11. From Obama, to Trump, and on … Durable Changes, Durable Continuities?

Beyond style and rhetoric, it has often been argued that President Obama and President Trump’s policies toward the Middle East have much more in common than it appears. The elements of divergence are certainly obvious: the will to settle the Israeli-Palestinian issue by a complete evacuation of the fundamentals of law and the existence of a Palestinian State; obvious bias, even if heavily monetized, with the Arab states of the Gulf against Iran—and the settlement of the nuclear agreement with the latter; the transactional, and mercantile approach in all its aspects with all the actors in the region, including Israel. The continuities are also as important: the will to remove the United States from the endless and costly quagmire, with the continuation of the “pivot towards the east”; a lack of interest in anything that could resemble “nation-building,” including the incentives for socio-economic reform in the most fragile countries; outsourcing of the security issue—perceived only from a counterterrorism perspective—to Russia and the main regional actors. This contribution will focus on this tension between break and continuity by concentrating on one or two case studies, where Syria will be in first place as it concentrates all these tendencies and ambiguities. Looking ahead to a post-Trump period, it will be interesting to picture what now appears to be structural in the American policy of the Middle East, in the long-term and in view of the global geopolitical upheavals as they are read and considered by the U.S. administration.