In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead remarks on the Trump policy with respect to the Middle East:
In seeking a reduced Middle East presence and retreating from expansive human-rights goals, both Team Obama and Team Trump have reacted to significant changes in American politics. Public support for U.S. military action and democracy promotion in the Middle East has all but collapsed, for two reasons. First, decades of engagement in the region have brought neither stability nor democracy. Second, as America’s dependence on Middle East energy recedes, many voters see less reason to prioritize the region. Pundits can argue that these reactions are shortsighted, but politicians must take them into account.
The Trump administration hopes that with limited American support, Israel, Turkey and the Sunni Arab countries can together contain Iran. If so, Mr. Trump can claim credit for improved Israeli-Arab ties and a more stable region even as he cuts back on American troop and aid levels. This is a sounder strategy in the abstract than the Obama team’s gamble on Iranian restraint. U.S. relations with the Sunni Arab powers, Israel and Turkey are sometimes difficult, but a policy based on continued cooperation with them is more feasible than subordinating their interests to chase after an improved relationship with the deeply hostile regime in Tehran.
Yet the Trump plan also has significant drawbacks. The first is that, as the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran points out, it unites the president’s domestic critics. Many of Mr. Trump’s staunchest critics in the conservative foreign-policy establishment continue to support the George W. Bush strategy of muscular engagement and democracy promotion. They are appalled by both Mr. Trump’s desire to retreat from the region and his willingness to work with autocrats like Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Team Obama, meanwhile, may be out of power but remains influential among opinion makers and pundits. And it knows a Saudi alliance is America’s only alternative to the Iran outreach of the Obama era. The Obama lobby has therefore joined the neoconservatives in the hopes of using public horror at the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, revulsion at the humanitarian cost of war in Yemen and unease about the deplorable state of human rights in Mr. Sisi’s Egypt to disrupt the Trump administration’s Middle East strategy.
I understand the desire to reduce the U. S. footprint in the Middle East because I share it. However, I don’t see much to choose among Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. They’re all reprehensible Islamist regimes. I also don’t understand the particular burr under our collective saddle about Iran. The Iranians are self-containing for a simple reason: they aren’t Arabs. Any notion that the Arab Middle East will unite behind an Iranian banner is far-fetched in the extreme. I can understand why the Israelis hate Iran. All of that rhetoric is pretty frightening to a country that can be destroyed by one bomb. As far as I’m concerned the Israelis are entitled to their own country as long as they’re willing to defend it. They’re not entitled to expand into Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
If anything Dr. Mead understates how colossal a failure our Middle East policy has been over the last 25 years. We’ve succeeded wonderfully in promoting everybody’s interests but our own. That’s what the European outrage over the change in U. S. policy has been—they’re concerned we might pursue our own interests. The United States can only be trusted as long as it’s working against its own interests.
“I also don’t understand the particular burr under our collective saddle about Iran.”
Dave Schuler is the Devil incarnate! Death to Dave Schuler!
But you still love me, right Dave?
The number of countries that hate us (or at least hate our government) is quite large. We don’t talk about bombing all of them.