During his first term, President Donald Trump unashamedly put Israel first. An important part of that policy was the so-called Abraham Accords, by which Washington paid Arab and other Muslim governments to recognize Israel. The American people received nothing of value in return.
The president is continuing his Israel-first policy, bursting with fulsome praise for the loathsome Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Far worse, and much more destructive, Trump has unreservedly supported Netanyahu’s brutal wars against Gaza and Lebanon, repression in the West Bank, and aggression against Iran. Trump once joked that “Even Bibi gets tired of war,” but, unfortunately, so far that claim hasn’t proved true. The only serious bilateral hiccup was Israel’s strike on Qatar, an official U.S. ally hosting Washington’s largest military base in the Middle East, which also recently donated a lavishly appointed jumbo jet for Trump’s use as the new Air Force One.
Netanyahu’s action offended Trump’s presumption of primacy rather than sense of decency. Even more important than the support of Israel’s backers to the president is his expressed determination “to run” the world. Rather than focus on America’s interests, he has sought to impose his geopolitical vision on friends and foes alike. Hence his outrage at Netanyahu’s effrontery. Israel can do anything it wants, except interfere with Trump’s globally meddlesome policies. In response to Israel’s insolent strike, the president three weeks ago issued a security guarantee in America’s name for Qatar—an implicit protection measure for Emir Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and his family.
Worse, the president apparently revived his offer to do the same for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia if it joins the Abraham Accords and recognizes Israel. “I hope to see Saudi Arabia go in, and I hope to see others go in,” the president has said. “I think when Saudi Arabia goes in, everybody goes in.” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly hopes to finalize such an agreement during his scheduled visit to the White House next month. Apparently MbS, as he is known, wants a “Qatar-plus” deal. An unnamed U.S. official explained, “There are discussions about signing something when the crown prince comes, but the details are in flux.”
MbS, who effectively rules in the name of his ailing father, was the first foreign leader visited by the president in 2017 and always has been a Trump favorite. After MbS had critic Jamal Khashoggi murdered and dismembered, Trump proclaimed that he protected the princely killer’s “ass” from accountability. Although these “Abrahamic” agreements have been acclaimed as a diplomatic masterstroke, they are nothing of the sort. They brought peace to no one, since none of the participants were at war with Israel. Indeed, several Persian Gulf and North African states, including Riyadh, had for years covertly cooperated with Jerusalem on security issues without American subsidies or other inducements.
Rather, this diplomatic initiative was an almost entirely malign policy, intended to reinforce Israeli dominance and Palestinian submission. The U.S. ostentatiously turned already oppressed Palestinians over to Israel’s not-so-gentle mercies, to be treated like Spartan Helots, a permanent underclass with neither legal nor political rights. Through the Abraham Accords, participating states essentially accepted Israel as a normal government while abandoning any defense of Palestinians.
Other beleaguered peoples lost out, too. The first Trump administration sacrificed the residents of Western Sahara, once a Spanish colony, by recognizing Morocco’s conquest of the region and suppression of independence aspirations. Washington refused to lift a discredited terrorism designation from post-revolutionary Sudan—which has since collapsed into a devastating civil war—unless it agreed to recognize Israel, against the wishes of a vast majority of its population. The United Arab Emirates demanded additional weapons transfers before making the deal, which it has since enthusiastically embraced. Only Bahrain, with a major U.S. naval base, failed to extort any special privileges from Washington in return.
What always mattered most to Netanyahu was strengthening his political position, preserving his narrow and extremist coalition parliamentary majority, thereby enabling him to continue avoiding trial and potential imprisonment on corruption charges. What matters most to the president is preserving his hold over America’s dwindling but still influential Israel-first constituency. For this, Trump promises that Americans will fight and die on behalf of privileged, corrupt, dissolute, and dictatorial Gulf monarchs.
At least Qatar has not recognized Israel and occasionally advances American interests. While Israel- and Saudi-firsters in the U.S. routinely denounce Doha, Washington has encouraged it to host representatives of antagonistic forces such as Hamas and the Taliban, creating indirect communication channels for Washington. Qatar also helped mediate prisoner exchanges between the U.S. and Iran, as well as Ukraine and Russia. Although during his first term the president initially backed the Saudi–Emirati campaign to isolate and overthrow the al-Thani monarchy, his administration eventually pushed for a peaceful resolution of the controversy, while the Biden administration designated Doha as a major non-NATO ally. Some 20 countries enjoy this elevated status, but it offers no security guarantee.
Now Trump has dramatically escalated Washington’s commitment. Section two of his executive order directs that
The United States shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States…
In the event of such an attack, the United States shall take all lawful and appropriate measures—including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military—to defend the interests of the United States and of the State of Qatar and to restore peace and stability.
This promise is akin to NATO’s famed Article 5. Observed David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “The last time we offered anything close to a treaty obligation security commitment was the revision of the 1960 U.S.-Japan treaty.” Thus, Miller added, the president’s action “is no small matter.”
While Trump’s pronouncement does not ensure military intervention—Washington ultimately decides what is “lawful,” “appropriate,” and, most important, “necessary”—the presumption is that the U.S. will take military action to defend Qatar, if threatened. Failing to act would be viewed by Doha and other Gulf states as bad faith on Washington’s part. There would be extraordinary pressure on the U.S. to act to maintain its “credibility,” if nothing else.
Yet despite its extraordinary wealth and legendary diplomatic prowess, the emirate is not important for American security. Of course, it has a multitude of interests for which it undoubtedly would like the U.S. to fight, but that is no reason for Washington to do so. No country threatens to conquer the Gulf, seize Mideast oil, destroy Israel, or otherwise discomfit the U.S., which has become an energy behemoth, and the international market has become much more diverse. Iran poses a potential threat to Doha only as host of America’s air force base, an obvious target for retaliation if Washington again initiates hostilities against Tehran—for which there is no justification.
Israel, committed to dominate the region, poses a more serious threat, but no one believes that the U.S. would ever go to war with Israel, even if Jerusalem decided to annihilate the entire Mideast. Washington’s usual suspects would, yet again, piously pronounce that Israel had a right to defend itself, irrespective of the consequences to anyone else. In any case, if a future administration nevertheless wanted to respond to an unlikely “armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar,” it could do so without a formal commitment, but should do so only after due deliberation in response to practical necessity, not reflexively to fulfill a political declaration.
Moreover, Trump’s promise binds no one, not even him. It is a unilateral, unenforceable personal promise. He did not negotiate a formal treaty or win ratification by the Senate, as with Washington’s formal “mutual defense” pacts. There was no congressional, let alone public, debate over the wisdom of committing America to go to war on behalf of someone else. The president is writing checks which the Constitution does not authorize him to cash. Without a congressional declaration of war, the president has no authority to fight over Qatar.
However, having made this commitment, the president cannot easily deny a similar guarantee to the other Gulf states, especially Bahrain, which hosts a major naval installation; Kuwait, which served as a major base for Iraq operations; and simultaneously repressive and aggressive UAE, which Trump’s former Defense Secretary James Mattis admiringly called “Little Sparta.” Adding a unilateral, lawless defense commitment for Saudi Arabia—with which the Trump as well as Biden administrations previously proposed negotiating a formal defense treaty—would be even worse.
The Kingdom, whose residents provided substantial financial support for Al Qaeda and 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, has long been the region’s most malign actor. For decades, the ruling royals have maintained a totalitarian state at home, repressing political dissent, religious liberty, and personal freedom, and promoting Islamic fundamentalism around the world. Although MbS introduced welcome social liberalization, he intensified the Kingdom’s political controls, leaving the country less free than Iran and Russia and tied with China in Freedom House’s ratings.
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Worse, from a security standpoint, the crown prince launched an aggressive war against Yemen, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, backed jihadist insurgents in Syria, who were more brutal than the odious Assad regime, economically isolated and threatened to invade Qatar, deterred only by U.S. diplomatic and Turkish military pressure, subsidized Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s coup against Egypt’s first democratically elected government, leading to a savage political crackdown, and intervened militarily to sustain Bahrain’s dictatorial minority Sunni monarchy, suppressing that country’s Shia majority. Perhaps most bizarrely of all, MbS even kidnapped the visiting Lebanese prime minister, later joking about the crime.
Finally, Washington has filled Saudi Arabia’s bases and arsenals with American weapons. Although the regime treated the purchases as de facto payment for Washington’s implicit security guarantee, the acquisitions should enable the regime to defend itself. If the Kingdom’s own people don’t want to risk their lives for the country’s parasitic royal ruling class, the American people certainly shouldn’t be expected to do so. Perhaps the Saudi royals can pay Pakistan to defend them.
America’s national interest today is best served by restricting, not expanding, its military commitments abroad, especially in the Middle East. The president should retract his promise to Qatar. Failing that, he should treat it as a one-off response to Israel’s wanton disregard for America’s interests as well as international law. He certainly should not risk even more U.S. wealth and lives on behalf of absolute monarchy in the Persian Gulf. Only vital interests can justify such a commitment, and they are absent in the Middle East today.
