Trump’s Mideast team: A familiar look for a transformed region

When President-elect Donald Trump named a Middle East team for his second term, it struck some as a bit of déjà vu.

The team includes a real estate mogul with no diplomatic experience, a conservative religious leader who views Israel in messianic terms, and an Israel hawk relishing the prospect of taking on the international community.

“What strikes me about this team is the mirroring” and how “the people he’s chosen are reminiscent of the people he put in the same positions in the first term,” says Michael Koplow, chief policy officer with the Israel Policy Forum in Washington.

“It suggests he liked what he got out of the first team,” he adds, “and wants the same, only more and bigger, from this one.”

Just as Mr. Trump has moved with lightning speed to name his picks for the top positions in the incoming Cabinet, he also lost no time in forming a Middle East team. According to his own pronouncements, the new group will be tasked with ending the region’s wars – within a context of unlimited support for Israel – and building on the landmark Abraham Accords initiated in his first term.

Those accords established diplomatic relations between Israel and some Gulf States, and set off a flurry of economic and cultural exchanges further normalizing the Jewish state’s existence among its Arab neighbors.

The team is also expected to play a key role in paving the way for Mr. Trump to achieve what in his circles is known to be the über dealmaker’s ultimate goal: the Nobel Peace Prize. Though critics of the proposed team note it is unlikely to work toward a Palestinian state.

A quickly changing region

Just what regional context the new team will inherit on Jan. 20 remains to be seen. On Tuesday, Israel and Lebanon accepted a U.S.-brokered deal for a ceasefire with Hezbollah, and it went into effect early Wednesday.

In White House comments, President Joe Biden said the deal would allow his Middle East team to turn back to securing an elusive ceasefire deal in Gaza.

With their eyes instead on January, some staunch Israel supporters are already calling the cast of Middle East aides whom Mr. Trump has assembled the “Dream Team 2.0.” It includes new Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, a Jewish, Bronx-born real estate developer and Trump golf buddy; former Arkansas governor and Christian evangelist Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel; and hard-line Trump loyalist and Israel defender Rep. Elise Stefanik as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Mr. Witkoff will assume the post filled by Jason Greenblatt, a Trump Organization lawyer and chief adviser on Israel in the first Trump White House. As U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mr. Huckabee, who faces Senate confirmation, would follow Mr. Trump’s lawyer-friend David Friedman.

Ms. Stefanik, the New York Republican who ferociously defended President Trump against House impeachment proceedings, is a frequent U.N. basher. That makes her reminiscent of Mr. Trump’s first U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, who famously announced upon her arrival in New York that “there’s a new sheriff in town.”

Perhaps even more than with the original Middle East team, everyone in the new one is known for intense loyalty to President-elect Trump. And much like the original team, no one has anything in the way of traditional diplomatic experience – favoring instead a transactional approach to international relations.

Which appears to be exactly what Mr. Trump was aiming for.

Nominated for secretary of state is Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who is winning accolades including from Democratic Senate colleagues as highly qualified for the job. But Mr. Rubio, a China hawk, is most likely to be focused on the Asia portfolio and reaching some settlement to the war in Ukraine, some experts say.

In the eyes of some regional analysts, the new Middle East team is already flashing a bright green light to Israel in terms of its pursuit of the war in Gaza and its expansionist policies in the occupied West Bank.

What of the two-state solution?

One of the key innovations of Team 1.0 was to sideline the pursuit of a two-state solution with Palestinians as a requisite part of any regional peace effort. Team 2.0 is likely to follow that approach, only on steroids, some experts say.

“What these appointments tell me is that there is not going to be even the pretense of a negotiated two-state solution” resulting in a Palestinian state alongside Israel, says Khaled Elgindy, director of the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “These people are hard-core annexationists, very much on board with the messianic extremists of the Israeli government.”

Indeed, Mr. Huckabee has said there is “no such thing” as the Palestinian people, and uses the biblical names “Judea and Samaria” to refer to the West Bank.

Moreover, he says the term “settlements” – used by international institutions to describe what much of the world considers to be illegal outposts on Palestinian lands – is a misnomer for what are simply Israeli towns and cities.

As for the war in Gaza, Mr. Elgindy says the “only way” to end it is to put meaningful pressure on Israel to draw it down.

But “Israel does not intend to leave Gaza, and northern Gaza is not going to be populated by Palestinians any longer,” he says, “and none of that is anything a new Trump administration is going to stop.”

Israel may face pushback from some European countries and others in the international community. But the fiery responses from some ardent Trump supporters to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over the war in Gaza suggest how far the new administration will go to protect Israel.

“You can expect a strong response to the anti-Semitic bias of the ICC & UN come January,” Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, Mr. Trump’s pick to be his national security adviser, posted on the social platform X.

Yet even if the new Middle East team resembles the version that once advanced key elements of Mr. Trump’s regional vision, a different context this time around could hinder further progress, some analysts say.

Most important are two major differences from the first Trump term, says Mr. Koplow: This time there is no strong team leader, and the new team starts off with a region deeply shaken by the war in Gaza and the fissures it has left between Israel and its Gulf and Arab neighbors.

“Last time it was understood that Jared Kushner was the centralizing power driving Israeli-Palestinian policy,” Mr. Koplow says of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law. “This team doesn’t have that central driver,” he adds, “so instead there will be competing power centers.”

A Saudi “wild card”?

A plus for the new team is that the Abraham Accords hammered out by Team 1.0 already exist and presumably could be built upon to attain the big prize: an agreement normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The complicating factor there, however, is the war in Gaza and Israel’s stepped-up operations in the West Bank.

“There will not be any normalization with Saudi Arabia until the fighting in Gaza stops,” Mr. Koplow says, “and it won’t happen if the Israelis are getting a green light [from the U.S.] to annex the West Bank or Gaza.”

Indeed, Saudi Arabia may very well be the “wild card” that could “fundamentally alter Trump’s perspective on the region and how his administration should deal with it,” Mr. Elgindy says.

In other words, the incoming Middle East team may start out by eschewing any pressure on Israel to exit Gaza or accept a two-state solution with Palestinians. But in the end, it may be Mr. Trump’s overriding desire to go down in history as the ultimate dealmaker – and peacemaker – that determines his Middle East team’s direction.