What Trump's Cabinet picks say about his Middle East agenda, including a two-state solution: ANALYSIS
So far, President-elect Donald Trump's proposed nominations and appointments to the highest ranks of government have included no shortage of unconventional and even controversial selections.
But when it comes to the positions that will drive American foreign policy, Trump has opted for more conventional conservative picks, selecting Republicans with long track records of staunch support for Israel and hawkish views on U.S. adversaries, including Iran.
As Trump prepares to enter the Oval Office and confront intractable conflicts in the Middle East, ABC News spoke to officials and experts about what the team the president-elect has chosen says about how he'll approach the troubled region and what he hopes to achieve.
Israel unleashed?
Almost as soon as it became clear that Trump had won the White House again, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shared his congratulations on what he called "history's greatest comeback."
In the run-up to the election, Netanyahu made little effort to hide his preference for Trump, believing that although the former president could be capricious, he was likely to give Israel free rein to manage its national security and prosecute its wars against Hamas and Hezbollah, according to U.S. officials.
Now, Netanyahu's bet appears poised to pay off.
Trump announced he had tapped former Arkansas governor and two-time candidate for the Republican Party presidential nomination Mike Huckabee to be his ambassador to Israel.
Huckabee, a Baptist minister, has little experience with Middle Eastern policy, but he has made dozens of trips to Israel, including hosting tours to holy sites in the country. He has also made several public comments supporting Israeli expansion into the occupied West Bank, refusing to say the Palestinian territory is "occupied."
"There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It's Judea and Samaria," Huckabee said in 2017, using the Israeli terms for the territory that is internationally recognized as the West Bank .
"There's no such thing as a settlement. They're communities. They're neighborhoods. They're cities," he added.
While Huckabee has insisted "I won't make the policy, I will carry out the policy of the president" as envoy to Israel, some believe his selection indicates the second Trump administration might end the long U.S. pursuit of a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Khaled Elgindy, the director of the Middle East Institute's Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute, says he also believes U.S. support for Israeli annexation of the West Bank and permanent occupation of the Gaza strip may be "imminent" when Trump takes power.
"If nothing else, under Trump, the United States will continue to provide unlimited weapons to Israel but without any of the pretense about concern for civilian lives, U.S. law, or international law that prevailed during the Biden administration," he said.
"Unlike Joe Biden, who projected occasional displeasure with Benjamin Netanyahu's government and its conduct in Gaza and the West Bank, the Trump administration is unlikely to object to any Israeli violations on the ground," Elgindy added.
Trump has also named another champion of Israel, New York GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik as his pick to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Stefanik has been an outspoken critic of the U.N.’s handling of the conflict. She also made headlines for taking on university presidents during a congressional probe into antisemitism on college campuses in 2023.
Return of the dealmaker
However, retired U.S. Army Col. Seth Krummrich, former chief of staff for special operations of U.S. Central Command and the vice president of the security firm Global Guardian, says that rather than siding with Israel's hardliners, Trump will move Netanyahu toward the middle in pursuit of broader, regional deals with Arab states.
"If he can get compromise on a two-state solution, President Trump will be in a position to create and to get exactly what he wants, which is normalized relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia," he said.
Establishing diplomatic ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia has been the single aim driving the Biden administration's Middle East policy both before and after Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel. But during his first term in office, Trump also worked toward integrating Israel with Arab states and ultimately oversaw the brokering of the Abraham accords, which includes bilateral agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Israel and Bahrain.
Krummrich says Trump's largely like-minded foreign policy Cabinet selections, including his nominee for secretary of state, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, will put the incoming administration in a place to capitalize on relationships that were forged during his first term in the Oval Office.
"As he has reloaded his team this time, he has executors. He doesn't have debaters," Krummrich says.
One of the president-elect’s first staffing decisions was to appoint Steve Witkoff, a real estate mogul who was golfing with Trump at Mar-a-Lago when he was the target of an apparent attempted assassination in September.
Like Huckabee, Witkoff is a strong supporter of Israel with limited foreign policy expertise. But although his negotiation experience centers on property sales rather than peace deals, some experts think an entrepreneurial approach to the region could play to the incoming administration’s benefit.
Ibrahim Al-Assil, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, says that although leaders of Arab states are wary of the volatility Trump brings to the geopolitical landscape, they have often responded favorably to Trump’s preferred, business-like brand of diplomacy.
"Gulf leaders, particularly those from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have long appreciated Trump's direct, transactional approach to foreign policy," Al-Assil said. "They believe they can navigate complex issues with a president who values relationships over bureaucratic norms."
An isolated Iran
When it comes to Iran, Trump's first term in office was defined by his "maximum pressure" campaign, as he withdrew from an Obama-era nuclear deal with the country and sought to weaken the regime by ramping up sanctions and eliminating the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani.
This time, Trump appears prepared to push Iran even harder, lining his Cabinet with similarly minded Iran hawks like Rubio and his pick for national security adviser, Florida GOP Rep. Mike Waltz.
"Trump's incoming national security team has promised to ratchet up economic pressure on Tehran once again. His administration will likely exert far less restraint than the Biden administration on Israel's campaign to degrade Iran and its proxies' capabilities," said Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution.
But she warns the second Trump administration may have trouble replicating the success of its first sanctions campaign.
"The early success of Trump's 'maximum pressure' sanctions relied on the willingness of major powers such as China to abide by them; that has long since eroded," she said, adding that dismantling evasion networks will also pose a challenge.
However, Krummrich says if Trump's team can bring Israel and Saudi Arabia together, it would deal a devastating blow to Tehran.
"If Israel and Saudi Arabia align and normalize relationships, that absolutely isolates Iran," he said. "Getting the Abraham accords to be fully realized ... that will absolutely change the landscape of the Middle East."
