Trump's Middle East Policy: Pull Troops Out of Syria To Put Them in Gaza?
The president says he wants peace in the Middle East. But his plans are all over the place.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) has finally found a war he doesn't like. During a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump said that "the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip" and send troops "if it's necessary." Graham, who's been a consistent advocate of U.S. military intervention overseas, told CNN that "most South Carolinians would probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza."
A few hours later, NBC News reported that the U.S. Department of Defense was drawing up plans to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, where the United States has around 2,000 troops deployed to fight the Islamic State group. Trump told reporters last month, "We're not involved in Syria. Syria is in its own mess. They've got enough messes over there. They don't need us involved."
It's a strange, confusing beginning to the second Trump administration. While planning to get out of one conflict in the Middle East, the president is talking about sending American forces into a much larger adventure next door. Trump, who won his first election by crushing the architects of the Iraq War within the Republican Party, would be launching the first hostile U.S. occupation of an Arab country since then. Even pro-Israel hawks have been taken aback.
"Obviously it's not going to happen. I don't know under what circumstance it would make sense even, even for Israel," Sen. Thom Tillis (R–N.C.) told reporters. "Now, if Israel is asking for the United States to come in and provide some assistance to ensure that Hamas can never do again what they did, I'm in. But us taking over seems like a bit of a stretch."
Although he began his term by securing an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire that the Biden administration could not or would not broker, Trump inherits the same dilemmas that former President Joe Biden faced. The U.S. presence in the Middle East is still oriented—to crib from the famous saying about NATO—to keep the Iranians out, the Israelis in, and the Arabs down.
The ultimate vision, which Democrats and Republicans share, is a U.S.-backed grand alliance between Israel and Arab monarchies, with Saudi Arabia as the centerpiece. However, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman is demanding a solution to the Palestinian issue before tying his fate to an Israeli alliance. And Iran, feeling cornered, is reportedly exploring its options for building a nuclear weapon.
Within the Trump administration itself, there's a strange mix of doves and restrainers who want to draw down from the Middle East and ultrahawks who want to come back with a vengeance to the wars of the past two decades. And American voters want less U.S. involvement in the world, but they don't like feeling like they retreated in weakness, as the political aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan shows.
Trump is a master of being all things to all people. He's good at theatrics and spinning compromise as total victory. Earlier this week, he threatened Canada with annexation, then backed down after the Canadian government announced a border security plan it had already decided on last year.
On Tuesday, an anonymous Trump administration official briefed Reuters that Trump was going to order a new "maximum economic pressure" campaign aimed at rolling back "Iran's malign influence." Later that day, Trump signed a presidential memo that mostly asks the U.S. Treasury to enforce existing sanctions.
"I'm going to sign it, but hopefully we're not going to have to use it much. We're going to see if we can arrange or work out a deal with Iran, and everybody can live together," the president said. "And maybe that's possible, and maybe that's not possible. So I'm signing this, and I'm unhappy to do it, but I really have not much choice, because we have to be strong and firm."
In this case, the message seems to be received. After calling maximum pressure a "failed experiment," Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told reporters on Wednesday that "if the real issue is that Iran can't pursue nuclear weapons, this is doable, this is not really a problem."
Sen. John Hoeven (R–N.D.) suggested that Trump's threat to take over Gaza could also be a negotiating tactic. Trump framed a U.S. occupation of Gaza as a win-win opportunity for "economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area."
But the U.S. is facing real tradeoffs and obstacles in the Middle East that bluster can't paper over. Trump said that Palestinians "can't go back" to Gaza and will have to leave for "other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts." Although many Israelis are fans of the plan, believing that Gaza is ungovernable, Palestinians themselves do not want to go along with it.
"If the United States deploys troops to forcibly remove Muslims and Christians—like my cousins—from Gaza, then not only will the U.S. be mired in another reckless occupation but it will also be guilty of the crime of ethnic cleansing. No American of good conscience should stand for this," former Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash wrote on X.
Hamas has vowed to fight any foreign occupation of Gaza, and Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said after the Trump-Netanyahu meeting that "such ideas are capable of igniting the region." Apart from starting the violence in Gaza itself, and putting U.S. troops in the line of fire, trying to evict Palestinians could ignite conflict with other neighboring countries.
Ahead of Trump's meeting with Netanyahu, six Arab nations and the Arab League issued a joint statement rejecting any attempt to seize Palestinians' land or remove them from it. Sources in Jordan, one of the countries where Trump wants to send Palestinians, told the Middle East Eye after the meeting that the kingdom is prepared to go to war with Israel over the issue.
The situation in Syria is somewhat more complicated. The U.S. military is embedded with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a coalition that is led by Kurdish rebels and includes other ethnicities. Turkey, another U.S. ally, has a history of fighting Kurdish guerrillas and considers the SDF to be a terrorist group.
The last time Trump withdrew U.S. forces from Syria, in October 2019, Turkey took it as a green light to invade Syria and attack the SDF. And the U.S. military ended up staying in Syria anyways, in order to keep its oil fields out of Russian hands and maintain pressure on Iranian supply lines.
The situation is different now. The Syrian civil war has ended, with Iranian forces evicted from the country and Russia on the way out. Syria's new leadership is optimistic that it can reintegrate the SDF into the Syrian state. Across the border, the Turkish government is engaged in serious peace talks with Kurdish parties. Although there's no guarantee of success, and the war could reignite at any time, there's also a real prospect of the U.S. leaving Syria in peace.
Trump could get the United States out of the region, allow its conflicts to resolve themselves, and let Americans feel like they've gotten a win-win deal. But he runs the risk of overplaying his hand if he really believes that everyone can have their cake and eat it too.
