Richard Hanania is president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, which funds policy research. His Substack newsletter is at richardhanania.com.
President Trump has been disastrous for America’s relationships with many of its allies across the globe. Yet he has been successful in the area of the world that most befuddled previous presidents: the Middle East.
This was demonstrated once again last week, when Trump welcomed President Ahmed al-Sharaa of Syria to the White House and announced that he would be brought into the coalition fighting the Islamic State.
The reason the president has succeeded in the Arab world is unlikely to satisfy his biggest fans or most virulent critics. His achievements are due to traits that are considered major character flaws in other contexts.
Before late 2020, the only Arab countries that had normal diplomatic ties with Israel were Jordan and Egypt. With the Abraham Accords at the end of his first term, Trump helped broker the same with three more, a feat that foreign policy experts had argued was not possible without movement on the Palestinian issue.
More recently, the cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas was the direct result of Trump administration pressure. It’s also easy to forget that Trump, unlike other recent presidents, has avoided both quagmires in which large numbers of American troops were killed, as in Iraq, and interventions that led to civil war, as in Libya.
Trump seems to be so well suited to succeed in the Middle East even while he is increasing tensions with other nations because in this region his views provide an accurate model of the world.
Trump sees the world in zero-sum terms: He says a trade deficit implies that one nation is making money off the other. Or that some national leaders are respected and others are not so it is important not to be seen as weak. Trump also believes that wars are kind of stupid, and if we could just calm down and stop fighting, we could all make deals and get along. This plays into his personal corruption. Wars, sanctions, and conflicts stand in the way of not just the country being able to profit but him personally.
This is a terrible way to approach politics between First World allies. Western countries have foreign policies that are driven by the assumptions and intellectual commitments of a class of experts and bureaucrats who genuinely believe that global cooperation is both possible and important. History shows that positive-sum relationships are indeed possible and that when nations pursue their narrow self-interest and seek to bully and dominate others, the result is economic crises and war.
Although it has become unfashionable to praise the global order built after the Second World War, which is reflected in institutions such as the EU, the World Trade Organization, and NATO, it has undeniable accomplishments to its credit, including the global reduction of tariffs and the lack of direct great power wars since 1945.
Hence when Trump muses about annexing Canada or says that the European Union was created to rip America off, it is both shocking to other countries and self-defeating. The main Trump innovation in our relationship with allies has been trade wars, and although from the Trumpian perspective we may have gotten the better of Canada and the Europeans, all of us are going to be worse off in the end. The Trump administration has now been scrambling to enact exemptions from his tariffs because they’ve created a political headache by making life more expensive for Americans.
In contrast, a largely zero-sum worldview — in which deals are possible, there are enemies out there to be crushed, and relationships between nations depend on the relationships between individual leaders — makes a lot more sense in the Middle East. Some nations and movements, like the Islamic State and to a lesser extent Iran, are naturally hostile toward America and are best dealt with through force or the threat of it. In the Gulf states, it is the individual wills of monarchs that matter, and royal families seem more than glad to give Trump a private jet or work out crypto deals with his children in order to advance foreign policy goals. Both the Abraham Accords and the Gaza cease-fire came about because Trump bypassed the foreign policy establishment and allowed his son-in-law Jared Kushner to take the lead in negotiating agreements, and Kushner has proved more than up to the tasks.
While idealism succeeded in establishing a rules-based international order that applies across the First World, too much idealism has arguably been our problem in the Middle East. President George W. Bush, after the embarrassment of his failure to find Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, kept us for years in Iraq on the theory that we could force-feed democracy to that nation, regardless of the local cultural and historical circumstances. In Libya, President Barack Obama was confident that the US military could help overthrow a dictator and then simply hoped that a more humane and representative regime would emerge. The result has been over a decade of intermittent civil war. We would pressure and sometimes shun countries based on human rights concerns, which many times made diplomacy more difficult without having its intended effect.
Al-Sharaa’s visit to Washington once again demonstrates the strength of Trump’s approach.
The United States had piled up years of sanctions on the Syrian government due to the behavior of the Assad regime. When it was overthrown in late 2024, the justification for the old policy no longer made sense. Al-Sharaa has been saying all of the right things about pluralism, democratic representation, and living in peace with other countries. While there are Islamist elements in his government and some forces nominally under its control have committed human rights abuses, we have every indication that he himself is trying to move his country in a positive direction. This has led many to argue that the United States should push for a positive working relationship with the new Syria.
Under previous presidents, the inertia of the old sanctions regime would have likely prevented the United States from moving forward to help al-Sharaa, and cautious norms around diplomacy would not have allowed for his government to develop ties with Washington. Trump does not care about the old way of doing things and has therefore been able to create a new partner in the Middle East.
In the end, Trump’s Middle East achievements are less a testament to a coherent grand strategy than to a worldview that happens to fit the political realities of that region far better than it does those of traditional American allies.