With just three days to go until Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, experts are steeped in uncertainty as to how Trump’s appointees to the top diplomatic roles will be vying for influence over long-term Middle East agenda items.
While the administration’s immediate priority will be on securing Israel’s ceasefire with Hamas and the release of the hostages, the focus will soon shift toward shoring up relations with Saudi Arabia and dealing with Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.
Trump’s cabinet and inner circle will be composed of both staunch isolationists and stalwart war hawks seeking to manage the president’s priorities in his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The Middle East is probably at one of the most uncertain moments it’s ever been, especially in recent decades, and they’re about to be reintroduced to the most unpredictable leader the United States has ever had,” Brian Katulis, a senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Middle East Institute, who specializes in Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Jordan, told the Magazine.
Katulis indicated that those in the think tank community and media had failed when trying to impose “some sort of rational, analytic policy analysis” over Trump’s decisions during his first administration.
When talking about predicting who will have influence over Trump and the Middle East, Katulis referenced John Bolton, Trump’s first national security adviser who, after leaving office, said Trump is a man who operates on instinct and quite often doesn’t listen to his closest advisers or his own team.
Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute specializing in foreign policy and civil liberties, reiterated Katulis’s uncertainty. Katulis added it almost doesn’t matter who in the administration will handle which Middle East file because if Trump sees an opportunity, he will interject himself in ways that steamroll the staffers and even cabinet officials.
Mike Waltz, Elon Musk, and Marco Rubio
Trump’s next national security adviser, Mike Waltz, will be challenged to maintain some sort of semblance of orderly inter-agency process and coordination between the Pentagon, the State Department, the Treasury, and the intelligence agencies, which Katulis said is made more difficult when Trump himself may be freelancing through different back channels as he or some of his family members outside of the administration did during his first term.
Katulis said it’s also a “different kettle of fish” right now with Elon Musk in the mix, citing reports of the tech giant’s alleged November meeting in New York with the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations Amir Saeid Iravani, which Iran denied.
Katulis pointed out that there’s usually a divide between both the White House and the National Security Council and the State Department, adding that outgoing President Joe Biden and Antony Blinken’s close relationship had prevented that division.
Katulis questions if secretary of state pick Marco Rubio will turn out to be more like Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who was fired early on, or more like Mike Pompeo, whom Trump closely trusted.
Bandow is interested in seeing the interplay between Rubio and Waltz. So is Ambassador Dennis Ross, the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Rubio and Waltz’s relationship will “go a long way” toward determining who will influence Trump regarding Iran. While Bandow described Rubio’s proclivities as tending to be very hawkish, he also thinks Rubio is a rational actor.
“He’s giving up a Senate seat for a position he could be fired from tomorrow, so he clearly will have to be very deferential to Trump’s views,” Bandow said, echoing Katulis.
“He doesn’t want to end up like a Tillerson, who, after a couple of years, is gone,” Katulis said. “You’ve given up your Senate seat, you’ve lost your career. He has strong views, but he also has to be very careful what he does.”
Bandow pointed out that while the national security adviser is always with the president, the secretary of state has more status internationally. Bandow queried whether Trump would be able to oversee someone like Rubio and how much he would actually let Rubio do.
“None of this we have any idea of, yet,” he continued. “Rubio has the institution, Waltz will have Trump’s ear.”
Steve Witcoff, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Mike Huckabee
Will Wechsler, senior director of Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East programs at the Atlantic Council, said that Trump looks more confident coming into the Oval Office this time around. This is evident by his decision to fill Middle East positions with people who are close to him rather than with seasoned diplomats.
“This is evidence of a president who believes he’s his own diplomat,” Wechsler said.
No one represents this confidence better than Steve Witcoff, Trump’s appointed Middle East envoy who, as a real estate tycoon and major campaign donor, has never held a position in government or worked in diplomatic relations with the Middle East.
Much like Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who lacked diplomatic experience when tasked by his father-in-law with pursuing the Abraham Accords, Witcoff will face immense pressure as he seeks to push Saudi Arabia’s normalization agreement with Israel over the finish line.
Witcoff’s first order of business starts before the war ends, getting fully up to speed with the Saudis and learning exactly what Riyadh and Washington agreed upon under Biden, according to Ross.
Ross said one of Witcoff’s major responsibilities will be seeing if there’s a way to overcome the gap between Israel and the Saudis over a pathway to a Palestinian state.
Witcoff’s point of departure will be Trump’s 2020 peace plan, which gives Israel full control of the settlements and Jerusalem as its undivided capital. The plan also established a Palestinian state.
In his 2022 book, Breaking History, Kushner wrote how Trump nearly shelved his peace plan at the last minute because the Palestinians did not support it. “This level of detail is significant and quite challenging,” Ross commented.
Ross also highlighted the uncertainty of how Witcoff’s relationship with Waltz and Rubio will function, as well as whether Witcoff’s responsibilities will extend to Iran.
“For all we know, Trump may decide to appoint an envoy for Iran,” Ross added.
“Certainly for Netanyahu, you could certainly envision a situation where some of what will be asked for him to do on the Palestinians, his ability to be responsive on that might be influenced by how much the administration is prepared to do to deal with the Iranian nuclear program and the character and the scope of the coordination between the two,” he said.
Bandow noted the unique role that Mike Huckabee, incoming US ambassador to Israel, could play in shielding Trump in Jerusalem from his decisions on Iran. Huckabee could be seen as a strategic pick who, at every turn, will tell Netanyahu and his loyalists what they want to hear.
“You could imagine that having somebody on station in Jerusalem who’s saying a lot of smooth things would give a bit of cover to Trump if he decided he wanted to make some kind of deal with Iran,” Bandow said of Huckabee’s job of reassuring Jerusalem how much the administration is supporting Israel.
Wechsler described “maximum pressure 2.0” as still unclear because of what, he said, had been fundamentally unclear during Trump’s first term: What’s the end objective of maximum pressure? Wechsler explained that while everyone in the Trump administration supported maximum pressure, they supported it toward varying ends.
Would Trump listen to his vice president, JD Vance who, while professing a love for Israel due to his Christian faith, positions himself as part of the Middle East isolationist wing, cautioning against war with Iran?
The defense and intelligence communities were happy and felt that maximum pressure efforts were sufficient, even if they only made it more difficult for Iran to “conduct their malign behaviors.”
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s scandal-riddled pick for defense secretary, however, doesn’t strike Bandow as someone who would resist a hawkish stance on Iran.
Elbridge Colby and Trump’s Iran policy
However, both Bandow and Katulis could see Elbridge Colby, Trump’s appointed under-secretary for defense policy, coming into the Pentagon saying China is the “big issue” and not to get bogged down in the Middle East.
But as Wechsler pointed out, it is clear that Trump foresees that his most important task at the Pentagon will be removing military personnel he views as “political generals” and those allied with former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley Miley – people he believes were responsible for delaying or denying military action.
A Pentagon purge and politicized confirmation process in the Senate Armed Services Committee could create a ripple effect in US military operations around the world and have effects in the Middle East.
Wechsler then nodded to the other group within the first Trump administration that saw maximum pressure policies as setting the stage for regime change in Tehran, saying: “Those people tended to have more of an impact on how it was actually handled in the Trump administration.”
According to Wechsler, “That group believed the purpose of maximum pressure was to get a better deal and do a deal from a position of strength.”
He also said that the underappreciated influence on Trump’s Iran policy will be the depth of information he’s briefed on, showing that Tehran has been trying to assassinate not only him but also people who worked for him.
“I do not think that the average analyst has, in any way, appropriately integrated that reality into the potential for policymaking,” Wechsler concluded. “That is a real, big thing. That should be the headline.”
Katulis mused that there was likely a 50-50 chance that Trump either “bombs Tehran or flies to Tehran and tries to negotiate with the supreme leader.” He said he doubted that anyone, in or out of the administration, might say or do anything to constrain Trump in any sort of way: “That’s how unpredictable he is.”