American Middle East Strategy in the Trump Era

Discussing his and Peter Rough’s September essay in Mosaic, Michael Doran explains his concern that the Trump administration is repeating some of the mistakes of the Obama administration, allowing Iran and Russia to expand their influence at the expense of the U.S. and its allies. He lays out a realistic strategy that the U.S. can pursue in order to reverse course. (Interview by Jonathan Silver. Audio, 51 minutes. For streaming and downloading options, please click on the link below.)

Beginning on November 13, Michael Doran will be giving a series of monthly lectures in which he will address how every American president, from Harry Truman to Donald Trump, has understood and shaped America’s strategic relationship with Israel. Click here for more information and for a special invitation to Mosaic readers,

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More about: Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Middle East, Politics & Current Affairs, U.S. Foreign policy

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

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More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF