It was clear during U.S. President Donald Trump's tour of the Gulf states that his foreign policy is in a very "different place" than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's, Washington-based veteran diplomatic journalist Laura Rozen said on the Haaretz Podcast, pointing to the growing divergence in interests between the White House and Israel's ruling coalition, both on Gaza and Iran.
In his second term in office, Trump "wants to make peace deals and trade deals," Rozen said, as Netanyahu, "for his own political reasons, wants to continue the Gaza war indefinitely."
From his behavior, it seems that Netanyahu "may be missing the signals that Trump is going in such a different direction," she said, pointing to Trump's agreement to cease U.S. attacks on the Houthis, his meeting with Syria's leader during his stay in Riyadh, his statements favoring a diplomatic nuclear deal with Iran over military confrontation, and his willingness to negotiate directly with Hamas for the release of Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander.
Netanyahu's decision to sit on the sidelines, she said, and failure to make a gesture that could have moved Trump to include a stop in Jerusalem on his Middle East visit, was something that not only the Trump administration but "a lot of pro-Israel Americans" found disappointing.
Many of the changes in Trump's Middle East policies – particularly regarding Iran – since his first term, Rozen noted, can be attributed to a power shift in the Republican Party.
The increasingly strong "America First, MAGA wing of the GOP is not interested in wars of choice in the Middle East," she said, and thus far, in the second Trump term "the neoconservative element, the hawkish element, is definitely getting battered."
As a result, "strangely, you see MAGA people who are almost with the more traditional progressive Democrats when it comes to looking for a diplomatic solution on Iran, which is not something we saw in Trump's first term. It feels a little bit disorienting, even here in Washington."
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