Donald Trump’s return to the White House after a short hiatus has scrambled foreign capitals, not because his win against former Vice President Kamala Harris was a surprise, but rather because the next four years could look remarkably different than the last four. Trump enters the Oval Office with a big “to-do” list on his desk and a boatload of ambition to boot. 

Reality, however, tends to throw cold water on the grandest plans. Some of the challenges Trump will try to tackle, like competing with China while minimizing the prospects of a war in the Indo-Pacific, are systemic problems that will likely take generations to resolve—assuming they can be resolved at all. Others require the cooperation of foreign leaders: ending the three-year war in Ukraine is clearly a top foreign policy priority for Trump but depends just as much on the calculations of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as it does on Trump’s desire to land himself the Nobel Peace Prize. Still others, like hammering out a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians, are so remote that one wonders whether expending U.S. diplomatic resources on this problem is even worth the energy.

Despite all of the challenges before him, Trump has an opportunity to score a quick foreign policy win right out of the gate—one that will require very little effort on his part but would nevertheless save the U.S. military from having to take on yet another security burden. He should walk away from the former Biden administration’s attempt to strike a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. 

Some of Trump’s advisers, and perhaps even the president himself, might look at this recommendation with a combination of contempt and befuddlement. After all, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz has called normalization between two of America’s closest partners in the Middle East “a huge priority.” Trump’s first phone call with a foreign leader was with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), and one wouldn’t be surprised if normalization had come up somewhere in the conversation. Moreover, an Israel-Saudi normalization pact would be a logical and groundbreaking addition to the 2020 Abraham Accords, which established formal diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab states. 

The issue, though, isn’t whether a normal Israel-Saudi relationship is a good outcome—it most certainly is. The question, rather, is what the United States would have to concede to get it. And that’s where the trouble lies: Trump would have to provide Riyadh with so many sweeteners, up to and including a formal U.S. defense guarantee, that Washington would wind up being enmeshed even more deeply in the Middle East.

For whatever reason, the Biden administration was incapable of acknowledging this basic fact—or worse, understood it but still thought the costs of turning the U.S. military into the al-Saud family’s personal security guards was worth the benefit. Whatever the case, former U.S. officials who had a hand in pushing a normalization mega-deal want Trump and his team to continue where they left off. 

“The work that we've done on putting in place the elements of that deal, including what we and Saudi Arabia would do together, what they would do with Israel, all of that is now there,” then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken told MSNBC in December. “Now the opportunity is there—and I know this is something that the president [Trump] will be focused on—to broaden that out with the Saudis.”

As originally constructed, the deal Blinken was referring to aimed to kill multiple birds with one stone. In exchange for Riyadh normalizing relations with Jerusalem, something Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sought for years, the Israeli government would create a pathway to an independent Palestinian state. This Israeli concession was less in service of the Palestinian cause per se and more about providing MBS the political space he needed to sell normalization to the Saudi public. The United States would offer Riyadh the carrots it actually wanted—a security guarantee as well as support for a domestic uranium enrichment program—to push MBS over the finish-line.

On paper, the deal serves each party well. Riyadh’s formal recognition would afford Israel (and Netanyahu specifically) a dramatic boost in prestige at a time when the war in Gaza has dented Jerusalem’s image in the region and, indeed, most of the world. The Saudis would get the United States, the world’s most militarily capable power, on its side for the long term, allowing MBS to focus on his top priority: diversifying the Saudi economy away from oil and transforming the kingdom into a 21st-century power. Former Biden officials, stung by their foreign policy setbacks, could celebrate a signal diplomatic triumph that helped solidify a bloc against Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance.” As for Trump: what better way to start off your tenure than closing a deal the Biden administration couldn’t?

Look beneath the surface, however, and the risks and costs of striking an arrangement like this are quite high for the United States. Despite his infatuation with both Israel and Saudi Arabia, President Trump needs to ask himself two fundamental questions: Is such a deal even possible, and if it is, should it be pursued? The answer to both is a resounding “no.” 

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The geopolitical circumstances in the Middle East have changed markedly since the Biden administration originally came up with this diplomatic concept in early 2023. There was a time in the not-so-distant past when MBS was comparing Iran’s mullahs to Adolf Hitler and talking about Israel as a potential ally, a force-multiplier to Riyadh’s own efforts to contain Iranian power. Relations with the West Bank–based Palestinian Authority weren’t particularly rosy either, with Saudi officials viewing the organization as hopelessly corrupt, ineffectual, and masterful at missing prior opportunities for peace, 

Needless to say, these regional dynamics no longer exist. Ever since Israel began a large-scale air and ground offensive in Gaza after Hamas’s bloody pogrom on October 7, 2023, the Saudi government has stated unequivocally that the Kingdom wants no part of normalization with Israel absent the establishment of a Palestinian state. Previously, Riyadh might have been open to token Israeli concessions on behalf of the Palestinians—the start of a formal peace process or perhaps some minor land transfers to the Palestinian Authority, for example—but Israel’s devastating military response in Gaza and the death of more than 46,000 Palestinians changed the game for the Saudis, who now have to firmly manage domestic concerns about indulging Jerusalem at a time when Gaza is reduced to rubble and Palestinians are living in the ruins.

Referring to the possibility of normalization, the Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan was unequivocal: “It is off the table until we have a resolution to Palestinian statehood.” When rumors spread last December that Riyadh may be watering down its demands, the Saudi foreign ministry quick to denounce them as totally inaccurate: “The Kingdom has communicated its firm position to the U.S. administration that there will be no diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognised on the 1967 borders with east Jerusalem as its capital, and that the aggression on the Gaza Strip stops and all Israeli occupation forces withdraw from the Gaza Strip.” 

In addition, many Israelis are skeptical that Israel can coexist peacefully alongside an independent Palestine, regardless of which Palestinian political faction rules it. Prominent members of Netanyahu’s parliamentary coalition are outright hostile to the idea and see any concessions to the Palestinians as a reward for Hamas’s attack. Annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, an idea that was previously on the fringes of Israeli political discourse, is increasingly a mainstream policy option. Netanyahu has declared multiple times that he won’t tolerate a Palestinian state—in fact, he wastes no opportunity to remind his constituents that he alone has single-handedly blocked such an outcome for the last 15 years. 

Indeed, Netanyahu was a vocal opponent of the Oslo Accords struck between Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat in 1993, which created Palestinian self-government in some parts of the West Bank as a placeholder for eventual statehood. While Netanyahu agreed to implement Oslo during his first stint as prime minister in 1996-1999, implementation was purposely slow. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and with respect to Israeli-Palestinian peace, Netanyahu is the epitome of the old dog stubbornly set in his ways. 

Even if Netanyahu were willing to cooperate in a new peace process with the Palestinians, the obstacles in Israeli domestic politics would be formidable. Since his political future depends on ultra-nationalists like Bezalel Smotrich and a Likud party that has become increasingly right-wing over the years, Netanyahu wouldn’t have the flexibility to pursue one even if he tried. For a man whose first, second, and third priorities are preserving his power, any grand diplomatic initiative that could possibly threaten his political standing will be sacrificed at the altar. 

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Ultimately, Israeli politics isn’t America’s concern. From the U.S. perspective, there are so many problems with a mega-deal between the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia that one wonders why Trump would bother following in his predecessor’s footsteps in pursuing it. Washington doesn’t get much out of this arrangement other than more risk.

If you take Trump at his word, he wants to pull the United States out of the Middle East after two decades of military engagements that have sapped U.S. combat power and brought the U.S. military squarely into the region’s inter-state rivalries. Giving the Saudis a security guarantee in exchange for normalization with Israel would exacerbate the dynamics he rightly wants to eliminate, locking Washington into a Faustian bargain with Riyadh.

The Saudis would be thrilled with a U.S. defense commitment for obvious reasons—the U.S. military is the most powerful on the planet, can project force at great distances quickly, and would certainly deter Iran from doing anything nefarious on Saudi soil. But the benefits to the United States are less clear, and one wouldn’t be speaking out of turn by arguing they are nonexistent. Some American foreign policy analysts argue that a U.S. security guarantee to Saudi Arabia would significantly improve Riyadh’s own military capacity, which would lessen Washington’s commitment over time. 

Yet this claim is hard to take seriously considering that Washington’s already extensive support to the Saudi military has produced very little in terms of capability. Three successive U.S. administrations have exported tens of billions of dollars in munitions and defense platforms to the Kingdom since 2009. The U.S. continues to execute a variety of training programs with the Saudi military as well. And yet despite this assistance, Riyadh’s military readiness is questionable, and its record against less-sophisticated adversaries is a bad one. Far from boosting the kingdom’s military strength, a U.S. security guarantee is more likely to disincentivize the Saudis from undergoing the necessary improvements Washington wants them to make. After all, why go through the trouble when your insurance policy is protection by a superpower?

Second, if Trump were to follow in Joe Biden’s footsteps, he would feed into the problem of moral hazard, enabling a client state to take risks it wouldn’t ordinarily take, since it won’t have to pay the consequences. The credibility embedded in a U.S. defense guarantee could perpetuate the very aggressive behavior from the Saudi leadership that Washington would be wise to discourage.

This isn’t theoretical. The Saudis have engaged in numerous unhelpful, counterproductive actions in the recent past, knowing that Washington’s military and diplomatic support was, if not automatic, then at least highly likely regardless of what it did. The Saudi-led war in Yemen, a campaign the Obama administration saw as ill-advised but supported nonetheless, is a case in point. The war, unleashed in 2015 to drive the Houthis from power, devolved into a disaster that bore intractable political, military, and humanitarian calamities. The Saudi military, which insisted to Washington that the fighting would be over in weeks, instead found itself bogged down in an expensive quagmire the Saudis were able to sustain for years thanks to U.S. defense exports and diplomatic backing at the UN Security Council. 

Washington’s siding with Saudi Arabia was a stain on its humanitarian record and sullied its own moral standing as a country that cared about the so-called rules-based order. Tens of thousands of civilians died from bombings, ground fighting, disease and famine. Ultimately, Washington was compelled to narrow its support for the Saudi-led war after the gruesome dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, but Saudi operations likely would have ended sooner had the first Trump administration cut off the aid spigot. By granting Riyadh a formal security guarantee, however, the U.S. would be pegging itself to the whims of a foreign capital and severely limiting its geopolitical flexibility in the process.

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Instead of escalating U.S. involvement in the Middle East, Trump should do exactly the opposite by deprioritizing the region in U.S. grand strategy and allowing local powers to make their own security arrangements. While it may sound counterintuitive, this strategy has a much better chance of promoting stability in the region than deepening America’s intervention there. 

It’s no coincidence that Saudi Arabia began diplomatic overtures to Iran after Trump refused to come to Riyadh’s defense in September 2019. That month, drones and cruise missiles attacked Saudi oil infrastructure, purportedly at Tehran’s behest. Saudi officials, shocked at the lack of U.S. involvement, eventually came to the conclusion that reconciling with its chief regional adversary was the only option it had available. After a series of meetings in 2021 and 2022, Saudi Arabia and Iran signed a normalization accord in March 2023 and regularized high-level contacts with each other. Last November, the chief of staff of the Saudi armed forces visited Tehran for talks with his Iranian counterpart.

None of this to say that Israel and Saudi Arabia shouldn’t consider normalization on their own. The two states have quietly cooperated for years on security and intelligence matters. If both states find it within their respective interests to formally recognize one another publicly, then they will make this decision in due course and Trump should wish them well. But the formation of a balancing coalition against Iran and its proxies should not require an extravagance of American indulgence. Donald Trump would be wise to remember that U.S. diplomacy should advance U.S. interests, not those of a foreign power.