During last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to do a great deal more in the Middle East than his immediate predecessors, but with much less. That is, he would achieve significantly more than Barack Obama at a much smaller sacrifice of blood and treasure than was incurred under George W. Bush. This he would accomplish by defining American interests sharply and pursuing them aggressively, not to say ruthlessly. The result would be a global restoration of American credibility and, as Trump never ceased to remind voters, renewed global respect. https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2017/09/what-america-should-do-next-in-the-middle-east/
As an act of political “signaling,” Trump’s blunt message was savvy. Many Americans, especially those in his base of supporters, regarded Obama as timid, weak, and more solicitous of enemies than of friends; Bush, they believed, had been strong in some ways but prone to quixotic adventures like building democracy in the Middle East, a putative sin of which Obama had at least been innocent. Trump offered an attractive alternative: a hybrid approach that would combine the best qualities of his predecessors in office while jettisoning their worst inclinations. “America First” meant placing a Bush-style readiness to use military force in support of a leaner, Obama-style agenda that nixed democracy promotion. Unlike Bush, Trump would resist thankless nation-building projects; unlike Obama, he would reward friends and punish enemies.
Exactly how Trump intended to translate this framework into concrete policy started to become clear only after the election. As he appointed his national-security team, four major policy goals in the Middle East came into focus. First in line was the swift defeat of Islamic State (IS). Second, the Trump team was keen to improve relations with America’s traditional allies in the region, especially Israel, who had felt abandoned by Obama. Third, the administration would push back aggressively against Iran’s hegemonic regional ambitions while also renegotiating the 2015 agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Finally, Trump was personally eager to explore the possibility of a strategic accommodation with Russia, especially in Syria.
These goals were not and are not obviously compatible with each other. The most significant contradiction has emerged between, on the one hand, Trump’s desire to defeat IS with the smallest possible commitment of American ground forces and, on the other hand, his intention to contain Iran. In the event, as we shall see, the administration has chosen to prioritize the defeat of IS. In so doing, however, it has unconsciously assimilated much of the strategy developed by the Obama team in its final years, a strategy thatconsciously facilitated the rise of Iran and brought the policies of the United States into alignment with that goal.
This alignment is now so extensive that any serious effort to contain or roll back Iranian power will require an equally lengthy and systematic effort to rethink American interests and reorder American policy. Such an effort will demand sustained presidential attention, the devotion of new resources, and, inevitably, the disruption of established relations with key allies. It will also bring down on Trump even more criticism than he is already receiving from pundits, allied nations, his own national-security bureaucracy, and, on a few key issues, his political supporters.
In the short term, the path of least resistance for the administration has been to accept Obama’s terms and muddle through on that basis. Ultimately, however, the outcome of any such course of action is certain to be deadly—not only for Trump’s agenda but for the interests and the national security of the United States.
I. The Great Reset
At the heart of Trump’s dilemma are the binding restrictions that the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, Obama’s signature foreign-policy initiative as president, has placed on the United States. But the nuclear deal itself was the direct outgrowth of an earlier decision in foreign policy, a decision at which Obama had arrived years earlier. Before he ever convened a meeting of the National Security Council, consulted with an ally, or received an intelligence briefing—indeed, before he ever set foot in the Oval Office in January 2009—Obama resolved to go down in history as the president who brought Bush’s wars to an end and who restructured relations with the Middle East.
Obama had articulated this vision throughout his first presidential campaign. At every rally, he promised that he would avoid the calamitous misadventures of the past, especially as exemplified by the war in Iraq. To fulfill this promise, Obama’s first priority in office was to bring the troops home from that country.
But how could the military withdraw without turning Iraq into a satellite of Iran? Obama declined to think in such terms. Rather, in keeping with a current of thought then circulating in national-security circles, he believed that the Middle East was altogether no longer as important to the United States as it once had been, and that, moreover, the fundamental interests of the United Statesoverlapped with those of Iran (not to mention Russia). In the case of Iraq, whose stability was vital to both Tehran and Washington, those interests were especially well-matched. The United States, therefore, could tolerate a reduction of its influence and a tilt by Baghdad in the direction of Tehran.
