Tuesday was a huge day for President Trump in Saudi Arabia.
President Trump has a warm relationship with Saudi Arabia in a way that Joe Biden did not. If you recall, Joe Biden really tried to alienate the Saudis. He came into office ripping on Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), ripping on the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, putting pressure on Saudi Arabia not to fight the Houthis in Yemen, and putting pressure on Saudi Arabia concerning democracy and human rights while ignoring American interests in the Middle East and trying to be buddy-buddy with Iran.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who had the same foreign policy vision, made a bunch of big mistakes in the Middle East, particularly with nations like Saudi Arabia.
First, they kept saying words such as “democracy” and “human rights,” and those would trump America’s interests. Joe Biden went out of his way during the 2020 campaign to talk about the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Muslim Brotherhood media member who was murdered by the Saudi regime in a Turkish embassy. He made this a major focus of his foreign policy.
But the reality is that the Middle East is a place filled with terrible regimes. The only truly democratic regime in the entire Middle East is Israel. Everywhere else, there’s a tyrannical dictatorship. The question is whether those tyrannical dictatorships are going to move in the direction of the West toward a gradual accommodation with modernity, or whether those tyrannical regimes are going to oppose the United States wholesale.
Again, Obama and Biden kept pretending that words like “democracy” and “human rights” trumped American interests. That’s how we got the Obama-era idea of an Arab Spring, that you needed “democracy in the Middle East,” which was going to fix everything, but it resulted in the Muslim Brotherhood initially gaining power in Egypt and the rise of terror groups all over the region, as well as the complete collapse of Libya.
It turns out the Arab Spring was actually an Arab Winter.
And then powerful people took over in these places and had to quash all the Muslim Brotherhood-led rebellions in a wide variety of these countries. Less democracy and fewer human rights were the result of the Obama/Biden matrix. The second thing that Obama and Biden did was create daylight with our actual allies in the Middle East in favor of our enemies, like Iran. Obama and Biden made numerous overtures to Iran while pushing our actual allies in the region off into the corner. Thirdly, the Obama/Biden matrix took at face value the idea that for any progress on anything to happen in the Middle East, Israel had to make all sorts of concessions to the Palestinians.
But President Trump, in his first term, took a different view. He said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was unsolvable, that the Palestinians didn’t want peace with the Israelis. He felt there could be commerce and cooperation between Israel and its neighbors outside of that particular issue.
That is still something that President Trump deeply believes.
We should recognize that democracy in the West took a couple of thousand years to take root in places like Great Britain, which we consider the great Western democracy. The powers of Parliament were not fully effectuated until, at the very least, the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Before that, there were hundreds of years of monarchy and oligarchy in Great Britain.
The same is going to hold true in the Middle East, particularly because the Judeo-Christian West and the Biblical values upon which it relies have some strains of democracy. There’s nothing in the Koran that tends toward democracy. Thus, the idea of democracy will be a problem in many Islamic nations.
What does that mean in terms of governance? It means that if you wish to do business with any of these places, if you wish to actually move these countries toward some level of modernization, democracy is not going to be the number one answer. If there were democracies overnight in Jordan, or the UAE, or Saudi Arabia, it’s likely that terrorist states could emerge.
What President Trump also understands is that isolationism is not a real perspective in the Middle East. There were a lot of people on the isolationist Right who championed what President Trump said in Saudi Arabia.
But let’s be clear: President Trump is not an isolationist. He’s never been an isolationist.
I’ll tell you what isolationists don’t do: sell $150 billion worth of military weaponry to the Saudis. They don’t fly to Saudi Arabia and Qatar to cut billions of dollars’ worth of business deals. You know what else isolationists don’t do? Try to broker accords between Syria and the Saudis and Qatar and the Turks, and Israel.
None of that is isolationism. President Trump is not an isolationist, but he is also not a Wilsonian interventionist, what some people mistakenly refer to as a neocon. That’s a misnomer because the neocons were a specific group of people, liberals who were mugged by reality and then became very hawkish on foreign policy in the 1960s and 70s and turned against the welfare state.
Today, there are no neocons, and the number of Wilsonian interventionists who believe in “nation building” in Iraq or Afghanistan is singularly hard to find.
Trump is not an isolationist and not a Wilsonian interventionist.
He is a realist.
A realist is someone who understands that different nations have different interests, they have different cultures, and there are different nations with different cultures that have to be negotiated with on their own level.
He stated, “In recent years, far 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. I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment, my job to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.”
“I will never hesitate to wield American power if it’s necessary to defend the United States, or to help defend our allies,” he also said. “If you threaten America or our partners, however, then you’ll be faced with overwhelming strength and devastating force. We have things that you don’t even know about.”
President Trump is a realist. He wants to be involved where it is in the interests of the United States to be involved. He doesn’t want to dictate to the Saudis; he was there to get deals done. His biggest contribution is the idea that commerce trumps ideology.
For that to happen, there have to be strings attached. And here is where things get a little bit complicated: Trump gave them an enormous number of benefits. The Saudis are spending an enormous amount of money in the United States or, at least, pledging to do so.
The question is whether enough strings are attached because just giving the Saudis (or the Syrians) benefits from the United States without strings attached in the hope that they will, through their own goodwill, do something nice and integrate further into the world system, seems to be a mistake.
You have to make this stuff conditional on them doing something that we want them to do.
Trump said that he wants the Abraham Accords to happen. I wish that some of the stuff that he’s giving to the Saudis had been tied to the Abraham Accords, because if he’s going to broaden out his Nobel Peace Prize-worthy accomplishments in term one, using leverage is a better plan than simply giving people things and then hoping on the back end they’ll do the right thing.
Trump also said Gaza’s leadership has to go, meaning Hamas has to go. He slammed Iran, saying, “Our task is to unify against a few agents of chaos and terror that are left, and that are holding hostage the dreams of millions and millions of great people. The biggest and most destructive of these forces is the regime in Iran, which has caused unthinkable suffering in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, and beyond.”
All of that is correct.
The bottom line is that this was a triumphant trip for President Trump. He ended up with the Saudis committing a bunch of money to the United States, as well as a warm relationship with the Saudi government.
What I would love to see from President Trump — and the American administration more generally — is that if we are going to be doing these sorts of things with Saudi Arabia, or relieving sanctions on Syria, or making deals in the Middle East, make the strings attached.
That’s what President Trump did in his first term.
And it worked.
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
Tuesday was a huge day for President Trump in Saudi Arabia.
President Trump has a warm relationship with Saudi Arabia in a way that Joe Biden did not. If you recall, Joe Biden really tried to alienate the Saudis. He came into office ripping on Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), ripping on the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, putting pressure on Saudi Arabia not to fight the Houthis in Yemen, and putting pressure on Saudi Arabia concerning democracy and human rights while ignoring American interests in the Middle East and trying to be buddy-buddy with Iran.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who had the same foreign policy vision, made a bunch of big mistakes in the Middle East, particularly with nations like Saudi Arabia.
First, they kept saying words such as “democracy” and “human rights,” and those would trump America’s interests. Joe Biden went out of his way during the 2020 campaign to talk about the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Muslim Brotherhood media member who was murdered by the Saudi regime in a Turkish embassy. He made this a major focus of his foreign policy.
But the reality is that the Middle East is a place filled with terrible regimes. The only truly democratic regime in the entire Middle East is Israel. Everywhere else, there’s a tyrannical dictatorship. The question is whether those tyrannical dictatorships are going to move in the direction of the West toward a gradual accommodation with modernity, or whether those tyrannical regimes are going to oppose the United States wholesale.
Again, Obama and Biden kept pretending that words like “democracy” and “human rights” trumped American interests. That’s how we got the Obama-era idea of an Arab Spring, that you needed “democracy in the Middle East,” which was going to fix everything, but it resulted in the Muslim Brotherhood initially gaining power in Egypt and the rise of terror groups all over the region, as well as the complete collapse of Libya.
It turns out the Arab Spring was actually an Arab Winter.
And then powerful people took over in these places and had to quash all the Muslim Brotherhood-led rebellions in a wide variety of these countries. Less democracy and fewer human rights were the result of the Obama/Biden matrix. The second thing that Obama and Biden did was create daylight with our actual allies in the Middle East in favor of our enemies, like Iran. Obama and Biden made numerous overtures to Iran while pushing our actual allies in the region off into the corner. Thirdly, the Obama/Biden matrix took at face value the idea that for any progress on anything to happen in the Middle East, Israel had to make all sorts of concessions to the Palestinians.
But President Trump, in his first term, took a different view. He said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was unsolvable, that the Palestinians didn’t want peace with the Israelis. He felt there could be commerce and cooperation between Israel and its neighbors outside of that particular issue.
That is still something that President Trump deeply believes.
We should recognize that democracy in the West took a couple of thousand years to take root in places like Great Britain, which we consider the great Western democracy. The powers of Parliament were not fully effectuated until, at the very least, the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Before that, there were hundreds of years of monarchy and oligarchy in Great Britain.
The same is going to hold true in the Middle East, particularly because the Judeo-Christian West and the Biblical values upon which it relies have some strains of democracy. There’s nothing in the Koran that tends toward democracy. Thus, the idea of democracy will be a problem in many Islamic nations.
What does that mean in terms of governance? It means that if you wish to do business with any of these places, if you wish to actually move these countries toward some level of modernization, democracy is not going to be the number one answer. If there were democracies overnight in Jordan, or the UAE, or Saudi Arabia, it’s likely that terrorist states could emerge.
What President Trump also understands is that isolationism is not a real perspective in the Middle East. There were a lot of people on the isolationist Right who championed what President Trump said in Saudi Arabia.
But let’s be clear: President Trump is not an isolationist. He’s never been an isolationist.
I’ll tell you what isolationists don’t do: sell $150 billion worth of military weaponry to the Saudis. They don’t fly to Saudi Arabia and Qatar to cut billions of dollars’ worth of business deals. You know what else isolationists don’t do? Try to broker accords between Syria and the Saudis and Qatar and the Turks, and Israel.
None of that is isolationism. President Trump is not an isolationist, but he is also not a Wilsonian interventionist, what some people mistakenly refer to as a neocon. That’s a misnomer because the neocons were a specific group of people, liberals who were mugged by reality and then became very hawkish on foreign policy in the 1960s and 70s and turned against the welfare state.
Today, there are no neocons, and the number of Wilsonian interventionists who believe in “nation building” in Iraq or Afghanistan is singularly hard to find.
Trump is not an isolationist and not a Wilsonian interventionist.
He is a realist.
A realist is someone who understands that different nations have different interests, they have different cultures, and there are different nations with different cultures that have to be negotiated with on their own level.
He stated, “In recent years, far 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. I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment, my job to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.”
“I will never hesitate to wield American power if it’s necessary to defend the United States, or to help defend our allies,” he also said. “If you threaten America or our partners, however, then you’ll be faced with overwhelming strength and devastating force. We have things that you don’t even know about.”
President Trump is a realist. He wants to be involved where it is in the interests of the United States to be involved. He doesn’t want to dictate to the Saudis; he was there to get deals done. His biggest contribution is the idea that commerce trumps ideology.
For that to happen, there have to be strings attached. And here is where things get a little bit complicated: Trump gave them an enormous number of benefits. The Saudis are spending an enormous amount of money in the United States or, at least, pledging to do so.
The question is whether enough strings are attached because just giving the Saudis (or the Syrians) benefits from the United States without strings attached in the hope that they will, through their own goodwill, do something nice and integrate further into the world system, seems to be a mistake.
You have to make this stuff conditional on them doing something that we want them to do.
Trump said that he wants the Abraham Accords to happen. I wish that some of the stuff that he’s giving to the Saudis had been tied to the Abraham Accords, because if he’s going to broaden out his Nobel Peace Prize-worthy accomplishments in term one, using leverage is a better plan than simply giving people things and then hoping on the back end they’ll do the right thing.
Trump also said Gaza’s leadership has to go, meaning Hamas has to go. He slammed Iran, saying, “Our task is to unify against a few agents of chaos and terror that are left, and that are holding hostage the dreams of millions and millions of great people. The biggest and most destructive of these forces is the regime in Iran, which has caused unthinkable suffering in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, and beyond.”
All of that is correct.
The bottom line is that this was a triumphant trip for President Trump. He ended up with the Saudis committing a bunch of money to the United States, as well as a warm relationship with the Saudi government.
What I would love to see from President Trump — and the American administration more generally — is that if we are going to be doing these sorts of things with Saudi Arabia, or relieving sanctions on Syria, or making deals in the Middle East, make the strings attached.
That’s what President Trump did in his first term.
And it worked.
“}]]
