If Trump wants to win in the Middle East, he must focus on security, not grand visions

President Trump’s plans for the Middle East are now coming into view, and they appear to be quite grand.

His proposal to take over Gaza indicates he is thinking in transformational terms about the region. Like other presidents before him, Trump is looking at what appear to be propitious conditions on the ground — namely, a strengthened Israel and a seriously weakened Iran and Russia — to craft ambitious initiatives meant to bring peace and order to this conflict-ridden region. Gaza will soon become the “Riviera of the Middle East,” according to Trump.

But it is a big mistake to focus on grand plans for transformation rather than U.S. national security interests. Trump should step away from it, if he’s smart.  

History shows that grand visions for the Middle East almost always come with unintended negative consequences for the U.S. Just look at former President George W. Bush’s democracy agenda and the war in Iraq. A Gaza takeover will look much the same.

With no strategic U.S. interests at stake in Gaza, it will almost certainly turn into a costly disaster for national security. A takeover is likely to fuel an insurgency by Hamas (which reportedly still has 15,000 fighters in Gaza), reinvigorate a now weakened Hezbollah, turn Jordan into a failed state, and ramp up anti-American sentiment across the region, making U.S. forces targets for reprisal. In the end, that will bog the U.S. down more than ever in the Middle East — to the detriment of bigger interests elsewhere, notably Asia. 

Instead of pursuing an agenda centered on transformation, Trump needs to follow his more cautious, realpolitik inclinations and center policy around U.S. national security interests in the Middle East. “It’s their [meaning Israel’s] war, not our war,” Trump rightfully said of Gaza the day after his inauguration. He needs to get back to that, and then build U.S. policy around the three interests — oil, terrorism and avoiding overly burdensome commitments in the Middle East — that matter most to U.S. interests in the region and beyond. 

On the oil and terrorism fronts, there is generally good news for the United States. The U.S. is energy independent today, and with the 2019 collapse of the ISIS caliphate, terrorism is a much-reduced threat to U.S. national security. That should free Trump officials to re-think U.S. military commitments in the Middle East.  

To help ensure stable global oil prices (which is important for the U.S. even with its energy independence), Trump should maintain a naval presence to protect sea lanes for oil in the region. Beyond that, plans should be made to reduce U.S. forces in the Middle East. At the very least, with Israel’s latest success against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, there is space now to draw down the thousands of additional troops sent to the region since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.  

On terrorism, Trump should also shift the burden to others in the region to create space for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and Syria. There is justified concern about a potential ISIS resurgence in the chaos generated in post-Assad Syria, but there is also a great opportunity here for the United States, given that ISIS has few friends in the region and the U.S. can always utilize intelligence and air strikes to manage any legitimate threats to its interests. 

The fall of Assad and reduction of Iranian influence has unfrozen the deadlock in Syrian politics that has kept U.S. forces locked in place in northeastern Syria and at al-Tanf in the east since 2014. All rebel groups, including Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which overthrew Assad, despise ISIS and have no interests in seeing it revived. Now that the dust has settled from Assad’s fall, potential exists to broker an arrangement whereby these forces can work together to manage the remnants of ISIS. That will allow the U.S. to draw down troops and focus attention elsewhere. 

Finally, on the commitment front, Trump needs to be careful, especially in trying to expand the Abraham Accords. Above all else, the president should rethink the grand bargain that his predecessor, Joe Biden, was trying to negotiate between Saudi Arabia and Israel.  

Normalization of Saudi-Israel relations would be nice, but not at the expense of U.S. national security. Biden’s deal would bring no added benefits to U.S. security. It would include, though, a raft of new U.S. commitments — from defense treaties to building a nuclear enrichment facility in Saudi Arabia — that research shows will only fuel conflict in the region. Again, more conflict will further tie the U.S. down in the Middle East, distracting from higher priorities elsewhere in the world. 

Great opportunities often come with great dangers. That’s the case today for Trump in the Middle East. If he wants to have a lasting positive impact on U.S. foreign policy in the region, being prudent rather than grand is the best way to go. And getting there starts by dumping the ill-conceived idea of a Gaza takeover. 

C. William “Will” Walldorf, Jr. is associate professor and Shivley Family Faculty Fellow at Wake Forest University, as well as a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities. He is the author most recently of “To Shape Our World For Good: Master Narratives and Regime Change in U.S. Foreign Policy, 1900-2011.”