As a man who has always prided himself on his unpredictability, President Donald Trump has achieved at least one goal in the Middle East of late. Few, if any, among his supporters or detractors (and perhaps not even the president himself) know exactly what he’s going to do next. As he zig-zags his way through the ongoing war with Iran while navigating the sometimes fractious relations with America’s main allies in the region—Israel and Saudi Arabia—he is, if nothing else, keeping friends and foes guessing.
But while it’s difficult to be sure where this is all heading, even his critics should concede that, for all of his erratic public statements and course shifts over the past few months, for the time being, Trump isn’t taking the expedient or even popular path with respect to the war. For the moment, he’s actually doing the right thing.
An unpopular war
That’s not the way most members of Congress see it. Democrats are united against his policies and the war. Republicans fear that the fallout from the conflagration is going to hurt them in the fall midterm elections; in fact, they are starting to worry about that more than being in Trump’s bad graces, with some even crossing the aisle to make their stance known.
The president’s declining poll ratings also demonstrate the war’s unpopularity, which has kept gas prices high for the past five months.
At the same time, the Iranians remain committed to their drive to achieve a nuclear weapon, and buoyed by opposition to the renewed war against them, rejected a U.S. ceasefire offer this week.
Meanwhile, the Saudis, who seem to be of two minds about the conflict, think that Trump double-crossed them. They’re angry because he first signed an accord that could let them enrich nuclear fuel. Then, only a day later, he said the deal was contingent on them joining the Abraham Accords and formally recognizing Israel.
For those who claim that Trump is an unprincipled cynic, his stand on both Iran and the Saudis makes no sense. After all, if doing the popular thing was his priority, he would have ended the conflict with Iran. An attempt by some in Congress to pass a war powers resolution that would hamstring the administration’s ability to carry on the fight has, to date, failed. It’s a reflection of the general lack of enthusiasm for a war the president struggles to explain clearly as much as it is about anti-Trump partisanship.
If he wanted to shore up America’s standing with a major ally in the Middle East that is also one of the world’s leading oil producers, then he might not have thrown a monkey-wrench into the nuclear agreement with Riyadh.
But Trump, who realizes that the final two years of his term in office could be turned into a nightmare if the Democrats win the midterms, chose not to do either of those things.
The war against Iran continues with no letup in sight. U.S. forces have been pounding Iranian targets for the last two weeks. Meanwhile, Tehran’s leaders continue to menace shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. They also continue to strike at America’s Arab friends in the region, including Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, while conspicuously not targeting the two most powerful countries allied with Washington: Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Taking him seriously, not literally
Undeniably, Trump’s statements on the war have been all over the place.
One day, he’s predicting that Iran will soon come to its senses and make a deal with him over its nuclear project and perhaps other outstanding issues that he can accept. Only a few days later, he’s declaring that the deal the United States struck with them in June is “over”—and that the regime’s leaders are “scum” or “sick people being led by sick individuals” and that “negotiations are a waste of time” with them. That’s after having said only a month ago that the same bunch was a group of “very rational people.”
Part of the problem is that Trump watchers, especially in the media and among his political opponents, keep forgetting the basic insight about him that journalist Salena Zito famously wrote in 2016 and which remains true today: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
The point isn’t that he engages in hyperbole, as well as pays little attention to whether his statements are measured or entirely accurate. His threats, like his praise, are merely talking points and negotiating tactics.
Sometimes, that’s deeply unfortunate. His comments earlier this year that encouraged the Iranian people to revolt against their corrupt Islamist tyrants, saying “help was on the way” when it was not, were a tragic mistake. The result was that tens of thousands of protesters were slaughtered by a regime still in place.
Rejecting appeasement
But for all of his inconsistency, Trump still gets the big picture on Iran right.
He ended the joint Israeli military campaign against Iran in April with a ceasefire out of impatience with Tehran’s resilience, despite overwhelming losses, mainly because the hike in gas prices was a blow to the GOP’s hopes of holding onto Congress this fall. And he sent Vice President JD Vance, along with foreign-policy envoy Steve Witkoff and presidential adviser/son-in-law Jared Kushner, to Switzerland to negotiate a pact to end the war while allowing him to claim that he had also ended the Iranian nuclear threat.
Predictably, this exercise in essentially repeating past administration’s mistakes failed. The notion, put forward by Vance—that ending the war was a priority and that the United States could trust the Islamists to keep their word on nuclear issues—was soon exposed as a colossal blunder. Iran had no more intention of giving up its nuclear ambitions than it had of ceasing its role as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, locked in a generational war against the West.
Trump could have accepted this humiliation. Indeed, all the experts urged him to do so because they argued that Iran could not be defeated. It was, they said, a struggle in which America’s refusal to accept any economic pain or even minimal casualties was matched against Tehran’s capacity to continually escalate the conflict and tolerate almost unlimited destruction. That’s something, establishment voices say, that makes them invincible.
But so far, Trump isn’t buying it.
He gave the Iranians a chance to make a deal that was extremely favorable to them. Had they abided by the Memorandum of Understanding negotiated by Vance, it would have been a triumph for the regime and a defeat for the United States. But, like former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Vance learned that the Islamists don’t want a favorable settlement. They will never give up their quest for regional hegemony or their mission of spreading their brand of fanatical Islam across the globe. The difference between this administration and its predecessors is that the man in the Oval Office isn’t willing to accept that kind of humiliation.
While he may be deeply frustrated with the failure of the military campaign to bring the regime to its knees as quickly as he would like, he is equally determined not to give up and let a terrorist regime have its way.
Trump entered politics primarily as a critic of the failed “forever” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although he is sensitive to critics who claim that he’s repeating the mistakes made by former President George W. Bush in those two unwinnable conflicts, he understands that while the United States might have been able to walk away, albeit disgracefully, from those battles, Iran is a different story.
The Islamic Republic has been at war with the United States since the Islamist regime seized power in 1979. It is responsible for killing hundreds of Americans and launching wars that caused the deaths of exponentially more people around the region, including the one that followed the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab assault in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Its nuclear ambitions are a direct threat to the United States as well as other countries in the Middle East.
Contrary to the arguments of those who claim that Washington can simply walk away from this problem—whether articulated by liberal pundits who hate Trump and are allergic to the exercise of U.S. power or antisemitic conspiracy-mongers like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who have become Islamist cheerleaders—this is a conflict where the defense of U.S. interests requires the defeat of America’s antagonist. Far from an illegal or immoral foreign adventure, it is a just war that needs to be fought to a successful conclusion.
Kicking the can down the road for a successor to deal with a dilemma that will almost certainly be harder to solve might lower fuel costs for now, as well as preclude any further casualties and bad press. But it would also be irresponsible and dangerous.
Ultimately, Trump may not stay the course on Iran. But for the moment, he is acting, if not always speaking, as if he knows that he must not let the Islamists triumph. The fighting will have to keep going until there is a government in Tehran that will accept American terms and be forced to abide by them.
It’s also true that Trump may have already concluded that his administration’s worries about the midterms won’t be fixed by letting the Iranians win. Whatever political capital he expended on the issue is, at this point, spilt milk and cannot be retrieved by adopting appeasement. Having lost a war to terrorists will be worse for the Republicans in November than to still be fighting one that is far from popular.
Standing his ground on Iran will be a better position for him and the GOP than waving the white flag. And in doing so, he will actually be rising to his responsibility of defending his nation and the West.
Saudi nuclear deal
The same is true for his reversal on the deal with the Saudis.
The Saudi monarchy was initially quietly in favor of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, which poses as great a threat to Riyadh as it does to Jerusalem. But it got cold feet once the Gulf states began to be hit by Iran, coupled with attacks on shipping that disrupted the oil trade.
Their interest in a nuclear deterrent to Iran—and approving the start of a nuclear project for the Saudis has no other purpose other than that—may be understandable. In a world where the United States punts on stopping the Iranian nuclear threat, this might seem rational. But save for Vance’s neo-isolationist rants, it has never been something Trump accepted as an option.
In contrast to Obama and Biden, Trump has rightly sought to maintain close relations with a nation that is—its flaws as an Islamist autocracy notwithstanding—key to keeping Iran in check and a Middle East that is friendly to the West. But giving it a pathway to nuclear weapons (safeguards in the proposed agreement with the United States notwithstanding) is frankly insane. There is always the possibility that the current leadership embodied by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who wants to modernize if not democratize his country, might be toppled by his radical foes. It is equally true that even under its current conservative leaders, the Saudis ought not to be trusted with the ultimate weapon.
Many in Israel and in the United States believe that it is only a matter of time before the Saudis join the Abraham Accords. But that sort of optimism, which was widespread after the normalization agreement was crafted in 2020, is almost certainly wrong.
The Saudis may have a relatively friendly relationship with Israel. They are tacit allies with it against Iran and open to the economic benefits of commerce with the Jewish state. But MBS and other Saudi leaders don’t need to extend themselves much further than that and rock the regional boat; they feel their current relationship with Israel is just fine.
Moving to full recognition and the exchange of embassies will bring them more problems than benefits. The core identity of the Saudi regime is inextricably linked to the Wahhabi sect of Islam, and its status as the guardian of the Muslim holy places in Mecca and Medina. That’s an insuperable obstacle to normalization. Moreover, their enthusiasm for closer ties with Jerusalem rises and falls in direct relation to the threat level from Tehran, which, as long as Washington is dedicated to ending the nuclear peril, is low.
By demanding normalization, Trump is essentially spiking the nuclear deal with the Saudis. Like the MoU with Iran, the pact with Iran was always a terrible idea. While there is clearly a faction inside the administration that, motivated by neo-isolationist sentiment, wants to retreat from the Middle East and likely pushed for this fiasco, Trump knew better.
Again, there is a political cost to this decision.
It is entirely possible that alienating Riyadh could contribute, either directly or indirectly, to oil-supply decisions that could contribute to rising prices—political poison for Trump. But to his credit, again he did the right thing after flirting with an unforced error that would have been a potential disaster.
Big picture decisions
Trump’s Middle East policies continue to be a mix of keen insight and puzzling decision-making. For example, his closeness with Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has led to mistaken policies with respect to the Kurds and Syria that are undermining the struggle against Iran and its terrorist auxiliaries.
And his on-again, off-again bromance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is deeply frustrating for friends of the Jewish state and those who understand the stakes involved in nurturing the alliance between the two nations. Going back and forth from rightly praising Israel for fighting side by side with America against common foes—and then, inappropriately, using the prime minister as a scapegoat for the lack of immediate success against Iran—only encourages the war’s critics, and antisemites on the right and the left.
When looking at the big-picture decisions the president is making, the errors aren’t as serious as his determination to keep fighting against Iran and not to let the Saudis go nuclear, despite the potential political costs. Focusing on his inconsistent day-to-day statements on the war only adds to the confusion. But so long as he is standing his ground on Iran and protecting U.S. interests rather than doing the politically expedient thing, Trump deserves far more praise than criticism.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
