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June 18, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:13
Here’s How Trump Is Changing the Game in the Middle East: Josh Hammer
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You can essentially divide the region between two sets of players.
You have the, broadly speaking, Western-aligned players, which essentially consist of Israel and the non-Islamist Arab countries, countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE.
And on the other hand, you have the axis of Islamism, of support for Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Jihadism.
And that is the Iranian regime, of course.
Turkey, unfortunately, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
And Qatar, Qatar being the lead financier of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Josh Hammer is Newsweek's senior editor-at-large and author of the new book, Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.
What does an America-first foreign policy look like when it comes to Israel?
How does Trump's Middle East strategy fit into it?
And what of the U.S. relationship with Qatar?
America has always been engaged on the world stage, so the fact that we're not necessarily going to be around crusading in the name of spreading liberal democracy does not necessarily mean that we have no interest in the world.
We're America first, but we have to be America smart as well.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Josh Hammer, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
It's wonderful to be here.
Thanks for having me again.
So, I keep hearing about America first foreign policy, okay?
Except that what that actually means to people spans such a wide range, it's almost unbelievable.
Yeah.
And so, why don't we start there?
Give me a picture of that and where you believe it, Lance.
Okay, so the right is obviously having a lot of foreign policy debates right now.
And the Trump-era America First...
MAGA movement essentially arises out of a rejection of the status quo ante of Bush era neoconservatism, which we can vaguely define as a felty, a loyalty to abstract ideals.
Perhaps at the expense of the concrete national interest.
So to kind of put some fine teeth on that, President Bush's second inaugural address, the so-called Freedom Agenda from January 2005, speaks in very grand terms about how human beings all throughout the world aspire to the same universal ends of Western liberalism, Locke, Jefferson, and so forth there.
And that philosophy, whatever its merits may be, Had fairly ruinous results, I think, in many ways in practice.
So the America First movement, I think, largely arises from a rejection of that.
However, you're totally right there.
The terminology America First really only goes so far.
I mean, you know, who is not America First, right?
I mean, I'm America First, you're America First.
I assume most people watching this are America First.
I am someone who came of age in part in the post.
9 /11 era.
9 /11, I was 12 years old.
It was a huge turning point for me.
And I, too, like many in this country, I was in middle school, to be clear.
I was initially a supporter of Bush-era policies when it comes to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Like many, I fairly quickly sobered up from that.
So I have been in kind of this murky middle.
Between neoconservatism and isolationism, to use these kind of two overused terms, for my entire adult life there.
So the America First movement in many ways was something that was welcomed to me because I've been thinking and saying a lot of this for years.
The devil is always, though, in the details.
America first means that the American national interest is the sole and exclusive criterion for American foreign policy.
that we're not going to have a foreign policy that is solely predicated upon trying to ally with democracies that act in a similar function to the Congress because of universalist ideas about free people there.
And part of that is going to countenance alliances with countries that might not share our same moral or ethical foundations if they happen to, for instance, share our enemies.
It's a little bit of kind of an enemy my enemy is my friend sort of situation.
So to kind of take the example of the Middle East, you know, a realist foreign policy would be much more comfortable with an alliance with a country like Saudi Arabia, for instance, than a neoconservative foreign policy would be because this is, I mean, they literally just allowed women to drive a few years ago, right?
But in the Middle East, for instance, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the Saudis are quite fearful of Iran.
They don't want Iran to get a nuclear weapon there.
This is kind of the America First vision that I think President Trump in many ways has inaugurated.
I think it's actually no accident, speaking of Saudi Arabia, that his first foreign trip in both 2017 and 2025 started in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
He's kind of making a firm declaration that this is my vision of realist, of realist foreign policy there.
I think another element of America first is necessarily – And we necessarily do have to focus this entry on America's number one gravest threat, which is China and the Chinese Communist Party.
But as it pertains to the Middle East in particular, the relevant question then is, how can America best secure and protect its interests in this region?
While then prioritizing mid to long term assets and military and all that into the Indo-Pacific to deal with China.
The brilliant insight, I think, of President Trump during his first term, using this America First realist mentality, was that you would embolden your allies in the region to essentially protect and secure the region on both of your behalves, because those allies then share your national interests.
Israel, for instance, is the state in the region, in this case, that shares pretty much all of America's core interests in the region there.
You know, Hamas, Hezbollah, for instance, these are U.S.-recognized foreign terrorist organizations there.
So the realest prescription for the Middle East would be to essentially embolden your allies to kind of take care of this region, not necessarily by feeding off of the American teat, but simply by having leeway to more or less do their thing.
And then that will allow America, in turn, to kind of focus, at least over the next 20, 30 years, on its true grave challenge, which is China.
What America First is not, to me, is being synonymous with this old kind of fortress America mentality of simply kind of shrinking up like a hermit into its shell and pretending like the world does not exist.
That's not America first.
American foreign policy has never, ever truly, truly, truly like that.
I mean, the Barbary Wars against the Barbary pirates off the coast of Tripoli and Algiers, off the southern Mediterranean Sea, those are the second and third wars that we faced after the Revolutionary War against the British there in the early 1800s.
I mean, the reason that Thomas Jefferson built up the United States Navy was in response to these So America has always been engaged on the world stage.
So the fact that we're not necessarily going to be around crusading in the name of spreading liberal democracy does not necessarily mean that we have no interest in the world.
We're America first, but we have to be America smart as well.
So, as you mentioned, the president's first trip was to the Middle East, and how do you
Like 2017, his first trip begins in Saudi Arabia, and he has this big speech at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum kind of calling for the formal end of the Bush-era nation-building project there, which is correct.
That project should be ended.
Your mileage may vary as to whether or not this was the proper venue to do so.
Saudi Arabia infamously was the sponsor of some of those 9-11 hijackers, but the country is very different now than it was back then, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
This really is a very, very different Saudi Arabia.
Look, under President Biden, who mollycoddled the Iranians, much like President Obama did before him, during the Biden presidency, the Chinese essentially tried to seize on this American shooing to the side of the Arab Gulf states.
The Chinese tried to come in and tried to make really firm inroads with the Saudis, with the Emiratis, tried to bring them into the Belt and Road Initiative there.
It was actually a major deal that the Saudis and the Chinese reached throughout the exact year, 2022, give or take, but kind of right in the midst of the Biden presidency there.
So I think part of the geostrategic, And there's, of course, an economic portion here, too.
I mean, these dollar signs are insane, what these Arab countries are pledging to invest.
We'll see what that looks like in practice.
I mean, you know, it's hard to say exactly, right, how exactly.
The steel worker in western Pennsylvania or someone in Oklahoma will exactly, tangibly benefit from this?
Maybe.
I mean, it's just hard to say.
I mean, we'll see what that means in practice.
But certainly that was part of this trip as well.
But geopolitically kind of peeling back the Saudis, Emiratis, so forth from Chinese sphere of influence, I think is part of the equation there.
Now, here is where I think I see a little bit of a difference and what frankly gives me a little bit of a pause for concern there.
The first Trump administration's foreign policy acting on this America First vision, I think recognized that, at least sticking to the Middle East for a second, that you can essentially divide the region between You have the, broadly speaking, Western-aligned players, which essentially consist of Israel and the non-Islamist Arab countries, countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE.
And on the other hand, you have the axis of Islamism, of support for Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and jihadism.
And that, these days, is mostly the Iranian regime, of course.
Turkey, unfortunately, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Qatar, Qatar being the lead financier of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
I got a little worried on this trip, I'm being very candid with you, when the president really kind of rolled out the red carpet in Doha with the emir of Qatar.
I think Qatar is actually a very problematic country there.
Now, we'll see what happens.
Maybe I might be missing part of the picture.
It's possible that there are conversations behind the scenes that I'm not privy to.
Perhaps President Trump is saying that in exchange for this, you're going to stop doing all these sorts of bad things that you've been doing for years there.
So it's a little too early to make judgments there, But overall, overall, a lot to take away positive from this trip.
By the way, Syria, I mean, taking away sanctions, may be a little premature on the removal of sanctions.
But there are reports that...
Right.
I mean, fascinating.
Just a little bit on Qatar, you know, there's a giant U.S. military base in Qatar.
So I think for a lot of people, it's viewed as an ally.
Very, very complicated country, right?
So this is a tiny, tiny country, first of all.
We're talking here about two and a half, three million people at the most.
A fraction of that are actually the native Arabs.
We're talking here about 500,000 to 600,000 Arabs.
The rest are these imported workers from Nepal and India there.
But extravagantly wealthy country.
sits on one of the world's, if not the world's single largest natural gas field.
Qatar, one They've been doing this strategy for decades and decades.
They also are very savvy.
They make strategic investments.
So Qatar actually owns, I forgot the exact percentage, but it's like 15 to 20 percent, maybe a little less than 10 percent, of the Empire State Building.
They're the number one foreign state investor into American universities since 9-11, literally number one, more than Russia, China, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, you name it, they're number one there.
So they pour money there.
But this is a country that likes to have it both ways.
Yes, they host Aludade Air Base.
That's America's largest air base in the region there.
And I believe they gifted that.
Didn't they?
They probably did, because, again, this country has a lot of resources.
And they allowed, actually, America to launch its strike that killed Qasem Soleimani from Al-Udad Air Base, which is actually quite notable.
On the other hand, Al Jazeera is state-sponsored Qatari television.
And when Donald Trump took office the first time back in 2017, the non-Islamist Arab countries, namely the Saudis, Emiratis, Bahrainis, and so forth, were so fed up with Qatar's sponsorship of the Muslim Brotherhood via Al Jazeera.
They actually announced a diplomatic boycott of Qatar.
This is actually the GCC crisis, a major diplomatic crisis that Donald Trump walked into back in January of 2017.
His instincts back then were to side with the Saudis and Emiratis against Qatar.
That crisis ends up unwinding with no particular resolution.
So, look, at best, this is a problematic country.
At worst, it's worse than that.
It's nefarious.
They do lavish a lot of money.
They have a lot of money to throw around there.
And my only thing would be, let's try to get some strings attached to this money.
Let's try to make sure that in exchange for this there, you guys are going to focus on the good activities, less so on the bad activities.
Let's talk about Syria a little bit.
It's a fascinating exploration, because I would have never guessed.
You know, say six months ago, that even the concept of having Syria somehow be involved in the Abraham Accords was even a possibility.
And maybe we should actually talk about how the Abraham Accords fit into all this, too.
So Syria, look, if Syria were to make peace with Israel, that would be obviously a landmark thing.
Syria has been one of Israel's foremost enemies since modern Israel was founded in 1948.
I mean, without question.
I mean, literally ever since the Israeli war for independence against the invading Arab armies there, it was really Jordan, Egypt, Syria that led those initial wars.
whether it was 48, 67, 73, Syria has always been one of Israel's arches enemies.
So if that were to actually happen, Having said that, let's be careful because of who we're dealing with here.
I mean, this guy, Al Jelani, is kind of his adapted name there.
He's essentially a puppet of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey there.
This is someone who was a At least at one point, the State Department had a pretty significant bounty on his head, if I'm not mistaken there.
Now, is he a net improvement over Bashar al-Assad?
Probably.
I mean, the bounce of equities probably are in that camp.
Assad was obviously a murderous tyrant and horrific.
You know, you've recently written a book about, you know, Israel and civilization.
So we're going to talk, we have to talk about Israel.
What is Israel's role in all of this, in your mind, from the perspective of an America-first policy?
The key thing about Israel is that more than any of the other countries in the region, even the non-Islamist Arab countries, we share precisely the exact same enemies.
Pretty much precisely.
I mean, are they literally identical?
Okay, fine.
I mean, maybe not, right?
I mean, maybe the Mexican drug cartels are more an enemy of the United States than Israel.
But when it comes to the threat of jihadism and Islamism there, we're dealing with shockingly similar threats there.
I'll give one very concrete example.
So last year, So, for instance, in late July in Tehran, Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas, disappears while being in Tehran for a funeral.
And around that same time, there was a major Lebanese Hezbollah jihadist by the name of Fuad Shakur, who was assassinated as well.
And then this ultimately, this culminates in the assassination, the bombing of Hassan Nasrallah, the decades-long head of Hezbollah, hiding in his bunker in Beirut, Lebanon, and then the death of Yahya Sinwar, the October 7th mastermind in southern Gaza.
But Fuad Shakur, who I mentioned, and then there was another top-ranking Hezbollah command by the name of Ibrahim Akil, who were both taken out by the IDF during this time span there.
And I like to focus oftentimes on Fuad Shakur and Ibrahim Akil because it's actually very instructive to the point I'm making here.
So, who are Fuad Shakur and Ibrahim Akil?
They are the masterminds respectively of the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombings that slaughtered 241 U.S. Marines and of the U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut the same year that killed 60 to 70 men.
These two men, Shakur and Akil, had U.S. State Department bounties on their head of five to seven million dollars respectively for literally over four decades from 1983 onwards until the IDF took them out as part of this kind of So, to me, that's what America First looks like in practice there.
As we finish up, there's been these significant forays by the administration as a priority, the U.S. administration into the Middle East.
There's been rumors of some sort of disagreements between Netanyahu and Trump recently.
What do you think is going to happen ultimately in the U.S.-Israel relationship?
Okay, so the first thing to note is, you know, the rumors of a Trump-Netanyahu rift are just that.
They are just rumors.
You know, it's very hard to try to sort fact from fiction.
In fact, Brett Baier on Fox News literally asked President Trump about this point blank, and Trump dismissed it and said, no, Netanyahu was a very tough job.
October 7th was one of the worst days.
You know, in the history of humanity, he's in a very difficult situation right now.
So it's worth knowing that the one time that I'm aware of that he's been explicitly asked about this possible riff, point blank, he's emphatically denied it.
Now, there is a slight history of Trump and Netanyahu butting heads.
Let's, you know, let's recall that in November 2020, you know, after the dispute election, Netanyahu did congratulate President Biden.
In his defense, he didn't really have a choice.
I mean, you know, any foreign country has to be able to get along with the great country, the United States there.
But President Trump was definitely upset about that after all that he had done to support Israel during his first administration there.
You know, it looked like that there was a rapprochement, that there was a real reconciliation.
Over the past year and a half, Netanyahu went down to Mar-a-Lago.
They had these photos, smiling, thumbs up, and so forth.
So it's very hard to know.
I think that what you're seeing play out with all these kind of You're seeing a real-time rift in the Republican Party and in the administration when it comes to the view of Israel, of the U.S.'s relationship, and of Prime Minister Netanyahu as an individual.
I think there are a lot of people in the broader Trump administration universe there who are probably not fans, actually, of Prime Minister Netanyahu there.
Also, let's bear in mind that this second administration seems to be even more focused on the economic transactional part of international affairs and diplomacy than it probably was the first time around there.
You know, I haven't necessarily seen a headline, you know, Israel pledges to commit, you know, trillion dollars.
You know, I'm making up a number, but that seems to be thus far the easiest way to kind of curry favor with the Trump administration is to just open up your checkbooks.
Easier said than done when you're a country like Saudi Arabia or Qatar that has just extraordinary amounts of petroleum reserves necessarily.
But look, I continue to be optimistic about U.S.-Israel relations, certainly under this administration.
The longer-term threat, very much so, is the younger generation of Americans, where the polls show that the 30-and-under category of Americans tend to be split, roughly split 50-50 almost when it comes to who you support between Israel and Hamas.
Obviously, deeply concerning there.
But I would not be tremendously concerned when it comes to this particular administration.
Ultimately, there are a lot of rumors flying around there.
And, you know, look, the worst case scenario is that maybe President Trump says, Netanyahu, you know, you go be a little more independent.
Not necessarily a bad thing.
Israel should be more independent, frankly, of the United States there.
I mean, that's kind of the whole purpose of Zionism, the term that we just defined there, is for the Jews to be in control themselves there without kind of listening to any great benevolent superpower like the United States or anyone else at all there.
So that wouldn't necessarily be the end of the world.
And the final thing that I'll say is I mean, no one had that on the bingo card.
Literally no one.
And to be clear, I don't know if he means that.
I don't even know what that means in practice there.
You know, by talking about things like population transfer of Arabs, I mean, he's literally starting to sound, you know, like Rabbi Meir Kahana, this very right-wing rabbi whose party was banned by the Israeli Knesset for talking about this.
So, I mean, Trump has said some shockingly, you know, pro-Israel things there.
So it's a mixed bag.
I think this kind of war in unnamed sources is just indicative of this broader rift in the party.
The Republican Party, the MAGA movement, by and large, remains a pro-America, pro-Western civilization, pro-Israel movement.
There are definitely real forces out there that are very critical.
Trying to contain those forces was a large reason, frankly, why I wrote this book in the first place, Israel and Civilization, there.
So we'll see how it plays out.
But despite the Qatar thing, which I'm less than thrilled about, I remain optimistic.
Well, Josh Hammer, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
My pleasure.
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