No, Trump did not bring peace to the Middle East
Despite his claims, Trump’s policies only fueled regional instability
Republican presidential nominee former U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks at the Israeli American Council National Summit at the Washington Hilton on September 19, 2024 in Washington, DC. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s death will hopefully energize hostage-release efforts, but it is unlikely to end the war that has been ravaging the Middle East under President Joe Biden’s watch. Still, for all the shortcomings of Biden’s Middle East policies, he did not inherit a good hand from his predecessor, former President Donald Trump. Even if one believes Biden’s approach to the Gaza war and the ever-expanding regional conflict has been disastrous, it is dangerous to engage in revisionism about the wreckage Trump left in the region as he seeks a return to the presidency. The reality is that Trump’s policies further fueled the repression and instability that continue to devastate the region and threaten American interests to this day.
This hasn’t stopped Trump and his surrogates from touting his achievements in the Middle East. Richard Grennell, a former Trump administration official likely to have a very senior role if Trump is elected in November, told Al Arabiya last month that, “Donald Trump delivered peace” when he was President and would be pushing for “total peace” if he’s back in the White House. Such boasts ring hollow when examining Trump’s actual record.
Take, for instance, what some claim as his signature achievement, the Abraham Accords, establishing formal diplomatic ties between several Arab states and Israel. Normalization is in and of itself a positive development. But the way the Accords unfolded did little to advance a genuine region-wide peace. They emerged as a last-ditch effort to stave off a formal Israeli annexation of the West Bank, but did not stop continuing settlement expansion and settler violence that undermines the possibility of a durable peace settlement. Instead, the Accords sidelined the Palestinians, providing a useful distraction for an Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu averse to addressing the core of the conflict.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s transactional approach to diplomacy committed the United States to pay a high price for these deals — in the currency of arms sales and bilateral political compromises with authoritarian rulers. During Trump’s tenure devastating regional civil wars intensified — fought through proxies backed in some cases by regional powers aligned with Washington—while new rifts emerged among American partners, most notably with Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain leading a costly blockade on Qatar, host to the largest U.S. military base in the region. The brazenness of authoritarian leaders only seemed to grow with Trump’s embrace, perhaps on most shocking display with the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul; Trump refused to condemn Riyadh despite US intelligence assessments that the Saudi government was behind the killing.
Trump’s promised “deal of the century,” his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s effort to supposedly resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was a complete failure. Kushner’s plan reflected the hubris of Trump officials, promising grandiose development projects but producing no tangible progress. Kushner’s initiative was so biased toward hardline Israeli positions that it was dead on arrival. Top advisors in the Trump administration were well-known supporters of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, forming an ideologically aligned group of aides who backed policies inimical to the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Trump’s policies supported Netanyahu’s misguided belief that the Palestinian issue could be wished away, and that Israel could gain regional acceptance without serious compromise because the region—and the world—had moved on.
The Trump administration went out of its way to humiliate the Palestinians, undermining the Palestinian national project at every turn. He cut funding to the Palestinian Authority, the main — though flawed — governing alternative to Hamas. He closed the American consulate in Jerusalem that was the principal vehicle for official US engagement with Palestinians. At the same time, Trump moved the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem with great fanfare not only in the absence of a political settlement, but even as Israeli-Palestinian relations worsened. Previous administrations — Democrat and Republican — had avoided such a provocative step absent a political settlement that would also address Palestinian claims to the city.
The Trump administration claimed the alarmists were wrong — that the move would not trigger serious violence. But the unpredictability of the simmering tensions concerning Jerusalem should never be underestimated. Terrorist groups like Hamas evoke Muslim claims to the city as a rallying call to attract wider regional support; Hamas labeled its heinous attack on Oct. 7 “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” referencing the most sensitive holy site in Jerusalem.
Trump’s policies across the region proved just as dangerous. He unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear agreement (JCPOA) despite Iranian compliance and against the advice of several of his early senior advisors. Even former Israeli officials who opposed the initial deal believed a withdrawal from the agreement once it was in place was irresponsible. Trump promised to bring about a “better deal” and pursued a “maximum pressure” campaign — an onerous set of sanctions targeting Iran’s banking and oil sectors in particular. The effort succeeded in devastating the Iranian economy, but it failed to bring about a stronger agreement.
What it did do was unleash more destructive Iranian activity across the region, including Iranian strikes on oil tankers and production facilities in Saudi Arabia and the shootdown of a US drone. Perhaps worst of all for global security, by the end of the Trump presidency, Iran accelerated its uranium enrichment activities beyond the restrictions of the nuclear agreement, setting the stage for Iran’s steadily advancing nuclear program.
And despite all the talk of Trump being averse to dragging the United States into another war, Trump approved military actions that provoked regional escalation on several occasions. His decision to kill Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Qassem Soleimani in the last year of his presidency proved particularly risky.
After the attack, Trump issued what his former advisors considered reckless statements to warn the Iranians against retaliating, even tweeting threats to strike cultural and historical sites in Iran. Iran still retaliated, launching 16 ballistic missiles at Al-Asad airbase in Iraq housing US forces. While the response was believed to be calibrated, senior US military officials did not take the attack lightly and assessed that it was designed to kill Americans. While it did not lead to deaths, the attack caused significant brain injuries for over a hundred US military personnel and put the United States on the path toward direct military conflict with Iran. Iran and the “resistance axis” only became stronger, not weaker, during Trump’s presidency.
Biden’s policies may not have helped stem the regional carnage unleashed since the start of the Gaza war; the Middle East is currently facing a dangerous escalatory moment. But Trump’s talk of peace is just that — talk. His policies as president left the region unsettled and prone to future conflict. There is little reason to believe a future Trump administration would look any different.
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