Jan. 24: What Is Trump's Plan for the Middle East?

State Dept pauses all foreign aid; Trump birthright citizenship order struck down; IDF to delay withdrawal from Lebanon

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The Big Story

As we near the end of Donald Trump’s first week back in office, we are no closer to clarity about the shape of the president’s Middle East policy than we were when we started. Indeed, we may be further away.

Trump has dashed hopes that he would immediately return to his first-term campaign of “maximum pressure” against Iran. Not only that, but also he’s publicly fired one of the architects of that campaign, former Iran envoy and State Department transition chief Brian Hook, bounced him out of a political appointment at the Wilson Center, and stripped him of his security detail—a fate shared by two other Iran hawks from Trump 45, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who, like Hook, face credible threats against their lives from Tehran. Plus, in comments on Thursday, the president indicated a desire to do a “deal” with Iran. Sort of. Maybe. Asked by reporters if he would support an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Trump first said, “I’m not going to answer that,” then added, “It would really be nice if that could be worked out without having to go that further step. Iran will hopefully make a deal, and if they don’t make a deal, that’s okay too.” The Financial Times had reported earlier in the day that Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who followed up his performance in closing the cease-fire deal with a series of bizarre comments this week, including that Qatar (an Iranian ally) could be invited into the Abraham Accords (an anti-Iranian alliance system), would be placed in charge of efforts to “see whether a diplomatic accommodation [with Iran] is possible.”

It was also hard not to notice that someone was staffing Middle East-related roles at the Pentagon with figures from the Koch network, whose views on the Middle East, though branded as “realist” or “America First,” are in fact indistinguishable from those of far-left members of the Obama faction, such as Robert Malley, the man who brought an Iranian influence network inside the Pentagon under Biden. Indeed, Jewish Insider on Thursday identified the person responsible for these staffing decisions as Dan Caldwell, another Koch network insider and a noted fan of Malley:

At the same time, it is worth keeping the president’s apparent dovish tilt in perspective. His administration is still staffed with Iran hawks, including secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and special missions envoy Ric Grenell. His first week in office saw a range of smart moves, from resuming shipments of 2,000-lb. bombs to Israel to lifting U.S. sanctions on West Bank settlers and redesignating the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization. Plus, some of the “dovish” statements are open to interpretation. “Iran will hopefully make a deal, and if they don’t make a deal, that’s okay too,” combined with Trump’s expressed wish that Israel not have to resort to a strike (i.e., leaving the option open), is at the very least preferable to the Obama-Biden version of Iran diplomacy, which prioritized a deal at any cost and ruled out confrontation—presented as the inevitable prelude to “all-out war”—in advance. During his first term, Trump often sought advice from staffers with wildly differing viewpoints, and policy was sometimes a function of who was up and who was down at any given moment, which changed frequently. All we can say for certain at the moment is that for now, the new president wants to keep his options open.

We do see worrying signs on social media of the sort of fights we’re likely to have going forward. Factions on the right who believe Trump’s first-term foreign policy was largely a failure will seek to launder more of the same failed Obama-Biden policies into the right as the true “America First” foreign policy, defined by opposition to “regime change” and “interventionism” and “endless wars,” even though Trump pursued none of these his first time in office. That this narrative is delusional and ahistorical—it was the Obama-Biden policy represented by figures like Malley, not the first-term Trump policy, that led directly to the Ukraine-Russia and the Israel-Hamas wars—will be no obstacle to its popularity, since it will scapegoat the “neocons,” which refers either to a powerless group of foreign-policy intellectuals that everyone loves to hate, or to Jews, depending on the speaker:

It would be a bitter irony if Trump’s landslide victory—which came about in part because of the global chaos birthed by the weak and pathological foreign policy of the Obama-Biden faction—led to a doubling down on those failed policies, rebranded with rhetoric “from the right” rather than the left, where it belongs. But we take some comfort in Trump’s history of being neither weak nor stupid on foreign policy. We hope that isn’t about to change now.

—PM

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The Rest

→The Trump administration has suspended all new foreign aid pending review, excepting Foreign Military Financing to Israel and Egypt, according to a State Department diplomatic cable leaked to journalist Ken Klippenstein on Friday afternoon. The cable, which appears to be from Secretary of State Marco Rubio (“From: SECSTATE WASHDC”), directs all State personnel to cease issuing new grants and issue stop-work orders on existing grants pending the completion of a government-wide review of all foreign aid, set to be complete within 90 days of Trump’s Monday executive order. There is no exception for Ukraine-related aid mentioned in the cable, though the Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that the executive order would not affect weapons deliveries to Ukraine.

→Yesterday, federal judge John C. Coughenour issued a nationwide injunction against Trump’s executive order revoking automatic citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants and other foreign nationals temporarily in the United States (such as tourists), writing that the order was “blatantly unconstitutional,” according to The New York Times. The Supreme Court should take up the matter soon and will likely side with the judge, writes the anonymous lawyer and author of the Substack “Techno Fog.” The 14th Amendment grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”—a requirement that a minority of conservative legal scholars, citing contemporary legislative debates, contends can be read to exclude the children of illegal or temporarily resident aliens, on the grounds that they are not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States. Still, writes “Techno Fog,” “there is the reality that Trump faces a Supreme Court that is undoubtedly hesitant to overturn a broadly accepted constitutional citizenship rule that has existed for 100 years and would implicate the lives and the rights of millions to come.”

→The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed Friday that the IDF would not be withdrawing from southern Lebanon by the Sunday deadline called for in the November cease-fire, citing the Lebanese Armed Force’s (LAF) failure to deploy to these areas in accordance with the agreement. The White House on Friday appeared to give its blessing to the delayed withdrawal, announcing that it had approved a “short, temporary extension” of the IDF’s presence in Lebanon. As Tablet’s Tony Badran notes on X, however, the extra time is unlikely to solve the fundamental problems with the deal—or with the LAF. The Times of Israel reported Wednesday on a briefing by IDF Northern Command Maj. Gen. Ori Gordin to the Knesset, in which Gordin said that Hezbollah had already violated the terms of the cease-fire “hundreds of times.” According to TOI, he added that “members that the Lebanese army [i.e. the LAF], which is supposed to be enforcing the ceasefire by preventing Hezbollah’s presence along the border, is in some places instead helping the terror group. He reportedly said that is happening in areas where the Lebanese army commanders on the ground and their units are Shia Muslims, in line with the ideology of Hezbollah and its sponsor Iran.”

→Stat of the Day: 15%

That’s the percentage of women in U.S. federal prisons who identify as transgender, according to reporting by The New York Times. Among male prisoners, by contrast, the figure is 750 transgender men out of 144,000 male prisoners overall, meaning that less than .01% of the male prisoner population is transgender. The figures come from a Times report on Trump’s executive order barring transgender women from women’s prisons, which critics, including Shannon Minter of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, say will facilitate sexual assault. The problem is that sexual assault is already a problem with the pre-Trump policy: Last year, a female inmate at Riker’s Island sued New York after claiming to have been raped by a “male inmate posing as trans,” according to NBC New York, which speaks to the abuses of transgender policy loopholes that Trump’s EO seeks to address.

→Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff and the “Obama bros” of the “Pod Saves America” podcast are promoting a charity for Los Angeles wildfire relief that has for years funneled millions to left-wing dark money groups, The Washington Free Beacon finds. The charity in question is the California Community Foundation (CCF), which houses a wildfire relief fund. As The Scroll reported earlier this month, Schiff and the bros promoted the charity on wildfire relief pages founded through ActBlue, the Democrats’ chief funding apparatus—effectively enabling them to use the tragedies for lead generation. CCF, however, is even more explicitly progressive—it has raised $30 million from donors such as Steven Spielberg and Mark Zuckerberg and has funneled at least $15 million to various groups supporting left-wing causes, like the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and a local Planned Parenthood clinic. Since 2018, CCF has also sent $14 million to liberal dark-money groups, including $11.6 million to three groups in the Tides Nexus, the dark-money giant backed by Soros, Pierre Omidyar, and other progressive megadonors, and $2.3 million to the New Venture Fund, part of the Arabella Advisors network.

→Quote of the Day

Elon is a great friend of Israel. He has repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes who seek to annihilate the one and only Jewish state.

That’s Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responding to the controversy surrounding Elon Musk’s alleged use of the “Sieg heil” hand gesture, or Roman salute, at a rally earlier this week. Musk and his allies have insisted that the billionaire, who extended his arm while telling the assembled crowd that “my heart goes out to you,” was merely making a clumsy gesture and have pointed to dozens of examples of other politicians, ranging from Tim Walz to Emmanuel Macron, making similar “salutes.” Critics such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have cited the incident as evidence of Musk’s hidden fascist ideology. A third interpretation, however, which claims that Musk’s hand symbol was merely an example of his zest for trolling, is endorsed by one Tablet contributor: “It strikes me as realistic,” says the contributor. “Elon is nothing if not a troll with the instincts of a 15-year-old on 4Chan.”

→Tennessee Republican Congressman Andy Ogles proposed a resolution on Thursday that would amend the U.S. Constitution to allow President Trump and any future president to be elected to a third term. Humorously, the resolution would allow only Trump to serve a third term, according to CMBC, and not any other living former president: The resolution bars presidents who served two consecutive terms, and Trump is the only president who has regained the presidency after losing an election. In a statement, Ogles was not timid about his desire to help Trump directly: “This amendment would allow President Trump to serve three terms, ensuring that we can sustain the bold leadership our nation so desperately needs.” Can’t blame the guy for trying.