the US that new foreign policy ventures do not look very feasible. But any sensible leader in the Middle East always looks at the worst-case scenario first. The wars in Syria and Iraq are either coming to an end or their present phase is ending, but in both cases, the situation is fragile.
It is doubtful if either the US or Iran would come out the winner in any new confrontation, but Iraqis would certainly come out the losers. The best policy for the US in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere is to do nothing very new. But this may be difficult for Trump. It is not just him who has wrong-headed ideas about the Middle East. There has recently been a stronger than usual surge of apocalyptic commentary about how Iran is winning victory after victory over the US in the region. Washington think-tankers, retired generals, and journalists warn of Iran opening up “a land corridor” to the Mediterranean as if the Iranians travel only by chariot and could spread their influence by no other means. It could be that Trump’s menaces really are serious, in which case the Iranians are understandably going to react. But even if they are largely rhetorical, they might trigger an Iranian overreaction.
“The Iranians are under the impression that others want to topple their regime,” an Iraqi politician told me. “The Iranians are very smart. They do not send their armies abroad. Once you do that, you are lost. They fight by proxy on many fronts outside their borders, but this destabilises everybody else.” Once again, Iraq would find itself in the front line. Curiously, Iran owes much of its expanded influence not to its own machinations but to the US itself. It has been the collateral beneficiary of US-led regime change in two of its neighbours, Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which had been viscerally anti-Iranian.
The sheer ignorance of Trump and his administration about the Middle East is dangerous. It is usual, particularly in liberal circles, to see people in the Middle East as passive victims of foreign intervention. This is largely true, but it masks the fact that at any one time, there are several governments and opposition movements trying to lure the US into a war with its enemies by demonising them as a threat to the world. Trump may speak of confronting Iran, but there is no sign that he has a coherent plan to do so. Much of what is happening in the region is beyond his control and US influence is going down, but for reasons that have nothing to do with him.
26 January 2018
Seldom has an important new US foreign policy crashed in flames so quickly and so spectacularly, achieving the very opposite results to those intended.
It was only ten days ago that Rex Tillerson unexpectedly announced that American military forces would remain in Syria after the defeat of Isis. Their agenda was nothing if not ambitious: it included the stabilisation of the country, getting rid of Bashar al-Assad, rolling back Iranian influence, preventing the resurgence of Isis, and bringing an end to the seven-year Syrian war. Tillerson did not seem to care that this new departure was sure to offend a lot of powerful players in and around Syria and was quite contrary to past US pledges that it was only fighting in Syria to defeat Isis and had no other aims. In effect, the US was reversing its old policy of trying to keep its distance from the Syrian quagmire and was blithely plunging into one of the messiest civil wars in history.
The first sign of this radical new development came early last week with an announcement that the US was going to train a 30,000-strong border force that, though this was not stated, would be predominantly Kurdish. This was furiously denounced by Turkey and Tillerson appeared to disavow it. But his speech spelling out the new interventionist American policy on 17 January was just as explosive and was the reason why, five days later, Turkish tanks were rumbling across the Turkish-Syrian border into the Kurdish enclave of Afrin. A fertile and heavily populated pocket of territory, this is one of the few parts of Syria that had not been devastated by the war. But this is changing fast as Turkish bombers and artillery pound the town of Afrin and the 350 villages around it. The YPG have been fighting back hard, but unless there is some diplomatic solution to the crisis, the enclave will end up looking like much of the rest of Syria with whole streets reduced to mounds of smashed masonry.
The fighting over the last five days has exposed as a dangerous fantasy; the US hopes that its new interventionist policy would stabilise northern Syria. Instead of weakening Assad and Iran, it will benefit them, showing the Kurds that they badly need a protector other than the US. The Kurds are now demanding that the Syrian army go to Afrin to defend it against the Turks because it is an integral part of Syria. A military confrontation between Turkey and the US would be much in the interests of Tehran and Damascus. The Iranians, denounced by the US as the source of all evil, will be glad to see America in lots of trouble in Syria without them having to stir a finger.
The post-Isis US policy in Syria and Iraq coming out of the Trump administration has more far-reaching goals than before but is vague on how they should be achieved. The US may want to get rid of Assad and weaken Iran across the region, but it is too late. Pro-Iranian governments in Iraq and Syria are in power and Hezbollah is the most powerful single force in Lebanon. This is not going to change any time soon and, if the Americans want to weaken Assad by keeping a low-level war going, then this will make him even more reliant on Iran. The US obsession with an exaggerated Iranian threat—about which, in any case, it cannot do much—makes it difficult for Washington to mediate and cool down the situation. Trump and his chaotic administration have not yet had to deal with a real Middle East crisis yet and the events of the last week suggest that they will not be able to do so.
14 September 2018
Before his election as president, it was understandable that Trump’s critics should have vastly underestimated his ability as a politician. It is much less excusable—and self-destructive to effective opposition to Trump—that they should go on underestimating him almost two years after his victory. Every week there are more revelations showing the Trump administration to be chaotic, incompetent, and corrupt. The latest are the anonymous op-ed in The New York Times in which one of his own senior officials claims to be working against him and Bob Woodward’s book portraying the White House as a sort of human zoo.
The media gleefully reports these bombshells in the hope that they will finally sink, or at least inflict serious damage, on the Good Ship Trump. This has been the pattern since he announced his presidential candidacy, but it never happens. Political commentators, overwhelmingly anti-Trump, express bafflement at his survival, but such is their loathing and contempt for him that they do not see that they are dealing with an exceptionally skilled politician. His abilities may be instinctive or drawn from his vast experience as a showman on television. Priority goes to dominating the news agenda regardless of whether the publicity is good or bad. Day after day, hostile news outlets like The New York Times and CNN lead on stories about Trump to the exclusion of all else.
The media does not do this unless they know their customers want it: Trump is an American obsession, even greater than Brexit in Britain. A friend of mine recently met a group of American folk singers touring the south coast of Ireland, who told him that they had often pledged to each other that they would get through the day without mentioning Trump, but so far, they had failed to do so. This tactic of dominating the news by deliberately headline-grabbing behaviour, regardless of the criticism it provokes, is not new but is much more difficult to carry out than it looks. Boris Johnson is currently trying to pull the same trick with outrageous references to “suicide vests,” but his over-heated rhetoric feels contrived. MP David Lammy’s jibe about Johnson as “a pound-shop Donald Trump” is apt.
Trump is never boring: it is a simple point and central to his success but is seldom given sufficient weight. During the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s supporters complained that Trump got excessive amounts of free television time, while her speeches were ignored or were given inadequate attention. The reason was not any pro-Trump bias—quite the contrary given the political sympathies of most people in the media—but because her speeches were boring and his were not. He has the well-developed knack of always saying something the media cannot leave alone. An example of this is his tweeted retort this week to a claim
