By negotiating the third historic Arab-Israeli peace treaty, Trump was in some senses presiding over a memorial service for this old way of thinking, as adhered to by the likes of John Kerry.
He might have muddled his way through, but Trump is the first President in decades to have charted a new path in the region. It was he who begun asking questions that should have been raised in the aftermath of the Cold War. For example, why are we in the Middle East anyway? What are exactly U.S. interests in the region at a time when America has become energy independent? And are we really advancing our interests by deposing rulers in the region and disrupting the status quo?
He rejected the all-too-familiar advice of the members of the foreign policy establishment to force a regime change in Syria; to punish Saudi Arabia and Egypt for their human rights violations; to pressure Israel to make more concessions to the Palestinians; and to allow Iran to fill the vacuum created by U.S. disengagement from the region.
As Trump saw it, American policymakers had to stop fantasising about creating a “new Middle East” through neo-conservative prescriptions like nation-building by accommodating radical Islamist forces like the Iranian or the Muslim Brotherhood, as advocated by Obama and now by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Instead, the Trumpist approach toward the Middle East centres on the idea that the Americans need to support those forces in the Middle East that are ready to protect the region’s best interests without requiring direct U.S. military intervention i.e. most of the Arab-Sunni regimes and Israel.
It did therefore make sense to create the foundations for a new balance of power in the Middle East. Specifically, this means forming a regional alliance between Israel and most of the Arab-Sunni states, backed by Washington, and aimed at countering the power of Iran and its regional partners.
The United States would continue providing its allies with military support and perhaps serve as a balancer-of-last resort, ready to intervene if a global player was threatening the status quo.
This breakthrough has come as another shock to a foreign policy establishment consistently wrong-footed by the Trump administration. Remember it was them who warned that Trump’s approach towards North Korea would risk igniting a nuclear war. On Iran, they said that rescinding the nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic would lead to a U.S. military conflict.
They predicted that the world would come to an end if Washington did not intervene militarily to end the civil war in Syria. And let us not forget Trump’s alleged plans to sabotaged NATO, the United Nations and the World Bank. As for Trump’s trade war with China, there were fears of a threat to the entire global economy.
Instead, the global economy is intact (despite Covid), the World Bank remains open, and most importantly, under Trump the United States has not been pressed into new military adventures in the Middle East. In fact, he was able to get Arabs and Israelis to make peace, a goal that Obama and Kerry failed to achieve.
Trump has embraced a very pragmatic approach that assumes that foreign policy paradigms evolve in response to domestic and international changes, and are not dogmas that need to be kept alive forever. He believes that U.S. national interests and not some universal dream of a perfect world should determine American foreign policy. As for intervention, he thinks that America should help those friends who can help themselves, and certainly not try to appease those players who hate America and what it represents.
So far it’s working despite the opposition from the Blob. Indeed, you do not need a foreign policy wonk to figure out the right approach. Sometimes all it takes is an outsider with no vested interests in maintaining the status quo — perhaps a real estate tycoon from New York for instance.
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