What Trump’s cabinet picks say about his Middle East agenda, including a two-state solution: ANALYSIS

So far, President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed nominations and appointments to the highest ranks of government have included no shortage of unconventional and even controversial choices.

But when it comes to the positions that will drive U.S. foreign policy, Trump has made more conventional conservative choices, selecting Republicans with long records of solid support for Israel and hawkish views on U.S. adversaries, including Iran.

As Trump prepares to enter the Oval Office and confront intractable conflicts in the Middle East, ABC News spoke with officials and experts about what the president-elect’s team says about how he will approach the troubled region, and what he hopes to achieve. .

Israel unleashed?

Almost as soon as it became clear that Trump had won back the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shared his congratulations on what he called “the greatest comeback in history.”

In the run-up to the election, Netanyahu made little effort to hide his preference for Trump, believing that while the former president could be capricious, he was likely to give Israel a free hand to manage its national security and prosecute its wars against Hamas and Hamas. Hezbollah, according to US officials.

Now Netanyahu’s bet seems to be paying off.

Trump announced that he had chosen former Arkansas governor and two-time Republican presidential nominee Mike Huckabee to be his ambassador to Israel.

Huckabee, a Baptist minister, has little experience in Middle Eastern politics, but he has made dozens of trips to Israel, including hosting tours of holy sites in the country. He has also made several public comments supporting Israeli expansion into the occupied West Bank, refusing to say that the Palestinian territory is “occupied”.

“There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It is Judea and Samaria,” Huckabee said in 2017, using the Israeli term for the area internationally recognized as the West Bank.

“There is no such thing as a settlement. They are communities. They are neighborhoods. They are cities,” he added.

While Huckabee has insisted “I’m not going to make the policy, I’m going to carry out the president’s policy” as envoy to Israel, some believe his selection indicates that the second Trump administration could end the long American pursuit of a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli – Palestinian conflict.

Khaled Elgindy, the director of the Middle East Institute’s program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute, says he also believes that US support for Israeli annexation of the West Bank and permanent occupation of the Gaza Strip could be “imminent” when Trump takes office.

“If nothing else, under Trump, the United States will continue to provide unlimited weapons to Israel, but without any pretense of concern for civilian life, American law, or international law that prevailed under the Biden administration,” he said.

“Unlike Joe Biden, who occasionally expressed displeasure with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and its behavior in Gaza and the West Bank, the Trump administration is unlikely to object to any Israeli violations on the ground,” Elgindy added.

Trump has also named another champion of Israel, New York GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik, as his pick to be the US ambassador to the United Nations.

In the wake of the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Stefanik has been an outspoken critic of the UN’s handling of the conflict. She also made headlines for taking on college presidents during a congressional investigation into anti-Semitism on college campuses in 2023.

Return by dealer

However, retired US Army Colonel Seth Krummrich, former chief of staff for special operations at US Central Command and vice president of security firm Global Guardian, says that instead of siding with Israel’s hardliners, Trump will move Netanyahu toward the center in pursuit of broader regional agreements with Arab states.

“If he can compromise on a two-state solution, President Trump will be able to create and get exactly what he wants, which is normalized relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia,” he said.

Establishing diplomatic ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia has been the single goal driving the Biden administration’s Middle East policy both before and after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. But in his first term, Trump also worked to integrate Israel with Arab states and ultimately oversaw the brokering of the Abraham Accords, which include bilateral agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Israel and Bahrain.

Krummrich says Trump’s largely like-minded foreign policy cabinet picks, including his nominee for secretary of state, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, will put the incoming administration in a position to capitalize on the relationships created during his first term in the Oval Office . .

“Since he’s reloaded his team this time, he has executors. He doesn’t have debaters,” says Krummrich.

One of the president-elect’s first personnel decisions was to appoint Steve Witkoff, a real estate mogul who was golfing with Trump at Mar-a-Lago when he was the target of an assassination attempt in September.

Like Huckabee, Witkoff is a strong supporter of Israel with limited foreign policy expertise. But while his negotiating experience centers on property sales rather than peace deals, some experts believe an entrepreneurial approach to the region could benefit the incoming administration.

Ibrahim Al-Assil, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, says that while leaders of Arab states are wary of the volatility Trump brings to the geopolitical landscape, they have often responded positively to Trump’s preferred business-like diplomacy.

– Gulf leaders, especially those from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have long appreciated Trump’s direct, transactional approach to foreign policy, Al-Assil said. “They believe they can navigate complex issues with a president who values ​​relationships over bureaucratic norms.”

An isolated Iran

When it comes to Iran, Trump’s first term in office was defined by his “maximum pressure” campaign, as he pulled out of an Obama-era nuclear deal with the country and sought to weaken the regime by increasing sanctions and eliminating Iran’s commander-in-chief. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani.

This time, Trump appears poised to push Iran even harder, lining his cabinet with like-minded Iran hawks like Rubio and his national security adviser pick, Florida GOP Rep. Mike Waltz.

“Trump’s incoming national security team has pledged to ratchet up economic pressure on Tehran once again. His administration is likely to show far less restraint than the Biden administration on Israel’s campaign to degrade Iran and its proxies’ capabilities,” said Suzanne Maloney, vice president and Director of the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.

But she warns that the second Trump administration may have trouble replicating the success of its first sanctions campaign.

“The early success of Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions depended on the willingness of major powers like China to comply; that has long since eroded,” she said, adding that dismantling evasion networks will also pose a challenge.

However, Krummrich says that if Trump’s team can bring Israel and Saudi Arabia together, it will deal a devastating blow to Tehran.

“If Israel and Saudi Arabia adjust and normalize relations, it completely isolates Iran,” he said. “Having the Abraham deal fully realized … it will absolutely change the landscape of the Middle East.”