More questions than answers in Donald Trump’s Mideast rhetoric

Donald Trump, due to be inaugurated as US president this Friday, has already stirred up the world, from Beijing to Berlin, with his foreign policy nostrums. In the absence of concrete policies, one can only judge by his attitudes. Yet on the Middle East it may be rash to assume all his campaign remarks — including against Muslims — were rhetoric. If he sticks to his views on a region plagued by implosion and explosion, Mr Trump could fall into its elephant traps or disappear down its myriad rabbit holes.

The new president would seem to have adopted a firm position on the Israeli conflict with the Palestinians. Israel’s rightwing government — tilted towards irredentist forces who wish to expand Jewish settlement in, and eventually annex most of, the occupied West Bank — greeted Mr Trump’s election as ending all talk of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. The "two state” solution has been a settled diplomatic consensus on the problem since the Oslo accords of 1993-95, reaffirmed at an international conference last weekend in Paris. "This conference is among the last twitches of the world of yesterday”, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, told his cabinet with Trumpian triumphalism on Sunday. "Tomorrow will look quite different and that tomorrow is very close.”

Mr Trump has pledged to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and named a supporter of the settlements as ambassador to Israel. He has appointed Jared Kushner, his Jewish son-in-law, as a senior adviser who, he told German daily Bild this week, would "secure an Israel deal which no one else has managed to get”.

Yet further settlement will foreclose any possibility of two states, as the Greater Israel camp correctly judges. And the Jerusalem move would turn a dispute over land into a religious conflict involving a city holy to the three Abrahamic monotheist faiths, and force Arab allies such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan to distance themselves from the west.

On Iran, Mr Trump keeps repeating, as he did to The Times this week, that the nuclear agreement reached last year with the US and five world powers is "one of the dumbest deals I’ve ever seen”, and pledged to either rip it up or make it unworkable. He has selected as top aides figures with visceral antipathy towards Iran — such as Michael Flynn, a former general, the incoming national security adviser who tends to conflate Tehran-backed Shia radicalism with Sunni jihadism, despite the conflict across the Islamic world between Sunni and Shia.

In the fact-based world, the alternative to a deal allowing Iran to enrich uranium under strict international invigilation is war, almost certainly bigger than any of the many the US has seen in the Middle East. Iran will not renegotiate and, if it pretends to, it will find other ways of sending painful messages to its interlocutors.

For all that Mr Trump decries the supposed feebleness of President Barack Obama towards Tehran, any US government has to deal with the rise in Iranian influence that followed President George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq and installation by default there of a Shia-dominated order. Any power determined to uproot Isis and its barbarism from the region, moreover, finds itself in de facto alignment with Iran. As a strident champion of US manufacturing, would President Trump, furthermore, want to put American jobs at risk by, say, cancelling Iran’s order for 80 Boeing aircraft, deflecting business to Airbus, its European rival?

These conundrums are almost simple in comparison to the multidimensional challenge of the shape-changing conflict in Syria, where an emerging power tripod of Russia, Iran and Turkey is filling a vacuum the US has inadvertently left.

This month, for instance, Russia — which even Mr Trump now acknowledges interfered in the US election — has been providing air support to Nato ally Turkey in its fight against Isis in north-west Syria, which is more about Ankara’s determination to prevent Syrian Kurdish forces creating a self-governing entity on Turkey’s border. But those Syrian Kurd fighters, allied with Turkish Kurd PKK insurgents most western powers designate as terrorists, are the US-allied strike-force against Isis further east, helping to encircle the jihadi stronghold of Raqqa.

Like the US, Turkey had opposed the Russia-and Iran-backed Assad regime in Syria. But now Ankara, a hesitant latecomer to the fight against Isis, is hinting it might bar the US and Nato powers from Turkey’s southern air base of Incirlik, complaining "you can’t defeat one terrorist organisation with another”, as a senior government official said last week. This — and there is so much more of it — does not fit easily in a tweet.

There are more questions than answers about future US policy in the Middle East. European officials can be heard saying they have a better sense of what Russian President Vladimir Putin might do than what President Trump will do — just one sign of how the volatile Middle Eastern story is disappearing beyond the looking glass.