Former president’s tenure in office upended decades of bipartisan foreign policy and prioritised war profiteering under guise of being anti-war
By Umar A Farooq in Washington
25 October 2024
On 18 September 2024, former US President Donald Trump made an appearance in the Michigan city of Hamtramck and met with the town’s Yemeni Muslim mayor, Amer Ghalib, and other leaders in the city.
The visit, not to mention Ghalib’s official endorsement of Trump for the upcoming November presidential election, would have been unheard of in the 2020 or 2016 race for the White House, when the majority of Muslims in the US voted for the Democrat Party.
However, amid the Israeli war on Gaza and the Biden administration’s full support of Israel’s war efforts, which have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed most of Gaza’s infrastructure, Trump has painted himself as the better alternative to Muslim and Arab voters outraged at the war, which is now over a year long.
And even more recently, Trump has further dug into this argument after Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, received the endorsement of former Congresswoman Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney was an architect of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
“Why would Muslims support Lyin’ Kamala Harris when she embraces Muslim hating Liz Cheney, a total loser, whose father brought years of war, and death, to the Middle East???” Trump said on Truth Social.
But at the same time, Trump has attacked Biden and his opponent Harris by claiming that they are holding Israel back from being able to achieve its war aims in Gaza.
Legal experts, rights groups, and several countries have labelled Israel’s actions in its war on Gaza as a genocide.
Trump also made it clear that despite his party’s emphasis on free speech protections, he viewed the ongoing mass pro-Palestinian mobilisation on American streets with absolute vitriol, and painted a grim picture of how he would treat any criticism of Israel, if he were to be elected again.
“We have the Palestinians and we have everybody else rioting all over the place. You talk about Charlottesville. This is one hundred times Charlottesville,” Trump said during a presidential debate in July, equating pro-Palestinian activism with a 2017 attack by White supremacists in Virginia.
Current polling has both Trump and Harris neck and neck, with Harris up by just under two points, according to the polling aggregator, FiveThirtyEight.
Trump’s previous tenure in the Oval Office was full of contentious and sporadic moments, with his foreign policy decisions upending decades of bipartisan approaches to the military and diplomacy.
He has already promised to bring back a version of the Muslim ban, and this time would extend the immigration ban to include an “ideological screening” to weed out immigrants who sympathise with the Palestinian group Hamas.
The campaign promises he has made for a second term already emulate his previous remarks in 2016, when he said: “Islam hates us”.
His tenure in office was also centred around an approach that favoured financial interests above all, revealing major concerns about the Trump family’s business stakes in the Middle East, which have skyrocketed since his mandate ended.
With the Middle East being entrenched in the largest conflict since the Iraq War, a look at Trump’s policies in the region can help create an understanding of its dynamics and perceived contradictions, much of which was unchanged by the Biden camp. It can also help understand what could happen in a potential second term for Trump.
The ‘most pro-Israel’ US president ever
The 7 October Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel were seen widely by the western world, particularly in the US, as a shock and a case of random terror unleashed by Palestinians.
But as Palestinian analysts have laid out, the war was a manifestation of a number of factors, including the dire economic situation in Gaza, repeated attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian land and also by the pushing of a potential deal to normalise ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
A look at Trump’s first year in office shows that the former president disrupted longstanding political positions in the Middle East, and at the centre of those policy shifts, was Israel.
Trump received, and still continues to receive, major backing from the US evangelical Zionist movement. The Christian Zionist movement is a major force in conservative politics, experts told Middle East Eye during Trump’s presidency.
And it was clear early on that Trump planned to make moves to energise that base. With the help of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and his lawyer Jason Greenblatt, the administration went to work to see how they could further aid Israel.
Trump ended his first year in office with a landmark foreign policy move to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The decision broke from a decades-long bipartisan policy for US presidents to abstain from making the assertion, and the move was met with outrage from segments of the international community, including the Arab and Muslim world.
The businessman-turned-president then capitalised on this move months later by moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
In March 2019, he signed an executive order recognising Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan Heights.
His policy shifts on Israel didn’t just focus on Israel’s claims on occupied land either, as the Trump administration also withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council, citing that the international body showed negative bias when it came to Israel.
One of his last moves in favour of Israel was to declare that products from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank had to be labelled “Made in Israel”.
Trump also moved to further weaken the position of Palestinian leadership.
Ahead of recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Trump shuttered the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s office in Washington DC. His administration also cut $200m of funds to the Palestinian Authority, the governing body for the occupied West Bank.
After leaving office in 2021, reporters released snippets of Trump’s conversations within the White House, which painted a picture that made it seem Trump had more scorn for Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu than Palestininian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Yet the policies pursued by Trump broke away from decades of American precedent, in order to aid Israel, as it continued to breach international law with the expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Over the past few months, he has made some limited criticism of Israel’s war efforts in Gaza, saying that Israel is “losing the PR war”. But he has continued to posit himself as a better friend to Israel than Biden or Harris.
As was evident during the first major debate between the two political rivals, Trump lambasted Harris over her Israel policy and said that Israel would be destroyed by a Harris presidency.
While media reports have said Harris is more sympathetic towards Palestinians, she has continued to support Israel’s war efforts and said she would make no break from Biden’s approach to Israel.
The overwhelming majority of decisions Trump made on Israel while in office were not reversed by the Biden-Harris administration.
Art of the deal
Part of what set Trump apart from the last several US presidents was how he pursued diplomacy in a manner similar to how he approached his business empire. In the words of his best-selling book, it was done through the “art of the deal”.
He took office and immediately exited international treaties he viewed as terrible business deals, such as the Paris Climate Accord and the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).
“I have long contended that Nafta was perhaps the worst trade deal ever made,” Trump said in October 2018.
This approach was no different in the Middle East, where his administration approached the region with a market-oriented lens, while also hiring Iran hawks like John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, and Mike Pompeo, his CIA director-turned-chief diplomat.
However, like several of his business ventures that went bankrupt, many of his foreign policy moves achieved little and turned sour.
Trump followed through on a campaign promise and exited the Iran nuclear deal, a watershed agreement brokered by the previous administration of Barack Obama which sought to limit Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions on Tehran.
The reimposition of those sanctions sent Iran’s economy into a spiral, and despite a perfunctory attempt by the Biden administration to restart nuclear negotiations, the deal remains broken to this day.
While the Trump administration claimed that the nuclear deal was enabling Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, under the parameters of the agreement Tehran was only allowed to enrich uranium up until 3.67 percent purity. Since breaking from the deal, Iran has enriched up to 60 percent purity.
And Trump’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organisation further complicated US attempts to facilitate diplomacy in the region, where authorities in countries like Iraq or Lebanon interact with the IRGC.
And despite those US sanctions crippling Tehran’s economy, the Iranian military has emerged as a desirable merchant for armed drones, with a major customer being Russia.
The bedrock deal of Trump’s Middle East portfolio came in the result of a series of agreements normalising ties between Israel and four Arab countries: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.
But those deals, which were largely seen as throwing Palestinians under the bus for marginal economic gain, have since been received positively by only a minority of the signatory countries’ populations, as protests against Israel erupted across the Arab world.
Nonetheless, in Washington, the normalisation agreements were met with major bipartisan approval, including from Trump’s own critics. And since Biden came into office, his administration has been working to build upon those deals by trying to broker an agreement that would normalise relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Then, there was the self-touted “Deal of the Century”, an 181-page plan surmised by Kushner and several others in the administration that Trump said would finally “solve” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It offered Palestinians economic incentives if they were to accept a state with limited sovereignty, which would be subject to Israeli control. Meanwhile, Israel would be allowed to annex 87 percent of the land that it currently controls in the occupied West Bank.
The plan was never signed into agreement, despite being pushed and marketed by the administration for years.
The business-minded approach to foreign policy came as Trump’s own family had financial interests in the Middle East. And those interests have grown considerably since he left office.
In November 2022, the Trump Organization inked a deal roughly worth $1.6bn to license its name for a housing and golf complex in Oman, and the complex would be built by a Saudi real estate developer.
Just this year, the Trump Organization signed another major deal, this time to build a luxury residential tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Outside of the real estate business, Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and former senior White House advisor, has created a private equity firm that has secured hundreds of millions of dollars from Gulf states. That is on top of the $2bn he received from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
The glaring business interests of Trump’s family will be on full display if Trump returns to office in 2025.
Anti-war but pro-war profiteering
Trump often has referred to himself as the anti-war president and has boasted about how the US did not get involved in any additional wars abroad during his tenure.
He did work to withdraw some troops from the Middle East, while calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan.
In March 2019, Trump declared the Islamic State (IS) militant group defeated after capturing an enclave of the group in Syria, and several months later in October, the US killed IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a raid by American forces.
Yet despite Trump spending the last several months boasting about being a president that brought peace and not war, several sporadic Trump decisions could have seen the US get further entangled into conflict in the region.
Trump ordered the launch of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Shayrat air base in Syria, which is controlled by the Bashar al-Assad government. And in a surprise move, Trump, on 3 January 2020, ordered a drone strike that killed senior Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
The assassination caused widespread fear that a war could break out between Iran and the US, but Tehran retaliated with a calculated barrage of rocket fire that injured several US servicemembers but killed no one.
Trump can credit himself with not starting any additional protracted conflicts in the Middle East, but he was eager to sell arms to countries at war while also being okay with greenlighting the launching of military operations in other countries – so long as Washington was not involved.
As Saudi Arabia was leading a military coalition of Arab allies in a war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Trump used his first visit as president to visit the Saudi kingdom, where he announced a staggering $110bn arms deal with Riyadh.
The deal was an exaggeration, and largely referred to contracts and defence agreements that were already on the books and some new ones that were proposed.
Still, the president continued to push through arms deals to Gulf countries, including bypassing Congress to advance an $8bn arms sale to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the UAE. He also lifted a ban on selling the Saudi kingdom precision-guided bombs, and over the years sold Riyadh hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the munitions.
While Republicans currently scorn Biden for sending billions of dollars to Ukraine, Trump had actually sold Kyiv lethal arms, including anti-tank weapons, prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Befriending Middle East leaders
As a world leader and public figure, Trump brought a markedly different presence to the Middle East.
While US news outlets were filled with reports of how European and other western leaders didn’t mesh with his style of leadership, he was received warmly by many in the Middle East and elsewhere, from monarchs and autocrats to democratically elected leaders.
His first trip abroad as president began with a stop in Saudi Arabia, which resulted in the viral photo of Trump, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Saudi King Salman holding onto a glowing orb.
And those friendly ties appeared to remain despite Trump’s occasional attacks on those leaders.
He once referred to Sisi as “my favourite dictator” during a meeting at a G7 summit. He previously praised Sisi as a great leader, but in the same light referred to the Egyptian president as a “killer”.
The relationship between Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a prime example of this dynamic.
In August 2018, the US administration sanctioned Turkey over the detention of American pastor Andrew Brunson. At the time, it was a rare rebuke from the US towards its Nato ally.
The following year in July 2019, the US kicked Turkey out of the joint F-35 fighter jet programme, over Ankara’s purchase of Russia’s S-400 air defence systems. The move furthered a growing rift between the two allies.
Several months later in October, Trump wrote a letter to Erdogan, threatening to destroy the Turkish economy if Turkey does not agree to “a good deal”. That same month, Trump gave the green light for Turkey to launch a major incursion into northern Syria that would push out fighters with the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
But the next month in November 2019, Trump and Erdogan met in person at the White House and the former US president said he was a “big fan” of the Turkish leader.
“You’re doing a fantastic job for the people of Turkey,” Trump said at the time.
In contrast, the relationship between Erdogan and Biden has been cold. And while a visit by Turkey’s president to Washington was scheduled for earlier this year, it has since been postponed.
The shadow of Jamal Khashoggi
Human rights activists and organisations will always remember the Trump administration for how it navigated the fallout of the Saudi kingdom’s murder of Washington Post and Middle East Eye columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
On 2 October 2018, a group of Saudi operatives killed and dismembered Khashoggi within minutes of him entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He had gone there to retrieve documents in order to marry his fiancee.
The killing sent shockwaves throughout the world, and quickly became one of the top news stories as it created a diplomatic crisis between Saudi Arabia, Turkey where he was killed, and the United States where Khashoggi held US residency.
Fingers immediately pointed to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder, with rights groups calling for the Saudi de facto leader to be isolated on the international stage.
US lawmakers were quick to pen a letter to Trump that would trigger the Global Magnitsky Act, a law used to sanction countries for major human rights violations.
Trump, however, was quick to come to Mohammed bin Salman and Riyadh’s defence, saying that whether or not the crown prince had knowledge of the killing, the “United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia”.
Ties between Washington and Riyadh were not affected by the killing during the Trump administration, with Trump repeatedly iterating that Saudi Arabia and Mohammed bin Salman have “been a very good ally”.
Years later in a book released by journalist Bob Woodward, Trump boasted about helping Mohammed bin Salman in the fallout of the killing, saying “I saved his ass”.
“I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop,” Trump told Woodward.
Trump and Mohammed bin Salman spoke several months ago in a phone call. And while the topic of the conversation was unclear, the public interaction showed the relationship between the two leaders extends beyond Trump’s time in the White House.
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