U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack has spent much of his tenure challenging the conventions of American diplomacy.
On Friday, he suggested fresh strikes on Iran were possible within days.
“Could there be a strike this weekend? Absolutely,” Barrack said, despite President Donald Trump’s Oct. 8 declaration ruling out any attacks before the next month’s midterm elections, a position the White House reaffirmed Thursday.
But when asked about Barrack’s comments, Trump distanced himself from the prediction. “That’s my ambassador to Turkey. He’s a pretty powerful man, I guess,” he told reporters. “If that’s the case, I don’t know anything about it.”
Three days earlier, the billionaire real-estate investor questioned a foundation of the U.S. role in the Middle East at a security conference in Doha.
“America as the guarantor to the world for the last 80 years, it is no longer there,” Barrack told the Global Security Forum. “What’s happening in this administration is not an abandonment. It’s a message for realignment.”
Washington, he explained, was “transitioning” away from its longstanding oil-for-security bargain with Gulf producers, likening the process to “raising a teenager.”
The United States remains deeply involved in its war with Iran, which a top U.S. diplomat said Friday could last another year while the U.S. Navy helps secure shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
These kinds of recent remarks have raised familiar questions about Barrack, a 79-year-old businessman with an expansive portfolio and a direct line to the Oval Office: When he speaks frankly about U.S. policy, how much is he speaking for Washington, and how much for himself?
An Unconventional Diplomat
Barrack, whose grandparents emigrated from Lebanon, built his fortune in real estate and private equity, and has known Trump for decades. He chaired Trump’s first presidential inauguration in 2017 before joining his second administration as ambassador to Turkey in 2025, later also becoming envoy for Syria and Iraq.
His close ties with the president and familiarity with the region grant him an unusual position in U.S. diplomacy, where he habitually dispenses with the carefully calibrated language traditionally expected of American envoys.
Randa Slim, who leads the Middle East program at the Stimson Center, told MBN that Barrack approached diplomacy by emphasizing close relationships and practical outcomes over ideological differences or rigid negotiating positions.
“He approaches diplomacy with a businessman’s mindset, seeking to get the job done through personal relationships with key counterparts, transcending ideological divides and avoiding becoming bogged down by red lines,” Slim said.
She pointed to his willingness to engage with Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former leader of an al-Qaeda affiliate who became Syria’s president early last year and has since become an ally of Trump, as an example of that pragmatism.
Diplomacy Without a Script
At times, Barrack’s personal touch has required clarifications.
In August, the U.S. envoy said Israel continued to occupy Syria’s Golan Heights in violation of U.N. resolutions, contradicting Trump’s 2019 recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the territory. After heated criticism from Republican lawmakers, he clarified that U.S. policy on the disputed territory had not changed.
In the same interview, Barrack suggested that Iran and Hezbollah were missing from U.S.-led talks with Israel over Lebanon’s security, before insisting he was describing “the difficulty of the problem” with disarming Iran-backed Hezbollah rather than proposing talks with the U.S.-designated terrorist group.
Barrack argued against Western efforts to impose democracy on post-Assad Syria, but went further by questioning whether any Middle Eastern country, including Israel, was truly democratic. His remarks drew criticism from Israeli officials and Republican lawmakers including the late Lindsey Graham.
Besides his most recent comment on possible airstrikes and the end of an oil-for-security deal, Barrack also made headlines at this year’s Global Security Forum in Doha for saying Iran is “not an evil regime” – comments that were contradicted just two days later by Trump in a Truth Social post calling Iran “truly an Evil Regime.”
An Old Bargain Under Pressure
Jim Krane, an energy and Gulf security expert at Rice University’s Baker Institute in Houston, Texas, said Barrack’s remarks could signal a policy shift or merely be a “trial balloon.” The oil-for-security bargain, he said, was never a formal deal but a strategic understanding dating to President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 pledge to defend U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf.
“It’s kind of a concept,” Krane told MBN. “As far as I know, there’s no oil-for-security document that you can read. At least there’s no public one.”
The Iran war has also exposed a weakness of that arrangement: U.S. military installations intended to protect Gulf partners have become liabilities.
“The security umbrella is now the target set of Iran,” Krane said. “They’re [the military bases] making our allies insecure because they’re coming under attack.”
But Krane doubted whether emerging regional security alliances like the Mecca pact could replace American military capabilities anytime soon.
“There’s no other external power that can provide the same level of security that the U.S. provides,” he said, with the status quo likely to endure.
Barrack’s argument is not new, Slim said. “This shift goes back to Obama’s Asia pivot,” she said, referring to the early 2010s effort to move on from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Successive administrations have tried to shift toward Asia, she said, but Middle East conflicts kept pulling the United States back.
For Whom Does He Speak?
Asked whether Barrack’s remarks reflected official U.S. foreign policy or his personal views, a State Department spokesperson issued the following statement:
“President Trump himself routinely communicates the positions of this Administration on the Middle East. There has been no change in U.S. policy,” the spokesperson told MBN. “The United States remains committed to protecting American interests and supporting our partners in the Middle East.”
The U.S. Embassy in Ankara did not respond to a request to interview Barrack, and the Pentagon did not respond to an inquiry about his Doha remarks.
In any case, Aaron David Miller, a veteran Middle East negotiator who served under the five U.S. presidents from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, said he believed Barrack’s headline-making remarks were not particularly unusual for the Trump era, and did not necessarily amount to a declaration of a new stance.
“It’s actually on the milder side,” he said of Barrack’s oil-for-security remark. “It could be construed as an analytical observation, not a statement of policy.”
Miller, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Barrack was widely regarded as intelligent and knowledgeable about the Middle East, but that his comments also had to be measured against actions.
“It’s a comment by a guy who knows the region, who’s close to the president, but you’d have to align it with reality, exactly what the administration is doing,” Miller said. He pointed to the Iran war, U.S. naval activity in Hormuz and Washington’s recent approval of a proposed sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia.
“Is Tom Barrack looking at the same region I’m looking at?” he asked. “Doesn’t sound to me like we’re in walkaway mode.”
