DONALD TRUMP’S all-but-dismissal of human rights as a foreign policy principle could hit like an earthquake across a Middle East landscape beset by warring factions and beleaguered governments, with some players eyeing the prospect of once unimaginable new alliances.
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A Palestinian vendor passes by a banner against a promise by US President-elect Donald Trump to relocate the US embassy to occupied Jerusalem, in the West Bank city of Nablus. — Reuters
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Syria is the foremost test of Trump’s promise of a return to a hard-headed realpolitik and could quickly show whether America is truly abandoning promotion of democracy and the rule of law in a way that could reshape much of the region’s post-Cold War, post-9/11 order.
Trump has raised the possibility of a broad new US partnership with Vladimir Putin’s increasingly authoritarian Russia and has even hinted at aligning with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, which would amount to a dramatic reversal from years of the Obama administration calls for Assad’s ouster. Trump seems to calculate that their shared enemy in the Daseh (so-called IS) is more important than shared values.
“When it comes to civil liberties, our country has a lot of problems, and I think it’s very hard for us to get involved in other countries,” Trump explained last July as Turkey was punishing tens of thousands of people seemingly unconnected to a failed coup attempt. “We need allies,” Trump said in a New York Times interview. “I don’t know that we have a right to lecture.”
When Barack Obama declared a new beginning with the Muslim world in a landmark speech eight years ago, he mentioned democracy six times and broached the subject of human rights on a dozen occasions. Trump has barely mentioned these as foreign policy principles, extolling instead deal-making, diplomatic and economic, and championing the fight against Daesh.
“Human rights will not be his top priority,” concluded Mustafa Alani, the director of the security and defense department at the Geneva-based Gulf Research Center.
Some believe the change will in the end be largely a matter of style, noting that Obama has fought militancy all over the region as well. Aaron David Miller, a Mideast adviser under five American presidents, expects Trump to prove “risk- averse” and remain consistent with Obama’s own reluctance to interfere in other countries’ affairs, use military force, remain engaged in Iraq or get truly involved in Syria’s civil war.
But it’s clear that several long-standing allies in the Middle East are relishing an end to what they saw as moralizing rhetoric, confused signals and unfulfilled red lines, and favoring a Trump pivot to counterterrorism and security.
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sissi is still waiting for a White House invitation, having been shunned by Obama for his bloody crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. Saudi Arabia is expecting a renewed push from Washington on its arch-rival Iran, instead of Obama’s more neutral stance and its accompanying criticism of the Kingdom’s treatment of women and killing of civilians in Yemen. And Israel’s nationalist leadership has made almost a public celebration of Trump’s imminent arrival, confident that its grief for how it treats the Palestinians is over.
Here’s a look at how Trump’s policies could shake up the Middle East:
Syria and Daesh
The US-led campaign against Daesh, more than 60 nations strong, has lacked in Syria the one thing it needs most: a partner on the ground capable of reclaiming and holding territory, as the Iraqi government is doing in its areas. Widespread evidence of torture, chemical weapons attacks and even war crimes by Assad’s forces had made a partnership infeasible to Obama and most of America’s foreign policy establishment.
Meanwhile, Russia’s intervention since September 2015 has dramatically shored up Assad’s position. If Assad and Putin now take on Daesh in its strongholds in northeastern Syria, it is less difficult to imagine Trump accepting perhaps a tacit partnership.
Trump has said Assad may be “bad” but the rebels fighting to topple him “could be worse.” He has said the US has no idea who its allies in the country are and has appeared most concerned about containing the exodus of Syrian refugees, fearing they’ll spread terrorism.
Assad recently suggested the US and Syria could be “natural allies.”
Such a shift would have consequences. America’s Sunni allies in the Arabian Gulf will chafe at any outcome they see as strengthening the hand of Assad’s other main partner, Shiite Iran.
Israel and Palestine
Years of contentious relations between Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu culminated last month in a UN Security Council resolution declaring illegal the Jewish state’s construction of settlements on occupied land the Palestinians seek for a future state. Obama’s decision to not veto the resolution followed bitterness in Israel over the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
Trump has vowed to heal the wound, apparently by embracing parts of Netanyahu’s nationalist agenda. He has appointed a pro-settlements ambassador, vowed to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to more controversial occupied Jerusalem and spoken of renegotiating and even dismantling the Iran deal.
Whereas much of Obama’s disapproval of Netanyahu was expressed in moral terms, Trump has steered wide of any such thing.
“He is against this kind of moralism and political correctness,” said Eytan Gilboa, an expert on US-Israel relations at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University. “He is a businessman. If there is a potential for a deal between Israel and the Palestinians, he will do it. If there is no potential for a deal, he will not do it.”
The Gulf and Iran
If there is one authoritarian country unlikely to enjoy the fruits of Trump’s human rights-free foreign policy, it’s Iran. The president-elect regularly chastised Obama for agreements that provided new funds to a US-designated terror sponsor and left it only several years away from potentially returning to nuclear weapons capacity.
Beyond the talk of a nuclear renegotiation, Trump also has promised to get American prisoners released and threatened to shoot Iranian boats out of the water if they provoke US Navy vessels in and around the oil-rich Aabian Gulf.
Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has said if the US tears up the nuclear accord, “we will light it on fire.” But Iranian President Hassan Rohani on Tuesday dismissed the possibility that Trump could undo the nuclear deal, likening it to turning a finished shirt back into cotton. The president-elect’s tough talk on the deal was is “mainly slogans,” he said. — AP
