By Noah Rothman
Thursday, May 15, 2025
You can identify the ambitious by virtue of their
willingness to subordinate what they know to be true to what they must pretend
to be true. The outward manifestations of this phenomenon are often linguistic.
Examples of this condition are, unfortunately, not hard
to come by. My favorite might be a moment in late November 2021, following the
discovery of Covid’s Omicron variant, in which Dr. Anthony Fauci demonstrated
the degree to which his core competency was bureaucratic ladder-climbing. The
doctor clearly and repeatedly referred to it as “Omicron,” before handing the
mic to President Joe Biden, who inexplicably and repeatedly called it
“Omni-cron.” Without skipping a beat and absent any guidance, Fauci, too,
started calling it “Omni-cron.” That’s some high-test toadying.
This mortifying vignette came to mind amid the
reflections on President Trump’s address to a collection of international movers and shakers
at the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum this week. The speech has become the subject
of study by his supporters and critics alike. Rich described it as the basis on which something resembling a
Trump doctrine might be predicated.
While much of the speech was substantive, the portions of
it that have generated the most attention in the United States were political
and likely designed for domestic consumption. Those were the segments in which
Trump dumped opprobrium onto the heads of America’s “neocons” — the MAGA
movement’s Emmanuel Goldstein. It was in those remarks that the president
denounced the malign works of America’s “interventionalists.” Be advised: When
you encounter that word — a medical term in most contexts — used as a substitute for
the far more common “interventionists,” you’ll know you’re engaging with the
MAGA equivalent of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
In fact, signaling to the faithful within the president’s
domestic base seems to have been the foremost objective of whoever authored
that speech.
In it, Trump hailed what he described as the Middle
East’s “transformation,” which he measured not in paradigmatic or ideological
terms — the Abraham Accords were mentioned only thrice, and Trump talked about
them as though they were purely aspirational. Instead, as Rich noted, he
dwelled on the power of money and commerce to reshape the region.
“It’s crucial for the wider world to note this great
transformation has not come from Western interventionalists or flying people in
beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own
affairs,” Trump insisted. The “gleaming marvels” of the petrostates “were not
created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits like
those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul,
Baghdad, so many other cities,” he continued. “In the end the so-called
nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the
interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even
understand themselves.”
It was flattery well-received by its targets — not just
the sheiks and business magnates in the room, but the Americans who blame U.S.
hegemony for a host of nebulous and evolving social ills. As an act of
emotional manipulation, it worked. But advocates of humbler American foreign policy
based on the promotion of rapacity rather than liberty may have to satisfy
themselves with muscular rhetoric.
In that same speech, the president sided decisively with the Marco Rubio wing of
his administration over the JD Vance/Tulsi Gabbard position as it relates to
engaging with the new regime in Syria. Trump’s offer to lift all Bashar
al-Assad–era sanctions in response to the confidence-building measures in which
the new regime has engaged is a gamble but a justifiable one. When it comes to establishing friendly
relations with the new bosses in Damascus, the ideological lines don’t cut
neatly. They rarely do. We can, however, infer that those in Trump’s orbit who wanted America to wash its hands of the Middle East are
displeased with that result.
The president devoted significant portions of the speech
to Iran — not just the problem posed by its nuclear program but the failure of
the Islamic Republic to contribute to the flourishing of its captive citizenry.
“Iran’s leaders have focused on stealing their people’s wealth to fund terror
and bloodshed abroad,” he noted. Trump has issued an ultimatum: Make a deal or experience “violence like
people haven’t seen before.”
We don’t know what Trump’s preferred terms for such an
agreement would be, but we know what Iran wants: an interim agreement in which Iran promises to
halt uranium enrichment for three years, after which it would resume enriching
fissile material to levels established in Obama’s nuclear accords (sidestepping
Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support for terrorism). The “restrainers” in Trump’s orbit may be satisfied with a deal
that legitimizes Iran’s enrichment capabilities, missile program, and terrorist
proxies, but the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Republicans aren’t convinced.
“I’m not hearing anywhere in the administration that
there’s a willingness to ‘get a deal just to have a deal,’” said U.S.
ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee recently. “Now, peace may not have a chance
in this,” he added, “but if there has to be an all-out attack, I think the
president wants to be able to say to the world, ‘Look, we did everything
possible to achieve some positive result diplomatically.’” The pointy end of the American stick is forward positioned in
the region, and the president has more options available to him than his
exhausted negotiating partners in Tehran.
Whatever this is, it’s not disengagement. Indeed, Trump
is not at all allergic to making long-term commitments to the region and
reveling in the successes that his predecessors engineered. “The wars for Iraq
and Afghanistan and later the U.S.-led military campaign against the ISIS
caliphate, which took place partly during Trump’s first term, created the
security the Saudis and Emiratis needed to build the prosperous economies their
nations enjoy today,” the Free Press’s Eli Lake observed. The commercial transformations that
enthralled Trump follow from a stable and predictable security situation — a
condition U.S. engagement in the region facilitated.
Afghanistan might have been lost under Biden (not that
Trump’s plan for withdrawal was likely to produce a different outcome), but
Trump is wrong to suggest that Iraq is a basket case. Baghdad is building
civilian construction at scale, developing tech start-ups and businesses, and
hosting international conferences. At the very least, it’s no longer a
terror-supporting backwater that instigated U.S. military intervention every few years. If Trump was resolved to leave the Middle
East to its own affairs, pledging America’s continued support for, investment
in, and protection of its partners in the region is an odd way to go about it.
Trump’s pursuit of long-term commitments in the region “indicates that the
United States no longer views the Middle East as a peripheral concern,” one
Hudson Institute research fellow observed, “but as a vital theater of strategic competition
with China.”
Which reminds me: The president’s diplomatic endeavor to
end Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine is rapidly coming apart. To hear Marco Rubio tell it, talks are going nowhere fast. The
president wants face time with Vladimir Putin to see if there can be a
“breakthrough,” but the Trump administration is shifting away from the
president’s happy misconception about Putin’s peace-loving motives. As JD Vance, of all people, recently confessed, “The Russians
are asking for a certain set of requirements, a certain set of concessions, in
order to end the conflict,” and the president thinks “they’re asking for too
much.” As such, the administration has prepared a new suite of sanctions, including restrictions on
Russia’s state-owned energy sector, that would increase the pressure on Moscow
— albeit at the risk of a grand rapprochement that would facilitate America’s
withdrawal from its security obligations in Europe.
As these ideological crosscurrents indicate, the Trump
administration’s foreign policy is not especially coherent. But it’s becoming more consistent
by the day as the fantasy of American retrenchment collapses upon contact with
the real world. As the American Foreign Policy Council’s Ilan Berman told our own Jimmy Quinn, the parts of Trump’s
speech that tickled the fancy of the MAGA movement’s RINO hunters “were likely
written into the speech far in advance.” Which is to say, they had little
bearing on recent events — or any events. They are statements of fealty to the
political principle that those who favor a strong, confident U.S. presence
abroad are bad, humbled, and vanquished. A comprehensive review of the second
Trump administration’s fluid approach to foreign policy renders these lines of
text a mere box-checking exercise.
The MAGA movement can have Trump’s tough talk in lieu of
its preferred policy outcomes. If being persona non grata is the price
that must be paid to see the president execute sound and effective stewardship
of America’s interests abroad, that’s not much of a trade-off.
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