America Has a Historic Opportunity in the Middle East . Trump Has Leverage, but He Must Use It Wisely

By Philip H. Gordon

For decades, the Middle East has been the region where diplomatic aspirations go to die. At least since U.S. President George H. W. Bush left office on the heels of the Gulf War, successive U.S. presidents have, often after fleeting periods of hope, ended up leaving the region in a more perilous state than they found it.Bill Clinton had high hopes for a historic Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement; he got the parties close at Camp David in 2000, only to see his presidency end with the collapse of talks and the beginning of the deadly second intifada. After the 9/11 attacks on the United States, George W. Bush successfully toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in the name of “transforming” the region, only to see that project become a quagmire that killed thousands of Americans and empowered Iran. Barack Obama sought to seize the opportunity of the Arab Spring, in 2011; although he negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran, his aspirations for democratization and regional cooperation were undermined by a bloody coup in Egypt, the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq, and the outbreak of a devastating civil war in Syria. In his first term, Donald Trump hoped that pulling out of Obama’s nuclear deal and killing Iran’s terrorist leader Qasem Soleimani would reduce the Iranian threat, but when he left office, in 2017, Iran was expanding its nuclear program and using proxies to attack U.S. troops, as well as its own neighbors. And most recently, Joe Biden, with past failures in mind, eschewed grand aspirations and focused on delivering stability to the region, only to see his final year in office consumed with the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks on Israel and the horrors of the war in Gaza that followed.With such a history, it might seem foolish to imagine that the Middle East today could prove to be anything other than a source of trouble for a new U.S. president. If anything, the past 30 years have proved that the Middle East is impossible to ignore, never fails to surprise, and that however bad the situation seems, it can always get worse. Yet for all the region’s real troubles and risks, Trump is in fact inheriting a series of opportunities. And in some ways, he may be well situated to take advantage of them—something I acknowledge even as a harsh Trump critic and former national security adviser to U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. Along with the new strategic landscape he inherited, Trump’s unpredictable nature could give him leverage with Iran, Israel, and the Gulf states, among others. And he could potentially sell policies to Congress—such as a nuclear deal with Iran—that a Democratic president never could.Trump is, of course, also uniquely capable of exacerbating the region’s problems, and he has already done so by deciding to cut vital U.S. assistance to the region and by calling for the United States to depopulate and take over Gaza. The fate of the Middle East over the next four years will depend in large part on whether Trump manages to take advantage of these strategic opportunities or instead squanders them with his reckless impulses.

A NEW DEAL

The first opportunity Trump has inherited is with Iran, which has for decades been at the heart of the Middle East’s problems. Today, Tehran is weaker, and likely more susceptible to leverage, than it has been since the Iranian Revolution, in 1979. Two of the country’s main terrorist proxies—Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza—have been decimated militarily. Its ballistic missile fleet, long a second line of deterrence alongside those proxies, has proved ineffective against Israeli air defenses that are backed by U.S. and other regional forces. Syria, Iran’s main regional partner, is now run not by Iranian ally Bashar al-Assad but by an anti-Iranian coalition that has deprived Tehran of its land bridge to Lebanon. Iran’s own air defenses proved so inefficient against Israeli airstrikes in the fall of 2024 that Iran felt too vulnerable to even try to respond. And the Iranian economy, wrecked by years of mismanagement, U.S. and international sanctions, and a period of low oil prices, is under tremendous strain—hardly the basis for addressing new gaps in its deterrence and defense capabilities.Under these new circumstances, it is not surprising that Iranian leaders have begun to signal openness to a new nuclear deal, because the alternatives to such a deal for Iran are worse than ever. President Masoud Pezeshkian was elected in 2024 on a platform of improving the economy, and the only conceivable way of achieving that objective is striking a diplomatic deal with the United States and gaining sanctions relief. Although Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a hard-liner and longtime skeptic of talks, remains the final decision-maker, even he knows that Iran’s ability to deter military strikes on its nuclear program or energy infrastructure—which relies on proxies, ballistic missile strikes against Israel, and domestic air defense—has been dramatically reduced. The leaders also know that the willingness of the United States and Israel to undertake offensive strikes has increased under an emboldened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and an unpredictable Trump.Trump has signaled his own interest in a deal, and the new strategic landscape could lead Iran to put far more on the table than previously imagined. Concessions that were never realistic in the past but might be today include strict caps on levels of nuclear enrichment, conditions without expiration dates, limits on ballistic missiles, and even limits on Iranian regional interference (since Iran’s proxies have been so weakened anyway). A new deal could even prevent a domestic Iranian uranium-enrichment program by allowing Iran to access an international fuel bank; such a setup would allow Tehran to claim to have preserved its right to benefit from civil nuclear-energy production and also permit Trump and the Israeli government to say that they denied Iran control over enrichment.Even amid the new strategic circumstances, there will be limits on Iran’s concessions, and Trump could easily overreach—or even pursue regime change in Tehran. But the attraction of a deal that verifiably prevents Iran from developing a nuclear weapon and limits its regional influence should be obvious, and the combination of Iran’s vulnerability and the United States’ increasingly credible threat of the use of force makes it more realistic than ever before. If Trump managed to negotiate such an agreement, he could gloat about getting a “better deal” than Obama and sell that deal to Congress.

WAR AND PEACE

Trump’s second opportunity in the region is to end the war in Gaza—the greatest setback to peace and stability in the region since the Iraq war—and to start the long process of stabilizing the “day after.” Since Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent response, the situation in Gaza has been an unfathomable tragedy. But the cease-fire and hostage deal reached between Hamas and Israel on January 15, after many months of failed efforts and with assistance from the incoming Trump team, provides a potential path to finally end the war. After 15 months of unprecedented devastation and suffering, Israel suspended major military operations, Hamas began to release hostages, and Gazans began to return to their neighborhoods.The first phase of the cease-fire is limited in time and scope, and it is far from guaranteed that it will last. Getting to a second phase will require even more difficult decisions on hostage releases (including Israeli soldiers), Israeli prisoner releases (including more terrorists), and ultimately on the fate of Hamas. At the same time, the images of the emaciated Israeli hostages released on February 8 were a stark reminder to Israel of the urgency of an agreement on the second phase, before more hostages die. Hamas must likewise realize that the end of the agreement would not end well for the organization. Trump has threatened Hamas with “hell” if it rejects a deal, and the group knows that its “cavalry,” Hezbollah and Iran, will not arrive—a main reason it agreed to the cease-fire and hostage deal in the first place.If Trump can help extend the deal between Hamas and Israel, or even prevent renewed fighting, he will have an opportunity to begin putting in place the building blocks for at least a modicum of stability in Gaza and the West Bank and, in the long run, for his long-coveted “normalization” agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the extension of the Abraham Accords that he negotiated in his first term. That historic vision would require not just an end to the war in Gaza but also an Israeli commitment to a pathway to a Palestinian state. Such a commitment is certainly hard to imagine under the current Israeli government, but it is perhaps not inconceivable under pressure from Trump, who would be uniquely well placed to influence Israel, especially if he saw doing so as a path to a Nobel Peace Prize.There are also more realistic, limited goals that Trump should be well placed to advance if he is willing: demanding genuine reform of the Palestinian Authority as the 89-year-old President Mahmoud Abbas leaves the scene; persuading Israel to accept a role for the PA in Gaza’s postwar governance, which the remnants of Hamas might tolerate as an alternative to further decimation; and persuading Arab Gulf states, which are keen to stay on good terms with the administration, to provide political support, reconstruction funds, and potentially security forces to support a peace agreement. The problems and challenges would remain enormous even with such progress, but they would pale in comparison with the destruction, divisions, and suffering that preceded the cease-fire deal. And Trump would get, and deserve, credit.

LOOKING TO LEBANON

Trump has also inherited opportunities in Lebanon, whose prospects seemed grim even before the Israel-Hamas war but got manifestly worse when Israel turned its forces on Hezbollah, leading to thousands of casualties and tens of thousands of displaced civilians. Lebanon has for decades suffered under the grip of Hezbollah and, since 2011, has been flooded with over a million refugees from the war in Syria. But with Hezbollah’s weakening, the country finally has a chance to free itself from Iran’s grip and to establish a more functional and sovereign state.That chance stems from the tremendous losses Hezbollah has suffered since it made the mistake of going to war with Israel following the October 7 attacks. Although some in Israel advocated launching a major military operation against Hezbollah from the start, Netanyahu initially held off, in part because of pressure from the Biden administration to avoid regional escalation. But as continued Hezbollah attacks in northern Israel prevented tens of thousands of Israeli evacuees from returning to their homes, Israel lost patience. In the last months of 2024, escalating Israeli military strikes on Hezbollah—including pager attacks that disabled thousands of fighters; assassinations of Hezbollah’s officials, including its top leader, Hassan Nasrallah; and relentless airstrikes against Hezbollah military infrastructure—gradually decimated the organization politically and militarily. By November 2024, fearing further losses and seeing that Iran was in no position to come to its defense, Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire with Israel that omitted its previous precondition to end the war in Gaza, required the group to withdraw its forces to north of the Litani River, and allowed thousands of Lebanese armed forces to deploy to a buffer zone in the south. The deal also paved the way for a breakthrough in Lebanese politics, with the selection of a new president, the former army commander Joseph Aoun, and prime minister, the respected jurist Nawaf Salam, both of whom are committed to improving governance and ensuring the independence of the Lebanese state.Hezbollah will still exert significant influence over Lebanese politics, but its influence has been greatly reduced. The Lebanese people are fed up with the results of Hezbollah’s leadership. Iran’s ability to resupply Hezbollah has been severely set back by its loss of Syria, and the new Lebanese government could win the international political, economic, and military support it needs to succeed—including from the United States. If Trump can overcome his instincts against foreign assistance, he has an opportunity to help provide the Lebanese government and military with the means and confidence to further sideline Hezbollah and reduce the influence of Iran.

A NEW SYRIA

Finally, and most stunningly, comes an opportunity in Syria, which has been perhaps the most destabilized and destabilizing region of the Middle East for the past 15 years. After years of trying to isolate and even oust Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, by 2020 the United States and many of its Arab and European allies had mostly moved on, accepting the grim reality of Assad’s enduring rule. But with the world’s attention rightly focused on the situation in Gaza, and with Iran and Russia weakened by their respective conflicts with Israel and Ukraine, Assad’s opposition, led by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, seized the opportunity to act. It was not a coincidence that HTS and its allies launched their military offensive immediately after Hezbollah’s cease-fire agreement with Israel, which ensured the Lebanese group would not come to Assad’s rescue as it did in 2011, when he had last been on the ropes.Perhaps equally surprisingly, HTS, which is still designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, professed and even began to act on a commitment to ensure human rights and respect for minorities and to distance itself from its terrorist past. Suddenly, the Syrian regime that had been Iran’s main ally in the Middle East, a conduit for arms to Hezbollah, the host to Russian military forces and naval bases, a major exporter of narcotics, and a supporter of Islamist terrorism was gone, and an opportunity to shape new Syria took its place. The new president, Ahmed al-Shara, will still have to prove his commitment to that better Syria, but as recently as three months ago, the idea that Trump would inherit the opportunity to support such a Syria would have sounded like nothing but a dream.U.S. policy will not be the main variable that determines success or failure in Syria, but Washington can make a difference. Trump could, for example, lift U.S. terrorist designations in exchange for good governance and cooperation on counterterrorism objectives, including a negotiated U.S. military presence in the northeast to help prevent an Islamic State resurgence. He could also lift broader sanctions and provide economic assistance if Syria agreed to deny Russian access to naval bases, and he could help the country find supplies of grain and oil to replace lost Russian and Iranian sources. Trump could also use U.S. leverage with Turkey and with Washington’s Syrian-Kurdish partners to ultimately broker a political agreement among them and the new regime in Damascus. These are opportunities that the United States has not had in decades, and Trump should seize them.

SEIZING THE MOMENT

No one should underestimate the challenges and risks that continue to loom throughout the Middle East. Weak and ineffective governments; deep religious, ethnic, and interstate rivalries; and a multiplicity of bad actors—on top of the consequences of a terrible war in Gaza that may well not be over yet—will continue to conspire against progress toward peace and stability. At the same time, it would be a tragic mistake to ignore the historic opportunities the new strategic landscape presents, all of which would have seemed far-fetched only a year or even a few months ago.Trump would no doubt like nothing more than to succeed where so many of his predecessors have failed. Anyone who cares about the region should hope that he does.