When Donald Trump takes office on January 20, the promises he made to end the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours and to stop Israel’s war on its neighbors will be put to the test. The choices he has made for his incoming administration so far—including Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, Mike Waltz as National Security Adviser, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, and Elise Stefanik as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations—are drawn from a rogues gallery of saber-rattlers.
The only conflict where peace negotiations seem to be on the agenda is the war in Ukraine. In April, both Senator, and now Vice President-elect, J.D. Vance and Senator Rubio voted against a $95 billion military aid bill that included $61 billion for Ukraine.
Rubio recently appeared on NBC’s Today Show saying, “I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong when standing up to Russia. But at the end of the day, what we’re funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion . . . . I think there has to be some common sense here.”
On the campaign trail, Vance made the controversial suggestion that the best way to end the war would be for Ukraine to cede the land Russia has seized, to agree to a demilitarized zone, and to become neutral and not enter NATO. He was roundly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats who argue that backing Ukraine is vitally important to U.S. security since it weakens Russia, which is closely allied with China.
Any attempt by Trump to stop U.S. military support for Ukraine will undoubtedly face fierce opposition from the pro-war forces in his own party, particularly in Congress, as well as perhaps the entirety of the Democratic Party.
Two years ago, thirty progressive Democrats in Congress wrote a letter urging President Joe Biden to push for direct diplomacy with Moscow. The party higher-ups were so incensed by their lack of party discipline that they came down on the progressives like a ton of bricks. Within twenty-four hours, the group had rescinded the letter. They have all since voted to send money to Ukraine and have not uttered another word about negotiations.
A Trump effort to cut funding to Ukraine could run up against a bipartisan Congressional effort to keep the war going. And let’s not forget the efforts by European countries, and NATO, to keep the United States in the fight. Still, Trump could stand up to all these forces and push for a policy that would restart the talking and stop the killing.
The Middle East, however, is a more difficult situation.
In his first term, Trump showed his pro-Israel cards when he brokered the Abraham Accords between several Arab countries and Israel. He also moved the U.S. embassy to a location in Jerusalem that is partly on occupied land outside of Israel’s internationally recognized borders, and recognized the occupied Golan Heights in Syria as a part of Israel. Such unprecedented signals of unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation and settlements have helped set the stage for the current crisis.
Trump seems as unlikely as Biden to cut the flow of U.S. weapons to Israel, despite public opinion polls favoring such a halt and a recent U.N. human rights report showing that 70 percent of the people killed by those U.S. weapons are women and children.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is already busy getting ready for a second Trump presidency. On the same day as the U.S. elections, Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who opposed a lasting Israeli military occupation of Gaza and had at times argued for prioritizing the lives of the Israeli hostages over killing more Palestinians.
Israel Katz, the new defense minister and former foreign minister, is more hawkish than Gallant, and has led a campaign to falsely accuse Iranian Revolutionary Guard units of smuggling weapons from Jordan into the West Bank.
Other powerful voices—national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also works in the Defense Ministry—represent extreme Zionist parties that are publicly committed to territorial expansion, annexation, and ethnic cleansing. They both live in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu has deliberately surrounded himself with allies who back his ever-escalating war. They are likely developing a war plan to exploit Trump’s support for Israel, but are surely also planning to use the transitional period between U.S. administrations to create facts on the ground that will limit Trump’s options once he takes office.
The Israelis will doubtless redouble their efforts to drive Palestinians out of as much of Gaza as possible, confronting Trump with a catastrophic humanitarian crisis—Gaza’s surviving population crammed into an impossibly small area, with next to no food, no shelter for many, disease running rampant, and no access to needed medical care for tens of thousands of horribly wounded and dying people. They know they can count on Trump to accept whatever final solution they will propose, most likely, to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, into the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt, and farther afield. When Trump takes office, the Israelis may ask for greater U.S. involvement to help “finish the job” of killing Palestinians.
In Lebanon, Israeli forces have met fierce resistance, taken heavy casualties, and have not advanced far. But, as in Gaza, they are using bombing and artillery to destroy villages and towns and kill or drive people north, in the hopes of effectively annexing the part of Lebanon south of the Litani River as a so-called buffer zone.
The big wild card is Iran. During his first term in office Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal; imposed severe sanctions that devastated their economy; and ordered the killing of the country’s top general. Trump did not support a war against Iran in his first term, but did have to be talked out of attacking Iran in his final days in office by General Mark Milley and the Pentagon.
Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, recently described just how catastrophic a war with Iran would be, based on U.S. military wargames in which he had been involved.
Wilkerson predicts that a U.S. war with Iran could last for ten years, cost $10 trillion, and still fail to conquer Iran. Airstrikes alone would not destroy all of Iran’s civilian nuclear program and ballistic missile stockpiles. So, once unleashed, the war could likely escalate into a regime-change war involving U.S. ground forces. This in a country that has three or four times the territory and population of Iraq, more mountainous terrain and a thousand-mile-long coastline bristling with missiles that could be used to sink U.S. warships.
But Netanyahu and his extreme Zionist allies believe they must sooner or later fight an existential war with Iran if they are to realize their vision of a dominant Greater Israel. And they believe that the destruction they have wreaked on Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, including the assassination of their senior leaders, has given them a military advantage and a favorable opportunity for just such a showdown with Iran.
By November 10, Trump and Netanyahu had reportedly spoken on the phone three times since the election, and Netanyahu is quoted as saying they see “eye-to-eye on the Iranian threat.” Trump has already hired Iran hawk Brian Hook, who helped him sabotage the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018, to coordinate the formation of his foreign policy team.
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So far, the team that Trump and Hook have assembled seems to offer some hope for peace in Ukraine, but little-to-none for peace in the Middle East and a rising danger of a possible U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.
Trump’s expected national security adviser, Mike Waltz, is best known as a China hawk. As a U.S. Representative, Waltz has voted against military aid to Ukraine, but he recently tweeted that Israel should bomb Iran’s nuclear and oil facilities, which would be the most certain path to a full-scale war.
Trump’s new pick for U.N. Ambassador, Elise Stefanik, has led moves in Congress to equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. She also led the aggressive questioning of university presidents at an antisemitism hearing in Congress, after which the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania resigned.
So while Trump will have some advisers who support his announced desire to end the war in Ukraine, there will be few voices in his inner circle urging caution over Netanyahu’s genocidal ambitions in Palestine and determination to decisively defeat Iran.
If he chose to, Biden could use his final two months in office to de-escalate the conflicts in the Middle East. He could impose an embargo on providing offensive weapons for Israel, push for serious cease-fire negotiations in both Gaza and Lebanon, and work through U.S. partners in the region to de-escalate tensions with Iran.
But Biden is unlikely to do any of that. When his own administration sent a letter to Israel last month threatening a cut in military aid if Israel did not permit a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza in the next thirty days, Israel responded by doing just the opposite—actually cutting the number of trucks allowed in. The State Department claimed Israel was taking “steps in the right direction” and Biden refused to take any action, so the deadline has come and gone with no change.
We will soon see if Trump is able to make progress in moving the Ukraine war towards negotiations, potentially saving the lives of many thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. But between the catastrophes that Trump will inherit and the warhawks he is picking for his Cabinet, peace in the Middle East seems more distant than ever.