By Arnab Neil Sengupta, Rudaw
When it comes to foreign policy, Donald Trump is by many measures a better president than America deserves. And almost certainly, he is the president the Middle East’s belligerent hegemons deserve.
At a time when the “tired”, the “poor” and the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” could do with more robust expressions of support from the American people, there is very little forthcoming. Instead all they hear is hyperventilation about a favored few issues (Khashoggi’s murder, the Yemen war, Saudi female activists) by an earnest new breed of elected representatives for whom all politics is local.
The moral posturing of these lawmakers, who include members of both sides of the aisle, is nothing if not a reflection of the black-and-white view they have of complex geopolitical issues, something the Trump administration, for all its flaws, cannot be accused of having.
By obsessing more about the foibles of Washington’s friends than the grand strategies of its adversaries, these American lawmakers are following in the footsteps of the old fogeys of Britain’s Labour Party, France’s Socialist Party, and India’s Congress Party, who treated foreign policy as a card to be played for winning extra votes during elections, not as a set of instruments to be wielded by a state boldly but judiciously.
Admittedly, the exigencies of a democratic system demand that politicians often take stands that are not in the long-term national interest. But what is equally undeniable is that US lawmakers’ refusal to outgrow domestic power politics can have grave repercussions for places a world away from their affluent congressional districts.
Take Yemen for instance. As Will Hurd, a former CIA officer turned politician, pointed out in a commentary in the Wall Street Journal on June 26, Congress was “emboldening Iran” with the Senate vote to halt military sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
“By taking a clear stand (by supporting a resolution condemning the Houthi militia for its actions in Yemen), we can protect American interests, stand up to Iran, aid our allies, and alleviate the needless suffering of millions of innocent Yemenis,” he wrote.
Echoing the views of like-minded lawmakers, many Western media liberals too have been critical of Trump’s Middle East policy – and for exactly the wrong reasons.
On issues where the president comes up scandalously short, such as speaking up for displaced peoples without a powerful voice (ethnic Kurds, Yezidis, Syrians, Iranian dissidents, stateless Baluchis) or championing causes that lack radical chic (dwindling religious diversity in Arab countries), he has won a free pass from said elements of the media.
On the other hand, Trump has several under-acknowledged accomplishments. A Nobel Prize-winning president and liberal-media favorite (Barack Obama) failed to summon up the courage to punish Damascus for its suspected (and repeated) use of chemical weapons against rebel-held areas since December 2012. It finally took a nativist American politician (Trump) to order the 2017 cruise missile strikes in direct response to the Khan Sheikhoun attack of April 4 that year.
Similarly, the option of using sanctions as a weapon to force Iran to give up its ballistic-missile program and to stop acting as the Middle East’s destabilizer-in-chief should not have been rashly taken off the table when the nuclear deal known as JCPOA was signed in 2015. Yet the fact is a barely concealed transatlantic doctrine of appeasement had reigned supreme until Trump’s clear-headed national-security team decided to draw the line.
Likewise, it was not rocket science to acknowledge the adoption of modernizing policies, gender equality, secular education, and religious and political tolerance by countries of the Middle East and North Africa was of far greater urgency than the promotion of liberal democracy in failed or fragile states. Again, the responsibility for better aligning America’s democracy-promotion objective with the facts on the ground fell on Trump – unfortunately, to the point of its abandonment altogether.
To tell the truth, many young Americans no longer want their country to act assertively on behalf of the “tired”, the “poor” and the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” in distant parts of the world. A survey conducted this year by the Center for American Progress (CAP) of 2,000 registered voters found that they do not believe defending human rights, challenging Chinese dominance, fighting global poverty, and promoting trade and democracy should be America’s highest foreign-policy priorities.
In an essay titled “America adrift” accompanying the survey, three CAP scholars wrote: “Given basic confusion about foreign policy, numerous voters in the focus groups and the online discussion reacted favorably to core elements of ‘America First’ nationalism, primarily notions that the United States should stop being the world’s policeman and that it should focus more on its own problems rather than worrying about what is happening in other countries.”
It is tempting therefore to put the blame for the insular world-view of the current crop of American politicians on voters. The increasing polarization of public opinion along facile left-right lines probably does not make it any easier for the average American to unpack complicated global issues. That being said, as Robert Blackwill of the Council on Foreign Relations observes in a special report that assesses the Trump administration’s foreign policy: “What matters most is the effectiveness of US policy over time and its consistency with US national interests, not the personal qualities of its leaders.”
Small wonder, then, for an administration whose commander-in-chief makes no apologies for his isolationist nationalism, erratic style, and base-pleasing behavior, the Middle East policy score card is, on balance, impressive. Hypothetically speaking, had the occupant of the White House been a more conventional Republican or Democrat but with the same foreign-policy team, the world’s sole superpower might well have regained both its military mojo and moral compass by now.
At any rate, when most American voters no longer appear to view the US as an indispensable nation, Trump has proved to be not only “the American president China deserves” (to borrow a phrase from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman) but also the American president the Middle East’s new hegemons deserve.
