Arab Violence, Volatility, and Vulnerability in the Era of Trump
By Rami G. Khouri
January 10, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
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BEIRUT — Of the many fascinating reports in
Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury book
on the Donald Trump White House, perhaps
most troubling for Americans and for the
world were the new insights into how the
United States today shapes its Middle East
policies. After spending the last three
months in the U.S. and interacting with
numerous people and organizations that deal
with Mideast issues, I see several problem
categories in Trump’s Mideast actions.
The key ones are: the adolescent and
personalized nature of how pivotal officials
engage with Middle Eastern leaders, based on
personal chemistry more than studied
national strategic realities; Washington’s
working to change Arab leaderships like
trading Monopoly properties; the massive
sway that extremist, pro-ultranationalist
Zionist American donors have in the White
House; the disdain that Trump and his
associates seem to feel for Arab leaders and
countries; the exaggerated and dominant
fears of Iran that shape U.S. policies; and,
the presumptuous, mostly ignorance-based and
unilateral decisions on critical issues such
as the status of Jerusalem.
The quotes in the book are not a
comprehensive overview of U.S. policy-making
in the region or the world, to be sure, but
the consistency and tone of the sentiments
expressed by White House officials —
especially former chief strategist and
American White-ultranationalist Steve Bannon
— reflect a manner of decision-making in the
most powerful office in the world that
should frighten us all. (The key quotes in
the book are in this report by Middle East
Eye:
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-president-donald-trump-middle-east-what-we-learned-from-michael-wolff-book-fire-and-fury-1505120232).
The bottom line for me is that major
decisions on existential issues that impact
the lives of 600 million people in the wider
Middle East are being made largely on the
basis of policy preferences among the
Israeli and Saudi Arabian leaderships, and
intermediated by mostly ignorant, and often
very young and inexperienced American
officials like Trump son-in-law Jared
Kushner.
The revelation that President Trump’s White
House last year managed Middle Eastern
issues mainly through the Israeli, Saudi
Arabian, and Egyptian leaderships, with an
overarching desire to push back Iranian
influence in the region, helps explain why
the United States finds itself in confusing
situations across the Middle East. It has
mainly crisis-managed relations through the
lens of security and militarism, and often
with mixed successes.
The main problem with the
Israeli-Saudi-Egyptian combine as
Washington’s preferred entry point into the
Middle East is that these four counties’
leaders appear to be totally blind to the
conditions, rights, sentiments, and
aspirations of the 400 million people in
Arab countries, and the other 200 million
Middle Easterners in surrounding states.
These four states’ steadfast attempts to
maintain “security and stability” by using
massive military and police force —
alongside stringent limits on citizen
political, social, and economic rights — has
achieved exactly the opposite of what was
desired.
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Never before has the Arab region been so
fractured, violent, volatile, and vulnerable
to the whims of desperate citizens, powerful
autocrats, renegade militants, durable
terrorists, and predatory foreign
militaries. And for good measure, Iran’s
influence in the region continues to expand
in places, as does that of Turkey and
Russia, making a mockery of the American
approach to Middle Eastern issues.
U.S.-backed Israeli, Saudi Arabian, and
Egyptian policies in the region are among
the leading causes of the tensions and
conflicts that plague us all, but they are
not solely to blame, due to many other
problematic policies by Arab, Iranian,
Turkish, Russian, British, and other
countries.
Last month’s decision by Washington to
recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital
captures in one fell swoop everything that
is wrong and destructive about the Trump
approach. It ignores existing international
law and UN resolutions that reflect a
powerful global consensus; it totally
dismisses the sentiments of the hundreds of
millions of Muslims and Christians in the
Middle East who see Arab East Jerusalem as
the rightful capital of a future Palestinian
state living alongside Israel; and, it makes
this decision unilaterally, and mainly on
the basis of domestic political commitments
to rightwing pro-Zionist lobbies and
political donors like Sheldon Adelson, who
has pushed hard for this move.
I thought the most striking revelation in
the book was the quote by Steve Bannon that
Jordan should take control of the West Bank
and Egypt of the Gaza Strip, saying the U.S.
should “let them deal with it — or sink
trying.”
Such disdain towards two long-standing Arab
allies of the U.S. like Jordan and Egypt
should be a red flag to all leaders in the
region who might want to rely on the U.S. as
a consistent partner. It is more apparent
now that the Trump governance system in the
U.S. is likely to please pro-Israeli
American political donors more than it would
consider the interests of its other friends
and allies, or the dictates of international
law and UN resolutions. This is a sure
recipe for greater strife and suffering in
the Middle East, which can only spread
dangerously to other parts of the world.
It should also be a warning sign to Arab
leaders that they should wake up and figure
out how to regain and exercise their own
sovereignty, in order to ensure the
well-being of their own citizens. Otherwise,
they will wake up one day and realize that
they have become little more than properties
on a Monopoly board that adolescent airheads
in the White House buy, sell, and discard at
the whim of wild men in the U.S. waving
campaign donation checks.
Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy
fellow and professor of journalism at the
American University of Beirut, and a
non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard
Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He
can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri
Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed
by Agence Global
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