President Donald Trump convenes the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace in Washington, DC, on February 19, 2026. Building a Middle Eastern security framework won’t be easy, writes James Jay Carafano. (Shutterstock/Robert Schwemmer)

Can Donald Trump Build a Middle Eastern Shield?

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The Middle East has rarely been kind to any form of collective defense partnership. Making one work will require prolonged investments.

US President Donald Trump plans to hold talks with Middle East leaders today. If he wants their help shaping the Middle East, he has a lot of work to do.

Computer-assisted historical trend analysis, combined with probabilistic futures assessments based on mathematical modeling, supports the conclusion that, despite delivering critical hits on Iranian military capabilities, the Trump administration lacks the momentum to achieve its goals unless it prompts specific policy shifts by key regional actors. 

Historically, Washington safeguards its global interests through two compatible security practices. One is “peace through strength,” with a significant effort to upgrade US conventional and strategic deterrence. The second is developing a network of stakeholders that take responsibility for securing peace and stability in their region. In practice, Trump is a strong proponent of “strategic autonomy,” in which US allies and partners build and sustain regional security.

This approach to collective security is foundational to US strategy, as reflected in Washington’s efforts to drive increases in defense investments by NATO member states and the development of the Shield of the Americas. The Trump way, however, faces a monumental challenge in the Middle East, which has a long history of failed collective security efforts.

In modern times, the Middle East has completely lacked an integrated, coherent, and effective collective security architecture, particularly one guided by Western powers. This is a historical truism. A review by SpearMind AI, a strategy consultancy, found that of the 43 regional security initiatives announced since 1945, only 9 percent became consolidated structures within five years. The success rate for the Middle East was worse at 4 percent.

President Dwight Eisenhower famously tried to assemble a Middle East NATO, perhaps his greatest foreign policy failure (as described in Michael Doran’s book Ike’s Gamble), revealing many pitfalls of........

© The National Interest