With just over a week until President-elect Donald Trump takes office, the soon-to-be second-time U.S. leader famed for his “art of the deal” approach in business and politics prepares to take on a series of interconnected yet equally volatile conflicts in the Middle East.
As war continues to rage between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement as well as Iran’s embattled coalition regroups from a series of losses, the prospect of diplomacy appears remote at first glance. Even Saudi Arabia seems to be driving a hard bargain in the elusive U.S.-led effort to establish ties between the influential kingdom and Israel.
But former officials familiar with the subject argue the vast changes that have swept through the region over the past four years and particularly in recent months also provide new chances for a grand bargain.
“The challenges are significant in the Middle East, but the opportunities are real,” one former government official close to the issues involved told Newsweek. “They may not be realized, but, boy, are they worth trying.”
What’s ‘The Big Deal’?
“There is no doubt Donald Trump wants to get ‘the big deal,’” the former government official said. “The big deal is something with respect to Iran achieved either through negotiation or kinetic activity or a combination of the two, that changes the past 45 years of Iran’s ability to negatively dominate the region, which is seen as challenging the US partners and allies.”
There is also “the Saudi deal,” which the former government official said Trump also seeks to obtain “for lots of reasons.”
“The Saudi deal, as it has been constructed and negotiated by the Biden administration, is strongly, I would argue, in long-term U.S. global strategic interests because it’s about a lot more than Saudi normalization with Israel,” the former government official said.
Trump may have won a Middle East milestone in his successful brokering of the 2020 Abraham Accords through which the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco established ties with Israel, but the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict has remained an intractable blind spot for U.S. diplomacy. Festering tensions gave way in October 2023 to the longest and deadliest war of its kind, sparking violence on multiple fronts and drawing in an array of actors, including the United States.
Among the most consequential players to enter the fray is Iran, which joined the fight through its Axis of Resistance coalition and in unprecedented direct exchanges of strikes with Israel. The country has also accelerated nuclear activities in the wake of Trump’s 2018 exit from the multilateral Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and recent setbacks among the Islamic Republic’s allies on the battlefield.
This series of blows began most notably in September with the large-scale detonations of communications devices used by the Lebanese Hezbollah movement in an act universally attributed to Israel, followed by the killing of the group’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an Israeli airstrike. On November 27, Israel and Hezbollah signed a 60-day ceasefire set to expire shortly after Trump takes office if it is not extended.
The same day the truce was signed, Syrian rebels launched a surprise offensive that ultimately toppled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, putting an end to more than half a century of his family’s rule along with Iran’s longest partnership in the Arab world. While geographically constrained in its ability to aid allies on the front lines with Israel, Iran continues to threaten a direct response to the latest Israeli strikes on the Islamic Republic conducted last October.
But amid these rising tensions have also been calls for dialogue from Tehran.
“Iran has been sending clear signals even before that last Israeli air operation that they want to deal, whether the deal is something like the JCPOA, some new arrangement, some partial arrangement, they want to deal,” the former government official told Newsweek. “They’ve got economic problems at home. They’ve got social problems at home. The cumulative impact of what has happened with regard to Hezbollah, what has happened with respect to their own revealed vulnerabilities post October, has certainly enhanced that.”
As such, the former government official argued that “the environment to at least explore the parameters of a deal are better now than they have been at any point in the modern relationship between the U.S. and Iran.”
Douglas Silliman, president of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington who previously served as ambassador to Iraq under Trump, felt the incoming president would likely revamp his “maximum pressure” policy of economic restrictions “as negotiating leverage to be given away at some point, if the Iranians are willing to cut a deal.”
“I think that Trump would see maximum pressure, or the reimposition of maximum pressure, as negotiating leverage with Tehran,” Silliman told Newsweek. “And I also think that he would be willing to negotiate and accept some sort of a replacement for the Iran nuclear deal that would have his name on it.”
And in addition to the external factors putting pressure on Tehran, the promises for economic improvement by reformist Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian may also serve to help cultivate the conditions for an agreement.
“I think there’s an opportunity for a dialogue between the United States and Iran under a Trump administration in a different way than there was under the Biden administration,” Silliman said.
He added: “It’s just that the messaging coming from Washington probably needs to be done fairly carefully if President Trump hopes to start a dialogue with Iran as opposed to pushing the more militarized parts of the Iranian government to double down on the nuclear program or to strengthen the proxies.”
Haggling Among Hard-liners
While Pezeshkian plays an important role in shaping Iran’s policies, ultimate authority in the Islamic Republic rests with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His predominantly hardline advisers of the Supreme National Security Council as well as the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) play influential parts as well.
Khamenei ultimately greenlit the pursuit of the JCPOA under the administration of then-President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who defied conservative skepticism to achieve the landmark deal alongside then-U.S. President Barack Obama. Its collapse under Trump, however, only fueled doubts about working with the West, which were further exacerbated throughout the abridged term of Rouhani’s successor, late President Ebrahim Raisi, who perished in a helicopter crash last May.
“It is possible that the IRGC and other maybe darker forces in Tehran could decide to double down on a nuclear weapons program, could decide to double down and strengthen and utilize their existing proxy forces in Iran in Yemen, and eventually try to find ways to redevelop the forces in Lebanon and elsewhere,” Silliman said.
He added: “So, there will be an internal debate within the Iranian government on how this will be done and a lot of discussions within the Iranian National Security Council.”
In Washington, Trump is poised to bring his own band of hard-liners with him to the White House, some of whom have expressed hawkish views in support of military action and even the pursuit of regime change in Tehran.
Trump has repeatedly announced his intention to “stop wars” rather than start them, yet he also previously threatened to strike Iran on several occasions during his prior tenure in office. In January 2020, he took the unprecedented step of ordering the killing of Iran’s most influential military leader, IRGC Quds Force commander Major General Qassem Soleimani, in Iraq amid a cycle of violence between U.S. forces and Iran-aligned militias.
Five years later, the threat of a direct confrontation between the U.S. and Iran remains substantial as Tehran weighs its options to maintain deterrence in the midst of an ongoing conflict across the region.
“It’s not out of the realm of possibility, if intelligence is clear that they are racing for a nuclear weapon, that the U.S. could participate in a strike against the nuclear facilities in Iran,” Mick Mulroy, who previously served as Trump’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, told Newsweek.
“I wouldn’t have said that two months ago or so,” Mulroy, now president of the Fogbow advisory firm and co-founder of the Lobo Institute, said. “I think now it’s just getting to the point where we’re actively considering it.”
But Iran has yet to publicly waver on its longstanding official ban on the production of weapons of mass destruction despite effectively becoming a nuclear threshold state. And the looming internal and external threats could ultimately empower Pezeshkian’s push to revamp his nation at this critical moment if both sides could find space for engagement.
“There is a formula that would lead to potentially a better agreement between the United States and Iran,” Mulroy said. “We would just have to be willing to do the sanctions relief. They would have to be willing to open up, to have complete visibility on what they’re doing and not doing.”
“So, there has to be a lot of trust, which is all the harder parts of this,” he added. “But I do think there’s an opportunity, and if the Trump administration could do it, I think they would.”
The Road to Riyadh
One element of Raisi’s tenure that Pezeshkian has openly embraced is the “good neighborliness” approach through which Iran sought to mend ties with other nations in the region, particularly among Arab states, with Saudi Arabia at the helm. In a quiet process that began in at least 2019 and garnered momentum in 2021, diplomats from both sides held several rounds of meetings brokered by Iraq and Oman until finally coming together in China to restore ties in March 2023.
Simultaneously, the U.S. brokered discussions toward establishing diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran’s archfoe, Israel. While negotiations overseen by the Biden administration appeared to gain some ground prior to the outbreak of the war in Gaza, Riyadh has demanded from Israel a tangible commitment to supporting Palestinian statehood as a prerequisite for forging ties.
Trump, for his part, cultivated close and personal ties with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, nicknamed Bibi and MBS, respectively.
But navigating this long-sought extension of the Abraham Accords may prove one of Trump’s most difficult deals to close as it ties directly into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has been a source of regional unrest since first erupting in 1948.
“The standard for what Bibi has to say and do to meet MBS’ minimal, optical, presentational, reputational requirements, the two of them don’t appear to match right now,” said the former government official with whom Newsweek spoke. “Could they be made to match? It would require Netanyahu to challenge [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir and [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and their seats, their votes, in a fashion he appears unwilling to do today.”
“But if you wanted the big deal, if you want to get to even the more limited goal of a ‘day before’ that offers the possibility of a ‘day after’ for Gaza,” the former official continued, “then you need two things: You must have a cease fire and that means Hamas willing to accept terms on hostage releases and other arrangements that are necessary, and you have to have Israel willing to cooperate.”
Thus far, Hamas and Israel remain at odds despite the growing toll of the war, pressure from the Biden administration and repeated threats from Trump.
The former government official called the effort to broker a deal involving Israel, Palestinians and Saudi Arabia “a major complex challenge,” but also acknowledged that “there’s an opportunity for the administration” that should not be overlooked.
Mulroy felt this would be a “major objective for the second Trump administration” given the Republican leader’s positive rapport with the Saudi royal court and the desire to check Iranian inroads into the Arab world.
In a statement shared with Newsweek on Tuesday regarding the upcoming administration’s approach to putting an end to the conflict in Gaza, Trump transition team spokesperson Brian Hughes said: “President Trump is committed to reestablishing peace & prosperity across the Middle East. This will include working in close coordination with our Arab & Israeli partners to ensure Gaza can one day prosper.”
Such comments have elicited hope from observers such as Silliman in the midst of foreign policy controversies brewing elsewhere over Trump’s threats regarding Canada, Greenland, Mexico and the Panama Canal.
“I’m encouraged that the president is already thinking about how to positively engage with the region,” Silliman said. “You have not had any of the controversies in the Middle East with the Trump administration that you have had say with our North American neighbors, our European allies.”
He continued: “Some of his early statements, they seem to be looking for deepening relationships, particularly commercial relationships, in the Gulf, in the wealthier states of the Middle East.”
After all, while Trump continues to warn that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if the war in Gaza did not end before his upcoming inauguration, Silliman said, “Let’s hope he doesn’t want that to happen.”
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