President Trump is an America Firster, but he has an undeniable affinity for the Arab world. He would have made a good sheik – he doesn’t drink, he loves developing flashy properties to show off his power and wealth, and he’s brutally realistic about the role of oil (and other commodities) in world politics.
In his first run for president eight years ago, Trump not only surprised the Republican establishment by criticizing the Iraq War, he surprised the war’s critics by saying that if America was going to invade we should at least have seized the oilfields.
The Abraham Accords were a triumph of the president’s first-term foreign policy, and this week Trump is back in the Middle East to strike new deals for peace and profit alike. In Riyadh on Tuesday he declared “a land of peace, safety, harmony, opportunity, innovation, and achievement right here in the Middle East” is “within our grasp.”
If that’s true, it will be because Trump’s approach to the Arab world, in contrast to that of other American leaders, isn’t ideological. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman was visibly delighted by the president’s remarks, as well he might be on hearing Trump say, “too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.”
Trump instead “believe[s] it is God’s job to sit in judgement – my job [is] to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.”
The Middle East has long wrongfooted America’s foreign-policy moralists. It has stubbornly resisted the democratization and liberalization that are meant to accompany “the end of history,” the myth (in Georges Sorel’s sense) on which the faith of Western elites depends. Twenty-five years ago, neoconservatives tried to explain away the problem by invoking the malign influence of just a handful of “rogue states” which prevented the region from developing into Switzerland. If only America could bring “regime change” to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Islamic Republic of Iran, the rest of the Middle East would take inspiration and in a peaceful revolution adopt western attitudes toward women, human rights, and Israel. In the meantime, while war had to be waged against Iraq, and sooner or later Iran, it was perfectly fine if Saudi Arabia remained theocratic and autocratic. Change would arrive before the House of Saud knew it, once America’s wars were won.
The neocon vision was also the vision of many centrist liberals and Democrats. To the right there were dissenters who believed in a “clash of civilizations” more violent than Samuel Huntington had imagined: they insisted that Islam is inherently violent and incompatible with Western security, so they supported the neocons’ wars for reasons of their own, not to democratize the Middle East but, so far as possible, to subjugate or destroy it. To the left of the neocon-liberal consensus were dissenters who were almost the mirror image of the Islam-hating right, only the civilization they considered to be unsafe for the world wasn’t Islam’s but the West’s. Halfway between these “anti-colonialist” ideologues and the neocons stood Barack Obama’s progressive faction. Its representatives in the press were willing to criticize Saudi brutalities – particularly the murder and butchery of Jamal Khashoggi – as Obama pursued a “deal” with Iran. His administration continued to employ neocon means in reduced proportions: Obama ended the Iraq War but prolonged the Afghan one; instead of invading Middle East countries outright, he settled for launching drone strikes. The philosophy behind his foreign policy amounted to using American force to midwife a post-American, post-Western world.
None of these ideological projects met with success in the Middle East. But where does that leave Trump? Can he build on the Abraham Accords while war rages between Israel and Hamas and the Houthis are prepared to resume harassing Red Sea shipping at their convenience? Can he not only resist the neocon pressure to go to war with Iran but cut a better deal to contain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions than Obama could?
Those are his aims, based on what he said in Riyadh. Rather than continue bombing the Houthis, he’s simply declared victory and called it off: “We hit them hard, we got what we came for – and then we got out.” His overtures to Iran are coming not just from his envoy Steve Witkoff but from the president’s own mouth: “I am here today not merely to condemn the past chaos of Iran’s leaders, but to offer them a new path and a much better path toward a far better and more hopeful future.” And he’s more outspoken than ever about the folly of neoconservatism and liberal internationalism: “the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called ‘nation-builders,’ ‘neo-cons,’ or ‘liberal non-profits,’ like those who spent trillions failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad, so many other cities.”
“In the end,” he added, “the so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built—and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
Trump’s vision is of a new Middle East in which interest has replaced ideology, where “a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts and tired divisions of the past, and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together – not bombing each other out of existence.”
That’s rather rosy, of course, but behind the rhetoric one can see the framework Trump has in mind, and it’s consistent with his approach to the Abraham Accords and his strategy elsewhere. Trump isn’t going to lecture the Islamic world about liberalism or democracy, and he isn’t going to let its age-old animosities get in the way of business. He believes the young leaders of the region, like the 39-year-old bin Salman, have the same mentality.
For a generation the Arab world was haunted by the spectacle of the Iranian revolution, with Saudi elites in particular fearful that what happened to the Shah could happen to them if Sunni clerics and religious ideologues were not appeased. Saudis and Gulf Arabs in effect paid off the troublemakers who might otherwise have brought down their kingdoms by encouraging them to export radicalism abroad, which at length planted the seeds for the 9/11 attacks and other terrorism. Bin Salman was born in 1985, and throughout his lifetime the lesson of Islamist extremism has not been that it could do to Saudi Arabia what it did to Iran but that it leads to pointless wars throughout the region that hamper economic progress. And bin Salman’s bloody way of dealing with opponents and critics is a grim testament to his resolve in putting down anyone who might challenge him. He’s unterrified of the clerics, and the terror he’s most ready to use as his weapon is the kind he wields at home (including in his embassies).
Trump will do business with him, just as he’d like to do business with Putin. And Trump would rather do business than wage war with Tehran. Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t happy about that, but if he wants to survive in Trump’s world, he will have to do things Trump’s way. Or so the president hopes.
It will take all the skill Trump has shown in entrepreneurship and political campaigns, and all the luck he’s had in an assassin’s gun sights, to make peace in the Middle East. But he made a promising start the first time, and he’s serious about picking up where he left off. If he’s a little Middle Eastern himself, he sees the potential for great things if Arab leaders become a little more Trump.
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