Ron DeSantis and the Middle East: Trump 2.0 or a new foreign policy?

Gaffe-prone, lacking emotion and now sagging in the polls. The last six months haven't been kind to Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis.

Late last year, the Florida governor was riding a wave of support, with some analysts even suggesting he was a superior Republican alternative to former US President Donald Trump. But the enthusiasm that once characterised his GOP campaign has subsided in a big way.

His efforts to style himself as a Trump-style conservative without the Trump baggage have fallen on deaf ears.

On 23 August, at the first Republican primary debate, he will look for a way to swing the momentum his way. But will the 44-year-old's candidacy be a continuation of Trump, will it be a Trump 2.0, or will he be a president that would restructure Republican politics?

One way to find the answer is to take a look at DeSantis' record when it comes to foreign policy.

Who is Ron DeSantis?

Ron DeSantis: Iraq War veteran. This is how he described himself when first entering politics during his run for governor of Florida in 2018.

"Ron DeSantis: Iraq war veteran, JAG officer who dealt with terrorists in Guantanamo Bay," stated a campaign ad at the time.

DeSantis studied history at Yale University, graduating magna cum laude before attending Harvard Law School, graduating in 2005.

He went on to serve in the US military, a personal anecdote he relied on when he began his run for Congress. He is the only Republican running for president who has served in the military.

“I’ll be the first president elected since 1988 who’s actually served in a war,” he said in response to a question on his foreign policy bona fides.

Not much is known about his time in Iraq, besides his serving in the Navy as a judge advocate general (JAG) - an attorney familiar with military law including the international laws of war.

However, the Florida newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times, interviewed Captain Dane Thorleifson, the Navy Seal commander for Special Operations Task Force-West in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2018, who said that DeSantis worked closely with the commander on military operations.

'Hey, you can actually force-feed'

- Ron DeSantis

DeSantis was also tasked as the only lawyer in the team to handle the detention of Iraqi men rounded up by coalition forces, according to Thorleifson. In his recently released book, he said that he also prosecuted cases in “military court martials”.

DeSantis served in Iraq a few years after the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse scandal. In his book, he did not discuss the abuse that took place there, except saying that news outlets had a "field day with Abu Ghraib", using the expose' on the US military's torture of detainees as a partisan attack.

In addition to serving in Iraq, a country he describes in his book as a "hot, miserable part of the world", he also was posted in Guantanamo between 2006 and 2007, a prison he refers to as a "terrorist detention camp" despite the fact that out of the 780 men and boys detained there, only seven have ever been convicted.

Similar to Iraq, his time working at Guantanamo was shrouded in mystery, until former detainee Mansoor Adayfi spoke out earlier this year about interacting with DeSantis.

Adayfi has claimed that when he was being force-fed at the prison to break his hunger strike, he saw DeSantis laughing and smiling with others.

DeSantis also advised Guantanamo officials, saying that they could use force-feeding in order to combat a hunger strike being conducted by detainees during his time there. Force-feeding has been described as a form of torture by the UN Commission on Human Rights.

"Hey, you actually can force-feed," he said.

The military prison at Guantanamo has become a symbol of human rights abuses conducted by the US government over the past two decades. UN experts, rights groups, and activists have long called for the prison to be shut down. But DeSantis has defended the prison, going so far as to sign legislation while he was a congressman that would have prevented a possible future closure had it passed.

But this differs little from Trump, who as president signed an executive order that would keep Guantanamo Bay's military prison open, and even previously suggested adding to its prison population.

Pioneering a 'Muslim ban'

Unlike Trump, who entered American politics as an outsider from the world of business, DeSantis has had a decade-long political career stemming back to his days as a junior congressman in the early 2010s.

By 2010, DeSantis had his eyes set on Congress and in 2012 won the 6th district of Florida's congressional election, which he went on to represent for the next six years.

He became engrossed in US foreign policy in the Middle East within his first term in office, joining the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa.

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He also was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, a faction of "ultra right-wing" Republican lawmakers created in 2015.

Middle East Eye previously reported on DeSantis and the concerns Muslim communities have about his run for presidential office, which can be read here.

He introduced a number of bills in Congress aiming to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation, and even railed on the State Department for not making the designation, saying the agency is "Arabist in outlook".

Those comments were made at an event hosted by ACT for America, one of the largest anti-Muslim groups in the country, according to Georgetown University's Bridge Initiative, which researches Islamophobia.

"It is clear that the [Muslim] Brotherhood constitutes a real threat to the national security interests of the United States," DeSantis said during a House hearing in 2018.

And while Trump has been credited with the implementation of the Muslim Ban when first becoming president, DeSantis himself had authored legislation to ban immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries before Trump even began running for president.

DeSantis was the lead author of the Terrorist Refugee Infiltration Prevention Act of 2015, which sought to ban the entry of immigrants from Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen - all Muslim-majority countries.

DeSantis also spent his time in Congress targeting Muslim charities in the US, drafting in 2012 legislation that would cut funding to Islamic Relief Worldwide, a well-known charity that has partnerships with a number of US and international agencies including USAID, the UN Development Fund, and the World Food Programme.

On Israel

DeSantis has also been one of Israel's most ardent supporters in US politics.

Trump has credited himself as the most pro-Israel president in US history, touting his success in moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and brokering the normalisation deals between Israel and several Arab nations including the United Arab Emirates.

It will be difficult for DeSantis to use his record on Israel to compete with the likes of Trump, or even Nikki Haley, who as US ambassador to the UN consistently defended Israel from any criticism at the world body.

However, to DeSantis, it was clear early on that Trump and other Republicans were not pro-Israel enough. He criticised the former president for delaying the moving of the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Public records show that DeSantis has made three trips abroad as a congressman, and two as governor. All five trips were to Israel.

While Trump has hosted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the White House, DeSantis has said that there is no such thing as a "Palestinian Arab entity", and consistently refers to the occupied West Bank as "Judea and Samaria" - the biblical terms of the area used by right-wing Israelis and pro-Israel Christian evangelicals.

His support for the country has also drawn him millions of dollars in donations from pro-Israel Jewish megadonors, including a $2.6m donation from American business magnate and billionaire Jeffrey Yass.

Roger Hertog, the chairman of the Tikvah Fund, the think tank that was behind the plans for Israel's judicial overhaul, also donated $250,000 to DeSantis' super PAC.

Bringing Florida and Israel closer together

After three terms in US Congress, DeSantis left Washington to become governor of Florida, the country's third most populous state. The move pushed his name to the national stage, and while he was no longer working in Washington, he continued to pad his portfolio with experience in international relations.

This time, he did so in the capacity of Florida's economic power.

DeSantis has been running the country's fourth-largest state economy in Florida, with a GDP of $1.4 trillion. During his time in office, Florida's bilateral trade with Israel more than doubled from $309.8m to $651m between 2019 and 2022.

He has led two trade delegations to Israel - one in 2019 and another in April.

“I promised to be the most pro-Israel governor in America," he said in 2019.

DeSantis imposed measures as governor to go after companies that stopped conducting business in Israel's illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

DeSantis moved to penalise ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's for its decision to stop selling ice cream in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and threatened Airbnb with sanctions if it did not reverse a decision to stop doing business in Israeli settlements. Airbnb obliged and began to again operate in the occupied West Bank.

"We should not be funding anybody who doesn’t recognise Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state," he said earlier this year at the annual summit for Christians United for Israel, founded by Pastor John Hagee.

Notably, Trump - who Hagee endorsed in 2016 - was not invited to the Cufi summit.

Still, DeSantis has yet to outline how he would differentiate himself from Trump when it comes to his Middle East policy. He has recently attacked the Biden administration for its handling of US-Saudi relations, and has also attacked the administration for its efforts on returning to the Iran nuclear deal.

"Prior to this administration taking office, the Middle East was probably in as good as shape as it's been in a long time. The momentum was really going in the right direction," he said in April.

"So recapturing that momentum and making sure we have good Arab allies working with the United States and Israel, that's how you combat threats from Iran."

While linking himself to many of the Trump administration's pro-Israel moves, DeSantis has yet to offer a comprehensive foreign policy agenda that would set himself apart from the rest of the Republican candidates.