Trump ramps up support for Israel, pressure on Iran with top job picks

By Iain Marlow 

President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of three ardently pro-Israel lawmakers for top foreign policy jobs underscores that his focus will be on heightening support for Israel and boxing in Iran once he takes office. 

Even after he won over many Arab Americans who criticised the Biden administration over its support for Israel in the Gaza war, the selections will be deeply reassuring to Israeli leaders after President Joe Biden’s sometimes fraught relationship with them.

 

Trump announced Sunday that he had picked Representative Elise Stefanik, of New York as United Nations ambassador. On Monday, he named Representative Mike Waltz of Florida as his national security advisor, a person familiar with the matter said. And he was expected to choose Senator Marco Rubio of Florida as his secretary of State.  

 

“The US is ready for a return to President Trump’s MAXIMUM PRESSURE campaign against Iran,” Stefanik, who addressed the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in May and called for harsher sanctions on Iran, wrote on X on Saturday, a day before Trump announced that he had chosen her. “For too long, our enemies have been emboldened by the weakness of the Biden-Harris Administration.”

 

Rubio has been equally hawkish. In October, he issued a statement saying he supported Israeli’s “right to respond disproportionately to stop this threat” from Iran. 

 

Those stances and everything Trump has promised so far suggest he will fire up the playbook he used for the region the last time he was president, except with even greater force. Although he’s expected to call for an end to Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and its campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, he’s unlikely to criticise how Israeli forces conduct their operations against the Iran-backed militants. He’s already spoken to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu three times in recent days by phone, and told him last month to “do what you have to do” when it comes to Iran and its militant proxy groups.

 

And he’s almost certainly going to try and expand the Abraham Accords normalizing ties between Israel and several Arab countries, which the first Trump administration celebrated as a signature foreign policy achievement.  

 

Already, there are indications that Trump will give Israel a freer hand with Iran. At a campaign rally in North Carolina in October, after Iran attacked Israel, Trump said Israel should “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later” — signaling he was open to an attack on Iran’s nuclear program, which President Joe Biden urged against.

 

One possibility would be for Israel to do that during Biden’s lame-duck period before Trump’s inauguration in January.

 

The new administration is “probably going to try to thread the needle — ‘Let’s end the war, let’s build on the Abraham Accords and let’s dial up some of the plays that worked on Iran in the past administration,’” said Michael DiMino, a fellow at Defense Priorities who worked as a CIA analyst during the first Trump administration and has advised Republicans in Congress on foreign policy. 

 

On the campaign trail, Trump depicted himself as a change agent on international affairs as the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine dragged on. He argued the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel — which killed 1,200 people and sparked the Gaza war — would never have happened on his watch because Biden abandoned his harder-edged approach, which he said deterred Iran and its proxies. 

 

Promising he could put a stop to the region’s warfare, Trump cast the Biden-Harris administration as “demented warmongers” and said his election would mean “peace in the world again.”

 

Biden administration officials reject accusations that they’ve been soft on Iran, and have sanctioned numerous individuals and entities in the country.

 

Running against Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t voice any alternative to Biden’s unpopular approach to the war, managing to alienate both pro-Israel Americans, who thought the US wasn’t supportive enough, and pro-Palestinian progressives, who wanted more pressure on Israel in light of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. 

 

“Trump’s narrative is, ‘I am change on foreign policy. What we’re doing is really not working. Look at the results. The results are terrible. I’m going to mix it up and do something else,’” said Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

 

In the end, Trump managed to win over some Jewish Americans through his ardent support for Israel and Netanyahu, while also peeling away disaffected Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan and elsewhere by promising change.

 

Those voters may be in for a surprise, however. This week. Israel’s hardline finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said his country should take sovereignty over the West Bank next year. He said he believes Trump will “support the State of Israel in this move.”

 

While the Biden team supported Israel with weapons throughout the war, Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken voiced strong disapproval of the civilian casualties as the death toll in Gaza — currently more than 43,000, according to the Hamas-run health ministry — climbed ever higher. They repeatedly urged Israel to pursue a cease-fire and to keep open the possibility of an eventual Palestinian state.

 

Saudi Arabia has signaled some gesture toward a Palestinian homeland would be needed for it to join the Trump-engineered Abraham Accords.

 

But “you’re not gonna have micromanaging of the war under Trump, like you had under Biden,” said Michael Makovsky, who leads the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. He added “you won’t have the same focus — I would almost say obsession — that developed over time with the Palestinian issue.”