2025 Will Be the Year of Trump's Crackdown on Islam
What Trump’s hawkish anti-Muslim appointees mean for the Middle East – and beyond.
Major decisions about the Middle East and the US role in it are about to be shaped by a coterie within Donald Trump's incoming administration that views the region and its peoples in terms of a grand historical clash with Islam, the religion of most of its residents.
At the dawn of the War on Terror, the Bush administration had strong influences from evangelical Christians prone to civilizational understandings of 9/11. But at its senior levels, its preoccupations had more to do with expansive assertions of US military power, even as those assertions might have suited those invested in a clash of civilizations.
The Trump restoration has no shortage of familiar right-wing hawks. But its senior ranks are also set to include those who see Islam as a marauding horde of invaders bent on conquest. The alliance between these two forces is about to have its biggest opportunity since 9/11.
The early December collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria has capped a failure cascade for its patron in Iran, which has seen US-backed Israel inflict catastrophic damage upon Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas-controlled Gaza, and even on Iranian soil. Senior officials in Israel are talking not only about another year of genocide in Gaza but the annexation of the West Bank. Far from the Trump campaign rhetoric about peace, as absurd as it was, the incoming hardliners are likely to feel that they have momentum – if not divine sanction – to reshape the balance of power in the Middle East. Just last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump is already considering airstrikes on Iran.
"Islamist Jihadists Are the Greatest” Threat
The regional losses Israel has inflicted upon Iran appear to have prompted something that the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency called a "dramatic acceleration." An IAEA report in early December warned that Iran had increased its production of bomb-grade enriched uranium four-fold, particularly at the hardened site Fordow, built deep into a mountain to protect its work from aerial bombing.
As the New York Times recently noted, there are two competing understandings of the enrichment spike. One holds that Iran, seeing the decimation of its regional strategy atop the US violation of a 2015 nuclear deal, has decided that its security requires a nuclear weapon. The other holds that Iran is moving closer to nuclear breakout so it has something to negotiate away when Trump is in power. Reminiscent of Iraq in 2003, war is at stake in the interpretation.
Early next year, the incoming Trump administration is certain to task the 18 US intelligence agencies with a formal reassessment of what Iran is up to. The person presiding over that process, pending Senate confirmation, will be Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, whose posture as a peace advocate ends where "radical Islam" begins.