By Chaim Noll, JNS
With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, the era of Obama and Biden and their failed Middle East policies are now over.
With U.S. President Donald Trump now back in the White House, a Middle East policy shaped by former President Barack Obama and his foreign-policy advisers, who also served under former President Joe Biden, comes to a close.
In between these two Democratic leaders, Trump launched of the Abraham Accords peace policy, and set a new course that many hope will be the new direction of the Middle East.
Throughout his eight years of presidency and later, in the background, hidden behind Biden, Obama sought to exert his influence in the region. This is why, at least from the perspective of the Middle East, there was no discernible difference between the two administrations. Obama’s failed policies were obediently continued by his former vice president, Biden.
During his presidency, Biden followed the antiquated concept of one-sided blame being placed on the West, which Obama had made the doctrine of his Middle East policy. This was clear from Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech, which was intended to build a bridge between the Western and Islamic worlds. This speech was unique in its blindness and misunderstanding of the real conditions in the Middle East. Then a newly elected president, Obama wanted to do everything in the Middle East differently than his predecessor former President George W. Bush, and announced “A New Beginning” of American Middle East policy to students at Cairo University named two sources for “the tensions that we must talk about.”
Those tensions? American military presence in the region and, as Obama made clear, “the situation between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world.” Obama did not utter a word about the endemic political grievances in Muslim countries, about the hopeless situation of the populations there. Not a word about Islamic terrorism and violence. There was no appeal to the dictators, kings, sheiks, emirs, military governors and the pseudo-parliaments of the region to begin democratic reforms in their countries to finally enable tens of millions of people to live in freedom, dignity and prosperity.
The populations of the Muslim countries of the Middle East proved this ignorance wrong just one year later, in 2010, when the great Arab “spring” broke out in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and elsewhere as popular uprisings gathered against the corrupt regimes.
It was striking that the Palestinians, the only Arabs Obama had described as having an “unacceptable” situation, did not take part in this uprising. The West Bank and Gaza remained quiet. In truth, the Palestinians had too much to lose for the majority to rebel against the status quo. Linked to the Israeli economic boom and showered with international aid, they live far better than their fellow believers in neighboring Arab countries.
Additionally, the conflict that continues to loom in the region—the simmering war between Shi’ite Iran and the Sunni Arab states—was not mentioned in Obama’s Cairo speech. Thus, from the beginning of both the Obama and Biden presidencies, Middle East policies were wrong.
Obama, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 after just months in office, hastily withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq. The gesture was intended to encourage peace. Instead, it created a power vacuum in which the Islamic State was able to grow and unleash its terror. Obama also pushed through the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” more commonly known as the nuclear deal with Iran, which instantly provided the then-bankrupt mullah regime in Tehran with tens of billions in liquidity. (The exact amount is still hotly disputed today).
Obama’s policy in the Syrian conflict was disastrously indecisive and inconsistent. When the civil war broke out in 2011, Obama announced “Assad must go” and spoke of a “red line” that required American intervention if then-Syrian President Bashar Assad used poison gas against the Syrian population. Yet, when the dictator did use poison gas against his own people in 2013, Obama did nothing. Obama missed the opportunity to arm the relatively moderate rebels in the north of the country and overthrow the weakened Assad regime. Instead of American action, Russia intervened and stabilized Assad’s reign of terror for another decade; a major failure that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and drove millions of Syrians to flee to Europe.
Biden’s trademark in the Middle East was his ever-perceptible spinelessness. He tried an appeasement policy against Islamic terror, which encouraged the anti-Western forces in the region: in the Middle East. His emphasized peacefulness was understood as weakness. In 2021, Biden suspended sanctions that then-former President Donald Trump had placed against the Houthi militia Ansar Allah with the justification for his short-sighted foreign policy being that the sanctions were blocking efforts to bring humanitarian aid to war-torn Yemen.
Biden reimposed sanctions in January 2024 after the Houthis threatened to paralyze a significant portion of world trade by firing missiles at merchant ships en route to the Suez Canal in the wake of the Gaza war triggered by Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel. Blocking Saudi attempts to use military means to prevent the Houthis from taking over further territory in Yemen also turned out to be a serious mistake.
The result of this failed Middle East policy became apparent on Oct. 7, 2023, when the terrorist group Hamas, armed by Iran, felt emboldened enough to start a war against Israel. Biden, fearful and indecisive as always, let hours pass before the much-vaunted protecting power gave its consent to an Israeli counterattack. It soon became apparent that any Israeli response would also mean military action on other borders, thus ending the false sense of peace in the Middle East that Biden preferred. American weakness had allowed Iran to build up strong anti-Western militias in several Arab countries, including Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, all of which joined in.
In the face of this immense threat, Biden initially assured Israel of American support without reservation, but as the pressure from left-wing friends and the noise of protests across the country, he linked it to conditions and threats, and finally to massive pressure such as the temporary halting of urgently needed supplies.
In both Israel and rich Arab states in the region, there are hopes for a change of course and a continuation of the Abraham Accords policy that Trump started in his first term. But whatever the Middle East policy of Trump’s second administration turns out to be, there is already widespread relief that the hapless policies of Obama and Biden have come to an end.
