THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION AND THE MIDDLE EAST – DANIELLE PLETKA

US involvement in the Middle East and its struggle against Islamic terrorists has engulfed US foreign policy over numerous decades. Especially since the attacks on the New York Twin Towers on 11 September 2001 and increasingly so after the massacre of Israelis by Hamas militants on 7 October 2023 in southern Israel. Danielle Pletka is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on US foreign policy, the Middle East, and terrorism. On a visit to Sydney sponsored by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, Danielle Pletka addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 9 December 2025 to discuss the Trump Administration and its approach to the Middle East.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION AND THE MIDDLE EAST

DANIELLE PLETKA

Thank you all for being here.

For about five minutes I shall talk on the Trump administration and the Middle East and then maybe some broader issues that I think are of interest. So be patient with me.

The Trump administration in the Middle East is a lot like every previous administration in the Middle East – desirous of getting away from it.

We have not had a president in America for the last 20 or 30 years, or maybe even 50 or 60 years, who has not wished to be uninvolved in the problems of the Middle East. We can talk about Eisenhower and Suez. We can talk about the 1960s. We can talk about the 1970s. There is no president, in fact, in recent history who has not in his campaign, told the American people that I, unlike my predecessor, will not pay attention to international affairs, especially the Middle East. I will be paying attention to domestic affairs. George H.W. Bush very famously said, right, it’s the economy, stupid. And then went to war to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Thank you very much. So, President Obama wanted to pivot to Asia but he wasn’t able to do so during his administration. We went back to Iraq.

 ISIS took over an area the size of the United Kingdom in the Middle East, due to the fine choices that the President made on the Middle East. War began. The Arab Spring broke out. We overthrew the dictator of Libya. Such was the administration that wanted to turn its back on the Middle East.

The next president, Donald Trump, recognised the many errors of Barack Obama’s ways and also wished to turn his back on the Middle East. But in a different way. President Obama had believed that the mistake of American foreign policy was that we looked at the region through the prism of our friends in Israel and our friends in the Sunni Arab world, particularly the Saudis and the Emiratis. We should look at the Middle East through the prism of the Iranians. And if we could solve the problem of Iran, then we could rid ourselves, finally, of these pesky Arabs and Jews and Iranians and their bloody wars. And wouldn’t that be amazing for America, because then we could, you know, pivot to Asia.

Anyway, that did not work out super well, as those of you who paid attention to history know, and President Trump was elected and immediately repudiated Barack Obama’s cornerstone, signature, great achievement, I would say Nobel Prize winning achievement, but he got that before he did anything. He immediately repudiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal, and then turned everything on its head. One has to be very careful calling oneself an expert in this day and age but, as an expert on the Middle East, I truly believed that in President Trump’s first term he had an incorrect grasp of the dynamics of the region. I’ve been in this business for a long time, a really long time, and I was quite persuaded.

Trump put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of dealing with the Middle East. I can’t remember how many books he had said he had read, but he said, “I’ve read several,” as if that was somehow the preparation for dealing with the region that had bedevilled decades and decades of American presidents. In fact, he was absolutely right. One of the things that it taught us was that, a lot of the preconceptions we had about the region and what drove people to do different things, and what drove decision makers in the region, were wrong. Jared Kushner thought about this differently and he was right.

Now, I want to give credit here to Barack Obama, which I rarely do, because I didn’t like him much as president, and really don’t like him much in retrospect, either. But Obama, in prioritising Iran and in bending to the wishes of the Ayatollahs, and in designing a deal that would advance, at the end of the day, Iran’s nuclear and conventional weapons aspirations scared the living daylights out of the Sunni Arabs.

 When Jared Kushner, backed by his father-in-law, walked into the region ready to flip everything back the way it used to be, they greeted him with love and adoration and relief. He was not a representative of a terrible administration that had left the dangerous Iranians as a great threat.

Another dynamic was going on at the same time, which was a generational changing of the guards. I’m eliding over the Arab Spring and lots of other dynamics here, because I want to get to the other stuff I need to talk about. So just take that all as a given. But let’s just say that the situation was fertile for a change in the region, where everybody always said piously that the road to peace in the Middle East runs through Jerusalem. Those involved felt this had lost any meaning. They recognised that the road to peace in the Middle East actually was to get rid of the regime in Iran, which actually threatened all of the countries that were not only our partners, but hoped to hang on to their governments, especially in the wake of the destabilising Arab Spring.

It was this new approach to Iran that created an environment in which Arab nations at once saw the wisdom of recalibrating on Israel, recognised that they couldn’t necessarily depend on the United States because we could elect another Barack Obama, and that they needed a strong, powerful and competent military friend, and that was Israel. So, we had the Abraham Accords. A lot of people do not like Donald Trump. But this was brilliant. It was probably the most important transformation in the Middle East for decades. And it was based on a few books and Trump’s son-in-law. Amazing.

Unfortunately, it also laid the groundwork for a further expansion of the Abraham Accords that would include Saudi Arabia. And this is where Israel found itself on October 7, 2023.

 Donald Trump had not been re-elected. In 2020, Joe Biden became president. Things went back to the old policy, but the old policy was being managed by somebody who wasn’t really there. I worked with Joe Biden in the 1990s when I worked in the Senate. He was there then, but he was not there later. And that is important, because the administration believed that they would go back to the way of the Obama administration when Joe Biden was Vice President. This was to go back to the JCPOA and start doing business with the Iranians again. Except, of course, the Iranians wouldn’t play ball. This left the administration with no idea of what to do. So, they just forgot about it.

Then came October 7th. Let us not lie to ourselves. There was purpose behind October 7th. Not just for Hamas, which sought to destroy the State of Israel, but for Hamas’ sponsors in Iran and elsewhere. This was to derail any expansion of the Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabia was on the cusp of joining. Bibi Netanyahu had said it at the United Nations General Assembly in 2023. The Saudis had coyly, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, suggested that, in fact, this was probably going to be the case. For Iran, that needed to end.

It needed to end because Iran and those who supported Iran and its ideology, whether Sunni or Shia, had to stand in the way of what would ultimately be the complete normalisation of the Jewish state in the Middle East. That had to end. And this was a priority, a critical priority. People will come and tell me that this is not right – nobody else planned this. Only Hamas planned it. Iran didn’t know about it. Qatar didn’t know about it. They may not have known what day, what time, and which particular Muhammad was involved, but they knew what the operation was going to be because they paid for it. They armed them and they set the stage for Hamas to do so.

So, why is Saudi Arabia important? Let’s say Saudi Arabia is the home of Sunni Islam. The King of Saudi Arabia is the Custodian of the two Holy Mosques. That is his title, Mecca and Medina. The second that Saudi Arabia accepts the Jewish state, it is really the end of the legitimacy of a lot of the ideology of extremist Islamism that suggests that this is completely illegitimate. Saudi Arabia undercuts that, and they recognise that. They recognise that, and probably it’s going to be hard to get back on track.

This was hugely important. What October 7 did was to change the dynamics in the region, and it changed the dynamics not only in the Middle East, but in Europe, the United States, Australia, Asia, and attitudes towards the region as well. When Donald Trump was elected, he brought the United States back to its much more traditional pro-Israel position.

There had been, over the last three, four decades, a massive flip. The Democratic Party was the traditional constituent, the traditional supporter of the State of Israel. Republicans were always a little bit more Saudi Arabia-esque, George H.W. Bush style. That has completely changed. When Donald Trump was elected, he really changed the dynamic back to the one that had animated his first term and sought to bring the conflict to an end.

Trump and his people were absolutely instrumental. Over the last few months, we have seen, with the Gaza peace plan, his 20-point plan, that saw the hostages returned. Hamas agreed to be disarmed (although later they refused) and the war ended. None of this was credible in December last year. These were the demands made by the Israeli prime minister. Hamas will disarm. They will no longer govern. They will be ousted from Gaza. All of the hostages will be returned on day one. But that’s what happened, at least, that’s what Hamas agreed to. Whether we’re going to get from Phase one, in which all of that happened, to Phase two is a question I can’t answer, although I am enormously sceptical.

What I want to talk about more is us. In the transformation that occurred over the period since October 7, we saw that something happen that had been claimed to never happen again. This is the massive animating of virulent anti-Semitism that everybody thought was finished with in the Hitler bunker in 1945. Apparently, it wasn’t.

Apparently, those of us who thought it was gone were lying to ourselves. There’s an expression that people use in the United States, which is annoying but descriptive. They talk about a permission structure. Something gives you a permission structure to behave in a certain way. October 7 gave anti-Semites a permission structure to come out from under the rocks where they were hiding, in order to embrace fully anti-Semitism. Worse yet, this was not simply a phenomenon of young people, where you could dismiss it and say they would grow out of it like college campuses. It was not simply a phenomenon of the far left, but has now been revealed to be a phenomenon of the far right as well.

Now, I would say that this anti-Semitism it is not central to the right. It is on the fringes, although it is growing more mainstream, particularly among younger people. On the left, it is quite central at this point. This is how you see that somebody who is an obvious anti-Semite, like Zohran Mamdani, can be elected the mayor of New York and be endorsed by the governor of New York and by the minority Democrat leader of the House of Representatives. In fact, the only person who didn’t endorse him on the left was the minority leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer. This has become the gravamen of the Democratic Party. Tucker Carlson and others are working very hard to ensure that this becomes part of the Republican Party as well. Among young people, they’re having much more success.

How organic is it? Where does it come from? Well, you saw Australia’s Intelligence Chief Mike Burgess speak at the Lowy Institute where he revealed that the Iranians were paying Muslim criminal gangs in Australia to engage in violent acts of anti-Semitism. This is something that we need to understand better. There are definitely organic elements there. There are young people at Sydney University, at Melbourne University, at Harvard and Yale and MIT and the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan, University of California, and I could go on for quite a while espousing this anti-Semitism. You could say some of that was organic, but it’s not all organic. It comes from sponsorship.

There are foreign nations that are paying for this anti-Semitism, rearing its ugly head all over Europe, the demonstrations in the UK, in New York, in Washington and on campus and in politics.

Who are they? You won’t be surprised to hear that one of the big sponsors is Qatar. What’s happening is that there is an education system and a protest system and a non-profit system that is being subsidised in lots of different ways by outside parties. This is well documented by Qatar, which also paid for Hamas.

To a much lesser extent, but with equal enthusiasm, it is also being subsidised by the government of Iran. It is being spread virally, not just in universities, but in the press and in high schools and in elementary schools. There are curricula about the settler colonial state of Israel and state of Palestine being pushed by the United Nations with great enthusiasm and vast quantities of American money. This is the organising power and the engine behind this. Now, again, that’s not to suggest that it wouldn’t have happened without that money, but it’s really important.

What else is fanning the flames? Politicians, obviously, are fanning the flames. Social media is fanning the flames. One in particular in the United States is Tiktok, which is fundamentally a tool of the Chinese Communist Party. The Russians do this too. The Iranians do it to a lesser extent. The Chinese Communist Party engages in this in an extraordinarily professional way. Why? Does the Chinese Communist Party hate Jews? I don’t think so. Do they hate Israel? Maybe, but not with the same enthusiasm as some of our friends in the Middle East. They seek instability inside democracies. They seek to fan the flames of division. They seek to enhance questions about the legitimacy of democratic governments. That’s what they do, and they’re really good at it.

I cite something that happened last year to explain to people how powerful this is and how much of a tool it is in the education of younger people, many of whom, I would say, creeping up on a majority of whom get their news from Tiktok. Some years ago, Osama bin Laden’s letter to America went viral. This was a letter that bin Laden wrote that was publicised around the time of 9/11, in which he criticised all of America’s culture, America’s governance, America’s system. He criticised America’s support for Israel, and a variety of other things. This became a viral piece of social media celebrated by hundreds of thousands of American young people. Where did it originate? On Tiktok.

 There was no question, because we could see how the algorithm was pushing this out. If I said, this is the person who murdered more Americans at any time in history, that would be suppressed. But if I said, hey, this guy really gets what’s going on, people should read this and pay attention. It would get thousands, hundreds of thousands of views. That’s how it works.

All of this is hugely important. So, we talk about what happened on October 7. We talk about the anti-Semitism, we talk about the fanning of the flames, and we talk about how this has become a problem, not just for Jews – Jews are always the canaries in the coal mine for societal problems.

What happens when you have a problem like this? In America, we say we have problems but our institutions save us. Our institutions are so strong that we can withstand bad presidents. We can withstand riots at the Capitol. We can withstand impeachment. We can withstand presidents doing really foul things in the Oval Office. We can withstand wars that our country doesn’t support. We can withstand any of these things, challenges to our system, because we have our Constitution.

Other democracies have their equal institutions that are the pillars of the society. It doesn’t rest on individuals. It doesn’t rest on Albo or Trump or Biden or Obama or Keir Starmer or Macron or anybody else. We are democratic countries. We have a system, and that is what saves us. Only our systems and faith in our institutions is breaking down. And when you need to fight these outside invaders, when you need to fight these insidious ideas, it becomes much harder. This is really what we see in Washington now.

The problem is that slowly, but systematically, we have seen our presidents erode these institutions and push the boundaries of their power. We have seen the growth of what we call the administrative state. That which is not elected but has enormous power, and each president, as one succeeds the other, expands these problems.

You had Obama, who regularly bypassed Congress and was slapped down by the Supreme Court repeatedly for having done so. You had Trump, who believed that he didn’t lose the election. You had Biden who wasn’t really there for the last two years and had a country run by his staff and his auto pen. And now we have a president who is apparently thinking that he should pardon absolutely everybody on the face of the earth.

All of this is chipping away at our institutions. We have Congress. We’ve got a tripartite system. We’ve got the legislative branch, the judicial branch, obviously the executive branch. As somebody who worked in Congress, I’ve always been a partisan of the legislative branch. It is, to my mind, closer to the people. The House of Representatives elected every two years. Our senators are elected every six years. Together, they are the representatives of the people in a much more active and day-to-day way.

Congress no longer does anything in America. I say this as a bipartisan slam. You don’t like what the President is doing. If the President is from your party, you’re not going to do anything about it. Congress used to pass 13 appropriation bills which funded the federal government. We pass about two now. Every year ends with a government shutdown and what’s called a continuing resolution, where we use the money from last year and we just put in the same ones, and then we add a couple different things. Congress doesn’t do anything. One of the things that we are facing, again post October 7, is to bring this back to the conversation we were having before, is this explosion of antisemitism, for which there are not very many consequences

In his first term, Donald Trump issued an executive order from the White House on anti-Semitism, about how it was to be treated, about how the Department of Justice was to address it, about how the Department of Education was to address it in schools. It was a very good document. It really was. It was the only executive order that was kept by the Biden administration. It was balanced. It was widely accepted.

Legislation was introduced in Congress to codify this into law. They haven’t passed it. They can’t pass it. In spite of it being bipartisan – a Democrat and a Republican introduced it. The House of Representatives passed it. The Senate killed it. Now the House of Representatives can’t pass because they cannot come to agreement about how to pass it. As a result, everything has ended up in the judiciary. And, of course, we’ve had a massive campaign by the American left to delegitimise our Supreme Court. We have now judicial activism, left, right and centre, on the right and on the left. If the left does it and it’s effective for them, why shouldn’t the right do it as well?

Our institutions are being frayed at every aspect. The tools that are available to us are not there to defend our culture, our values, our national security, our people.

And there are plenty of people out there, plenty of countries out there, eager to take advantage. This is not just in America. This is here in Australia. This is in the UK, where you see the Met Police knocking on people’s door and saying, “I’d like to talk to you about what you posted on Facebook yesterday.

I said to you at the beginning that I would talk to you about the Middle East but broaden the aperture to talk about these issues that we cannot contend with. A lot of the issues that I’m talking about right now make the problem, of an Israeli, Palestinian war, seem pedestrian, because how are we going to address these problems? We will have peace in the Middle East before we are able to figure these out.

 And if we don’t figure these things out, we risk the erosion of the very things that we fought two World Wars and numerous regional wars in the name of everything that our countries were founded for. And that is really, a slightly bigger problem than the Middle East, but one that the Middle East has helped us focus on.