After New Orleans, will Donald Trump abandon the Middle East to its own devices?

The new year truck attack may be a harbinger of revived Islamist terrorism on US soil, but it is also a rebuke to Joe Biden’s failed foreign policy – and, says Mary Dejevsky, an unforeseen and unwelcome red flag for the incoming administration

Whatever the truth of the new year atrocity in New Orleans, it will serve as a reminder of how foreign conflicts, and specifically Middle East conflicts, can play out at home to fatal effect.

It may be that the driver of the pickup truck, who was killed in a shoot-out with police, was a troubled individual using the Isis emblem as no more than a flag of convenience, even if his background, his past military career, his contacts and the weapons at his disposal might suggest otherwise.

But the connections have been drawn. The spectre conjured up is not of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, but of a rather similar pickup truck attack in New York City in 2017, conducted in the name of Isis, and the ever-looming memory of 9/11.

And the effect, intended or not, will be of a destructive rebuke to the largely failed Middle East policy of the outgoing president Joe Biden, and a warning to the incoming administration of Donald Trump.

The question, then, is how, if New Orleans is seen as a possible harbinger of revived Middle Eastern terrorism, Trump decides to respond – and what plans he may have for US policy in the region at a time when it is in more flux than at any time since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The overthrow of Bashir al-Assad in Syria has left a vast pool of uncertainty at the heart of the region, which could evolve into a new haven of stability or, more likely, the opposite. The dynamics between a strengthened Turkey to the north, a weakened Iran to the east, and the Kurds – who are also holding thousands of former Isis fighters – in between, are shifting.

Further east lies Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. To the west, a leaderless Palestine, with a shattered Gaza, and an Israel that has made heavier weather of trying to destroy both Hezbollah and Hamas than it had surely hoped. Existing uncertainty is compounded by ageing or insecure leaders all over the region.

It is not, to put it mildly, an easy or trouble-free inheritance for any US administration. But it is probably not one that Trump envisaged as a central concern, either – at least until now.

When he left office in 2021, the Middle East was, in the view of his successor’s secretary of state, as peaceful as it had recently been. Trump could also have hoped that the conflict between Israel and Hamas would be over well before he took office this time round, yet a ceasefire and freedom for the hostages still hang in the balance.

The next president has, therefore, to contend with US engagement on three fronts: his country’s support for the war in Ukraine against Russia; his own personal preoccupation with China, and the high level of concern within Congress about Beijing’s intentions towards Taiwan; and now the constantly changing power relations in the Middle East, with a possible revival of jihadi terrorism, including on US soil.

Trump may be intending to treat the Ukraine war as his foreign policy priority, but fate could have other ideas. The Middle East could quickly become as great an emergency, if not a greater one. On the basis of Trump’s handling of “abroad” during his first term in the White House, here are a few tentative glimpses into the future.

In the very short term, Trump could decide to hit back in a limited way against Isis and any other groups looking to exploit moving power vacuums, using forces already in the region or remote drone strikes. He ordered highly targeted strikes against Syrian forces after reported chemical attacks, and could decide to act against anti-Western terrorist groups in a similar way, albeit such attacks could prove counterproductive if they encourage recruitment to Isis and its fellows.

Trump has often been described as isolationist. But this is not strictly true. It would be more accurate to say that he has been highly selective in any action he has taken. This included the 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, described as the spymaster of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards – an act for which Iran has threatened, and may again threaten, revenge.

Trump, it might also be observed, sees individuals, rather than organisations or governments, as key – in negative ways, as with Soleimani, but also in positive ways, as with his controversial meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and his failed rapprochement with Vladimir Putin. Something of the same can be seen in his dealings with Volodymyr Zelensky – and in the Ukrainian leader’s increasingly positive references to him.

In the Middle East, a similar approach could entail early meetings with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and the Saudi crown prince. It was Trump’s first administration that sealed what were known as the Abraham Accords, under which several Gulf states recognised the state of Israel. The next stage was to be a Saudi-Israeli agreement, which was derailed, but not completely shelved, by the Gaza conflict.

Given the power shifts underway in the region, Trump might also consider an epoch-making invitation to Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, whose tentative overtures to the West (at last year’s UN General Assembly) were widely ignored.

If Trump is not isolationist, he is non-interventionist in his reluctance – nigh refusal – to deploy US troops abroad, and indeed in his strong preference for bringing them home. It was he, after all, who committed to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan that was so chaotically executed by his successor.

It might also be noted that neither of the current conflicts – in Ukraine and Gaza – began on his watch, an electoral point in his favour. And this might just offer the merest hint of a more ambitious Trump policy towards the Middle East.

Could it be that, at the end of his four years, the United States will have executed its long-promised “pivot” to the Pacific – by dint of having radically scaled back, if not actually ended, its active military presence in the Middle East?

There have been two main rationales for the US to keep a substantial military presence in the region. One was to secure oil exports for the United States; the other, to protect Israel. With the US now more than self-sufficient in energy, the first has lost much of its validity, unless the country sees itself as a global policeman for other supply routes. The need for the second could be greatly reduced with a less threatening Iran and with complete regional recognition of Israel, to which end the Abraham Accords were a start.

If, as it would appear, US diplomatic and security support for Israel is becoming more problematic at home, and the political complexion of Israel is also changing, a more hands-off approach on the part of the US could suit both sides, as well as helping to ease some of the other tensions in the region.

Donald Trump, a fierce champion of Israel with a famously transactional cast of mind, could be just the president to do it.