When President Trump welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House on Tuesday, their conversation will focus on a Middle East where Israel’s stunning military prowess — supported by its American patron — has tilted the balance of power more heavily in favor of the U.S. and its allies than at any point in decades. The challenge for Trump is how to take advantage of this moment.
It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of the blows delivered by Israel in recent months to our common adversary, the Islamic Republic of Iran and its so-called “axis of resistance.”
Lebanese Hezbollah, the jewel in the crown of Iran’s regional proxies, is in tatters, its leadership decapitated.
Hamas, which launched the war against Israel 16 months ago, has been battered beyond recognition. It survives as a shadow of its former self solely because Israeli domestic politics prevent the emergence of a political alternative.
Syria, once the key link connecting Tehran to Lebanon, has ended the horror of the Assad family tyranny after a weakened Iran and a distracted Russia stopped propping it up. The new regime in Damascus, whatever its other faults, considers the ayatollahs to be bitter enemies.
And Iran itself made the fateful error of launching direct assaults against Israel. This reckless act legitimized Arab participation in a U.S.-led regional missile defense that helped protect Israel. It also prompted Israel’s own reprisal attacks that exposed vast weaknesses in Iranian defenses.
In sum, this is a rare moment in the Middle East. Opportunity outweighs risk, and shrewdly applied American power and influence could produce breakthroughs once thought unimaginable.
Trump already built upon this hopeful moment by pushing a long-sought Gaza ceasefire deal over the finish line with his “hell to pay” threat. Now he has the potential to build a new regional order anchored in that rarest of Middle East commodities — peace.
Over the next four years, the potential is real for Trump to achieve, with our Israeli partners, peace agreements on five fronts: with Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, broader Arab and Muslim states and the Palestinians. As breathtaking as that sounds, it is not a pie-in-the-sky dream.
With Syria and Lebanon, the first task is to strengthen the nationalist foundations of their new governments so that outside powers, such as Iran or Turkey, are not able to hold power behind the scenes.
In Beirut, that means cautioning the new leadership of President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam against so much “national unity” that Hezbollah is allowed to recoup some of its losses by controlling certain key ministries and thereby wriggle its way back into respectability.
And in Syria, that means offering the new Sunni-led leadership incentives to complete the eviction of Russian forces from Moscow’s Mediterranean military bases and to welcome Kurds, Druze, Christians and Alawites as full partners in a free, unified but decentralized Syria.
While steep, the path to peace between Israel and both post-Assad Syria and post-Hezbollah Lebanon is not insurmountable. Washington should encourage incremental steps — including a border demarcation and monitoring agreement between Israel and Lebanon, and an updating of the half-century-old Golan disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria — before pursuing non-aggression accords and, ultimately, the brass ring of full-fledged peace treaties. With creativity and commitment, this long-term goal is achievable.
All of that would be made easier by progress with Saudi Arabia, where a three-way set of defense and normalization agreements with the U.S. and Israel, negotiated by the Biden administration, is waiting to be signed. That event would be tectonic, opening the floodgates for a broader set of Arab and Muslim states — from Riyadh’s Gulf Cooperation Council partners to more distant countries like Indonesia and Mauritania — to reach their own accords with Israel, which Riyadh wants to see as validation of its decision to reconcile with the Jewish State.
The trigger for all this has two parts. The first is a sustainable calm in Gaza, based on the ceasefire and hostage release agreement now in its first phase. Second is an Israeli commitment to a political process with the Palestinians that is both time-bound (a Saudi concern) and conditions-based (an Israeli necessity). Squaring this circle is complicated but doable.
A particularly tricky part will be to convince Netanyahu to invest in a political process that cannot be realized without allotting a substantive role to the much-maligned Palestinian Authority. This is the governing administration that — with all its many faults — offers the sole practical alternative to continued Hamas control of Gaza.
Left to a choice between empowering a yet-to-be-reformed PA or returning to war with Hamas, Netanyahu would likely choose the latter. But if Trump adds to the equation the prospect of peace with all Israel’s other neighbors, including the Saudis, the balance could shift. His energy policy of “drill, baby, drill” is, at least in part, a message to Riyadh to do its part — and not overplay its hand.
To be sure, this potential Middle East rose garden is still laced with minefields. Hamas could violate the ceasefire, restarting the war. Lebanese politicians could botch the chance to rebuild their state, paving the way for Hezbollah’s resurgence. Syria’s new leadership could succumb to its jihadist origins, leading to a loss of international support and renewed civil war.
Saudi Arabia could demand more on the Palestinian front than any Israeli leader could accept in the post-Oct. 7 world, scuttling that transformative deal. Israel’s far-right, fearing the loss of its messianic dream of a Greater Israel, could ignite a firestorm of conflict in the West Bank.
And, worst of all, Iran could compensate for its conventional military vulnerabilities by pursuing a nuclear breakout that upends prospects for peace and instead triggers a regional nuclear arms race.
Preventing all these bad outcomes will require skill, persistence, creativity and a hefty dose of brinkmanship. But, in the grand scheme of things, this is a much better set of problems than what the region faced six months ago, before Israeli power began to reshape what is possible. Translating possibility into reality begins with the Trump-Netanyahu conversation.
Robert Satloff is Segal Executive Director of the Washington Institute.
