By Robbin Laird
Among the many charges levelled at Donald Trump, that he is impulsive, inconsistent, transactional, hostile to alliances, one rarely examined proposition cuts in a different direction: that across both of his terms in office,
Trump has pursued a strikingly coherent strategic objective.
That objective is the containment and ultimate transformation of Iran, and through Iran, the erosion of Russia’s most consequential partner in its global revisionist project.
When viewed through this lens, the Abraham Accords, the Riyadh speech, the calibrated approach to munitions in Ukraine, and the current campaigns in Iran and Venezuela are not disconnected episodes.
They are chapters in a single long-range strategy.
The Abraham Accords as Anti-Iran Architecture
It has become fashionable to treat the Abraham Accords as a diplomatic vanity project, a set of normalization agreements between Israel and a handful of Arab states that generated headlines without fundamentally altering the region’s security landscape. This reading misses the point entirely. The Accords were, from inception, designed as architecture against Iran.
Washington’s own framing and subsequent analysis make this explicit. The normalization agreements were intended to consolidate a U.S.-aligned regional bloc in which Israel and key Arab partners could cooperate not merely on trade or tourism but on the strategic challenge posed by Tehran’s network of proxies, ballistic missiles, and nuclear ambitions.
The so-called “crown jewel” of this enterprise was always Saudi-Israeli normalization, not because of its bilateral dimensions, but because a deal between Riyadh and Jerusalem would have cemented a coalition spanning the Gulf, the Levant, and North Africa, leaving Iran diplomatically encircled by its own neighbors.
That Hamas, an organization sustained by Iranian money, weapons, and training, understood the stakes is now documented beyond reasonable dispute. A Hamas document recovered in Gaza records Yahya Sinwar arguing that an “extraordinary act” was required to stop Saudi normalization with Israel, precisely because such a deal would open the way for a wider Arab-Israeli realignment that Tehran could not survive strategically. The October 7, 2023 attack was, among its many dimensions, a deliberate strike against the Abraham Accords.
The fact that the architects of that attack were willing to risk a regional war in order to derail a diplomatic process confirms, paradoxically, how seriously Iran’s proxy network took the Accords’ strategic logic.
The Riyadh Speech and the Coalition of the Willing
When Trump returned to office in 2025, his first major foreign policy address was delivered in Riyadh, a choice that was itself a signal. He explicitly identified Iran as the regime that provides terrorists with “safe harbor” and “financial backing,” framing the contest as one between order and disorder, between state-sponsored terrorism and a regional architecture of stability. He called on Muslim-majority states to work together to isolate Tehran.
This was not new rhetoric. It was the articulation of a strategic project.
The Riyadh speech launched or more precisely, relaunched a political effort to mobilize Arab partners not merely against non-state jihadist networks but against the Iranian proxy system itself: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, and the Shia militias threading through Iraq and Syria.
By framing the contest in these terms, Trump was constructing the ideological and diplomatic scaffolding for a coalition that would extend the Abraham Accords’ logic from normalization agreements to active strategic alignment.
Crucially, he also cast this regional project in terms that connected directly to the broader Eurasian contest. Iran is not merely a Middle Eastern problem.
It is a key node in what I have described in my work as the “authoritarian axis”, the alignment of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea that defines the strategic environment of the current decade.
Any serious effort to contest Russian revisionism must reckon with Iran’s role in sustaining it: as a sanctions-busting partner, a supplier of drones and ballistic missiles to Russia’s war in Ukraine, and a spoiler capable of driving energy crises and regional instability to Moscow’s advantage.
Ukraine, Munitions, and the Logic of Strategic Husbandry
Trump’s approach to munitions transfers in Ukraine has generated sustained criticism from those who read it as either indifference to the Ukrainian cause or servility toward Moscow.
Neither reading is persuasive when examined against the broader strategic picture.
The United States faces a genuine munitions constraint. The industrial base has not kept pace with the consumption rates generated by sustained high-intensity warfare in Ukraine, and the stocks of precision-guided munitions, air and missile defense interceptors, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets are finite. A rational approach to this constraint requires choices about where those assets are most critically needed and the answer, in Trump’s strategic calculus, is increasingly the Middle East.
The campaign against Iran demands exactly the categories of capability that Ukraine has consumed in large quantities: long-range precision strike, integrated air and missile defense, and the ISR architecture needed to prosecute a complex, distributed target set. If the United States is to sustain credible military options against Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile programs and, as events have demonstrated, to act on them it cannot afford to deplete its precision munitions inventory in a single European theater.
In this sense, the limits placed on certain transfers to Ukraine are not a betrayal of American commitments but a consequence of a strategic reordering of priorities in which the Iranian threat is being treated as the primary near-term military problem.
This logic has been understood, if not always publicly acknowledged, by serious analysts of U.S. force posture.
What it requires is a willingness to view Ukraine and the Middle East not as separate theaters but as components of a single strategic environment in which choices made in one place have direct consequences in the other.
The Current Campaign and the Prospect of Iran 2.0
The military campaign now underway against Iran represents the operational expression of the strategic architecture Trump has been constructing since his first term. It has targeted Iran’s top leadership structures and strategic programs, the nuclear enterprise, the ballistic missile force, and the command networks that direct the proxy system across the region.
The strategic aim, as commentators from multiple analytical traditions have now noted, appears to be something more ambitious than simply setting back Iran’s programs by a few years. The objective seems to be forcing a regime transformation or at minimum, a fundamental reorientation of Iranian foreign policy in which Tehran abandons nuclear weapons ambitions, long-range missile development, and proxy warfare in exchange for sanctions relief and the prospect of reintegration into a regional order shaped by U.S. and partner interests.
This is what some analysts are calling “Islamic Republic 2.0”, a successor regime, or a profoundly reformed version of the current one, that maintains its domestic political character while abandoning the foreign policy instruments that have made it a destabilizing force across the Middle East and a strategic asset for Moscow.
Whether this objective is achievable remains genuinely uncertain. Iran is not a small or brittle state, and the historical record of externally coerced regime transformation is mixed at best. But the ambition itself is coherent, and it connects directly to Trump’s stated goal of completing the “historic transformation of the Middle East” that the Abraham Accords began.
Such an outcome would reorder the regional landscape in ways that directly serve American strategic interests far beyond the Middle East itself.
A post-Khamenei Iran or even a pragmatically constrained Islamic Republic that had abandoned its nuclear program and disengaged from its proxy network would deprive Russia of its most important strategic partner in the region. It would remove the primary engine behind the Houthi threat to Red Sea shipping, the Hezbollah threat to Israel’s northern border, and the militia network that complicates American force posture in Iraq and Syria. It would also, over time, create conditions in which Saudi-Israeli normalization could resume and the Abraham Accords’ logic could reach its intended completion.
Venezuela: The Western Hemisphere Front
The parallel campaign against Venezuela completes the strategic picture by closing what might otherwise remain an exposed flank. Venezuela under Maduro has functioned as a Russian and Iranian outpost in the Western Hemisphere, providing military access, intelligence platforms, sanctions-evasion networks, and the diplomatic footprint of a state nominally beyond Washington’s immediate reach.
Moscow and Tehran have used Venezuela as a node in an integrated ecosystem of arms transfers, energy trading, and illicit finance that sustains both regimes and gives Russia a tool to project pressure toward the United States from below the equator. Striking at this node is not a distraction from the main effort. It is a logical extension of the same strategy that is being pursued in the Middle East.
In the framework I have developed for understanding the Global War in Ukraine, Venezuela represents the Latin American flank of a broader contest in which the United States is rolling back Russian leverage not only in Eastern Europe but across multiple theaters simultaneously.
This is what distinguishes the current strategic moment from the episodic interventionism of earlier decades.
The Trump administration is not simply responding to crises as they arise. It is pursuing a coordinated campaign across connected theaters, aimed at dismantling the authoritarian axis that sustains Russian revisionism, in the Middle East through the Iranian campaign, in the Western Hemisphere through Venezuela, and in Europe through the pressure being applied on Ukraine’s neighbors to accelerate their own defense contributions.
The Global War in Ukraine: A Framework for Understanding
The concept of the Global War in Ukraine which I have developed across my recent analytical work is sometimes misread as an attempt to inflate the significance of a regional conflict. The argument is precisely the opposite.
What has happened in Ukraine since February 2022, and what has been building since at least 2014, is not a regional conflict that the world has chosen to treat as globally significant.
It is a genuinely global contest that has taken one of its most visible forms in Ukraine.
Russia’s war is sustained by Iranian drones and North Korean artillery shells. It is underwritten by Chinese economic support and shielded by Chinese diplomatic cover.
Its strategic logic connects directly to Iranian provocations in the Gulf and Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. The authoritarian axis is not a metaphor.
It is an operational reality, and the United States and its allies are contesting it, whether they choose to frame their actions in these terms or not.
Trump’s approach, for all its rhetorical unconventionality, has the virtue of treating this reality with appropriate seriousness. The Abraham Accords were a move against the Iranian pillar of the axis. The Riyadh speech was an attempt to mobilize the regional coalition needed to sustain that move. The calibrated approach to Ukraine munitions reflects a judgment that the Iranian theater is now the most pressing operational priority. And the campaigns in Iran and Venezuela are the operational expression of a strategy that has been in construction, with varying degrees of coherence and consistency, since 2017.
One can dispute the tactics, the sequencing, or the adequacy of the resources being applied. One can argue that the munitions constraint in Ukraine has imposed genuine costs on a democratic partner fighting for its survival. One can question whether the Iranian campaign will achieve its ambitious objectives or whether regime transformation is a realistic goal.
These are legitimate debates, and they deserve serious engagement.
What is harder to sustain is the proposition that there is no strategy here at all, that Trump’s approach to Iran, the Abraham Accords, Ukraine, and now the campaigns in Iran and Venezuela represent nothing more than an assemblage of impulsive decisions driven by personality rather than purpose.
The evidence points in a different direction.
Across eight years and two terms, the strategic through-line has been remarkably consistent: Iran is the central problem in the Middle East, the Abraham Accords are the diplomatic instrument for building a coalition against it, and dismantling the Russian-Iranian axis is the key to resolving not only the Middle Eastern disorder but the broader Eurasian contest that defines the current decade.
That is a strategy. Whether it succeeds is another question entirely but it deserves to be engaged on its own terms.
The Global War in Ukraine: An Essay on the Changing Global Order
The Emergence of the Multi-Polar Authoritarian World: Looking Back from 2024