The Arab world cannot be pleased about the imminent arrival of Donald Trump in the White House. He has very little interest in the Middle East and his comments during the presidential election campaign have been ill-informed.
If there was any common theme to his random thoughts, it was a desire to do as little as possible, although that was coupled with a strong pro-Israel bias. Israeli officials have been delighted by Trump’s victory and have been saying that this is an end to the two-state solution. The Americans have officially backed two states for many years, even if they have not done much about it, and any shift would be a tragedy for the Palestinians and Arabs.
It is all too possible that Trump’s attitude to the Iran nuclear deal will be influenced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is violently against the deal and would love to see it wrecked for his own purposes. Trump has explicitly denounced the deal as the worst-ever negotiated and said during the campaign that he was eager to tear it to shreds.
The danger is that given Republican control of the House and the Senate, Trump may be able to reverse the deal, especially since it has so little domestic support in the US, and as the most powerful Republican president in decades, Trump will be under a lot of pressure do something dramatic.
Another battleground will be any Arab effort to seek the repeal of the outrageous Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (Jasta), which has relaxed sovereign immunity in the United States. Even though the law does not specifically mention the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, the practical effect of the legislation is to allow to proceed long-standing civil lawsuits against Saudi Arabia by the victims and their families.
Trump will see no political advantage in being seen as a close friend of Arab states and may well distance himself from any such attempt to change or repeal Jasta.
And Trump’s lack of interest in the Arab world may have a particularly disastrous impact in Syria and Iraq, where he may pull back from any ongoing interest in ending the civil war, other than a simplistic attack on Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), with little regard for supporting any necessary political rebuilding of the nation-states of the region.
