When Donald Trump returned to the White House, many expected he would make major changes to U.S. policy in the Middle East. After all, Trump opposed forever wars on the campaign trail, worked to reduce troop levels in the Middle East and nearby Afghanistan during his first administration, and came back to office with a lot of political space to challenge conventions on foreign policy.
At a strategic level, the expectation that Trump would begin pivoting from the Middle East made sense too. With the emergence of U.S. energy independence and the serious diminution of global terrorism following the 2019 collapse of the ISIS caliphate’s leadership, the Middle East is far less important to U.S. national security today than in past decades—a point acknowledged by the Trump administration’s own strategy documents.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House, many expected he would make major changes to U.S. policy in the Middle East. After all, Trump opposed forever wars on the campaign trail, worked to reduce troop levels in the Middle East and nearby Afghanistan during his first administration, and came back to office with a lot of political space to challenge conventions on foreign policy.
At a strategic level, the expectation that Trump would begin pivoting from the Middle East made sense too. With the emergence of U.S. energy independence and the serious diminution of global terrorism following the 2019 collapse of the ISIS caliphate’s leadership, the Middle East is far less important to U.S. national security today than in past decades—a point acknowledged by the Trump administration’s own strategy documents.
So a year into his second term, is Trump meeting expectations for a pivot from the Middle East?
Not really. A few bright spots aside (minor troop reductions in Iraq and Syria, bucking Israel at a couple key moments), current trendlines point to more U.S. military engagement in the region when Trump leaves office in 2029. At this point, the best one can hope for is to avoid excessive overreach that does great damage to U.S. national security.
Since Trump took office, U.S. troop levels in the Middle East have increased from about 35,000 to 50,000. Moreover, several new policy initiatives are expected to keep current U.S. force levels in place and might even lead to increases over time.
Start with Gaza. Trump’s policy here has been nothing short of a nation-building operation, progressively Americanizing peace, reconstruction, and postwar governance. “This is our show,” a Trump advisor said. “We managed to do things in Gaza in recent months nobody thought was possible, and we are going to continue moving.”
Trump has stacked the permanent members of the Board of Peace that will oversee Gaza with U.S. citizens, appointed a U.S. general to head the International Stabilization Force (whose composition might include U.S. forces, according to the White House), and drawn up extensive plans for U.S. postwar re-development of Gaza on par with the “Riviera of the Middle East” Trump suggested last year.
With Hamas still armed and active, it appears Trump may be taking up Israel’s mantle in Gaza and plowing the United States into the kind of forever war he campaigned to end.
The same goes for Syria. Trump was right to engage, rather than isolate, the new post-Assad regime in Syria, but even with recent force reductions, U.S. troops remain in northeast Syria. More concerning still, U.S. forces are now apparently operating on a new military base near Damascus for peacebuilding operations meant to bolster the al-Sharaa regime.
All told, it’s conceivable the United States will get further dragged into Syria’s messy domestic politics. Recent U.S. airstrikes on ISIS targets following the assassination of U.S. military personnel on Syrian soil serve as a case in point.
Trump’s Iran policy also belies any pivot from the Middle East. In June, Trump crossed an important Rubicon with the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. This first-ever use of direct U.S. force against Iran helped make force the new center point for policy.
With the White House talking about the need for “new leaders” and regime change in the wake of recent protests in Iran, the new policy node of force both ties U.S. military assets down in the Middle East and significantly increases the likelihood of expanding the U.S. force presence. Again, case in point: Trump has dispatched a U.S. carrier to the Persian Gulf.
If the Iranian regime happens to collapse due to U.S. military action, the United States will own that. The drain on U.S. military resources in Iraq will pale in comparison to what will be required for the U.S. to stabilize Iran, which is four times larger geographically.
New security commitments under Trump also make a pivot from the Middle East unlikely. Trump gave Qatar a NATO-like security pledge in September—a first for any state in the Middle East—and signed a security pact for the first time with Saudi Arabia in November. Though not ratified by Congress, both commitments add pressure on policymakers to keep U.S. troops in the Middle East.
These moves taken in sum point to an unambiguous reality: the U.S. is set to stay in the Middle East for decades to come. Some might challenge this assessment by saying Trump’s policies are setting the stage for a pivot—get conditions right, then leave. Yet from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, history shows that this logic tends to fail. Deeper engagement produces just that, deeper engagement, and the same is now likely to happen under Trump.
Can Trump still return to drawing down troops from the Middle East? Theoretically, yes, but realistically that’s probably too much to expect without a crisis elsewhere that requires a significant redeployment of troops from the region.
Research by political scientists and social psychologists shows that a status quo bias tends to set in for leaders once a policy decision is made. For a host of potential reasons, leaders resist reconsideration, block out countervailing evidence about the efficacy of existing policy, and instead double down.
Trump is notorious for his deep aversion to admitting mistakes. “I don’t like to analyze myself,” he said in 2016. This will almost certainly reinforce a status quo bias on his Middle East policy.
Trump also runs the risk of falling into the fallacy of sunk costs, whereby leaders plow ahead with costly and even failing policies when they perceive that high reputational stakes are on the line. To avoid embarrassment or achieve grandeur, leaders tend to highly value costs sunk into existing endeavors and plow more resources in to save face.
Such sunk-cost thinking can be seen most perhaps in Gaza, which is deeply tied to Trump’s fixation on expanding the Abraham Accords and central to Trump’s mission to go down in history as a transformative order-builder and peacemaker in the Middle East. Those ambitions might be leading Trump toward wishful thinking that misses or trivializes the costs associated with deeper involvement.
Trump is surrounded by loyalists, has a weak national security-making process, and takes council on foreign policy, as he says, “mainly from himself.” Such an absence of checks and counterweights can also make it tough to break out of status quo and sunk-cost thinking.
What should advocates of retrenchment from the Middle East, both inside and outside of the administration, do now? Simply stated, keep hammering that more action and more engagement will increase U.S. costs in a region that by the president’s own words and strategy documents is of limited strategic value to U.S. security.
Research in the fields of law, business, and international politics shows that turning attention to future costs and benefits offers the best hope to force decisionmakers (i.e., Trump) toward greater reanalysis of policy.
The bright spot is that with his unconventional way of doing things, Trump has shown a willingness to change course when presented with future-oriented cost-benefit analysis.
He did this when he negotiated an end to the war in Afghanistan. He did it when he promised last year to “completely annihilate” the Houthis in Yemen only to recognize bombing wasn’t working, pull back, and opt for a ceasefire. He did it when he told Iranian protesters earlier this month that “help was on its way,” but instead backed away from using force when he realized U.S. military assets were limited, airpower wouldn’t work, and destabilization could follow.
Focusing Trump on future costs and benefits works—sometimes. Let’s hope he goes there more often on Middle East policy. U.S. national security hinges on it.
