PART I. AN ISOLATIONIST IN THE AMERICAN TRADITION
I was in Erbil in northern Iraq in November 2016, covering the start of the siege of Mosul, when Donald Trump was elected US president. I had always taken his brand of American isolationism seriously during the campaign. I saw it as a very American type of populist nationalism that his multitude of critics in the US and the rest of the world found difficult to understand. Jingoistic in tone, laudatory of US military might, bursting with furious threats towards potential enemies—and frequently allies—it was also much against foreign wars and entanglements.
This bellicose bluster was to continue for the next three years, but at the time of writing, Trump has yet to start a war, though he has teetered on the edge of one with Iran. A hostile media and foreign policy establishment in Washington alternate between denouncing Trump as a warmonger, an appeaser—or a fool. Lost in this torrent of abuse is the fact that at the core of Trump’s foreign policy is a brutal realpolitik and a realisation where power actually lies. His decision, for instance, in October 2019 to withdraw US troops from north-east Syria was a betrayal of the Syrian Kurds and was announced in a chaotic manner. But he was correct in recognising, as his critics often did not, that the US military position in this isolated corner of Syria was weak, risky, and unsustainable. In the event, thanks to push-back by the Pentagon, Republican hawks, and his own neoconservative-dominated cabinet, US troops withdrew from Syria and then half-returned in a messy compromise between different forces in Washington.
The assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad airport on 3 January did not denote a real change in this strategy of avoiding all-out military conflicts. Trump said that he gave the order to kill Soleimani to prevent a war and not to start one, though it could have had that effect. It could also have worked to the advantage of the government in Tehran as millions of Iranians rallied to mourn Soleimani and revile the US. But, at that very moment, Iran shot down a Ukrainian airliner, killing 176 people, and lied about it for three days. The popular backlash was no longer against the US but against their own government. Lost in all this was the fact that the US had allowed Iran to fire ballistic missiles at US bases at Ain al-Asad in western Iraq and Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan and had not retaliated, a remarkable degree of restraint in the face of an undoubted act of war, masked by Trump’s belligerent rhetoric.
I had spoken to the leaders of pro-Iranian paramilitary groups in Baghdad in September 2019, and I could see that they believed that Trump would not act militarily against them or Iran. Their over-confidence stemmed from US lack of action over the previous summer, exemplified by Trump’s last-minute change of mind over launching US air strikes against Iran, after it shot down an American drone on 20 June 2019. He showed equal restraint on 14 September when there was an Iran/Houthi drone and missile attack on Saudi oil facilities. In both cases, his instinct against retaliating directly against Iran was correct. Had strikes against Iranian radars and missile batteries gone ahead in either case, what exactly would he have achieved? This sort of limited military operation usually works better as a threat than in actuality. The US was never going to launch an all-out war against Iran in pursuit of a decisive victory, as in Iraq in 2003, and anything less than that would create more problems than it would solve.
This calculation still makes sense: Iran would inevitably retain the ability after the air strikes to launch pinprick attacks up and down the Gulf and, above all, in and around the thirty-five-mile wide Strait of Hormuz, through which passes 30 percent of the world’s oil trade. Trump has chosen to rely on sanctions against Iran, re-imposed after he withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, that have devastated the Iranian economy. The US Treasury is a more lethal international power than the Pentagon, but what if the most rigorous sanctions do not force Iran to negotiate? Iran is likely to resume proxy attacks on US allies, because these are one of its few high-value cards in its confrontation with the US. Each phase of the crisis sees an escalation that brings a shooting war closer, though neither side wants one. A rule of Middle East politics is that every side overplays their hand at some point in the belief that they can win a complete victory. A compromise US-Iran deal is possible, but not if the US thinks it can force Iran to capitulate.
11 November 2016
“Make America Great Again” was the slogan of Donald Trump’s election, but the immediate impact of his victory is to make the US less of a power in the world for two reasons: American prestige and influence will be damaged by a general belief internationally that the US has just elected a dangerous buffoon as its leader. The perception is pervasive but not very deeply rooted and likely to be temporary, stemming as it does from Trump’s demagogic rants during the election campaign. Those about relations with foreign countries were particularly vague and least likely to provide a guide to future policy.
More damaging in the long term for America’s status as a superpower is the likelihood that the US is now a more deeply divided society than ever. Trump won the election by demonising and threatening individuals and communities—Mexicans, Muslims, Latinos—and his confrontational style of politics is not going to disappear. Verbal violence produces a permanently over-heated political atmosphere in which physical violence becomes an option. At the same time, the election campaign was focused almost exclusively on American domestic politics with voters showing little interest in events abroad. This is unlikely to change.
Governments around the world can see this for themselves, though this will not stop them badgering their diplomats in Washington and New York for an inkling as to how far Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks were more than outrageous attempts to dominate the news agenda for a few hours. Fortunately, his pronouncements were so woolly that they can be easily jettisoned between now and his inauguration. Real foreign policy positions will only emerge with the formation of a Trump cabinet when it becomes clear who will be in charge. But, if future policies remain unknowable, super-charged American nationalism combined with economic populism and isolationism are likely to set the general tone. Trump has invariably portrayed Americans as the victims of the foul machinations of foreign countries who previously faced no real resistance from an incompetent self-serving American elite.
This sort of aggressive nationalism is not unique to Trump. All over the world, nationalism is having a spectacular rebirth in countries from Turkey to the Philippines. It has become a successful vehicle for protest in Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe. Though Trump is frequently portrayed as a peculiarly American phenomenon, his populist nationalism has a striking amount in common with that of the Brexit campaigners in Britain or even the chauvinism of Erdogan in Turkey. Much of this can be discounted as patriotic bombast, but in all cases, there is a menacing undercurrent of racism and demonisation, whether it is directed against illegal immigrants in the US, asylum seekers in Britain, or Kurds in south-east Turkey.
In reality, Trump made very few proposals for radical change in US foreign policy during the election campaign, aside from saying that he would throw out the agreement with Iran on its nuclear programme—though his staff is now being much less categorical about this, saying only that the deal must be properly enforced. Nobody really knows if Trump will deal any differently from Obama with the swathe of countries between Pakistan and Nigeria where there are at least seven wars raging—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and South Sudan—as well as four serious insurgencies.
The most serious wars in which the US is already militarily involved are in Iraq and Syria and here Trump’s comments during the campaign suggest that he will focus on destroying Isis, recognise the danger of becoming militarily overinvolved, and look for some sort of cooperation with Russia as the next biggest player in the conflict. This is similar to what is already happening. Hillary Clinton’s intentions in
