Trump’s Apology Tour

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 12, 2025

 

Within the first 100 days of his presidency, Barack Obama set out on a whirlwind public relations campaign in which he promoted the notion that the only thing wrong with America was all the presidents who preceded him.

 

“America has acted unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others,” he confessed in an address to the United Nations General Assembly. American hubris “fed an almost reflexive anti-Americanism” among our nation’s partners abroad. But who could blame them?

 

The United States, he told an audience in France, “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.” In Cairo, he criticized his hidebound countrymen who “continue to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights.” The speech represented an extension of remarks he provided Al Arabiya within a week of his inauguration. “We sometimes make mistakes,” the president admitted. “We have not been perfect.”

 

Obama’s defenders insisted these were merely overdue gestures of “respect” toward our allies and partners abroad, but his critics branded it an “apology tour.” At the time, Republicans seemed genuinely revulsed by Obama’s supplicative posture, but it was not to last. Of all the foreign policy projects Obama undertook in his eight years in the White House, his embarrassment at the country he led may be his most lasting achievement — if only because Republicans have surrendered to the idea that Obama was right all along.

 

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The first foreign trip of Donald Trump’s second term took the president on a swing through the Middle East. In a major address before the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the president outlined something like a doctrinal approach to foreign affairs. Trump’s vision prioritized tangible objectives, such as pursuing investment opportunities abroad, over promoting American ideals. In it, the president’s speechwriters took a variety of Obama-like swipes at Trump’s political opponents in his own party, many of whom happen to be the same people Obama set out to repudiate.

 

In the speech, Trump hailed what he saw as a grand commercial transformation of the Middle East — progress most readily apparent in the skyscrapers he referred to and with which he seemed genuinely impressed. There’s no obvious reason why that observation was used as an opportunity to belittle the president’s fellow Americans, but that is where he went: “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,” the president declared. “No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi 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.”

 

“In the end,” Trump continued, “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. They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves.”

 

The president’s gratuitous jab at the MAGA movement’s Emmanuel Goldstein — the “neocons” and “nation-builders” who are simultaneously vanquished forever and yet somehow also a looming menace nefariously plotting their restoration to power — may not prove especially controversial. It should be, though, if only because the president is dead wrong.

 

The glittering Arabian skylines, the region’s political and commercial integration, and the relative regional peace necessary to create this “modern miracle,” the “Arabian way” — all these wonders are due in no small part to the efforts made by the Americans whom Trump and his movement seem to enjoy denigrating.

 

Saudi Arabia no longer has to defend itself against the barrage of ballistic missiles that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq rained down on the country in the first Gulf War. Indeed, thanks to the second war on his regime, it no longer has to worry about Saddam at all. That all-consuming regional threat, which necessitated U.S. military intervention in 1991, 1993, 1998, and 2003 (to say nothing of the two no-fly zones that required constant and dangerous policing), is no more.

 

With the end of the Baathist regime in Baghdad, the region has experienced dramatic economic growth fueled not just by the export of hydrocarbons but also by the development of sophisticated commercial interests, ranging from logistical firms to tech start-ups and financial-services providers.

 

Trump can say what he will about Kabul. The city was lost to the Taliban during Joe Biden’s hapless tenure in the Oval Office. But Trump wanted to withdraw, too, and it’s not clear that he would have engineered a more satisfying retreat. He is, however, simply wrong about Baghdad.

 

Once a war-torn city defined by checkpoints and no-go zones, substandard or nonexistent public services, and crumbling infrastructure, Baghdad has been reborn. Today, “consumerist spaces like malls and restaurants have become a dominant feature of postwar reconstruction,” architecture writers Azadeh Mashayekhi and Rend Beiruti observed last year. Foreign investment in commercial and civil-engineering projects has exploded in recent years — projects that are no longer complicated by an armed insurgency but by the messy, fractious politics that typify relatively free societies.

 

Trump and his coterie may regard the Iraq War as a mistake. But they prefer the status quo that prevails today as a result of Saddam’s ouster, if only because they seem to want to take credit for the results that flowed from it.

 

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That wasn’t the only dissonant moment of the speech. Trump’s denunciation of “interventionalism” rings discordant given the extent to which he praised his own style of interventionism. “Together we had obliterated the killers of ISIS,” the president said with all due pride. But the rise of the Islamic State was enabled by American nonintervention, thus affording him the opportunity to engineer a critical military victory.

 

The ISIS caliphate emerged in eastern Syria several years into that country’s civil war. It was incubated by the Bashar al-Assad regime, which purchased its own oil from the terrorist proto-state while it crushed relatively pro-Western rebel factions. That cynical game allowed the last Baathist regime in the Middle East to claim that its opponents were, to a man, Islamists.

 

ISIS spilled over the Syrian border in 2014 and collapsed the Iraqi Security Forces because America allowed it to metastasize unchecked. Obama had bugged out of Iraq less than three years earlier, relying on Iran-backed Shiite militias to fill America’s gaps. The Islamic State caliphate ceased to exist when the United States applied the muscle to it that skeptics of U.S. interventionism had withheld for years.

 

Obama’s expedient effort to make Iran into the foremost steward of U.S. interests in Iraq might have been delusional, but it advanced his goal of securing a nuclear agreement with Tehran. The deal that emerged from negotiations with the Islamic Republic looked past Tehran’s ballistic missile program and its support for terrorism. It legitimized Iran’s ability to enrich uranium to weapons grade, and it flooded the Islamic Republic with liquid capital. Iran’s regional opponents, including representatives from the countries Trump lauded in his address in Riyadh, were duly spooked.

 

Trump 1.0 capitalized on Obama’s mistakes. The Abraham Accords were an outgrowth of the first Trump administration’s skillful exploitation of the Sunni states’ hostility toward Iran, as well as the evidence (apparent in Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign) that the U.S. would once again serve as a reliable partner in the region’s effort to contain Iranian aggression. The accords were not just a triumph of American diplomacy. Would the region have been capable of that evolution if Saddam’s regime were still paying bounties for dead Israeli civilians, elevating the Palestinian question to the point that Israel’s Sunni neighbors couldn’t ignore it? In the absence of the Iraq War and subsequent support for “democracy promotion” provided to local actors, would there have been an Arab Spring? Those demonstrations did not beget a more liberal social order in the Middle East, but they did give way to economic reforms that produced a more egalitarian commercial culture, the results of which Trump now finds so impressive.

 

The campaign to constrain Iran and frustrate its ambitions was not defined by sanctions alone. By the middle of Trump’s first term, it was clear that Iran was spoiling for a fight, and it wasn’t getting one. It shot down U.S. surveillance drones, an act to which America did not respond. It seized and sabotaged commercial shipping vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. It organized a brazen and dramatic drone assault on the world’s largest petroleum-processing facility inside Saudi Arabia — an attack to which America reacted only by releasing an unspecified amount of oil from its strategic reserves, stabilizing global energy markets, and foreclosing on the need for armed retaliation. But Trump’s refusal to respond directly to Iran’s provocations ensured that the regime would become only more reckless.

 

In the final months of 2019, Iran’s terrorist proxies rained rockets down on the U.S. positions inside Iraq. Trump was reluctant to respond to those attacks until one U.S. contractor died and three soldiers were wounded. The U.S. retaliated, albeit proportionately, by striking sites from which the attacks on U.S. forces originated. But Iran was not deterred. Tehran organized a mob that laid siege to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, breaching its outer walls, setting fire to a reception area, and forcing American diplomats to take shelter in safe rooms. It was then that Trump responded with commensurate force, ordering the strike that took out Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Qasem Soleimani.

 

Iranian retaliation for that surprisingly bold maneuver took the form of an unprecedented barrage of missiles into Iraq from Iranian territory, but officials in Tehran also signaled their desire to secure a face-saving de-escalation even as the missiles were in the air. With that, the Abraham Accords suddenly had teeth.

 

Trump’s speech in Riyadh made a point of holding out an olive branch to Iran by leaving open the prospect of a new Iran nuclear deal. But there was little indication in the text that the president sought an agreement to finalize America’s divorce from the region. He did not dance around the regime’s fundamental illegitimacy, and he castigated both Obama’s and Biden’s attempts to bribe Iran into complicity. Disengagement doesn’t seem to be the president’s goal as it relates to Iran.

 

The same could be said of his stance on Syria. In the speech, Trump shocked the world by announcing that he would extend the hand of friendship to the provisional government in Damascus, the forces of which ousted the Assad regime late last year. It was a grand gesture, one incentivized by the new government’s hostility toward the Palestinian and Iranian terror groups that once populated Assad’s Syria. It was also a repudiation of his administration’s most vocal skeptics of America’s extroverted posture on the world stage and a victory for the forces of internationalism.

 

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Within the Trump administration, the vanguard of a movement that argues for “restraint” in the application of American soft and hard power abroad had advocated a wait-and-see approach to determine if the formerly terrorist-affiliated group in power in Damascus had truly changed its stripes. Opponents of that approach warned that dithering in this moment could scuttle the potential for a genuinely anti-Iranian bulwark to emerge in the Levant.

 

That was the faction represented by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz. They won that argument against counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. “So, I say good luck, Syria,” Trump declared. “They’re going to show us something special. Very good people.”

 

Trump deserves to be proud of America’s achievements in the region. We all do. They are the culmination of generations of efforts by America and its Western allies to create the world we inhabit today. We helped collapse pan-Arabism and Baathism. We imported a commercial culture that was not guaranteed to take hold in the Middle East when the region was dominated by Soviet client states. We fought radical Islamism and made Wahhabism an impractical proposition. These are civilizational successes that have given way to a more stable and prosperous international environment. To someone surveying the geopolitical landscape from the perspective of September 2001, the state of play that prevails today would appear to be a partial victory at the very least.

 

That’s why Trump’s jab at the hated “neocons” sounded so out of place. It was a triumphalist assertion of dominance from the nationalists and “restrainers” for whom the promotion of liberty abroad is the great bugbear. But the speechwriters’ victory celebration rings hollow, if only because the policies Trump wants to take credit for — namely, the successful kind — were not a result of the global retrenchment that a policy of “restraint” was supposed to beget.

 

America made plenty of mistakes in its post-9/11 wars, but to conclude that America only made mistakes in Iraq would lead observers to the confused conclusion that the modern Middle East sprang ex nihilo from Mohammed bin Salman’s forehead. Such an outlook would be no less blinkered than the caricatured worldview supposedly embraced by the reviled “neocons.” Maybe those who thought Trump would engineer America’s retreat from the world needed a confidence boost. If so, they can have it. A sop to their pretensions is a small price to pay for policies that advance American interests overseas.