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Everywhere I have been in the past month—New York City, Tulsa, Santa Fe, Dallas, Seattle—someone asks me: “What are the differences between what a Harris administration and a Trump administration would do in the Middle East?” My answer: Strip out all the rhetoric, and the two candidates overlap more than they diverge.
People mostly then look at me like I have three heads. But that’s only because their expectations of what the candidates might do are based on their feelings about the candidates, not what they actually stand for.
Think about the important issues of the day:
The two-state solution? Both are for it. They may have different ideas of what two states living side by side and in peace might look like, but they have nevertheless devoted energy and resources to advancing this goal.
Iran? Neither is particularly interested in direct confrontation over its malign activities. Former President Donald Trump may have been rhetorically belligerent toward Iran during his time in office, but when he had the opportunity to respond in the summer of 2019, when the Iranians seized oil tankers, mined the Persian Gulf, shot down an American surveillance drone in international airspace, and attacked Saudi Arabia, the then-president punted.
For Vice President Kamala Harris’s part, the Biden-Harris administration spent the better part of the first three years in office seeking to coax Iran back into a nuclear deal, and over the past year, has sought de-escalation in the region in order to avoid confronting Iran.
Regional normalization? Again, both Trump and Harris are for it, though it seems unlikely that either administration would have the opportunity to advance Saudi-Israeli normalization without a resolution regarding the future of the Palestinians.
The differences between Harris and Trump will be—as they often are—in rhetoric and tone.