The US’ postwar regional plan is a nonstarter

The Trump administration is drafting a postwar regional strategy that is built around containing Iran and expanding Israeli-Arab normalization, according to a widely circulated report this week. This should alarm anyone, especially in the Middle East, who has watched the region’s geopolitical reality speed toward a dangerous tipping point since Oct. 7, 2023.

The US approach underscores a return to the same old mentality by American strategists, which has failed to prevent multiple regional catastrophes. Containment and normalization are not new ideas but go back decades, as successive US administrations tried to bypass the Palestinian issue and impose Israel’s peace in return for peace formula. The ideas that governed US policy on Oct. 6, 2023, failed to stop what followed.

This is not the first time a US administration has forced a new plan on the region and it is worth asking why each previous one failed. George W. Bush's “Greater Middle East Initiative” promised democratic transformation following the invasion of Iraq. His promise left the region more fractured than ever.

Barack Obama’s 2009 Cairo address sought “a new beginning” with the Muslim world while failing to kick-start Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. The so-called Arab Spring — which began less than two years later — upset the decades-old dynamics and brought new nonstate actors into the arena. Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal was presented as the centerpiece of regional de-escalation and the entire international community, except Israel, supported it. Obama’s successor abandoned it three years later.

Washington is already drafting a plan for the day after, even as the region’s fundamental power balance is changing
Osama Al-Sharif

Donald Trump’s first-term Middle Eastern approach was to exert “maximum pressure” on Iran while pushing his Abraham Accords deal. The latter exemplified a flawed approach, promising normalization while explicitly bypassing the Palestinian issue. Trump’s “deal of the century” stopped short of giving the Palestinians what they had been struggling to achieve. They rejected it, as was expected.

Joe Biden inherited that same flawed strategy.

Each of these plans was based on the same defective concept that the one being constructed today is also trying to offer: contain or manage Iran, expand Israeli-Arab ties and brush Palestinian statehood aside. Each of the past initiatives collapsed for the same reason.

Nobody knows how or when the war with Iran — a war that the Trump administration initiated at Israel’s behest — will end. Yet Washington is already drafting a plan for the day after, even as the region’s fundamental power balance is changing. Iran, its proxies, Israel and the Gulf states are all recalibrating their strategic options for a region undergoing major geopolitical shifts. The US approach fails to understand the new reality.

That defective approach ignores a major assumption: that Gulf states want the US to remain as their principal security guarantor. That assumption no longer holds. Speaking at the Hili Forum in Abu Dhabi this week, Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majed Al-Ansari said that the war with Iran demonstrates that Arab Gulf states cannot solely rely on their strategic partnership with Washington to guarantee their security. An alliance with the US is “extremely important but not sufficient,” he said, calling for Gulf self-sufficiency in security matters as “the only way forward.”

The plan ignores the root cause of the region’s decades-old conflict, which is the unresolved Palestinian question
Osama Al-Sharif

Al-Ansari expressed what Gulf leaders are thinking. He spoke at a forum explicitly convened to discuss the future of maritime security and regional stability in the Strait of Hormuz. When a Gulf official questions whether the region should keep outsourcing its security to Washington, any plan anchored on the premise that the US will continue to act as the sole regional guarantor is detached from reality.

The proposed plan misses the target by ignoring the root cause of the region’s decades-old conflict, which is the unresolved Palestinian question. The events of Oct. 7, 2023, led to the devastation of Gaza and ongoing Israeli war crimes. That crisis then paved the way for the Israeli occupation and the current destruction of southern Lebanon. Finally, a multifaceted regional crisis culminated in a US-Israeli war on Iran.

Each escalation is caused by the one before it and all trace their origin to a single unresolved issue: the continued denial of Palestinian self-determination and the ongoing Israeli occupation.

Any new regional strategy that skips over the Palestinians in favor of managing Iran and expanding normalization deals rests on shaky ground — the same weak foundations that produced three years of war in Gaza and a costly stalemate in the Arabian Gulf, which is now wreaking havoc with the world economy.

The reality in the Occupied Territories underscores this fact. As war raged in Gaza, Israel forcibly displaced the entire Palestinian populations of three West Bank refugee camps in early 2025 — and those residents are still being prevented from returning. The “Greater Israel” project, just like the Abraham Accords, treats the Palestinian issue as a footnote. Still, while most countries are becoming vociferous in condemning Israel’s actions, Washington’s voice is muted.

Normalization, as the US proposes, has proven to be a failed policy and an expired political commodity, underlined by the fact that Israel’s far-right ministers are openly promoting annexation of the West Bank, the displacement of Gaza’s population and permanent Israeli control over parts of southern Lebanon and Syria. The repeated talk of a “Greater Israel,” whose borders may extend to Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and parts of Saudi Arabia, undercuts any future for the Abraham Accords.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s new Middle East is one of Israeli hegemony over the rest, which is not exactly fitting with the spirit of the Abraham Accords.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said last week that Israel has plans to move Palestinians out of Gaza and is waiting for US approval on where to send them. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir went even further, unveiling a plan targeting the forced displacement of 250,000 Palestinians from Gaza within a year and the remainder of the territory’s roughly 2 million residents within six years.

These are policy affirmations by those who control Israel’s defense and security portfolios. What no US official is able to understand is that no Arab leader can accept normalization when senior Israeli ministers are bragging about plans for ethnic cleansing in public. Washington’s aim to expand the Abraham Accords assumes that regional peace can be achieved separately from Palestinian statehood. Such an assumption has been proven wrong time and again.

And when it comes to Iran, Gulf states have far more to gain from negotiating their own understandings with Tehran than from being subjected to an American-imposed containment scheme that lets Israel off the hook. Iran’s Gulf neighbors share a coastline and centuries of trade and each has legitimate rights to manage that relationship directly by safeguarding its own interests and avoiding becoming the front line in an American-Israeli confrontation it did not choose.

Without addressing Palestinian statehood by ending the occupation, the new US strategy will be a nonstarter. Containment alone did not work before Oct. 7, 2023, while normalization without addressing Palestinian rights has lost credibility in light of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. A security architecture designed in Washington, without consulting the stakeholders in a region actively eyeing new options, is a plan that does not learn from past mistakes. The lessons of the last three years were never understated. Washington has yet to learn them.