Trump’s Middle East Strategy Is Ambitious but Also Dangerous

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. President Donald Trump this week had a historic tour of the Gulf monarchies in the Middle East, in general.

He went to Saudi Arabia and he met Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. And he cut a huge deal, which promised $600 million of Saudi investment in the United States and well over $130 or $140 million in Saudi purchase of American arms. And he sort of reset the relationship that had been tenuous during the Biden administration.

Then he went to Qatar—which is a rival of Saudi Arabia—and he met the emir. And he kind of topped the Saudi investment because they agreed to buy well over 200 Boeing 777 passengers and 787. That purchase alone could be $200 billion, with maybe a trillion dollars of investment.

At the same time, he met the de facto leader who’s emerging out of the disruption and disintegration of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who’s had, unfortunately, he’s had a history of terrorist activity. And he’d been associated with al-Qaeda, ISIS. Kind of a nebulous past.

And the subtext of all of these meetings were: We’re going to replace strife with money. We’re all gonna be profitable. And we have to bring the cause of all of this trouble, Iran, into the fold of the Middle East and drop the hostility to Israel.

Notice, of course, that he didn’t go to Israel, although he was trying to elicit support for the continuation of the Abraham Accords with Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

This is very ambitious but it’s also very dangerous. Donald Trump thinks he can cut a deal with Iran so that they would do essentially three things: They would give up their nuclear program; they would stop the subsidies to the terrorist surrogates of the Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis; and they would liberalize their society and reenter the family of nations.

I don’t think that Shia theocracy feels that is their agenda. I think what they’re probably doing, given their prior history, they’re negotiating, drawing out, and hoping they can outlast the Trump administration while they get closer and closer to 90% enrichment.

And they don’t think that Donald Trump, given the MAGA agenda that frowns on unilateral or optional military engagements, especially in the Middle East, will be willing to sacrifice or endanger what has been a spectacular first 100 days, at least in economic terms.

And so, they feel that they’re going to, I think, string Donald Trump along and wait him out and then, maybe, with a Democratic administration, announce that they’ve reached 90% enrichment and have a few bombs.

So, what am I getting at? There’s a couple of fundamental issues here. One is that the MAGA agenda is kind of a neo-isolationist, that we don’t get involved. But Donald Trump himself—as we saw the first administration and as we saw with the Houthis when he bombed them—has a Jacksonian deterrent and foreign policy. And they’re coming into conflict. MAGA people do not want him to unilaterally stop the nuclear threat in Iran. They would prefer negotiations. But negotiations depend on that threat.

By the same token, he’s going to try to get the Saudis and the Middle East sheikhdoms to pump more oil. Pump more oil to not only bring down the price of oil worldwide but really, to be frank, to hurt Russian President Vladimir Putin’s only source of income. And he feels that these two conflicts may be connected.

If he can peel away the Middle East from China and Russia and bring down the price of oil, then Putin, who, rumors have it, increasingly is short men, manpower, and equipment, and wants to make a deal with Ukraine but doesn’t know how he’s going to explain to the Russian people how he lost over a million dead, wounded, and missing Russians—for what? Very little in return. Can he make that argument to the Russian people?

In conclusion, Donald Trump is facing dichotomies with the MAGA agenda and his Jacksonian foreign policy. He’s trying to get the Arab world to drop their hostility to Israel. At the same time, he’s trying to reason—if that’s the right word—with an unreasonable Iranian regime. And he wants oil to go down. I’m not sure that’s gonna help him in the United States. A lot of the frackers and horizontal drillers are—as the oil has dropped—they’re not at a very big profit margin. And yet, Trump wants them to spend more money and pump more and buy more rigs, etc.

So, there’s a lot of things going on. But one thing that’s not going on is we’re not being estranged from the Arab world. We’re not being estranged from Israel. This is not former President Joe Biden mouthing off about the Saudis or the Israelis. It’s a new type of approach that if everybody will just calm down, there’s a great opportunity to make money and be profitable. And that would include the disarmament, nuclearly, of Iran and the inclusion of Israel in the body politic.

Very ambitious. Let’s see how it works in the ensuing months.

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