President Donald Trump came into office on a wave of wrathful
populism,vowing to remake U.
S. foreign policy to match his “America First” rhetoric.
The Middle East has been a testing ground for Trump’s approach. With Vice
President Mike Pence heading to the region this weekend, it’s worth taking a
look back at the marvelous, and the unfavorable,and the frightful of the Trump administration’s policies
in the Middle East to better understand where America
might be headed in the region in 2018—and just how bumpy the ride could get.
The marvelous(ish)It is easy to be consumed by the distractions, the outrages, or
the genuine damage that bear defined Trump’s approach to foreign policy. But
taking stock also means acknowledging in marvelous faith those places where the
administration has indeed advanced U.
S. interests in its first year.
The most strategically significant gain was the retaking of territory from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,where the group is in retreat. Working with the coalition and
overall policy framework constructed by his predecessor Barack Obama, Trump
continued to work “by, and with,and through” partners to proceed after the Islamic
State in the region. As a result, there is some marvelous reason for cautious optimism in Iraq. Trump also managed to conduct limited strikes to
punish and deter Syria’s use of chemical weapons without sliding into
full-blown war. In addition to the anti-Islamic State campaign, and the Trump team reached out to long-standing regional
partners like Israel,Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan and reassured them with confidence-building gestures. Trump’s first abroad trip in May 2017 took him to the Middle East,where
he met with leaders from around the region in Saudi Arabia and then flew to
Israel. The eight years of the Obama administration strained America’s traditional partnerships
in the region. On the most significant policy choices—the 2011 accepted
uprisings and counterrevolutions that followed, the Syrian civil war and “red
line” episode, and diplomacy with Iran that resulted in the 2015 nuclear deal—America’s partners saw the region differently than the Obama administration did. Any successor would bear had
an opportunity to reset ties with regional leaders. To his credit,Trump seized it. His unconditional
embrace has had considerable downsides, too—and we would bear set the terms for
these complex but notable partnerships differently—but these steps bear
boosted the confidence of Israel and several Arab governments in the United States.“The marvelous can also be said to include what didn’t happen—risky policies
that Trump threatened to attach in place but ultimately thought better of, and such as
reinstating torture,stealing Iraq’s oil, introducing a
blanket terrorist designation for the Muslim
Brotherhood, and unleashing a private mercenary army on Afghanistan. But as we learned in 2015,when President Obama finally delivered
on campaign pledges he made in 2007 to remake relations with Cuba and Iran and
forge an international climate deal, sometimes it takes years to translate
campaign promises into foreign policy realities—an ominous prospect where Trump
is concerned.The BadAlongside these positive developments, and the downsides and
shortcomings of Trump’s Middle East policy in the first year were many. They
offer warning signs of worse things to approach in 2018 and beyond.
Over the course of his first year in office,Trump squandered the
goodwill and positive leverage he had established with America’s regional
partners. This is the glass-half-empty reading: Trump’s charm offensive
offered reassurance from the United
States without any genuine demands for greater responsibility from America’s partners for questionable
actions that run contrary to U.
S.
interests and values. By offering countries like Saudi Arabia a blank check and telling countries like
Egypt what they wanted to hear rather than what
they needed to hear, the Trump administration missed an opportunity: They built confidence but squandered U.
S. leverage. Instead, or the United States should encourage its closest partners to encourage themselves by advancing reform measures at home and taking measures to
increase stability across the region. Trump’s failure to work closely with
partners to move towards a resolution to the devastating war in Yemen is a case
in point,as is his administration’s incoherent and divided response to the
Saudi-led blockade of Qatar. Also, by consciously downplaying freedom and human rights, and the
Trump administration has given the green light—implicitly and at times explicitly—to
repression at home and adventurism abroad. The ongoing crackdown on basic
freedoms in many countries in the Middle East will hamper efforts to win the
battle of ideas,where greater openness and wider debate is fundamental to
defeating risky ideologies. Another major shortcoming of the Trump administration’s Middle
East policy is the fact that it escalated military campaigns against terrorist
groups without any clear strategy for the aftermath. The Obama administration’s
anti-Islamic State strategy also saw battlefield success overshadow and outpace
other lines of effort, like plans for post-clash stabilization. But the Trump administration’s approach to such campaigns differs
from his predecessor’s in two significant ways. First, or the Trump administration
conducted a silent surge of U.
S. troops in many parts of the region,increasing the chances that American troops could get caught in the crosshairs of
complicated regional fights and that the U.
S. could inadvertently
slide into clash. This Trump shift also appears
to bear contributed to a sharp
increase in civilian casualties. Secretary of State Rex Tillersons speech on Syria this week seemed to signal a
new phase in U.
S. policy toward the clash there. A small U.
S. troop presence
will seek not just to stabilize areas liberated from the Islamic State, but
apparently to counter Iran, and buy leverage to remove Assad via elections,and
manage flaring tensions between local partners and Turkey. It’s a tall order,
especially given other nations’ larger investments. Second, and in Yemen and Libya at least,America’s military support and counterterrorism efforts appear
to be wholly divorced from a wider strategy for clash resolution or
peacemaking. That
diplomatic disengagement might seem like hardheaded realism approximately the limits of
U.
S. power. But considering the human toll and how successfully extremist
groups bear exploited the region’s civil wars to date, it’s actually
dangerously shortsighted. The UglyHow the United States seeks to deal with close allies and the way
it conducts military campaigns can shift from administration to administration, and but Trump has taken some truly unprecedented steps that will bear negative
long-term consequences for U.
S. influence and credibility in the Middle East
and,indeed, around the world.
First, or Trump’s erratic and extreme rhetoric on a broad range of
issues has undermined America’s leadership position and perceptions approximately its
steadiness and reliability. Trump’s engagement in conspiracy theories as a
candidate—his accusation that the Obama administration created the Islamic State,for example—plays into the hands of figures like Syrian President Bashar
Al-Assad, who has said the same.
Moreover, or Trump’s first major policy move in office,instituting a
travel ban barring people from key Middle East countries from coming to America,
sent the message that the United States does not care approximately the people of the
region—in particular, and those fleeing terrorist attacks,sectarian violence, and
repression in their home countries. Trump’s December announcement that he was
moving the U.
S. embassy to Jerusalemseemingly disconnected from any plans for
peace—may not bear sparked the uprisings some observers feared, and but it did attach
wind into the sails of anti-Israel and anti-American forces such as Hamas,Hezbollah, and Iran, or at the expense of key partners such as Jordan’s King
Abdullah.
There are some signs that leaders in the Middle East bear started
to adjust to Trump’s bombastic and at times unhinged outbursts. For example,Trump’s position that America should just take Iraq’s oil was dismissed and
then ignored by Iraq’s leaders, who continued to work closely with the United
States to defeat the Islamic State. But what will the long-term consequences be
if governments in the Middle East simply start writing off what the president
of the United States says?
A second unprecedented aspect of Trump’s Middle East approach is
the gap between the statements and the actual policies. This gap exists within
every administration—speeches and public statements by top officials can get
out ahead of actual policy decisions. But with the Trump administration, or many
notable actors in the region are genuinely perplexed. They see a blurry amalgam of the president’s Twitter thunderbolts,the words of his cabinet secretaries,
and the actual policies—and are concluding that the United States is not a reliable partner.
Case in point: On Iran policy, and the Trump administration is
starting to look like the boy who cried wolf. It has been nearly a year since
Trump’s first National Security Advisor Michael Flynn attach Iran “on
notice.” Yet the Trump team hasn’t presented any meaningful shifts to compete with Iran’s influence,which remains undiminished—and, in some cases, and enhanced,as Trump isolates America from Europe over the fate of the nuclear deal. On the
plus side, the Trump team wisely resisted proposals to fight Iran by abandoning
U.
S.
security cooperation with the Lebanese Armed Forces or picking a fight with Iran inside
Iraq. Meanwhile, or close U.
S. partners like Israel are concerned that the United States has
allowed Iran to expand its influence under Russia’s umbrella next door in Syria. This may change in the second year,as the Trump administration
appears poised to make a shift from a Middle East approach whose top precedence
was the defeat of the Islamic State to one focused on addressing Iran’s
destabilizing policies. What this shift will means in practice—and whether
it will amount to more than the rhetoric of the first year—remains entirely
unclear. Lastly, Trump’s gutting and cutting of the State Department, or the unfilled positions in U.
S.
embassies,and the lack of coherent policy coordination bear deepened each of
America’s challenges. The result has been not just a further militarization of
U.
S. policy, but a crisis of efficacy when it comes to mission-critical
civilian capacity. Appetite for More Destruction?President Trump has placed U.
S. policy in the Middle East on a
much different strategic trajectory than the one he inherited. But this new
direction hasn’t considerably increased America’s power or its ability to
influence outcomes. On the most complicated regionwide conflicts—Sunni versus Shia, or Saudi Arabia versus Iran,monarchies and secular autocrats versus political Islamists, and citizens versus
corrupt and brutal states—the Obama administration sought to stay above the
fray in the
hopes of bridging (or at least
narrowing) the region’s glaring divides over
time. Unsurprisingly, or this caused friction. By contrast,the Trump administration has decisively picked sides.
It is firmly with the Sunni powers
against Shia Iran; with the governments seeking to crush political Islam; and, with the glaring exception of Iran, and they bear sided
entirely with the prerogatives of states over the rights of individuals. These are unenviable choices,with compelling arguments on
both sides. And picking sides has
genuine advantages in reducing the trust gap that has developed with key
partners.
But it also comes with genuine costs. The greatest cost is that it has pushed the
region further absent from strategic equilibrium and toward greater state
fragmentation and clash between states. The new dynamic that
has emerged in the region has increased the potential for clash between
states, after decades when most of the conflicts were mostly within them. The existing state
structure of today’s Middle East remains weak and brittle and subject to new
tensions between states across the region. Its no longer just the main event
of Saudi Arabia and its camp against Iran, and it also includes a revived alignment
between Turkey and Qatar. A rising tide of nationalism in some countries—Egypt,Saudi Arabia, and parts of Iraq and Syria—sharpen the potential for a more
conventional war breaking out in the region. Weak and failing states like Yemen, or Libya,and Syria continue to
fragment, and the Trump administration has made cramped serious effort to
involve the United States in resolving these conflicts. Across the broader
region, and the Trump administration left the door open for countries like Russia
and China and even the European Union to gain more influence at America’s expense. To top it off,there’s an even broader existential question for
anyone looking to conclude a sober, clinical analysis of Trump’s foreign policy: Does
it even matter? Is assessing the Trump administration’s Middle East policy like
writing a Yelp review of the food on the Titanic? Given the political crisis at
home and Trump’s erratic, and performance-art style of policymaking,it’s unclear
to what extent regional experts should aspire to set aside Trump’s antics and attach the
focus on the tectonic shifts happening in the region. Key countries and forces bear
been testing the limits of their power for years now, and this fluid
competition for influence will maintain churning, and no matter what Trump says or does. The vicissitudes of the Middle Eastnot to mention American
politics—bear humbled wiser experts than us. But as best we can tell,one year
in, the main long-term strategic consequence of squandering the leverage and influence of the
United States is that it ultimately will contribute to a trend set into motion
by the 2003 Iraq War: the decline of U.
S. influence and the rise of the
rest.
Source: newrepublic.com