My very first column as a regular contributor to Foreign Policy ran under the headline “Trump’s Middle East Policy Is Totally Boring.” The point of the piece was not to imbue the White House’s foreign policy with an intellectual framework but rather to show how banal it was. Stripped of all the theatrics and peculiarities associated with President Donald Trump—who had been in office a little over a year—U.S. policy in the Middle East resembled what was once a bipartisan consensus: support for Israel, tough on Iran and others outside America’s coalition of regional partners, and support for those partners regardless of the character of their regimes.
At the time, one of my friends who is a sophisticated observer of U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, sent me an email that read: “Dude, I think you are imbuing way too much coherence to the administration’s thinking on these issues.” In retrospect, my buddy was spot on. A couple of years since that debut column appeared, and almost four years after Trump took the oath of office, the only way to describe U.S. policy in the region is “strategic incoherence.” Every White House has trouble being consistent in its foreign policy. The problem with Trump’s approach to the Middle East is not actually inconsistency but rather the scattershot quality of his encounters with the region.
