News Monday that President-elect Trump was eyeing three hawks for top slots in his administration has put a bit of a damper on the headiness that restrainers on the right were feeling over weekend news that Nikki Haley or Mike Pompeo would not be joining the administration.
By 8 p.m. Monday, there was confirmation that Elise Stefanik, arch-defender of Israel who once worked for the neocon outfit Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and Bill Kristol's Foreign Policy Initiative, is Trump's pick for UN ambassador.
China hawk Rep. Mike Waltz, who spent much of his time on Capitol Hill this year saber rattling about Chinese military and spies in our backyard, and calling for a "new Monroe Doctrine" and a lot more military build-up to confront them, is Trump's pick for National Security Advisor. He worked in the George W. Bush Pentagon and for Vice President Dick Cheney as a counterterrorism advisor.
Add to that, he resisted Trump's efforts to get the U.S. military out of the 20-year war in Afghanistan, and like many uber-hawks in Congress, has been open to bombing Iran.
Some point out that he recently voted against Ukraine aid, and has said the war in Ukraine must end in a negotiated settlement. However, on Israel and Iran he has never wavered. Rubio, who was reportedly close to late-pro-Israel billionaire Sheldon Adelson and other big neocon donors, has supported illegal settlement building in the West Bank and has suggested that the U.S. may have to go to war with Iran over its nuclear program. On the current conflict, he has defended Israel's every move in the war in Gaza and Lebanon. He has warned that Iran wants to make Israel "an unlivable place."
He has always been a staunch opponent to any U.S. deal that would hem in Iran's nuclear program, including the JCPOA.
Later Monday, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a pro-Israel evangelical Christian supporter of Israel who has been a vocal supporter of illegal settlements in the West Bank, was named by Trump as the next U.S. ambassador to Israel. By night it was announced that FOX News personality and Iraq/Afghanistan war vet Pete Hesgeth is Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense.
The appointments of Stefanik, Waltz, Huckabee, and Hesgeth have been announced by Trump. As of Monday afternoon, Rubio's nomination had yet to be confirmed. But the day's news has left observers with the feeling that it is déjà vu all over again.
"Trump often deviated from the views of his top advisers. And I know @DonaldJTrumpJr and others are doing what he said below," said Glenn Greenwald, pointing to a X post reply by Don Trump Jr. about keeping neoconservatives out of the administration. "But Trump's last 3 appointees - Elise Stefanik, Mike Weltz (sic), and Rubio - are war hawks fully aligned with the worst prongs of bipartisan DC consensus."
Top photo credit: The President-elect of United States of America Donald Trump at the Elysee Palace for an interview with Emmanuel Macron and the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, December 7, 2024. (Shutterstock/Frederic Legrand-COMEO)
If the Trump administration truly makes good on its threats to walk away from its efforts to settle the war in Ukraine, the situation is very likely to get worse for all parties to the conflict, including for the United States. Potentially far worse.
This would most obviously be true for Ukraine if President Donald Trump’s diplomatic disengagement were paired with a cutoff of military and intelligence assistance. Ukraine is highly dependent on American intelligence data and on the U.S.-provided Starlink satellite network to target and coordinate attacks on Russian forces.
Without this support, few of Ukraine’s precision-guided weapons would function effectively, and Ukrainian communications would be far more vulnerable to Russian jamming, disruption, and interception.
Kyiv could still elect to fight on under such difficult conditions, but its battlefield fortunes would greatly suffer. Coupled with Ukraine’s ongoing manpower challenges and with the dwindling number of U.S. Patriot air defense systems to protect against large-scale Russian missile attacks, the blow to Ukrainian morale might prove decisive. Trump is correct that the Biden administration deserves considerable blame for failing to prevent the war in the first place, but in the ensuing controversy over who lost Ukraine, many would be quick to point fingers at Trump.
In fact, absent a compromise settlement of the war, Trump has no clear way of avoiding that blame, justified or not. Doubling down on Biden’s sanctions strategy by toughening enforcement or imposing secondary sanctions on Russia’s trading partners stands little chance of forcing the Kremlin’s capitulation to American demands for an unconditional ceasefire, but it very likely would roil American relations with India, Turkey, and others while undoing recent hard-won progress in Trump’s trade negotiations with China.
Opting to sustain or even increase current levels of U.S. military and intelligence aid to Ukraine would delay defeat, but not prevent it. Many point to the slow pace of Russia’s advance along the front line as a sign that Ukraine can sustain a stalemate with sufficient Western political will. But gauging Ukraine’s fortunes by tracking Russia’s progress on the map is misleading. In a war of attrition, progress is measured not by battlefield breakthroughs, but by how many well-trained and well-equipped troops each side can put in the field.
By this metric, Ukraine is in big trouble. Russia’s defense industry is greatly outproducing U.S. and European military factories in such critical munitions as artillery shells, and it is assembling attack missiles at a faster rate than the West can produce air defense missiles. At least a million Ukrainians have been killed or wounded on the battlefield; many millions more have fled the fighting for Europe, Russia, and beyond.
Although Russia has also suffered great casualties, it has five times Ukraine’s current population and has employed sound approaches to training and replenishing its forces. These trends point not to a long-term stalemate, but to a World War I-style Ukrainian implosion sooner or later, probably during Trump’s term in office.
Contrary to popular perceptions, however, a Ukrainian collapse would not be entirely good news for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Granted, Russia would be in a commanding battlefield position that would allow it to occupy all four of the Ukrainian regions it has officially annexed but not entirely conquered. And Moscow could reasonably expect that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would not survive such a defeat politically, paving the way for regime change that Russia claims to want.
But that would very likely amount to a Pyrrhic victory.
Although Moscow can break Ukraine, it cannot fix it. Its territorial expanse is too vast and its war-stricken population too anti-Russian for military occupation beyond Ukraine’s east and south to be viable. Absent a compromise peace settlement, Ukraine’s societal repair and economic reconstruction would be difficult to imagine, as few refugees would return, and no one would invest hundreds of billions of dollars in projects that could be wiped out by Russian missile and bomb barrages in a matter of hours.
A physically and militarily broken Ukraine could very well become politically broken, too, leaving Putin with a failed neighbor, whose dysfunction would in turn radiate problems — such as crime, terrorism, ethnic unrest, and political extremism — that could pose threats to Russia itself.
For Putin, such an outcome would be preferable to a Ukraine that is a military ally of the United States and NATO, but failed peace efforts would still spell bad news for Russia’s efforts to address its broader security concerns with the West.
Absent new arms control and confidence-building measures — which will be almost impossible without a settlement in Ukraine — Europe’s rearmament would be constrained only by its own political will and industrial capacity, and such informal NATO sub-groupings as the Nordic-Baltic axis combine a high degree of military capacity with deeply held anti-Russian views. Even with a massive militarization of the Russian economy, using conventional forces to defend a border with NATO that has doubled in size since the Finns joined the alliance would be almost prohibitively costly for Moscow.
It would be only a short hop from that dilemma to new, more cost-effective deployments of Russian nuclear forces in the European theater, resurrecting the days of nuclear decapitation scenarios and hair-trigger warning times that ended when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the now defunct Treaty on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces in 1987.
Some in Washington might look indifferently at a re-nuclearized Europe that lacks the diplomatic safeguards that kept the Cold War cold but features a host of imaginable new East-West flashpoints in Belarus, Kaliningrad, Moldova, Georgia, and the Balkans. They might ask, why would this be America’s problem?
For starters, American fingers would still be holding the nuclear triggers on one side of that tense Russia-West divide. The United States is scheduled to deploy new intermediate-range missiles in Germany next year, and the political pressure to pair them with nuclear warheads will be enormous if Russia points new nuclear weapons at Europe. Trump officials have openly discussed drawing down US ground forces in Europe, but no one has suggested withdrawing America’s nuclear umbrella, because doing so would prompt Germany and other technically capable European states to develop their own nuclear weapons, which in turn would fuel proliferation in other regions and increase the odds these weapons would one day be used.
Moreover, this more volatile version of the Cold War in Europe would deepen Russian dependence on China, incentivize Russian mischief-making in the Middle East, and make Trump’s vision of stabilizing and counterbalancing relations among great and rising powers in an increasingly multipolar world considerably less attainable. Much of Washington is already opposed to Trump’s broader efforts to pursue détente with Russia; improved US-Russian relations will be well-nigh politically impossible absent a compromise settlement in Ukraine.
For obvious reasons, Trump does not want this. For less obvious ones, neither does Putin. And neither of them has a good way to avoid this mutually troubling future without a negotiated end to the war.
The path to that compromise will not begin with an unconditional ceasefire, however. Having been burned before by perceived American deception over NATO expansion and European double-dealing over the Minsk 2 accord in Ukraine, Putin will not agree to a ceasefire (which would ease military pressure on Ukraine and undermine Russian negotiating leverage) until he gets strong assurances that the United States is addressing his key security concerns.
Ukraine and Europe lack both the desire and the capability to bargain with Russia over these issues. Only Trump can deliver the kind of deal that can secure Ukraine, stabilize Europe, and still address Russia’s core concerns.
To test Russia’s interest in peace, Trump’s negotiators should press Moscow directly to agree to a settlement framework that codifies the key geopolitical compromise — Western assurance that Ukraine will not join NATO in return for Russia’s support for Ukraine’s EU membership — and establishes a roadmap for resolving the range of complicated issues required for a stable peace.
The sooner we begin the hard negotiations over these core issues, the better. They will not get easier to resolve if the Trump team steps away from the table.
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Top image credit: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan holds a joint press conference with Syria interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa in Ankara on Febuary 4, 2025 (Turkish presidential press service via EYEPRESS and REUTERS)
Of all powers in the Middle East, none did as much as Iran to help President Bashar al-Assad weather the Syrian civil war.
When Assad’s regime fell in late 2024 to a coalition of rebel groups led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Tehran lost its closest Arab ally, constituting a major crisis and humiliating setback for Iran. The amount of blood and treasure that the Islamic Republic invested in shoring up Assad’s government meant that his overthrow was, as the senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Behrouz Esbati put it, a “very bad defeat” for Iran.
Now, approximately six months into the post-Assad era, Syria and Iran are cautiously re-engaging in limited ways that underscore a pragmatic approach by both Damascus and Tehran.
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa is intent on strengthening diplomatic and strategic relations with the West, building on his recent fruitful engagements with the U.S. and France. In pursuit of this goal, he is likely to exercise considerable caution in his dealings with Tehran, mindful of the fact that Washington and most European capitals view Iran with deep suspicion and regard the Islamic Republic as a destabilizing force in the Middle East. As such, he will seek to avoid any actions or overtures toward Iran that could jeopardize his efforts to build trust and cooperation with Western powers.
As reported by the National, an Abu Dhabi-based media outlet, on May 20, Iranian officials have acknowledged being in “indirect” communication with Syria’s relatively new government, with Turkey and Qatar acting as intermediaries.
Nevertheless, Tehran has signaled that it is “not in a hurry” to reestablish full diplomatic relations.
Mohammad Sheibani, the Iranian Foreign Ministry's special envoy for Syrian affairs, explained that the Islamic Republic is “watching and waiting” to see how Syria’s situation plays out under Sharaa’s HTS-dominated government. According to the National, Tehran is seeking to find ways to possibly engage Syria’s current government and revive Iranian investments previously made in the Syrian economy.
The Iranian diplomat specified that “appropriate” conditions on political and security grounds would need to take hold prior to direct talks with Sharaa’s government. He voiced his concerns about instability in post-Assad Syria potentially fueling “growth of terrorism and ISIS” — identified by Sheibani as a threat not only to Syria but the entire Middle East. Stability in Syria, he argued, requires “the whole political spectrum” to participate in the country’s political process.
Batu Coşkun, a political analyst at the Sadeq Institute (an independent public policy think tank based in Tripoli, Libya), expects Iran to eventually formalize diplomatic relations with Syria’s post-Ba’ath government.
“Syria is being embraced in the Arab world and Western sanctions are easing,” he told RS. “It’s unthinkable that Iran would not formalize diplomatic ties, particularly as Tehran’s regional rivals, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, have emerged as al-Sharaa’s primary interlocutors. Though at the current stage, Iran remains reliant on the current power brokers in Syria, namely Turkey and the Gulf.”
Balancing the US and Iran
The White House’s shifting stance toward post-Assad Syria is an important factor to consider when assessing Damascus’s perspective on engagement with Iran. At least for now, President Donald Trump’s administration is aligning Washington’s Syria foreign policy more closely with Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, as demonstrated by Trump’s recent face-to-face meeting with Sharaa in Riyadh in mid-May and his administration’s lifting of some U.S. sanctions on Syria.
With Sharaa seeking better ties with the U.S. and other Western powers, he will be careful to avoid moves toward Tehran that might undermine his efforts to establish a positive image of his government in the West’s eyes.
“Sharaa seems to be saying all the right things related to the U.S., and how Trump’s national security elite view the region. This can be tied to his comments related to normalizing ties with Israel, and positioning Syria as a country open for business with the West,” said Coşkun. “Likely, Sharaa will retain his distance [from] Tehran as the new Syria’s goal of cultivating strong ties to Western powers eclipses any need for an urgent rapprochement with Tehran.”
“Both Iran and Syria are testing each other’s boundaries and moving towards an informal, pragmatic relation at a time of radical uncertainty, mainly due to the U.S.’s unpredictable strategy in the region,” said Marina Calculli, assistant professor in International Relations at Leiden University, in an RS interview. “Overall, Tehran sees the Syrian government as subjugated to the influence of the United States, and therefore unable to establish its own foreign relations.”
Nonetheless, Sharaa will probably be careful to avoid making too much of an enemy out of Iran. Although Iran and the “Axis of Resistance” are weaker today as a result of the 2023-24 Israel-Hezbollah conflict and Assad’s fall last year, the Islamic Republic maintains substantial clout in Iraq and Lebanon — two countries on Syria’s borders with which Sharaa wants to establish positive relations.
“Iraq is especially important for trade, water and energy and these deals cannot happen without the green light by pro-Iran Iraqi political factions,” Calculli said. “[Sharaa] may think that in a long-term perspective it is unrealistic and unwise to antagonize Iran. It may also be unwise to do so in a short-term perspective, especially at a time in which Iran is trying to conclude a deal with the U.S.”
The Turkish and Qatari bridges
Turkey and Qatar’s desires for a certain “balance” in Syria largely motivate Ankara and Doha to serve as diplomatic bridges between Damascus and Tehran.
On one hand, Ankara and Doha want to prevent Syria from becoming “a zone of Iranian influence,” said Javad Heiran-Nia, the director of the Persian Gulf Studies Group at the Center for Scientific Research and Middle East Strategic Studies in Iran (a primarily self-funded NGO that receives a portion of its funding from the Iranian government). But he also explained that, on the other hand, Turkey and Qatar have interests in bringing Tehran to recognize the relatively new Syrian government “to ensure that Iran is not completely sidelined from Syria’s political landscape.”
Furthermore, as Heiran-Nia observed, Iran, Turkey, and the GCC members have some common cause in post-regime change Syria.
“The disintegration of Syria and the resurgence of terrorist groups in the country are shared concerns for Iran and regional states, including Turkey and Qatar. Aside from Israel, no country in the region benefits from Syria’s fragmentation. Thus, Israeli influence in Syria and the occupation of parts of it are also common concerns for Iran, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf Arab states,” he told RS.
Turkey and Qatar seem to be mostly in the same boat when it comes to questions about post-Assad Syria’s foreign policy. Turkey and Qatar were major winners from Syrian regime change, and as key conduits for other nations looking to reestablish ties with the Islamist rebels-turned-rulers in Damascus, Ankara and Doha have played pivotal roles in facilitating Syria’s reintegration into the international community.
These Turkish and Qatari efforts were instrumental in securing the latest round of sanctions relief. In contrast, the lack of any significant Iranian role in these developments reflects a broader shift in regional power dynamics, marking a relative decline in Tehran’s influence alongside the rising prominence of Ankara and Doha, which have vested interests in shaping Sharaa’s perception of regional actors, including Iran, and how Damascus engages with them.
Ultimately, the transformation in Syria’s foreign relations since the collapse of the Ba’ath regime almost six months ago is remarkable. The very states that once stood as Assad’s fiercest regional adversaries in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising — Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia — now appear to be the closest partners of the “New Syria.” In a striking reversal, Iran, once Assad’s most steadfast regional ally, now finds itself reliant on these Sunni powers as intermediaries simply to maintain dialogue with Syria’s post-regime change leadership.
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Top image credit: Inspired by maps via shutterstock.com
Since mid-April, Iran and the United States held numerous rounds of nuclear negotiations that have made measured progress — until Washington abruptly stated that Iran had no right to enrich uranium. Moreover, 200 members of the U.S. Congress sent president Trump a letter opposing any deal that would allow Iran to retain uranium enrichment capability.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei called U.S. demands “excessive and outrageous” and “nonsense.” Since the beginning of the Iranian nuclear crisis in 2003, Tehran has drawn a clear red line: the peaceful right to enrich uranium under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is non-negotiable.
In my 2012 book “The Iranian Nuclear Crisis,” I revealed for the first time that during nuclear talks with the U.S. and other world powers, Khamenei had explicitly told then-chief negotiator Hassan Rouhani that if Iran were to abandon its legal and legitimate right to enrichment, either he must resign or ensure such a decision be made only after the Leader’s death. I disclosed this fact publicly so that Washington would understand: no nuclear deal that denies Iran its enrichment rights is politically or legally viable within Iran.
Eventually, the Obama administration, understanding this reality and favoring diplomacy over war, reached the historic 2015 nuclear agreement (JCPOA) — the most comprehensive non-proliferation deal ever signed.
The current U.S.-Iran nuclear talks will fail if Washington denies Iran’s rights for enrichment under the NPT. In fact, and somewhat paradoxically, allowing Iran to enrich uranium is not a threat to U.S. national interests — it could be an opportunity.
Balancing power in the Middle East
There is now broad bipartisan consensus in Washington that the United States must refocus its strategic posture away from regional entanglements and toward countering great powers — particularly China. To do so effectively, a new Middle Eastern order must be founded on a concept of “balance of power” rather than “hegemony.”
Any effort to grant regional dominance to regional powers including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, or Iran will only perpetuate the instability of recent decades. The White House’s Middle East strategy must be anchored in a “regional balance,” not unilateral containment.Washington’s double standard — tolerating, if not supporting, Israel’s nuclear arsenal while denying Iran’s NPT-protected right to peaceful enrichment — effectively supports Israel’s strategic supremacy in the region.
Learning from failed wars
A quarter of America's 400 wars have been in the Middle East and Africa. There is also growing bipartisan recognition that U.S. military interventions in the Middle East have failed— costing trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of American lives, and fostering terrorism and instability in the region.
Since the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, every U.S. president has tried to avoid new wars in the region. Obama regretted intervening in Libya and described it as his worst mistake. The recent U.S. war on Yemen has cost $7 billion and ultimately failed. After a month of bombings, President Trump announced an end to offensive operations saying that the Houthis promised not to target American ships. A military confrontation with Iran would far exceed the cost and chaos of Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen. Enrichment rights may be controversial — but war would be catastrophic
The logic of nuclear balance
Kenneth Waltz, the father of neorealism in international relations, argued in a 2012 Foreign Affairs essay that a nuclear-armed Iran could bring strategic stability to the Middle East by balancing Israel’s nuclear monopoly. In his view, mutual deterrence reduces the risk of war.
While I disagree with Waltz on proliferation, I agree that Israel’s nuclear monopoly is neither a solution and nor sustainable. Sooner or later, the other powers in the region will inevitably seek nuclear capabilities. The only viable alternative is implementing existing U.N. resolutions that call for a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East.
Iran's enrichment program — and Saudi Arabia’s pursuit of one — offers the U.S. a unique opportunity: to support a regional nuclear consortium under international supervision in the Persian Gulf and even the Middle East. This would remove the risk of nuclear weapons development while preserving NPT rights.However, such an achievement will only be sustainable if Israel, like all other countries in the Middle East, joins the NPT and renounces its nuclear weapons.
Upholding the NPT and the US-led global order
The post-WWII global order, built around U.S. leadership, has long rested on the NPT’s twin goals: nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. The Middle East’s nuclear future can be governed only by the NPT — nothing else. The decades-long U.S. double standard — tolerating Israel’s nuclear arsenal while denying Iran peaceful enrichment — has undermined global norms and fueled regional instability.
“What angers the Arabs most is the perception they have of a double-standard U.S. policy consisting of two approaches, one for Israel and another for the Arab countries” wrote Mohamed El Mansour, an influential Moroccan historian. Double standards and the inconsistency with international laws and regulations will ultimately threaten U.S. credibility and long-term strategic interests.
Economic stakes
President Trump recently boasted of securing trillions of dollars in trade deals with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. “You know, we took in $5.1 trillion in the last four days from the Middle East,” Trump said. Such agreements require long-term regional stability. A war with Iran would put every U.S. military base in the region within reach of Iranian missiles and drones. The cost of lost deals and military escalation would erase any economic gain and burden American taxpayers for decades.
Breaking the Israel-centric mold
It is no secret that current U.S. positions in nuclear talks are heavily influenced by Israeli policy — not American interests. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has lobbied Washington for a U.S.-led war against Iran during past decades and now, demands the full dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program while he knows such a demand non-negotiable for Tehran. Israel is even reportedly considering attacking Iran’s nuclear program while Trump’s negotiations are ongoing.
U.S. Middle East policy has long been aligned with Israeli preferences, but unconditional support has backfired. Today, more than two-thirds of Americans , 69%, prefer a peaceful agreement with Iran and that neither Israel and nor Iran possess nuclear weapons. Over 60% of Americans now believe Israel is playing a negative role in resolving the key challenges facing the Middle East. The International Court of Justice has accused Israel of plausible genocide. Mass protests across the West reflect growing disillusionment. As a result, Israel is one of the world’s most isolated countries. More importantly, Western silence on Israel’s conduct has discredited the very ideals of human rights, women’s rights, and international law that the U.S. once championed.
***
The U.S. cannot afford to repeat old mistakes. Instead of opposing Iran’s legitimate enrichment rights, Washington should leverage them. This is not about appeasement — it is about realism, law, and long-term American interests. A balanced, rules-based approach rooted in the NPT and regional diplomacy is the only sustainable path forward. Moreover, through a fair and mutually face-saving nuclear deal, Washington can open the path to normalize diplomatic relations with Iran based on mutual respect and non-interference, as enshrined in the U.N. Charter.
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