Donald Trump’s ‘New Middle East’ won’t fly

The Trump-Netanyahu version of a ‘New Middle East’ is largely a knee-jerk reaction to the realignments that began appearing in West Asia following the Iran-Saudi Arabia rapprochement mediated by China.

The New Middle East is a century-old Western colonial concept that recalls the Greek legend of Sisyphus as a metaphor for the persistent struggle against the essential absurdity of life. The Arab Revolt, Jewish State of Israel, rise of ‘Arabism’, Arab Spring, etc. were successive thematically complementary stabs in search of answers to unfinished questions of state formation in the loosely-defined geopolitical region following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire that encompassed the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, the Levant, and Turkey.

We are currently witnessing United States President Donald Trump and his closest West Asian ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu follow a roadmap toward their own version of a ‘New Middle East’. It is largely a knee-jerk reaction to the realignments that began appearing in West Asia following the Iran-Saudi Arabia rapprochement mediated by China, and an ensuing conviction among regional states that regional issues are best resolved through native efforts without external interference.

The ‘New Middle East’ expression as such is attributable to a phrase used by former US Secretary Of State Condoleezza Rice to embellish Israel’s third invasion of Lebanon in 2006 as “the birth pangs of a new Middle East”, but its real objective all along was the perpetuation of the Western hegemony that was imposed on the regional states created arbitrarily on the debris of the Ottoman Empire.

Two decades after the US’ humiliating expulsion from Iraq, “a new, similarly fantastical Trump-Netanyahu roadmap used the multilayered Israeli wars that started after October 7, 2023, as weigh-stations to reach the same destination — a region in which Israel is the hegemon, acting at will to neutralise Iran and its Axis of Resistance, with the United States as Israel’s indulgent ally” — to quote from a recent policy analysis by Nabeel Khoury, the well-known regional expert at the Arab Centre in Washington DC who was a career diplomat in the US foreign service for a quarter century.

The Trump-Netanyahu roadmap aims to weaken Hamas, sideline Hezbollah, and punish the Houthis. Meanwhile, last December, the Joe Biden administration promoted an offensive spearheaded by the al-Qaeda affiliate Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, to capture power in Damascus and install Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, an enigmatic 43-year-old ex-commander of the Islamic State with a secret history as Syria's new leader. This audacious neocon move was pinned on the belief that the US/Israeli hegemony needed another militant entity as a ‘catalyst’, since the Arab regimes were increasingly drifting away towards the SCO, the BRICS, OPEC-Plus, etc. and jettisoning their entrapment within sectarian identity to normalise with Iran, the ultimate nonconformist freethinker and disruptor on West Asia’s geopolitical chessboard. 

The Trump-Netanyahu juggernaut reached its final destination, Iran, last month with the launch of 12 days of attacks against Iran’s nuclear sites. But, Khoury wrote, “judging from the results to date, it does not appear that the United States and Israel are close to achieving their goal of a new Middle East.” 

In the Trump-Netanyahu calculus, the destruction of Iran and the Axis of Resistance would promote another normalisation between Israel and the Arab world, which is severely damaged due to the horrific Gaza war. Of course, its bottomline is that a wilful abandonment of the question of Palestine and rights of the Palestinians is not only possible but necessary for the realisation of Greater Israel, anchored on the ideology of Zionism, with Jerusalem, ‘the shining city upon a hill’, as its capital. 

The Trump-Netanyahu vision is predicated on the belief that the Arab world would normalise relations with Israel and open its markets to US investments without a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — “in essence, capitalism without democracy”, as Khoury wryly puts it.

It is an alluring package for Arab states as it ostensibly poses no threat to their autocracies. Of course, it is a different matter if and when Al-Sharaa gets going — a “young, attractive guy with a very strong past” (Trump) — reaches adulthood. By the way, Turkey and Israel, in an unholy alliance in the sub-soil, have already arranged that Syria’s oil needs will be met from Azerbaijan, their Transcaucasian ally, through Turkey’s Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline (which also feeds Israel) rather than from Saudi Arabia or Iraq.

But the ‘New Middle East’ vision will not fly. Israel, at great cost to its economy and population, has failed to achieve the total defeat of any of the members of the Axis of Resistance. Israel’s attack on Iran has been a strategic mistake too, as it has not obliterated the latter’s ‘Islamic nuclear capabilities’, while Iran’s retaliatory strikes caused unprecedented damage to civilian life and Israeli strategic installations. Tehran today may even choose to develop a nuclear weapons programme.

Another Israeli attack on Iran without the US green lighting is unlikely, now that Trump’s limited attention span is overstretched, having decided in a dramatic U-turn to inherit Biden’s war in Ukraine. Trust Russia (plus China and North Korea) to make Ukraine a bleeding wound for Trump. Cauterising that wound before the hugely consequential midterm elections in the US seems highly problematic.

(M K Bhadrakumar is a former diplomat.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.