Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.

Q. Donald Trump is two months away from the presidency. Joe Biden is still in charge in Washington. So does it make sense to speculate about Trump and the Middle East after January 20, 2025? A lot can happen until then.

A. If we can just keep in mind that this is a speculative exercise, we might be able to learn something about the next four years of Trump and the Middle East. Trump’s surprising haste and characteristic lack of depth and sound judgment in making high-level appointments that relate to the Middle East render the exercise all the more relevant.

Here is another obvious area of relevancy: President-elect Trump has said he wants Israel’s conflicts with Hezbollah in Lebanon and with Hamas in Gaza to end by the time he takes office on January 20.

Q. Is that effective pressure, coming from the future president? Is it realistic?

A. With Hezbollah in Lebanon, yes, realistic. And probably unnecessary. The momentum for a ceasefire deal existed even before the results of the US presidential election were known. With Hamas in Gaza, on the other hand, probably not realistic: neither the Netanyahu government nor the Hamas leadership is strongly motivated to end the conflict. The Biden administration, for its part, is working hard to end both conflicts.

In this sense, it is hard to credit all the talk about Prime Minister Netanyahu wanting to delay ceasefires until he can render them ‘gifts’ to President Trump. The incoming president clearly prefers not to have to ‘manage’ intractable conflicts like those that pit Israel against militant Islamists with whom his transactional style is not likely to work.

Netanyahu, for his part, clearly prefers to end the Lebanon conflict and lighten the awesome burden on IDF reservists and their families. In contrast, for domestic political reasons--his and his government’s political survival--he would rather not end the Gaza conflict, but only if he can keep Israel’s casualties in Gaza at a level low enough for the Israeli public to tolerate.

Neither of these specific calculations is likely to interest Trump, who needs to wrap everything in a “deal’ that he can trumpet to his supporters. Still, with or without a Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal, Trump will inherit a Gaza humanitarian crisis of awesome proportions. That only last month he stated that Gaza “could be better than Monaco . . . one of the best places in the world” reflects his monumental ignorance of the facts on the ground; everyone else stopped boosting Gaza as the “next Singapore” a generation and several wars ago. (That Trump models Monaco rather than the Peres-era Singapore for the Gaza Strip of course also says something about Trump.)

Q. Ending conflicts is one dimension of the shadow cast on the Middle East by the impending second Trump administration. Another, broader aspect, is the flurry of regional diplomatic and strategic activity seemingly dictated by the prospect of Trump’s presidency without his having yet entered the White House.

A. Given Trump’s spontaneous and unpredictable mode of decision-making, this seems like a worthless exercise. But that is not stopping anyone, as Trump piles on appointments of business and ideological cronies, some seemingly contradicting one another.

Thus, the Iranian leadership is intimating that it will delay its promised armed response against Israel at least until Trump takes office. Trump advisor Elon Musk has already met (or not, depending whom you believe) with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. Meanwhile Tehran is being courted by Gulf Arab leaders, led by the Saudis. The general idea seems to be to avoid appearing weak, isolated or friendless in Trump’s eyes and to blur the notion of Iranian-Arab conflict.

Will Trump want to settle scores with Iran--which is accused of at least one plot to assassinate him--or denuclearize it, or both? Netanyahu hopes to find in Trump an American partner for attacking Iran’s nuclear project. The Gulf Arabs fear, understandably, that this will come at the expense of their security and economies. Iran is dropping hints about some sort of détente with Washington.

Brian Hook, a Middle East expert who is now leading Trump’s transition team, recently told CNN that “President Trump has no interest in regime change [in Iran]... [But] he would isolate Iran diplomatically and weaken them economically so that they can’t fund all of the violence that’s going with the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and these proxies that run around Iraq and Syria today, all of whom destabilize Israel and our Gulf partners.”

Saudi de facto leader Mohammad Ben Salman would apparently like to be seen by Trump as a potential bridge to Iran. He is a candidate for new arms deals and a security pact with the US--the latter a goal that eluded the Biden administration. In return, MbS can offer renewal of discussion of Saudi-Israeli normalization--one more reason Trump wants the Gaza conflict out of the way. Here we recall that the 2019-2020 normalization agreement linking Israel to four Arab countries was perhaps the crowning achievement of Trump’s first-term diplomacy. It has thus far withstood the ravages of the Gaza war and can be built on: the planes are still flying between Tel Aviv and Dubai.

Q. Where do Trump’s more bizarre appointments enter the Middle East picture?

A. Building on normalization will be one of the tasks of Steven Witkoff, a New York real estate investor newly appointed by Trump as Special Envoy to the Middle East. Another task could be putting Iran’s nuclear program back on the table. All of this will require the quid pro quo of some sort of progress on the Palestinian issue--more, presumably, than offered by the ludicrous and ignorant two-state solution map that accompanied normalization in 2019 and seemingly satisfied the UAE and Morocco while infuriating Jordan, Israel’s vital neighbor and security partner. Witkoff, like Jared Kushner before him, presumably knows how to close a deal but does not know the Middle East.

Enter Trump’s appointment as ambassador to Israel, evangelical ex-governor Mike Huckabee, a fervent believer in the Greater Land of Israel, meaning annexation of war-ravaged Palestinian territories. That prospect excites the messianic extremists in Netanyahu’s government. They conveniently ignore the ultimate objective of Huckabee and company: the End of Days and end of the Jews. Needless to say, wholesale annexation means a binational Israel-Palestine--clearly a step toward Huckabee’s end of days.

Q. What other Trump appointments could steer his Middle East designs?

A. Trump’s emerging security team is of particular concern. Secretary of Defense appointee Pete Hegseth has no experience managing US defense relationships with Israel and Saudi Arabia or the hostile relationship with Iran. Prospective head of the intelligence community Tulsi Gabbard has been too friendly with Russia’s Putin and Syria’s Assad and has blamed NATO for Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Her appointment could conceivably deter Israel from vital intelligence sharing with the US.

Compared to Hegseth and Gabbard, prospective Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, all hawks on Iran, look like solid Washington-style establishment figures. Still, even if we ignore outrageous appointments that do not relate to the Middle East like Matt Gaetz as Attorney General and RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary, the potential for mayhem and misdirection in the new administration’s Middle East dealings is immense.

Q. We don’t know specifically how Trump wants to choreograph the solving of Middle East issues like Gaza and Iran. But we do know his recipe for Ukraine. And we are aware of his deference to Putin and his disdain for NATO-- both key actors in a Ukraine settlement. What can we learn here regarding Trump and the Middle East?

A. It is not pretty. Trump seems capable of demanding to tear off chunks of sovereign Ukraine, in the country’s east, to satisfy Putin. He could well dry up Ukraine’s American arms supply. He could try to dictate an ‘end of conflict’ in Ukraine that devastates NATO and spawns widespread low-level warfare along Russia’s European borders. In this regard, Iranian weapons-supply and North Korean manpower supply to Russia may just be commencing.

In this spirit, expect more ungainly and anti-strategic maps of Palestinian territorial ‘solutions’ that cater to Israel’s messianic annexationists and guarantee yet more conflict. On the other hand, could Russia reward Trump for his territorial benevolence at Ukraine’s expense by ‘delivering’ a denuclearized Iran?

Q. Bottom line?

A. Trump has pledged to end Middle East wars. He rewards ‘winners’ and disdains ‘losers’. Democracy and human rights are not important considerations; territorial-political transactions are. Trump is soft on proponents of ‘lite’ fascism like Putin, Erdogan and Netanyahu. He has scores to settle and arms deals to sign throughout the region. He has a right-evangelical ‘base’ to satisfy, ideally with chunks of the Land of Israel.

Seen from Israel, where Netanyahu’s rule is stable, the Palestinians are in total disarray, and conflicts with Iran and its proxies still rage, the prospect of four more years of a Trump presidency has the Israeli right-messianic mainstream (yes, mainstream!) rubbing its hands in ecstasy.

As for a Jewish, democratic Israel in harmony with its immediate neighbors--not on Trump’s (or Netanyahu’s) agenda.