In January, President Donald Trump returned to the White House, facing a world that is arguably more complicated than when he left the building four years earlier. The war in Ukraine, which will enter its fourth year in February, will take much of Trump’s time as he begins to craft and sell a detailed plan to cease the fighting and negotiate a peace settlement that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin can live with. China, the aspiring hegemon that seeks to displace the United States as the world’s foremost power, will be a constant challenge for Trump’s administration as it was for former President Joe Biden’s. U.S.-European relations will be a challenge as well, thanks to Trump’s infatuation with tariffs as a tactic to extract economic concessions, as well as the president’s commitment to decadeslong wariness watching Uncle Sam carry the security of the entire continent on his back.

It’s the Middle East, however, where things could get particularly dicey. This region hasn’t been especially kind to the U.S. or its presidents over the last two decades. Of course, much of this displeasure is self-induced: The Washington foreign policy establishment has an ingrained belief in its own brilliance and is all too willing to succumb to hubris about the extent of its power, influence, and ability to will the Middle East to its preferences. The list of foibles is long. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq got rid of a tyrant in Saddam Hussein but ushered in years of instability, sectarian civil war, and terrorism that dragged hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops into a high-cost occupation and gifted Iran the ability to expand its influence into the Arab world. The 2011 U.S.-led military intervention in Libya threw another dictator out of his lair, yet within months, devolved into a mess as militias opposed to Muammar Gaddafi started fighting among themselves for power and resources. Today, Libya is, in essence, two states, one led by a Russian-backed warlord with a penchant for torturing his opponents and the other managed by the internationally recognized administration. In Syria, the U.S. contributed to the chaos of that country’s long civil war by arming bands of vetted Syrian opposition fighters who were no match for either Bashar Assad’s militias or the more well-resourced jihadist battalions who eventually hijacked the Syrian revolution.   

Trump can be quite an ambitious — and yes, at times hubristic — man as well. He comes into office with grand plans and, like all presidents before him, a dream that he alone can accomplish permanent peace in the Middle East. His signature diplomatic accomplishment during his first term was the Abraham Accords, a series of agreements that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and four other Arab states. Trump and his national security team hope to expand upon those deals by adding Saudi Arabia to the mix. Trump also occasionally talks about striking another nuclear agreement with Iran, Washington’s preeminent adversary in the region, but has yet to articulate how exactly he would do it other than resurrecting the failed maximum pressure strategy from his first term. Trump no doubt wants to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well — after all, what other accomplishment would differentiate him from his predecessors and land him a Nobel Peace Prize in the process? “I want a long-lasting peace,” Trump told Time during a long interview in November. “I’m not saying that’s a very likely scenario, but I want a long-lasting peace, a peace where we don’t have an Oct. 7 in another three years. And there are numerous ways to do it.”

The president, however, is a very complicated person. Sure, he has plans, hopes, and dreams like everybody else. But he can also be remarkably prescient on the limits of America’s power. This is particularly so when it comes to the Middle East. You can trace this reticence back to his first campaign for the presidency in 2015-16, when the real estate tycoon repeatedly made the point that Washington’s Ivy League-educated policymakers were apparently too stupid to understand the gravity of their mistakes. Or, as Trump argued in an April 2016 speech, the history of U.S. foreign policy post-Cold War is a story of own goals and counterproductive moves that make U.S. security even more challenging to uphold. “Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, which led to one foreign policy disaster after another,” he said. “It all began with a dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interests in becoming a Western democracy.”

Given the U.S. record in this region of the world, one is hard-pressed to argue with him. When Trump was sworn in for the first time, most people couldn’t care less about what was happening in the Middle East. The U.S. war in Afghanistan was viewed less as a necessary campaign to prevent the next 9/11 and more in the realm of a costly, unwinnable counterinsurgency campaign on behalf of a corrupt, predatory government in Kabul whose entire existence relied on U.S. military power. Unlike former President Barack Obama, who surged another 30,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan in the hope of pushing the Taliban to the negotiating table, Trump chose to escalate the air war before coming to the conclusion that there really wasn’t anything Washington could do to win the conflict. In Syria, Obama’s policy centered on regime change in Damascus. Trump, in contrast, wanted nothing to do with Syria — outside of destroying the Islamic State — which he euphemistically referred to as a land of “sand and blood and death.” During his first six months, he redoubled the U.S. military campaign against ISIS’s territorial caliphate but also pulled the plug on Operation Timber Sycamore, a CIA-backed program that funneled arms to vetted Syrian opposition fighters to overthrow the Assad regime in Damascus. That program, it should be said, not only failed to do the job but was also riddled with corruption, as Jordanian intelligence officers sold some of those very same arms on the black market. Trump even flirted at times with Iran. During the September 2019 U.N. General Assembly meetings, Trump was ready to pick up the phone in his hotel suite to talk directly with then-Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (the conversation never took place).

Trump’s instincts were often in conflict with the policy preferences of his more hawkish, conventional advisers throughout his first term in office. Whether it was H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, Jim Mattis, James Jeffrey, Mark Esper, or the generals in U.S. Central Command, Trump was willing to be persuaded — even if the advice presented to him turned out to be the exact opposite of the policy positions he ran on. Trump, for instance, wanted to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria not once but twice. The first time, in December 2018, his national security advisers put on a unified front and convinced him to lengthen the timetable. The second time, in October 2019, Trump’s advisers circled together and settled on a new theory that would appeal especially to him: The U.S. needed to keep troops around to make sure Syria’s oil was safe from the prying hands of ISIS or Iranian-backed militias. Trump, who a week earlier was announcing troop departures, would soon change his tune. The Syria withdrawal never happened. Instead, U.S. mechanized units were simply redeployed from northeastern Syria to the oil fields further south in Deir ez-Zor. U.S. troops remain there to this day, with no end of their deployment in sight.

Iran policy is another example of how his instincts may have been overpowered by his advisers. True, Trump never liked the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, an imperfect deal that nevertheless forced Tehran to dilute 97% of its uranium enrichment stockpile, limit the amount of uranium it could store at any one time, restrict the quality of the centrifuges it could use, and be subject to inspections over its entire nuclear apparatus. Trump took a much dimmer view of the deal, describing it as “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.” His strategy was clear and had a certain logic to it: By tightening the screws on Iran’s economy, the mullahs would, over time, conclude that the only way to save the Islamic Republic was to reenter a new round of nuclear talks on Washington’s terms.

For Trump, the so-called maximum pressure policy was designed to squeeze the Iranians into a new nuclear deal. Yet for others in his administration, the same playbook was geared toward an even grander objective: weakening the pillars of the Iranian regime in the hope it would eventually collapse. Bolton, one of the original architects of the strategy, Mike Pompeo, and Elliott Abrams, one of Trump’s special envoys to Iran, all have long records as regime-change enthusiasts in Tehran. Trump eventually lost patience with Bolton, firing him in September 2019 in part over a dispute on whether lifting U.S. sanctions on the Iranians should even be considered.

Whatever the motivations for Trump’s strategy, a new nuclear deal or regime change, it failed on both counts. By the time Trump left office, Iran’s nuclear capability grew markedly in both quantity and quality. Instead of going back to the table, Tehran used Washington’s withdrawal from the JCPOA as an opportunity to break out of the deal’s restrictions. Courtesy of the Biden administration’s inability to strike a new agreement, Trump will now be confronted with an Iranian nuclear program that is as close to assembling a nuclear weapon as it has ever been. “Tehran has the infrastructure and experience to quickly produce weapons-grade uranium at multiple underground facilities, if it so chooses,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessed in a special report in November 2024.

Has Trump learned from these experiences? One hopes so, because his intuitions in the Middle East are not bad. In fact, they’re pretty good compared to his immediate predecessors. Bill Clinton, for example, saw the Middle East largely through the lens of retaining U.S. military superiority and enforcing the so-called rules-based international order (Clinton bombed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1993, 1996, and 1998, the last of which was a four-day air campaign designed to destroy Baghdad’s weapons of mass destruction programs and push Saddam into cooperating with international weapons inspectors). George W. Bush’s Middle East policy was a modern-day crusade in which authoritarians would be slayed and pro-American democrats would somehow magically rise from the ashes. Obama’s was liberal internationalism-lite — large-scale democracy promotion projects were jettisoned, but Washington was still wedded to the old construct of getting involved in regional conflicts (Libya in 2011; Yemen in 2015) that had little bearing on U.S. security. 

In contrast, Trump’s foreign policy was somewhere between cold-hearted realism and reflexive “do something” interventionism. He bombed the Syrian government’s military bases twice, in 2017 and 2018, in retaliation for the Assad regime’s chemical weapons attacks on civilians but chose not to act militarily against Iran after the September 2019 missile strikes on Saudi Arabia’s energy infrastructure — to the dismay of the Saudi royal family. He assassinated Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad but aborted U.S. military strikes on Iranian targets months earlier after Tehran shot a U.S. drone out of the sky. He ordered a mini-surge of several thousand additional troops into Afghanistan in the summer of 2017 but also negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban to end a two-decades-long U.S. occupation of the country. Trump was never fully dedicated to disassociating the U.S. from its legacy overseas deployments but wasn’t really comfortable with continuing them, either.    

The second term provides Trump with an opportunity to do what he couldn’t or wouldn’t do during his first four years: ditch the unwanted missions that strain the U.S. military and whose costs and risks outweigh the benefits. In so doing, he would preserve America’s military and diplomatic power for the core foreign policy issues that truly matter. Outside of defending against anti-U.S. terrorist groups, preserving the free flow of oil into the international marketplace, and maintaining a stable balance of power in the region — none of which require perpetual U.S. forces there or semi-permanent military bases — there aren’t many of those core missions in the Middle East. In fact, if there is any time when the U.S. can choose to do less, it’s today, when Iran’s proxy network is battered, U.S. partners such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are seeking to reconcile with Tehran after years of adversarial relations, and China’s military modernization, expansive territorial claims, and saber-rattling over Taiwan necessitate a shift in where Washington allocates its limited resources. 

U.S. grand strategy is hard enough without tacking on unnecessary commitments in places of low strategic importance. Trump seemed to comprehend this fundamental fact during his first stint in the White House. He should execute on it during his second. 

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.