Arabs often like to search, even with a magnifying lens, for a rift between the United States and Israel. At times, they claim that President Donald Trump is preventing Israel from attacking Lebanon, and at other times that he is stopping it from completing a war of extermination in Gaza. The reality, however, is that the United States has decided to contract out the entire Middle East to Israel, not only Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria.
Let us begin from the end. When Arab states are prepared to develop their relations with the occupying state despite all the crimes it has committed over the past two years, there is nothing that would cause the Trump administration to hesitate over its strategy and decisions.
When an Arab state commits itself to purchasing gas from Israel until the year 2040 at a value of 35 billion dollars, when another builds an industrial complex on its territory to produce Israeli drones worth 2.3 billion dollars, and when a third cooperates with Israel in Libya, Sudan, and Yemen, what the US National Security Strategy implicitly says about contracting out the Middle East to Israel becomes both possible and reasonable.
The National Security Strategy is not, of course, solely about Israel and the Middle East, and what it contains does not necessarily translate directly into daily White House policies. It nevertheless expresses Washington’s conception of its priorities and its strategy for protecting its interests. Accordingly, the Middle East is viewed through these lenses alone.
The strategy argues that the United States has overemphasised the priority given to the Middle East for decades due to its reliance on oil. Now that it has become an oil exporting country, the historical reason for concentrating US forces in the region no longer exists.
This does not mean that the Middle East has entirely lost its importance. Rather, the strategy redefines US interests in the region by focusing on three issues: protecting Israel, which it describes as a vital interest; ensuring that maritime routes in the region remain open; and preventing the export of terrorism from the region or against US interests within it.
The strategy also highlights two additional points: that the United States accepts the region as it is, with no plans to promote democracy, and that its interests lie in expanding its commercial relations with the Gulf states in areas such as artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, and defence technologies.
As for how Washington intends to protect its interests, and here lies the core of the matter, it is not through increasing its military presence in the region, but rather through transferring burdens and building peace. These are the key terms in the US strategy. Although the strategy does not spell out what it means by these terms, certainly, it does not mean building peace by restraining the occupying state and obliging it to end its occupation of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian lands. These issues are not addressed at all, and Lebanon is not mentioned in the document.
As for Palestine, it is referenced in empty phrases. For example, the strategy states that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains complex, that a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages have achieved progress toward a more durable peace, and that supporters of Hamas have become weaker. Beyond that, the strategy says nothing. It even drops the two-state solution, which was part of the National Security Strategy under Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Syria is mentioned only in the context of counterterrorism and weakening Iranian influence in the region. Its occupied territories, its conflict with the occupying state, and its political transition are not mentioned.
If the strategy does not aim to transfer burdens and build peace by ending Israeli aggression against Palestinians and Arabs more broadly, then what burdens are to be transferred and what peace is being discussed?
The detail provided by the strategy is that Washington will work to place greater responsibility for security and stability on regional partners, instead of engaging in long term wars in the region. This would be achieved by reviving regional alliances as an implementation lever, by empowering allies to take on a greater role in deterring and containing adversaries and managing crises. In practical terms, this means continuing to empower Israel further in the Middle East militarily, economically, and politically by making normalisation a regional path.
The strategy states that the United States has a clear interest in expanding the Abraham Accords to more countries in the region, and even to other countries in the Islamic world, as part of engineering regional stability.
But who are the regional partners to whom the burdens will be transferred, and can they truly guarantee the region’s security and stability? The United States undoubtedly views the Gulf states as partners, but it clearly sees them primarily through the lens of economic investments, as all these states seek to conclude defence treaties with Washington to protect their security. It also certainly does not view Egypt as a security partner, as it refuses, for example, to send forces to Gaza to fight Hamas. The same applies to Turkey.
In effect, only the occupying state remains as a partner that can be relied upon to shoulder the burdens. This is precisely what the new strategy seeks: greater empowerment of Israel in the region militarily, economically, and politically in two ways. First, by continuing to invest in the development of its military and technological capabilities. Second, by attempting to force other regional partners to open up to it further and normalise relations, it would grant it additional security, economic, and political empowerment.
In other words, the new US strategy, in its Middle East component, aims to contract out the region to Israel in every sense of the word.
Taking into account that if the occupying state is unable to close any of the wars it has launched in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, it will not be able to carry out the new task assigned to it, nor will it be able to form the partnerships required with regional states while these files remain open. Accordingly, the priority will be to close these files before moving on to carrying the burden the United States seeks.
With an extremist government and society in the occupying state, and with what it sees as a potentially unrepeatable opportunity, namely a US administration supportive of everything it does and a region unwilling to defend itself and its interests, closing these files will only occur through achieving the maximum level of security and land for itself. In practical terms, this means attempting to close these files by subjugating opponents and forcing them to surrender through military pressure.
This means that the region continues to live in a climate of war. Such a war could begin at any moment against the resistance in Gaza and Lebanon, against Iran, and perhaps also Yemen, while the occupying state continues to expand its presence and role in Syria.
