The Reason Why Trump Is Succeeding In The Middle East And Not Russia

Is that Arabs love his brand-transactional style

Left: the man who runs the country where all but four of the 9/11 hijackers originated. Right: a man who admits he was happy on 9/11. Center: Donald Trump, who ran for president in 2016 on complaints about nonexistent Muslims dancing in New Jersey on 9/11 to exploit fears of Muslim immigration to the United States

Donald Trump is not ideological. He is not natively opposed to Islam, or Arabs, or the Middle East anymore than he was ever really a Mussolini fascist or an admirer of Hitler’s program or a Manchurian candidate, per his most deranged critics. Trump is in fact brand-transactional: he loves gold decorations almost as much as the Arab potentates do. He would love a Trump Tower Dubai. He has praised the new Disney theme park licensing deal in the Emirates. Trump loves power, and wealth, and glamor, and investment. It does not matter whether the profits are real, or a desert mirage. He is still the man who made the most of himself on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous four decades ago.

In the above photo, he is grinning ear to ear while standing between Ahmad Hussein al-Sharaa aka Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the new strongman in Syria, and King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the strongman of Saudi Arabia since 2015. Trump loves strongmen. He does not like war, does not want to own any wars, but he is eager to put his name on peace agreements with strongmen. That is totally on-brand for Trump, formerly the star of his own reality show in which contestants competed at branding. Arabs love Trump. Even Arabs who hate America love Trump. His transactionalism, his brand, are exactly what they love about him.

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The Devil We Are Getting To Know

Israel is clearly the biggest loser from Trump’s big Middle East tour. “I didn’t ask [the Israelis] about that,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “I thought it was the right thing to do. I’ve been given a lot of credit for doing it. Look, we want Syria to succeed.” The Times of Israel notes the recent pattern of Trump cutting Benjamin Netanyahu out of the loop.

Washington negotiated indirectly with Hamas on the release of an American-Israeli captive soldier, resumed nuclear talks with Iran, inked a ceasefire in Yemen that allowed its Iran-backed Houthi rebels to continue targeting Israel, and reportedly dropped normalization with Israel as a condition for Saudi Arabia to advance its civilian nuclear program.

Being pragmatic, Israel has negotiated in secret with the new Syrian regime through talks in Azerbaijan mediated by the United Arab Emirates. But Trump went against Netanyahu’s policy last Wednesday by announcing his intention to drop sanctions on Syria and inviting Sharaa into the Abraham Accords, two moves that the Israeli government had opposed.

Heralding a shift towards a more neutral posture, J.D. Vance canceled a visit to Israel this week when a hostage and ceasefire deal with Hamas fell through. Operation Gideon’s Chariots has even begun with an expression of concern from Trump. “I think a lot of good things are going to happen over the next month, and we’re going to see,” Trump told Reuters. “We have to help also out the Palestinians. You know, a lot of people are starving in Gaza, so we have to look at both sides.” Trump is always looking at the problem. “A lot of people are starving,” he repeated. “A lot of people. There’s a lot of bad things going on.” It was not a condemnation of the IDF, just a careful disambiguation of US policy from Israeli policy. As always, Trump does not want to own the war. He prefers business to war. He yearns to make peace and stamp it with his Trump brand.

After the 37-minute Riyadh meeting with Sharaa, Trump described the Syrian leader as a “young, attractive guy. Tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter,” adding that “I think he has got the potential.” Video from a 2019 PBS Frontline interview re-emerged shortly thereafter in which Sharaa was asked about his immediate reaction to the 9/11 attacks. “Anyone living in the Islamic or Arab world who tells you he wasn’t happy is lying,” Sharaa replied.

As distressing as that reply is, those words are also honest, therefore consistent with a man trying to live down his past as a terrorist. The “Global War on Terror” was conceived as a “Long War,” and its Arab Spring sequels might as well be considered part of the 9/11 aftermath; peacemaking in that conflict zone was always going to involve former fighters becoming potentates, but it was never possible to imagine George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden signing a peace treaty with a former terrorist. Trump has no real, deep, or meaningful attachments to the past the way that establishment men do. He is happy to shake hands with Sharaa.

Trump told reporters that Sharaa and King Salman had prevailed upon him to drop US sanctions on Syria because the country deserves “a chance at greatness.” Trump was “standing by Syria at this critical juncture,” according to the Syrian foreign ministry. “Gulf states have been keen to invest in Syria and prop up its economy but have been wary of violating US sanctions,” CNN explains. “Trump’s move is likely to remove such barriers, making way for potentially billions of dollars in investments.” Talk of money and trade is Trump’s catnip. Trump just appointed one of his best friends, investment king Thomas Barrack, to be his special envoy to Syria.

Of course, sanctions will be more difficult to unwind than a simple wave of Trump’s hand. For example, he has demanded that foreign fighters be expelled from Syria first, whereas Sharaa seems intent on incorporating them into regular military division as naturalized Syrians. Then there is Congress, which must repeal its own Caesar Act of 2019. A thicket of sanctions was created to limit the Assad regime, so a little care and consideration is necessary to untangle the deliberate mess. All of this must happen in a country that is still fighting its own Islamic State insurgency. Trump wants Syria to let Americans into Syria to deal with ISIS whenever they want, but he also wants to withdraw American troops from Syrian bases.

But these are petty details. Trump had tea with two Arab leaders and made his announcement, so this will be enough, from his own perspective. He repeated himself the next day at the US-Saudi Investment Forum. “I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness,” he said. “In Syria, which has seen so much misery and death, there is a new government that will hopefully succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace. That’s what we want to see.” His audience applauded.

Forget the hyper-partisan American context. It turns out that many Arabs see Trump as an aspirational figure, though of course the New York Times prefers the most controversial ‘man on the street’ story quotes. How else to explain the strange synergy of Trump-Arab haggling?

“From way back, I feel like he gets us,” said Fahad al-Yafei, 30, a gold salesman in Riyadh’s bustling Taibah market. “There’s affection.”

Mr. Al-Yafei said he approved of Mr. Trump’s Middle East policy, including the removal of sanctions on Syria and his rhetoric about ending wars. But he also liked his domestic policy, citing what he believed were shared values.

“The best thing he did is he stopped homosexuals,” he said.

[…]

Nawaf al-Omar, 21, said that as much as Saudi Arabia had changed over the past eight years, so had Mr. Trump.

Before, he said, “he was really racist.” But now “I think he knows his interests,” he added, explaining that he thought the president’s Middle East policy was much better in his second term.

Trump inked an economic deal with King Salman that includes nuclear electric generation. “Notably, the Trump administration is no longer requiring Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel as a precondition for advancing these nuclear talks — a significant shift from previous US policy under President Joe Biden, when nuclear cooperation was tied to progress on Israeli normalization.”

Regional neighbors are excited. Iran, which has proposed a uranium enrichment consortium with the Saudis and the Emirates, is the silent winner, here. Turkey also wins from the refresh of American policy in Syria as well as the withdrawal of American support from the Kurds. Whereas Trump’s hopes for peace between Russia and Ukraine have faded, his hopes for regional peace in the Middle East are growing. His style of brand-transactionalism simply works much better with carpet salesmen than Kremlin spooks.

America’s other regional security partners are also very excited by Trump’s diplomatic style. “For Gulf rulers, Trump offers something his predecessors didn't: fewer lectures, more arms deals and a direct line to U.S. power insulated from Congress.” He wants the Gulf states to have the cutting-edge microchips that power AI advances, raising security concerns about Chinese access.

Trump gets along with Arabs so well that some of his most avid supporters objected to his acceptance of a lavish Boeing 747 gifted by Qatar. Never one to back down, Trump defended his decision to Sean Hannity. “Now, some people say, ‘oh, you shouldn't accept gifts for the country.’ My attitude is, why wouldn't I accept the gift? We’re giving to everybody else? Why wouldn't I accept the gift?” Regardless of the rationalization, accepting such a gift from Arabs is a culturally-sensitive act. Trump has honored the Qataris by accepting their gift. It would have been a humiliation to refuse.

Once again applying our rule that Trump is serious rather than literal, there is no reason to expect that this airplane will ever fly with an American president inside, much less Donald Trump. L3Harris, the contractor involved in the deal, is the best in the world at that business, but security experts say it would still be a nightmare to convert into a properly presidential airborne platform. If this particular plane ended up in a southwestern boneyard, however, it would not impact Trump’s relationship with the Qatari royal family in the slightest. They do not give a damn about what happens to that airplane. They only care that Trump accepted the gift.

All of this stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s frustrated peacemaking with Vladimir Putin. Trump seems to accept now that his interlocutor is not interested in any kind of peace while he believes himself to be winning. This outcome was inevitable, for Putin is not interested in a transaction.

Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine because Russians keenly feel the decline of their great power status. The goal of Russia’s war against Ukraine is the restoration of Russian greatness through palingenesis: millions of dead Russians is greatness, in Putin’s Russia, and this sacred project is not for sale at any price. Ideology rules Russian behavior, whereas the Arab states, Turkey, and perhaps now Iran are all capable of transactional relationships with Donald Trump. Always bilateral, he does not consult the Israelis. He makes the deal on his own, with a handshake, in the ancient way of the bazaar and the souq. The Arabs love it.