Europe and the US because states are more fragile than they look and once destroyed prove impossible to recreate. This was a lesson that the foreign policy establishments in Washington, London, and Paris failed to take on board after the invasion of Iraq, though the disastrous outcome of successful or attempted regime change has been bloodily demonstrated again and again. It was always absurdly simple-minded to blame all the troubles of Iraq, Syria, and Libya on Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, and Muammar Gaddafi, authoritarian leaders whose regimes were more the symptom than the cause of division. But it is not only in the Middle East that divisions are deepening. Whatever happens in Britain because of the Brexit vote or in the US because of the election of Trump as president, both countries will be more divided and therefore weaker than before. Political divisions in the US are probably greater now than at any time since the American Civil War 150 years ago. Repeated calls for unity in both countries betray a deepening disunity and alarm as people sense that they are moving in the dark and old norms and landmarks are no longer visible and may no longer exist.
The mainline mass media is finding it difficult to make sense of a new world order which may or may not be emerging. Journalists are generally more rooted in the established order of things than they pretend and are shocked by radical change. Only two big newspapers—the Florida Times-Union and the Las Vegas Review-Journal endorsed Trump before the election and few of the American commentariat expected him to win, though this has not dented their confidence in their own judgement. Criticism of Trump in the media has lost all regard for truth and falsehood with the publication of patently concocted reports of his antics in Russia, but there is also genuine uncertainty about whether he will be a real force for change, be it good or ill.
Crises in different parts of the world are beginning to cross-infect and exacerbate each other. Prior to 2014, European leaders, whatever their humanitarian protestations, did not care much about what happened in Iraq and Syria. But the rise of Isis, the mass influx of Syrian refugees heading for Central Europe, and the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels showed that the crises in the Middle East could not be contained. They helped give a powerful impulse to the anti-immigrant authoritarian nationalist right and made them real contenders for power.
The Middle East is always a source of instability in the world and never more so than over the last six years. But winners and losers are emerging in Syria where Assad is succeeding with Russian and Iranian help, while in Iraq, the Baghdad government backed by US airpower is slowly fighting its way into Mosul. Isis probably has more fight in it than its many enemies want to believe but is surely on the road to ultimate defeat. One of the first real tests for Trump will be how far he succeeds in closing down these wars, something that is now at last becoming feasible.
10 February 2017
President Trump made a great play when he came into office with his return of a bust of Winston Churchill to the Oval Office, presenting the move as a symbol of his admiration for adamantine patriotic resolve in pursuit of patriotic ends. Presumably, Trump was thinking of Churchill in 1940, not Churchill in 1915–16 when he was the leading advocate of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in which the Turks decisively defeated the British army with great slaughter.
Trump is reputed to seldom read books or show much interest in history other than that of his own life and times, but it would be worth his while reflecting on Gallipoli because Churchill was only the first of six British and American leaders to have suffered political shipwreck in the Middle East over the last century. The prime reason for these successive disasters is that the region has always been more unstable and prone to wars than anywhere else in the world. Mistakes made on its battlefields tend to be calamitous and irretrievable. Avoiding this fate is not easy: the six British and American leaders who came a serious cropper in the Middle East were generally abler, more experienced, and better-advised than Trump. It is therefore worthwhile asking, at the beginning of his administration, what are the chances of him becoming the next victim of the permanent state of crisis in the wider Middle East. He campaigned as an isolationist who would avoid being sucked into armed conflicts abroad, but his first weeks in office and his senior appointments suggest that he will try to take a central role in the politics of the region.
These failings unite with a crippling ignorance on the part of foreign powers about the complexity and dangers of the political and military terrain in which they are operating. This was true of Churchill, who wrongly assessed likely Turkish military resistance in 1915. Lloyd George, one of the most astute of British prime ministers, made the same mistake in 1922 when his government destroyed itself by threatening to go to war with Turkey. Anthony Eden lost office after the Suez Crisis in 1956 when he failed to overthrow Nasser in Egypt. Tony Blair’s reputation was forever blasted for leading Britain into war in Iraq in 2003.
Of the three US presidents badly or terminally damaged by crisis in the Middle East, Jimmy Carter was the most unlucky, as there was nothing much he could do to stop the Iranian Revolution in 1979 or the seizure of diplomats in the US embassy in Tehran as hostages. Ronald Reagan’s presidency saw military intervention in Lebanon where 241 US Marines were blown up in 1983, and the Iran-Contra scandal that permanently weakened the administration. Significant though these disasters and misadventures seemed at the time, none had the impact of George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, which led to the regeneration of al-Qaeda and the spread of chaos through the region.
In retrospect, these leaders may look foolhardy as they plunged into bottomless quagmires or fought unwinnable wars. Some, like Carter, were victims of circumstances, but entanglements were not inevitable, as was shown by President Obama, who did read books, knew his history, and was acutely aware of the pitfalls the US needed to skirt in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and beyond. Avoiding disaster that nobody else knew existed will seldom win a politician much credit, but Obama deserves credit for escaping being sucked into the civil war in Syria or into a broader conflict against Iran as the leader of the Shia axis.
Trump continually promised during the presidential election that he would focus exclusively in the Middle East on destroying Isis, but one of the first moves of his administration has been to shift the US closer to Saudi Arabia by backing its war in Yemen. In almost his first statement of policy, Secretary of Defence James Mattis said that Iran is “the single biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world.” One of the dangers of Trump’s demagogic rants and open mendacity is that they tend to give the impression that less theatrical members of his team, especially former generals like Mattis or Michael Flynn, are monuments of good sense and moderation. Yet both men are set on threat inflation when it comes to Iran, though without providing any evidence for its terrorist actions, just as their predecessors inflated the threat supposedly posed by Saddam Hussein’s non-existent WMD and fictional support for al-Qaeda.
Given the high decibel level of the Trump administration’s threats and warnings, it is impossible to distinguish bellicose rhetoric from real operational planning. A confrontation with Iran will probably not come soon; but in a year or two, when previous policies conceived under Obama have run their course, Trump may well feel that he has to show how much tougher and more effective he is than his predecessor, whom he has denounced as weak and incompetent. In four years’ time, the select club of American and British leaders who failed in the Middle East, with disastrous consequences for everybody, may have a voluble seventh member.
3 November 2017
In his jeremiad against Iran on 13 October, Trump justified his refusal to certify the Iran nuclear deal with gobbets of propaganda, one-sided history, and straight lies. He proposed a new US policy towards Iran based “on a clear-eyed assessment of the Iranian dictatorship, its sponsorship of terrorism, and its continuing aggression in the Middle East and all around the world.” The speech sounded like the opening volley in a new campaign against Iran, to be fought out on multiple fronts.
Some sort of collision between the US and Iran looks possible or even likely, a battle which will probably be carried out by proxies and will not be fought to a finish. It may not come to that: such
