Trump and the New Middle East

With Israel ratifying it, the deal is done. That’s the good news. The bad news is that what happens now, over the next six weeks, will determine whether the Gaza ceasefire will be ‘permanent’. Discussing that second deal hasn’t even begun.

Phase 2, to be negotiated through the implementation of Phase 1, which begins Sunday, January 19, means the return of all remaining hostages from Gaza, a full Israeli withdrawal from the Strip, and a full cessation of hostilities.

Unfortunately, Phase 2 is in the interests of neither Hamas nor Benjamin Netanyahu. Hamas would like to hold on to the last of the hostages as its sole bargaining chip and the Israeli prime minister cannot really claim his stated objective—a complete and total victory over the militant outfit—has been achieved. Hamas has been decimated but not annihilated. It will regroup and rearm, using the very window meant to rebuild Gaza.

US President Joe Biden turned round as he was leaving after announcing the deal and retorted, “Is that a joke?” when asked who deserved credit for the ceasefire deal: Trump or him. Biden had earlier said that his and the president-elect’s teams had worked as one.

That was the truth. Such cooperation between incumbent/outgoing and incoming presidential teams is unprecedented in DC. And rumour has it that it was Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff who whispered the magic words in Netanyahu’s ear that made the Israeli prime minister decide not to take on the best friend he has ever had in the White House. Irrespective of that, Phase 2 of the ceasefire deal now rests on Trump’s shoulders. At least that’s how the world will look at it.

But the Middle East that Trump inherits, partly the product of his own first term, is not the same he had bequeathed Biden four years ago.

Lost in the smoke of war has been what Saudi Arabia has been saying. Ignored has been what the Gulf states have been doing. These are all, or mostly, America’s friends. Trump made history with some of them when he got them on board for the Abraham Accords in his first term, establishing diplomatic relations between some of them and Israel.

Yet the Abraham Accords missed out on the biggest prize of all—the Saudi-Israeli embrace. On the verge of that success, albeit near the end of Biden’s third year in office, Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023 and Israel launched its retributive war on Gaza. The Saudis stepped back and have stepped back farther since.

Crown Prince Salman has laid out his conditions: a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an irreversible Israeli commitment to Palestinian statehood. Before that, he had called the Gaza war “genocide”. Other Gulf states too, notably the UAE and Qatar, now want Washington to go harder on Israel. And they want Trump to go softer on Iran.

The weight of the Gulf states, in fact of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as a whole, has increased given how deftly these countries managed to stay out of the overlapping conflicts in the region, or rather kept the conflicts as far from their shores and sands as they could. Trump has to show them respect.

At the heart of these changes on the diplomatic ground stands the China-brokered Saudi-Iran rapprochement in 2023. But at the time of Hamas’ October 7 attack and the early days of the Gaza war, Riyadh was in the weaker position. Tehran was brimming with confidence, not least from the latitude the Biden administration had returned to it. Its proxies, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen, were powerful and causing serious damage. Biden had pushed Saudi Arabia into a lonely corner, with US-Saudi relations sinking to their lowest.

As Trump returns to the White House, many of those facts have changed.

One, Hezbollah has been decimated, to the extent that it had no say in the elections of the new Lebanese president and prime minister. Loser: Iran.

Two, Bashar al-Ashad has fallen in Syria. Loser: Iran.

Three: Israel has exposed the vulnerabilities of Iranian defence and security in the retaliatory strikes with Tehran. The revolutionary regime has never been pushed this far on the backfoot. Loser: Iran and only Iran.

The biggest gainer: Saudi Arabia. It is now in a position of such strength in the nascent relationship with Tehran that it can ask the incoming US administration to accommodate Iranian interests.

The Gulf states, too, no longer consider Iran much of a security threat. The memory of the 2019 allegedly Iranian drone strike on Saudi Aramco’s oil facilities or that of the 2022 Houthi attack on the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company seems to have faded.

Trump’s team, meanwhile, is staffed by Iran hawks and friends of Israel. That’s in keeping with his promise of turning the pressure full-on on Tehran, but of late he has given indications of a willingness to talk to the Ayatollah’s regime and renegotiate things.

But what is likely to complicate matters most with America’s Arab friends in the Gulf is his determination to step up US oil production, a policy that can only make Gulf oil less competitive and keep prices down.

“Trump’s trade and energy policy could be the most challenging for the Gulf. His promise to drill and pump more American oil while imposing higher tariffs on imports weaponizes the economy. Increased US oil exploration and production will lower prices and jeopardize the oil-driven economies of the Gulf. It will also threaten their ambitious national visions and even the shift to a post-oil future premised on high oil returns,” argues Bader Mousa Al-Saif of Chatham House.

Saudi Arabia, above all, had been planning to diversify its oil-dependent economy just as other GCC states had been signing on to a greener future.

As of now everybody, except Tehran and ironically the Israeli far-right, is welcoming Trump enthusiastically. Despite his unpredictability, both Israel and the Gulf Arab states know that he has got things done earlier and he may well again.

Alan Dershowitz’s protest—“let us put the blame for ALL the deaths in Gaza where it belongs: on Hamas and the useful idiots and useless bigots who support murderous terrorists”—may have a ring of truth to it in an absolute and abstract sense. But diplomacy and geopolitics are by nature transactional. And Trump knows that perhaps best of all.

Donald TrumpGaza CeasefiregeopoliticsGulf Cooperation CouncilHamasIranMiddle EastNetanyahuSaudi-IsraeliUS presidentWeb Exclusive