As the Trump administration entered its final days toward the end of 2020, it secured four normalization accords in the Middle East – known as the Abraham Accords – and generated momentum for more.
Now, as the Biden administration nears the end of its term in 2024, the region is ablaze and teetering on the cusp of a wider regional war.
Coincidence? Unlikely.
Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran – not the US administration – are responsible for the current mess in the region. Mistaken Israeli policies over the years – primarily toward Hamas and Gaza – have compounded the problem.
US President Joe Biden is a friend of Israel with a soft spot in his heart for the country. That is undeniable.
But when historians look back and chronicle this period, they will see a series of Biden administration policies that sent the wrong messages to the wrong players and added to the combustible atmosphere in the region. Here are a few of those policies:
• Not building immediately on the momentum of the Abraham Accords because those accords were brokered by the hated Trump administration – in fact, for nearly a year, not even calling those accords by their name so as not to tacitly admit a Trump administration success.
• Removing the Houthis from a US list designating them as a terrorist group.
• Initially treating Saudi Arabia as a pariah, only being forced to backtrack following the outbreak of war in Ukraine, when Saudi cooperation was needed to ensure oil output and prevent the skyrocketing of global oil prices.
• The chaotic withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, which led US allies in the region to question whether Washington would be there for them over the long haul.
• The removal of some Trump-era sanctions on Iran, freeing up billions of dollars for the Islamic Republic to spend on its proxies, and an overeagerness to reengage with the Iranians and reenter the Iranian nuclear agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
• Renewing payments to the Palestinian Authority.
• Renewing payments to UNRWA.
• Rejoining the UN Human Rights Council.
• Demonstratively snubbing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for nine months and creating the impression of a Washington-Jerusalem rift.
All these actions, while not primarily responsible, helped contribute to the current Mideast turmoil. If, as the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding, then the region’s current state must, at least to some degree, be traced back to the Biden administration’s policies and actions.
US DIPLOMACY in the Mideast has failed, foreign policy wonk Walter Russell Mead wrote this week in The Wall Street Journal. But not because of a lack of trying.
“No administration in American history has been as committed to Middle East diplomacy as this one,” he wrote. “Yet have an administration’s diplomats ever had less success?”
Mead ticked off a list of American diplomatic failures in the Mideast under Biden: getting Iran back into a nuclear agreement with the US; getting a new Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic dialogue on track; ending the civil war in Sudan; getting Saudi Arabia to normalize ties with Israel; settling the war in Yemen.
And that is to say nothing of Washington’s failure to broker a deal in Gaza that would bring about the release of the hostages or efforts to get Hezbollah to stop firing rockets at Israel.
Israel stepped up its military campaign against Hezbollah some 10 days ago, after 11 months in which American envoy Amos Hochstein failed – not for lack of trying – to negotiate a diplomatic agreement whereby Hezbollah would stop firing and move its terrorists off of Metulla’s front porch.
Either the Americans did not have leverage over the right people or were not using those levers efficiently, but Hezbollah continued to use drones and rockets to make a large swath of the North uninhabitable.
The IDF’s intense action in Lebanon that began a fortnight ago became necessary because all diplomatic efforts to silence Hezbollah and move its forces beyond the Litani River failed.
Only after Israel began pummeling Hezbollah did the diplomatic efforts led by the US and France start to gain traction. But if the past four years of failed US diplomatic efforts in the region are any indication of things to come, beware of placing too much stock in America’s ability to broker a diplomatic solution now to the fighting in Lebanon.
Mead offered a reason for Washington’s unsuccessful Mideast diplomacy:
“The Biden administration wants something it can’t have in the Middle East: continued influence with diminished presence. Its diplomacy is aimed at preserving a regional order that depends on the kind of American power projection the president desperately wants to avoid.”
According to Mead, as America withdraws, or attempts to withdraw, from the region, “its influence over the relevant parties diminishes. The less reliable America looks, the less value anyone attaches to promises of American support. The more obviously America looks toward the exits, the less anyone fears American power.”
And the results of that are not good.
“As Iran’s fear of American power fades, it becomes more aggressive,” he said. “This, in turn, drives Israel to ever tougher and more dramatic responses, as it scrambles to convince both Iran and the Arab countries that it can deter Iranian aggression even as America walks away.”
WITHDRAWING FROM the Mideast, however, is not the exclusive domain of the Biden administration. Former president Donald Trump, during his term, also spoke of reducing American involvement in tribal wars overseas and focusing more on domestic problems.
Likewise, when the Houthis attacked a significant oil-producing facility in Saudi Arabia in 2019, Trump said the US military was “locked and loaded,” but in the end the US did nothing militarily to defend the Saudis – sending a message to the region of a rather feckless ally.
Nevertheless, Einat Wilf – a former MK and coauthor of the book The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace – said in a recent lecture to the Herzliya Cultural Group that the former president’s Mideast policies during his first term were “pitch-perfect.”
Asked, as are most speakers these days lecturing on Israel and the Mideast, about which candidate is better for Israel – Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris – she diplomatically prefaced her remarks by stressing that she was speaking from the perspective of an Israeli who is not an American citizen, who cares about Israel.
Wilf said the pitch-perfect steps Trump took that led to the signing of the Abraham Accords at the end of his term included defunding UNRWA; making it clear to the Palestinians that if they don’t play ball, then the US “would be done coddling them”; and still offering them “a shiny vision of peace, sovereignty, and statehood,” though on much less than along the 1967 lines.
In addition, Trump moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem and recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. All of these moves were right and broke with “a lot of old orthodoxies,” she said, and as a result he ended “his four-year term with four peace agreements and momentum for more.”
This is to say nothing of his withdrawing from the JCPOA and reinstating certain sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
What has changed?
None of this means, however, that what was is what will be with a second Trump presidency.
Two things have changed since the last time around. First, it is unclear who Trump will surround himself with and who will whisper in his ear on the Mideast. Last time, it was Jared Kushner, but Kushner’s future role is unclear.
Second, a robust isolationist wing – which has within it an antisemitic component – is emerging in the Republican Party. That wing’s desire to focus inward on America’s problems and not act as the world’s policeman or get involved in overseas adventures does not bode well for the Mideast.
For the US to have sway here, it needs to have a strong presence. If the isolationists weaken that presence, then there will be – as there already have been – significant ramifications.
If Harris wins in November, it seems safe to say, based on who her advisers are and her own comments, that there will be a continuation of Biden’s policy toward Israel – though with less of a personal connection to the country (unlike Biden, she has not met every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir, and spoken endlessly about it). In other words, what you see now is pretty much what you will get under a Harris administration – for better and for worse.
Harris will commit to Israel’s security, though perhaps be more amenable to withholding certain weapons out of “humanitarian concerns,” as she said in a recent interview. She will give Israel significant diplomatic cover, pledge rhetorical allegiance to the two-state solution, feel both sides’ pain, and decry “settler violence” in such a way as to make its proportions seem similar to that of Palestinian terrorism in Judea and Samaria. Her policies are unlikely to vary that much from the administration’s current policies and, to that extent, are predictable.
Trump, on the other hand, is not known for his predictability.
Asked point-blank – Harris or Trump? – Wilf responded: “If I knew that I could get the Trump policies [toward the Middle East] of 2016-2020, then the answer would be very simple: absolutely Trump.”
But that is a big “if,” and the uncertainty is that no one knows. “Harris will continue Biden’s policies,” she said, “and I don’t know where Trump is.”