Portrait of President-elect Donald Trump. Digital photograph, 2016. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division
On 7th November, Joe Biden was declared winner and president-elect after a turbulent contest for the White House in the 2020 U.S Elections. In a fiercely competitive campaign - which took place against the backdrop of a global pandemic and pending legal action taken by Donald Trump - Biden is set to become President of the United States in January 2021. President Trump has been a divisive Commander in Chief since he took office in both his conduct in domestic affairs and his broader foreign policy.
His critics have accused him of being an authoritarian, one who has brought democratic norms into disrepute while courting endless scandals, fuelling disinformation and acting as a catalyst for ethnic nationalism and white supremacism. His supporters have lauded President Trump as an anti-establishment figure, praised his bullish attitude on tackling globalisation and putting ‘America First’ and his strongman approach to foreign policy (particularly on Iran and North Korea).
Whatever happens between now and January when Biden is sworn into office, the legacy of Trumpism and the divisions it has unleashed in the United States and the inspiration it has given to other nationalist-populist movements across Western Europe have left a mark on global affairs. The Trump administration has largely been defined by chaos, a TV Reality Show blended with brutal realpolitik.
The president’s foreign policy has been defined by some contentious issues which have stemmed from his domestic agenda ranging from anti-immigration policies and a conservative approach to international aid which has left non-governmental organisations and charities reeling.
In the Middle East, North Africa and Afghanistan, regions ripped apart by conflict, the Trump administration did not inherit an easy task. Syria’s civil war had been barely won by Assad, albeit at an extensive cost to the murderous regime. Libya was teetering on the brink of yet another civil war between its respective governments fighting for power.
The United States and its Western allies were already supplying weapons and hardware to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States embroiled in Yemen’s conflict on the Arabian Peninsula. The new president also inherited a gruelling war with Islamic State, one being fought to the bitter end by Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s jihadist group operating in Syria and Iraq. The effects of the popular protests - commonly known as the Arab Spring or Arab Revolutions - which started across the region in 2010 were still rippling across the region and around the world.
In Afghanistan, after sixteen years, the United States and its NATO allies were still at war with the Taliban and various terrorist and militant groups. At the very top of this pyramid of chaos, revolution and violence were the rivalries between the United States and its allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia and that of Iran, Russia and its paramilitary proxies and political allies across the region.
For Trump, much like Obama, the Middle East was becoming less and less important to U.S foreign policy. In his inauguration speech, Trump promised his supporters that it would be “America First”. In the Middle East, this meant withdrawing from costly wars in Iraq, and limiting the presence of the United States in Afghanistan and Yemen where the security and humanitarian situation continued to crumble.
More controversially, this included a flagrantly racist policy, anti-Muslim agenda when Trump signed an executive order banning people from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the USA, and shutting the door on refugees. This prevented anyone from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the United States for 90 days.
In the wake of the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino attack in November and December 2015, Trump had made a promise during his election campaign to for a “total and complete shutdown” of the country’s borders to Muslims. In 2017, days after becoming president, he fulfilled his promise when he implemented the horrific decree, one which was met with ferocious international criticism and protests across the United States.
Trump’s priorities lay in challenging the growing might of Xi Jiping’s revanchist neo-Maoist China and its prodigy Kim Jong Un in North Korea. Trump was also intent on withdrawing the U.S from a host of initiatives on humanitarian aid, environmental challenges and global health that he felt were taxing the country’s economic growth and threatening the ideological convictions of his court, one awash with capitalist fundamentalists, neo-conservatives, fanatical evangelicals, white supremacists, and climate change deniers. Like his predecessor though, Trump could not escape the Middle East’s maelstrom, but he approached the conflicts and political carnage consuming the Middle East with a wrecking ball. Being a businessman, Trump believed that the Middle East’s complex problems could be solved by arbitrary deals and messages to allies and enemies in the region.
CIVIL WARS IN IRAQ AND SYRIA
Good to his word in his divisive campaign, Trump “bombed the s**t” out of Islamic State successfully bringing a conclusion to the war with Abu Bakr Al- Baghdadi’s fanatical project in Syria and Iraq. This culminated in a successful raid in Idlib which led to the death of the leader of Islamic State who had been hiding out in the Syrian province after the final collapse of Islamic State at Baghouz in eastern Syria.
However, this campaign came at a great cost with U.S artillery and airstrikes killing thousands of Iraqi and Syrian civilians in the siege of Mosul and Raqqa, Islamic State’s main ‘capitals’ in Iraq and Syria. The U.S also turned a blind eye to the orgy of the violence which came after the fall of Mosul as Iraqi security forces committed multiple atrocities against the population.
The defeat of Islamic State also did little to solve the symptoms of Iraq’s crisis which spawned the organisation, to begin with, which ranged from lack of clean drinking water, militia power across the country and the flagrant corruption and human rights violations of successive Iraqi governments.
In Syria, the defeat of Islamic State - a strategy predominantly designed by the Obama administration - left the Trump administration rudderless in the war-torn country. Token missile and airstrikes in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Khan Shaykhun and Douma did little to change the course of Assad’s brutal war on his own people, one which was bankrolled by both Russia and Iran.
This lack of strategy was exposed for all to see when Trump withdrew U.S troops from Turkey, effectively abandoning the Syrian Kurds. The Kurdish-Arab alliance composed of the Syrian Democratic Forces and the People’s Protection Units, who were instrumental in driving Islamic State from Raqqa and broad swaths of eastern Syria, were routed by a series of offensives by President Erdogan’s revanchist Turkey.
The move was reversed swiftly by the Trump administration, but the betrayal of the Syrian Kurds was complete as hundreds of thousands of civilians were ethnically cleansed, several Kurdish leaders were executed and Turkey cemented its position across northern Syria and Idlib province.
With little appetite to intervene in the Syrian Civil War, Trump stood back as the country burned leaving the country’s fate to that of Putin, Assad and Erdogan as they warred over Idlib province, the final stronghold of rebel forces and a coalition of jihadists opposed to the Assad regime.
TOWARDS THE BRINK WITH IRAN
In 2018, partly out of personal spite for Obama, he withdrew from the Iranian Nuclear Deal. This came one month after he had appointed John Bolton as his National Security Adviser, a staunch anti-Iranian zealot who had long advocated for regime change in Tehran. A campaign of maximum pressure which included draconian sanctions and stepping up military operations against pro-Iranian paramilitaries across the region was adopted with Trump believing it would give Washington a ‘better deal’.
The sanctions pushed Iran to the brink, with mass protests in Iran leading to thousands of arrests and death, murder and torture of hundreds of civilians. However, far from getting a better deal, it pushed Iran and the United States to the brink of war. Israel and the United States stepped up to Iranian provocations by bombing pro-Iranian paramilitaries in Iraq and Syria. The Assad regime, which Iranian’s top operative, Qassem Soleimani had propped up for a decade as it massacred its civilians with barrel bombs, chemical weapons and militias, was also repeatedly targeted by the Israelis.
Iranian proxies, under Soleimani’s direction, responded ever more viciously, seeing U.S and Israeli plots everywhere even if they did not exist. Organic protests against rampant corruption broke out in Iraq and Lebanon. Hundreds were killed and maimed by pro-Iranian Iraqi militias and U.S armed security forces while pro-Hezbollah protesters beat up protesters in Lebanon.
Iranian consulates and buildings belonging to the paramilitaries in Iraq were targeted and burned. Anti-Iranian sentiment was at an all-time high in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon as economic pressure and protests across the region challenging were threatening Iranian interests. The Iranians responded by lobbing missiles at Western airbases and targeting Western oil tankers on shipping lanes along the Strait of Hormuz in an effort to destabilise the global economy and oil prices.
This turned the strait into a flashpoint and after several attacks on oil tankers in June 2019, the downing of U.S surveillance drone, and Iranian uranium enrichment levels exceeding limits of the Iran Nuclear Deal, war appeared to be inevitable. The series of missile and airstrikes were called-off by Trump, 10 minutes before the scheduled military operation. For some, it was perceived as a sign of weakness.
As the United States tightened the noose on Iran, alienating allies who had signed the Iranian Nuclear Deal, Iran stepped up its covert operations. In late 2019, cruise attacks missiles and drones on two key Saudi oil facilities, Abqaiq and Khurais, wrought havoc on the global energy industry as Iran knocked out half of the Gulf state’s oil production.
Israel and Iran’s proxy war along the Golan Heights and southern Lebanese border with Iranian Qud forces and Hezbollah has hotted up since the Trump administration came into office. In December 2019, as Iraq buckled under a wave of protests, anti-U.S protests in Iraq turned violent outside the U.S embassy after a series of Western airstrikes targeted pro-Iranian paramilitaries.
In this instance, the Iranian provocations were, for Trump, a step too far and Qassem Soleimani, the head of Quds forces, was assassinated outside Baghdad airport on January 3rd, 2020. For Trump, the death of the Iranian warlord was a significant PR coup but it did little to change the Iranian regime’s strategy as Washington continued to introduce further sanctions on Iran and Syria throughout 2020 while both countries buckled under the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
ISRAEL’S MINI-TRUMP
Trump’s policies in regards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been nothing but inflammatory. For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump’s presidency has been a gift that has kept on giving at the expense of the Palestinians in Gaza, Israel and the West Bank.
Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has courted controversy from the beginning of his time in office and has been a lynchpin in Israeli politics since the 1980s. Virulently opposed to a two-state solution and the Oslo Accords established by the Bush and Clinton administration, he found a natural ally in Trump at a time when he was facing increasing hostility at home, facing a police investigation into corruption and struggling to keep together a fragile right-wing coalition.
Trump took decisive action to support his ally immediately. In December 2017, he recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a highly disputed fact in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The opening of U.S embassy in Jerusalem by his daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner was marred by the massacre of Palestinian protesters along the Gaza-Israeli border as the Palestinians raged against the decision by Trump to upend the Oslo Accords. The massacres committed by the Israeli military and which occurred along the fence are now under investigation by International Criminal Court for potential war crimes.
Following this, Trump went on to recognise the Golan Heights, Syrian territory under Israeli military occupation since 1967 as part of Israel as Netanyahu set about plans to annex the West Bank. Both acts, a carte blanche for annexation, are illegal under international law, and the Trump administration, less turning a blind eye to the Israeli government’s human rights violations as previous U.S administrations had done, actively encouraged them. To stroke Trump’s ego, Netanyahu went as far as to name a settlement built on Syrian territory after the president.
The Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and its hapless leadership in the form of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, are fractured and divided, and Trump’s nakedly pro-Israeli stance has ripped the band-aid of a long-dead peace process kickstarted by the Bush administration in the 1990s. Aid to the Palestinians has been cut and the leaders in Gaza City and Ramallah have rejected Trump’s overtures, including the economic bribes integrated into Jared Kushner’s ‘Peace into Prosperity’ deal.
The recent signature of a peace deal between Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and the normalisation of relations between Israel and the Gulf States has only made their position more hopeless. Many have heralded Trump’s peace deals between the Gulf States and Israel as a momentous moment in the long-standing Arab-Israeli conflict. At face value, perhaps, but shrewder analysts argue differently.
“If the US were more serious about creating true and lasting peace in the region, rather than promoting ideological and economic domination, it might perhaps be possible to strike deals based on a popular desire for peace,” wrote Orwa Ajjoub, a Middle Eastern analyst at Lund University. “The recent UAE, Bahrain, and Israel deals, however, will not create peace, but rather only more frustration and anger, perpetuating the cycle of destabilisation, autocracy, and oppression.”
Israel has found common ground with the Gulf States and the United States in its proxy war with Iran. A peace deal between them assuages certain security concerns in the face of Iranian operations and containing what many critics call ‘The Shia Crescent'. However, it does little to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Israel’s confrontation with Iran, Hezbollah or the Assad regime, both of which have gone on for decades.
Far from resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Trump has reignited them, ushering them into a new phase that is much more dangerous and unpredictable. From empowering autocracies, arming all sides with more weapons and legitimising land grabs and annexation, which the international community has condemned in Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgia and Crimea, Trump can hardly be categorised as a peacemaker. In the short-term, he may have benefited key allies, but in the long-term, the consequences could be far broader.
The Prince
Saudi Arabia was Trump’s first country of choice to visit as president of the United States in May 2017. It was an unprecedented moment which signalled Trump’s intent to repair ties with the Gulf States despairing at Obama’s overtures to bring Iran to the table through diplomacy and U.S policy in Yemen and Syria. At the Riyadh summit, Trump committed to fighting terrorism, Iranian influence across the Middle East and signed an arms agreement worth a record $110 billion with King Salman.
The Saudi monarchy, which has bankrolled many Syrian groups fighting the Assad regime, was angered by the Obama administration’s unwillingness to intervene in the civil war and were hostile to half-hearted efforts of the former president’s efforts to end the war in Yemen and condemnation of war crimes. The latter described Yemen’s conflict in private, like the ill-fated foray by NATO into Libya in 2011, as a “complete s**t show” and for good reason.
The war in Yemen has left 20 million without food, and millions more on the brink of famine (though some say it has already occurred across pockets of the country) as Saudi military intervention - aimed at curtailing the rise of the Houthis who Saudi Arabia regard as an Iranian proxy - has obliterated Yemen’s infrastructure, destroyed medical facilities and catalysed a conflict which has killed 100,000 Yemeni civilians.
Ultimately, Trump’s policies on Yemen were not much different from Obama. Weapons and military support were poured into the Saudi war effort and devastating drone strikes and costly counter-terrorism operations continued while reinforcing a disastrous Saudi intervention in one of the world’s poorest countries. The only difference was that Trump took an overt anti-Iranian stance and gave the Saudis more leeway in how they conducted the war effort on Yemeni soil. Saudi Arabia has regarded Iran as an existential threat to the Wahhabi monarchy on the Arabian Peninsula since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This rivalry has fuelled the Middle East’s Cold War and proxy wars across the region.
Parallel to encouraging Saudi Arabia’s adventurism across the region, the Trump administration also notoriously mishandled the grisly killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The journalist was murdered and dismembered by Saudi agents in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Turkey. There was credible evidence that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman could be held ‘liable’ for the journalist’s murder.
The Trump administration did little to condemn the barbaric act, and Trump boasted that he “saved his ass.” “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone,” he went on. “I was able to get them to stop.” This protection came despite evidence from several foreign intelligence agencies that the Prince had ordered the assassination. The murder did not stop Trump from bypassing Congress to sell $8 billion’s worth of armaments to Saudi Arabia’s war-machine in May 2019. As Mohammed Bazzi wrote in The Guardian in 2019:
The Trump administration and Wall Street executives are sending a clear message: Saudi Arabia is open for business, and US firms don’t want to miss out on billions of dollars being dangled by Saudi leaders…After Khashoggi’s murder, US and European firms did not stop doing business with Saudi Arabia, though many kept a low profile. But Trump and members of his administration – especially Kushner, who became friends with Prince Mohammed soon after Trump took office – never wavered in their support for the Saudi regime.
The grotesque affair has yet to be resolved, and weapons and military aid continue to pour into Saudi Arabia’s coffers. Like Netanyahu, Trump’s close relationship with Prince Mohammed has enabled the latter to redraw the maps of the Middle East with impunity and deal with political rivals at home and abroad with calculated brutality. The case of the war in Yemen and the murder of Khashoggi has perhaps best encapsulated the harsh outlook which has driven Trump’s Middle Eastern agenda: business, bombs and scant regard for human rights.
A Turbulent Legacy
President Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East has been chaotic. In some cases, counter-terrorism operations and old alliances across the region were simply intensified. The war against ISIS and the conflicts in Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Syria (and the U.S approach to the violence) continued under Trump’s watch. Arms deals done by Obama were also done by Trump. He has cosied up to autocrats and monarchies across the region and turned a blind eye to their violent suppression of dissent, political protests and human rights from Bahrain to Egypt to Turkey. Some aspects of U.S foreign policy changed little.
The U.S has historically always been close to autocrats in the region, had extremely strong ties with Israel, Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia in recent decades sees them as key pillars in the geopolitical battle for influence. These relationships have courted controversy from their inception for a multitude of different reasons whether ideological or through the lens of human rights.
Trump was just more blatant about these uncomfortable truths and relationships, unapologetically on one side of a political conflict rather than using diplomacy to solve delicate conflicts in the region and wielding U.S military power haphazardly to accomplish quick wins. There was a crude cunning to his winner takes all logic and at other times shocking ignorance in the way, he conducted his foreign policy. In other some cases, he completely upended decades of Western policy in the region as demonstrated by his brief withdrawal of U.S forces from Syria, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and ripping up the United States’ role in the Iranian Nuclear Deal.
He brought Iran and the United States to the brink of war yet at the same time started a peace process with the Taliban in Afghanistan and a sealed a controversial peace deal between Israel and the Gulf States. He also set a precedent by sanctifying Israel’s annexation of territories belong to Syria and Palestine, an act that could empower actors fighting over disputed territories in Kashmir, Nagorno-Karabakh, Crimea and beyond.
Trump has met chaos with chaos in the Middle East, a natural result of the political pandemonium which has consumed the White House and polarised the country since his divisive 2016 election campaign and eventual inauguration. Domestic politics, whether it be currying the favour of Israel and Saudi Arabia’s powerful U.S lobbies or gaining the support of key communities in his drive for reelection, have shaped his policies in the region.
The shocking anti-Muslim rhetoric and decrees designed to shut Muslims and refugees from the region out of the United States were birthed by his ‘America First’ policies. Trump and Steve Bannon saw the raw power they wielded when they tapped into these fear and the rampant Islamophobic hatred present at Trump rallies. These fears preexisted Trump’s tumultuous campaign, reverberating from the September 11 attacks and the rise of ISIS. Trump’s Islamophobia has empowered other repugnant groups who support him including white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and anti-Semites.
These ‘America First’ policies and the widespread anti-Muslim bigotry have been catalysed by the war against ISIS, terrorist attacks conducted by the group in the U.S and abroad, and the long-lasting legacy and shadow of the September 11 attacks in 2001 which has entrenched the United States in multiple conflicts in the Middle East.
These policies, alongside the multitude of other controversial acts and scandals that have consumed the Trump administration beyond the Middle East, will have a long-lasting, and devastating impact on American society. From courting autocrats to legitimising land grabs in the Middle East to flirting with war with Iran to using the War on Terror to fuel narratives and policies of hate at home, Trump’s legacy in the Middle East will be long-lasting, consequential and remembered mostly for all the wrong reasons.