Synopsis
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s clearest indication yet of his policy approach towards the Middle East and North Africa was tucked into a recent thank-you speech in Cincinnati. It is a transaction-based return to support of autocracy that is likely to tie him into knots and reinforce drivers of militancy and political violence.
Commentary
IN A little-noticed thank you speech in Cincinnati, a stop on his tour of battleground states that secured his electoral victory, President-elect Donald J. Trump recently vowed to break with past United States efforts to “topple regimes and overthrow governments” in the Middle East and North Africa. Trump was likely referring to costly US military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq that toppled the Taliban and Saddam Hussein but failed to produce stable regimes while giving half-hearted US support for democracy and the strengthening of civil society.
“Our goal is stability not chaos... We will partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism… In our dealings with other countries, we will seek shared interest wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding and goodwill,” Trump said. In effect, the president-elect was reiterating long standing US policy without the lip service past US presidents paid to US values such as democracy, human rights, freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
Traumatic Consequences
It was a policy that backfired with traumatic consequences for the US. President George W. Bush, in a rare recognition of the pitfalls of decades of US policy in the Middle East and North Africa, acknowledged within weeks of the 9/11 attacks that support for autocratic regimes that squashed all expressions of dissent had created the feeding ground for jihadist groups focused on striking at Western targets.
That was no more true then than it is today with significantly stepped-up repression across the Middle East fuelling civil strife, humanitarian catastrophes, and the swelling the ranks of militant and jihadist groups.
If anything, Trump’s seemingly status quo-based, transactional approach to the Middle East and North Africa risks exacerbating the drivers of violence and militancy in the region and threatens to enmesh his administration in a labyrinth of contradictory pressures.
One lesson that emerges from post-World War Two North Africa and the Middle East is that the region will go to any length to ensure that it is a focus of attention. US administrations come to office with lofty goals and ambitions, only to see their agenda driven by acts on the ground in the region. The Trump administration is unlikely to fare any better.
Multiple pitfalls
The pitfalls are multiple, as follows:
• Syria: Backed by Russia and Iran, Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad may be gaining the upper hand in the country’s brutal six-year war, but that is likely to prove a pyrrhic victory. The likelihood of Syria returning territorially and politically to the pre-war status quo ante is nil. Al-Assad’s Alawites like Syrian Kurds will not see their safety and security guaranteed by a Syrian state dominated by remnants of the old-regime.
Al-Assad, with a long list of scores to settle, moreover will be damaged goods for whom the knives will be out once the guns fall silent. And that silence will at best be temporary with foreign forces covertly and overtly continuing to intervene. Not to mention the fallout of an angry, disillusioned generation that has known nothing but brutality, violence and despair and has nothing to lose.
• Russia: A partnership with Russia may initially reshape Syria but will be troubled by radically different views of Iran. While Russia backs Iran, Trump has promised to take a harder line towards the Islamic republic even if he stops short of terminating the nuclear agreement concluded by the Obama administration and the international community.
• Islamic State: Bringing Russia on board in a concerted allied effort to destroy IS will contribute to depriving the jihadist group of its territorial base in Iraq and Syria but will do little to help put the two countries back together as nation states. Nor will it address underlying drivers of jihadist violence fuelled by disenfranchisement, marginalisation, repression, regimes that fail to deliver economic and social goods, and the unilateral re-writing of social contracts.
• Egypt: Blinded by a focus on the fight against jihadism, support for general-turned-president Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi, one of the country’s most repressive rulers, could prove to be an example of the pitfalls of uncritical backing of autocracy as dissatisfaction mounts with failed economic and social policies.
• Israel and Palestine: A policy that is less critical of Israeli policy towards the West Bank and Gaza and that moves away from support for the creation of an independent Palestinian state will complicate relations with the Arab and Muslim world. It will also further undermine the pro-peace faction led by President Mahmoud Abbas and strengthen Islamist groups such as Hamas.
Quintessential Approach
In many ways, Trump represents a quintessential approach towards foreign policy expressed by a US diplomat 40 years ago as he defended autonomy agreed at the time by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat as the response to Palestinian aspirations. Questioned about the viability of the concept, the diplomat said with no consideration of the consequences and cost of failure: “We Americans are very pragmatic. We keep on trying. If one thing doesn’t work, we try something else.”
To be sure, Trump has yet to articulate a cohesive Middle East policy. The president-elect has nonetheless promised “a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past.”
In many ways, Trump’s statements hold out the promise of harking back to a policy that was first seriously dented by the 9/11 attacks and ultimately punctured by the popular Arab revolts of 2011 and their aftermath.
Trump’s foreign policy and national security line-up raises the spectre of an approach to the Middle East and North Africa that will further stir the region’s demons and set the scene for an administration policy that is driven by events on the ground rather than a cohesive, thought-out strategy.
James M. Dorsey PhD is Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University and co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of University of Würzburg, Germany.
I think your view of the Middle East is essentially colonial--which is really the root cause of what we are witnessing in the region today. I completely disagree with you when you say:
"One lesson that emerges from post-World War Two North Africa and the Middle East is that the region will go to any length to ensure that it is a focus of attention."
The Middle East has not asked to be the center of attention. It was made so post WWI & WWII by invading powers that divided the territory up into artificial countries such as Iraq, Syria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Libya, etc....Mots of those artificial countries were held together by strongmen who were supported by one super power or the other. After the fall--or weakening --of those strongmen, the territories reverted back to their natural ethnic and religious boundries, with the inevitable bloodletting that comes with these types of divisions. Despite my shock at the atrocities that have taken place in the process, I believe that what is happening in the region was just inevitable. It's just going back to what it should have been from the start: a collection of small, ethnically based nations, not unlike Europe.
And the Middle East is not alone in this type of re-alignment. The Balkans states were other examples of artificially created countries that ereverted back to their original state after bloodletting.
First of all, let me express my joy and happiness to see Barak Hossein Obama, the greatest friend of ruling Islamist terrorists in Iran, to be out of white house in less than a month, being replaced by a true American.
Secondl. Let me assure you that within four years, the main square in every city in Iran will be called MEIDOON_TRUMP_KABIR. Translation: Trump _the Great_Square.
You may be right historically. One doesn’t wipe out more than half a century of history just like that. The dynamics have changed and are as I described them.
I also think that the concept of "nation state" has not quite made it through to the Arab culture. Iran, by contrast, has been a nation state at least since the Sassanid era, or one could even argue since the Achaemenid era. I think it was the famous Egyptian actor, Omar Sherif, who once said something to the effect of "when will the West realize that Arabs are tribal." We see tribalism in action across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Iraq.
I would agree in principle. The weakness of Arab states may lie less in the concept of the nation state and more in the fact that regimes are exclusive rather than inclusive. That is to say that significant segments of the population don’t feel that they have a stake.
Just one observation
How will the downfall of the Oxford educated Saudi Princes ( whose wives often live in accordance to western standards yet at odds with the majority of the population) if triggered by let's say a popular uprising which could threaten their rule or topple them as was the Shah of Iran back in 1979 ( after getting much bad press in the West) make the situation in the middle east any better ?
I have noticed alot of anti Saudi articles in recent years trying to put the blame of ISIS on the Saudis as they have on Erdogan's islamist state but with little if no proof sustaining it.
The Western Democracies decreasing dependency on Saudi Oil makes them think they could very well do without them but have their think tanks ever considered what would be the situation the DAY AFTER an eventual revolution ?
I think the West has totally misread the middle east inside out.
Would the fall of the Saudis ( which could very well happen due to an economic meltdown and foreign meddlling ) leaving their palaces in the Sands truly benefit the region ?
Yes the Saudi Kingdom chops off heads and hands with medieval laws but their dependency on the West in terms of military purchase and Oil Exports and that is precisely why I think they are not behind the genesis of ISIS as often claimed. They see ISIS as some Frankenstein monster born out of the rubbles and mess created in the region and as a direct threat to their own authority.
So let's just project ourselves into the future for the sake of the argument:
The Saudi Kingdom falls under a popular uprising encouraged by the West and analysts praising the upheavals as they did for the Arab Spring.
Then What ?
How can peace, stability, women rights and human rights emerge following the vacuum created by their downfall ?
The history of revolutions have always suggested that the transition from an authoritarian rule to a democratic rule is not an overnight process.
Given the chaos in which the middle east finds itself isn't it a little dangerous to suggest ( not that the author here has) that Sunni Chaos vs Shi'ia Stability is inevitable and that the West at some point may have to choose who to side with ?
What I see unfolding in the middle east with the increasing human tragedy resulting in the refugee crisis which Europe is at it's forefront ( risking political instability and the rise of populism as a consequence) is actually very similar to what Europe faced during WW I.
It is a tragedy that the West and the current generation of world leaders seem to have hardly learned anything from history.
I am afraid that the result is that a Middle East in chaos where arms dealers will be selling weapons to the highest bidder and a generalized war across the middle east is what awaits the region's future.
The day that happens the same "experts" of the NY Times who pushed for the US IRan deal at the expense of the martyrdom of the Syrian population will lament just like Ponce Pilat over the fall of the Saudis but won't accept responsibility for the generalization of the bloodshed across the region which in their naivity always claim they wanted to avoid. Yet it's Europe who will have to live with the consequences of sheltering the countless flood of refugees which Americans sitting safely miles away won't have to worry about.
2016 was terrible ... I dare not think of 2017 ...
It’s a catch-22. Either way there is a price to pay. The question is at what point does one want to pay, upfront or at a later stage and at what point is it the least painful.
The autocracies are ultimately unsustainable, what that means in terms of a timeline nobody knows. They’ve certainly brought us to where we are now.
That doesn’t mean that a post-autocracy period would not be messy, even very messy. Again, it’s the price one pays.
What if they don't want to pay the price ... yet are dubiously encouraged to do so ...
Fall of Eagles TV Series: Lenin and Trotsky in London
Fall of Eagles TV Series : Lenin Train returns to Russia
But then by the "price one pays" ... I suppose you mean the "Price THEY pay" ...
UNHCR report: More displaced now than after WWII - CNN.com
Paying the price is not a question of choice. History proves that. They are those opt to support autocratic regimes.