support Israel’s official annexation of a significant portion of the West Bank and Gaza (the northern part of the Strip in particular, where “ethnic cleansing” is presently carried out by the Zionist army) for the expansion of its West Bank settlements and the resumption of their build-up in Gaza. Israel will keep its hold over strategic corridors that allow it to control the remaining Palestinian population concentrations in the two occupied territories. As in the Deal of the Century elaborated by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and announced in early 2020, the transaction will probably include “compensation” for the Palestinians for what is being taken from them and officially annexed to Israeli territory, by offering them areas in the Negev Desert. Eight months ago, Kushner expressed the opinion that Israel should seize the northern part of the Gaza Strip and invest in developing its “waterfront”, while transferring its Palestinian residents to the Negev Desert. Once again, this “deal” that take the Palestinian people for fools will find no Palestinian actor with the slightest credibility willing to accept it. Israel will thus feel allowed to unilaterally impose it by force, while the Zionist far right will keep increasing its pressure for the completion of the 1948 Nakba by annexing all Palestinian land between the river and the sea and uprooting most of its inhabitants.