How Trump Is Restoring Sovereignty to the Middle East

Why Ending Western Management Is the First Real Peace Process

#SovereigntyFirstDiplomacy #MiddleEastStabilization #AbrahamAccords #ProxyChaos

#PostImperialForeignPolicy

For much of the post–Cold War period, the Middle East has been governed less as a collection of sovereign states than as an externally managed system of instability. Western policy, particularly after the 1990s, increasingly substituted permanent mediation, intelligence-driven proxy politics, NGO governance, and ideological “peace processes” for state-to-state diplomacy. This model did not eliminate conflict; it professionalized it. What distinguishes the Middle East approach of Donald Trump is not rhetorical novelty but structural rupture. Trump’s policy rejected imperial administration without abandoning power, replacing managed chaos with a sovereignty-first architecture that allowed regional states to stabilize themselves rather than be perpetually supervised.

Modern imperialism rarely resembles overt conquest. Instead, it manifests as continuous involvement justified by moral language—democracy promotion, civil society empowerment, humanitarian intervention—while systematically displacing local sovereignty. Scholars of empire have long noted that late-stage imperial systems prefer indirect control, leveraging intermediaries rather than direct rule (Gallagher and Robinson 1953; Mann 2012). In the Middle East, this translated into reliance on non-state ideological movements, intelligence-mediated proxies, and endless negotiation frameworks that elevated process over outcome. The result was a region locked into low-grade instability, where conflict was managed rather than resolved because too many external institutions derived legitimacy, funding, and influence from its persistence (Bacevich 2016).

Trump’s break with this system was pragmatic rather than theoretical. He rejected the assumption that peace requires Western supervision and instead treated sovereignty as the precondition for stability. This meant restoring state primacy over movements, interests over ideology, and responsibility over grievance management. Rather than expanding U.S. governance of the region, Trump sought to remove the external scaffolding that distorted regional decision-making while retaining leverage through deterrence, sanctions, and diplomacy (Walt 2018). This approach was neither isolationist nor pacifist; it was anti-imperial in administration while realist in power.

The clearest illustration of this shift was the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and multiple Arab states without requiring regime change, ideological convergence, or resolution of every historical grievance beforehand. Unlike prior peace processes, the Accords did not route negotiations through NGOs, revolutionary movements, or multilateral institutions that claimed veto power over normalization. Instead, they treated states as legitimate actors capable of recognizing one another based on mutual security and economic interests (Friedman 2020; Ross 2021). By doing so, they collapsed the long-standing practice of granting non-state actors effective control over regional diplomacy.

This was a restoration of sovereignty in operational terms. States were permitted to act in their own interests without external moral arbitration, and peace was reframed as a transaction rather than an ideological reward. Critics often mischaracterized this as dismissive of Palestinian concerns, but the reality was more precise. Palestinian participation was not eliminated; it was redefined. Trump’s framework engaged Palestinian technocrats—economists, planners, and business leaders—rather than elevating ideological representatives whose power depended on permanent deadlock. This shifted the Palestinian question from symbolic resistance to material governance, a move consistent with historical evidence that durable political order depends on institutional capacity rather than revolutionary legitimacy (Huntington 1968; Fukuyama 2014).

Another critical component of Trump’s sovereignty-first approach was his rejection of proxy-chaos diplomacy. For decades, Middle East instability had been shaped by intelligence services cultivating non-state actors as instruments of leverage, often tolerating or engaging Islamist political networks because they were socially embedded, deniable, and disruptive. Political Islam, particularly in its transnational forms, functioned less as a governing solution than as a mechanism for eroding state authority across borders (Roy 1994; Kepel 2017). Trump’s policy implicitly challenged this model by signaling that the United States would no longer underwrite strategies that relied on endless instability, whether employed by adversaries or allies.

This rejection of proxy politics aligns closely with the analysis advanced by Promethean Action, which argues that Middle East disorder is driven primarily by the empowerment of non-state ideological movements and the displacement of sovereign authority by Western mediation. Promethean Action contends that stability emerges when states are allowed—and required—to govern, secure borders, suppress militias, and normalize relations without external tutelage. In their framework, peace processes fail not because the region is uniquely intractable, but because Western intervention systematically prevents the consolidation of state order (Promethean Action 2023).

Trump’s approach operationalized this insight by bypassing the traditional intelligence, NGO, and multilateral intermediaries that had dominated Middle East diplomacy. Rather than convening large, permanent peace frameworks, his administration relied on ad hoc, deal-specific alignments that functioned informally through shared interests. This informality was not a weakness; it was the mechanism. By refusing to institutionalize the process, Trump eliminated the veto points that had historically allowed external actors to preserve conflict under the guise of management (Lake 2009).

Importantly, restoring sovereignty did not mean relinquishing U.S. power. Trump maintained military deterrence, economic sanctions, and strategic pressure, but these tools were used to compel alignment rather than justify occupation or governance. Power was retained; supervision was withdrawn. This distinction is critical. As realist scholars have long argued, order does not require moral consensus, only predictable interests and credible enforcement (Mearsheimer 2001; Waltz 1979). Trump’s Middle East policy reflected this logic by prioritizing stability over ideological transformation.

The resistance to this approach—particularly from European institutions, NGOs, and segments of the foreign-policy establishment—was telling. Many of these actors had become structurally dependent on permanent processes, endless negotiations, and managed instability. A sovereignty-first model threatened not only their influence but their purpose. By enabling regional states to normalize relations independently, Trump’s approach undermined the external ecosystems that had long positioned themselves as indispensable intermediaries.

In this sense, Trump did not “solve” the Middle East. He did something more fundamental: he removed the imperial management structures that prevented it from solving itself. By restoring state primacy, rejecting proxy chaos, sidelining ideological veto players, and allowing normalization to proceed without Western supervision, his approach returned sovereignty to the region in functional terms. Peace, in this framework, is not a process administered from abroad, but a byproduct of sovereign actors allowed to act sovereignly. That is the restoration underway—and the reason it was so fiercely opposed.