President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance came into the White House promising to take more of a backstage role in the Middle East. In a May 2025 speech, Trump railed against military interventionism and praised Arabs "developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies in your own way." A few months before, Vance had argued that U.S. support would help "Israel, with the Sunni nations," to "actually police their region of the world. That allows us to spend less time and less resources in the Middle East."
Nearly a year into the second Trump administration, it looks like Americans will be doing a lot of that policing themselves. The administration is pushing the United Nations to pass a two-year mandate for international peacekeepers in Gaza, to be overseen by a Board of Peace chaired by Trump himself. U.S. forces are already in Israel to monitor the ceasefire with Hamas, and the U.S. military seems to be getting a lot more directly involved in guarding the borders between Syria and Israel. Reuters reports that Americans have made several visits to an air base outside Damascus, the Syrian capital, in preparation "to use the base to help monitor a potential Israel-Syria agreement."
