What Trump's win means for the Middle East
A few quick thoughts on what we're looking at. It's ugly.
This is a sad day for America and the world. Like most of us, I’m still processing Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris last night. It’s not just that he won — it’s the wholesale shift to the right seen almost everywhere after the most extreme right wing campaign in American history. With the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court behind him, and his near certain escape from all of the lawsuits against him, there is a near complete absence of any checks on his power. His campaign was very clear about its agenda, and the capitulation of leading newspapers and the ‘neutrality’ of our higher education leadership leads me to expect that his administration will move quickly to implement those extreme policies with little resistance.
I’ll leave it to others to talk about the domestic politics of it all. This wasn’t a foreign policy election, but it seems pretty clear to me that Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza demobilized a significant segment of youth (not just Arab Americans) and Harris refused to do even the bare minimum to win them back. I don’t think that the Arab Americans who voted for Stein or Trump in order to send a message to the Democratic Party over Gaza tipped an election where virtually the entire country shifted to the right. I disagreed with the call to vote against Harris, but nobody should blame people whose families and communities are being slaughtered with Biden’s active support for voting their conscience over genocide, and nobody should be punished for their advocacy or political expression. But now the bill will come due. They got what they said they wanted, but nobody on the Democratic side is going to learn the lesson they hoped to send and the Republicans who despise them and everything they stand for are not going to respond to their demands. They will need to own the consequences of their choices for American policy towards Palestine and the region, for the migrants Trump plans to deport, and for the repression of advocacy for Palestine which is about to hit.
Here, I wanted to offer three quick thoughts on what a second Trump administration probably means for the Middle East and for the Middle East Academy.
One: While Trump’s taking office has massive implications for American domestic politics and the future of its democracy, and likely signals the end of Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion — and, quite possibly, an American withdrawal from NATO, its immediate impacts on the Middle East will likely be relatively muted. That’s not because Trump doesn’t have a whole range of terrible policies in the Middle East — it’s because Biden’s Middle East policy looked almost exactly like Trump’s. It isn’t just Biden’s total political support and massive arms supplies for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which should be an eternal shame and professionally disqualifying for everyone involved (but probably won’t be). Biden stood by as Israel escalated its destruction of Lebanon and steadily ratcheted up military conflict with Iran. His team will say that they constantly tried to influence Israel’s war, pushing it to minimize civilian casualties or to avoid extreme escalation against Iran, but Israel routinely ignored that American pressure and he refused to exert any real leverage to compel them to change. Even before Gaza, Biden opted against any effort to return to negotiations towards a two state solution, or even to get Israel to restrain its rampaging West Bank settlers; mostly, it just ignored Palestine.
What’s more, Biden failed to revitalize the nuclear agreement with Iran, slow rolling a return to negotiations in the name of leverage long enough to guarantee that Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA would stand. Biden embraced Trump’s Abraham Accords, based on the premise of Arab-Israeli normalization without dealing with the Palestinian issue, and made the pursuit of a deal with Saudi Arabia pretty much the administration’s only policy goal in the entire region. After promising to get tough with Saudi Arabia on human rights, Biden reversed course and - like Trump - completely ignored human rights and democratization in the Middle East. It’s a dismal record, one with which Trump’s extreme right win team will find sadly little to quibble. That’s a real fucking legacy to leave.
Two: Biden’s horrid Middle East policy doesn’t mean that Trump won’t change anything. Full war with Iran has become more likely, as has an Iranian decision to accelerate towards a nuclear weapon. But the biggest impact will be on Palestine. Trump’s ongoing conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu and every comment he made on the campaign trail made it clear that Trump plans to not just green light whatever Israel wants to do but will actively push it do more. When he said Israel should end the Gaza war, I suspect he meant that it should “finish the job.” Biden gave a green light to genocide in Gaza, Trump will actively push the gas pedal. The single biggest difference is likely to be on the West Bank, which is as good as annexed. It’s been widely reported that Miriam Adelson’s price for her campaign contributions was Trump’s support for West Bank annexation, but he probably would have done it for free. His key Middle East advisers have openly advocated for it, they don’t believe in “linkage” between Palestine and the broader regional strategy, and they won’t stand in Netanyahu’s way when he goes for it to hold his extremist coalition together. We already lived in a de facto one state reality. It’s about to become de jure, probably through the mass displacement of Palestinians in a second Nakba. Jordan, always on the brink, is in real trouble this time. We all are.
Three: Higher education is absolutely going to be in the crosshairs; Trump’s people, who routinely declare that the professors are the enemy, could not be more clear about their plans to weaponize the federal government to go after colleges and universities at all levels. This spring’s House hearings about campus antisemitism are just a preview of what’s likely to come. We are likely to see the acceleration of the criminalization of criticism of Israel — one more place where Biden shamefully failed to stand up for liberal values — with federal aid made contingent on unprecedented governmental oversight and intrusion into Middle East Studies curricula, classroom lectures, events, faculty hires and tenure, and institutes. Israel/Palestine will be the leading wedge for the assault on academic freedom and the autonomy of higher education, as it so often is, but it won’t stop there.
The next four years are going to be extremely difficult. What else is there to say?