How Trump could help the Middle East
As President Donald Trump plans for his first year in office, he will not have to make space in his calendar for a December trip to Oslo. Unlike Barack Obama, he will not be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for just marvellously being Obama. Neither will he be grandiosely addressing the “Muslim world,” as Obama did in Cairo during his first months. But he might be rather more welcome in the capitals of Muslim countries than one might expect.
Even in the Trump world of employing reckless hyperbole to make a general point, the campaign promise to “temporarily ban” Muslim immigration was inexcusable.
Likely he meant that admitting 10,000 Sunni Muslims from an ISIL-controlled refugee camp in Syria poses different security issues that taking 10,000 Christian software engineers from Kerala, and to pretend that all immigrants from all parts of the world are identical is both false and foolish. Certainly Canada’s selective immigration policy has never taken that view.
Nevertheless, the Muslim ban is fairly cited as evidence that Trump’s relations with the Islamic world will be rocky. Perhaps. But as Obama takes his leave it is fair to ask what happened to the great religionand- politics project of his presidency. Obama thought that his Muslim father and his childhood years in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, would endear him to Muslims and lead to a rapprochement with the West.
Yet much of the Muslim world today is worse off after Obama.
Certainly that’s true for the part of the Muslim world that Obama focused attention on — the Middle East. Given his Indonesian roots, it remains a mystery why so little effort was made to include the experiences of Indonesian Muslims in the global conversation about Islam and violence. It is a more hopeful tale. Jakarta, rather than Cairo, would have been a better place from which to address the Islamic world, and might have helped displace the Arab terrorist as the malevolent face of Islam in popular imagination.
Nearly half of the world’s Muslims live on the subcontinent — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh — but l i ttle attention was paid to what lessons, for good and for ill, could be learned from those massive Muslim populations.
Aside from drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama showed very little interest in the subcontinent in terms of global security, despite the fact that Muslims encounter pluralism there more than elsewhere.
Indeed, the great engagement promised by Obama with t he Muslim world really meant a disengagement with the Middle East. American troops would be greatly reduced in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States would “lead from behind” on the Arab Spring, and would make a deal to lift sanctions on Iran. The great withdrawal would remove the American finger from the Islamic eye.
What Obama did not see, or chose to ignore, is that an American vacuum would be filled by someone. By early in Obama’s second term, it was clear that the candidates were ISIL on the Sunni side, and Iran, together with its allies in Moscow and Damascus, on the Shia side. The price of disengagement in Iraq was the rise of ISIL. The price for a deal with Iran was allowing Assad and Putin to brutally seize control of Syria. Obama willingly paid both prices.
The most haunting failure of Obama’s engagement with the Islamic world is that so many are desperately trying to leave it.
The millions of Syrian refugees are largely Muslim, desiring at all costs to get out of Syria and into Europe. The Mediterranean Sea has become a watery grave for tens of thousands fleeing life in Muslim lands.
As Obama leaves office, the pathologies of the refugee resettlement have turned northern European populations against both refugee resettlement and continued Muslim immigration.
On the whole, Muslims are less secure, less free and less welcomed after eight years of Obama. It’s not all his fault, but it does mean that his central religion-and-politics realignment failed to improve the lives of actual Muslims.
Who knows what Trump will bring? There is the possibility that he might make things worse. But not necessarily.
Neither Saudi Arabia nor Egypt want a Middle East dominated by Iran. They might welcome Trump’s skepticism over the nuclear deal.
The Gulf states consider Israel a greater force for security and stability than the various Iranian proxies in the region, and would welcome American diplomacy that did not seek to isolate Israel.
While many Arab states have shut their border to Syria’s refugees, Turkey and Jordan have been overrun, and would no doubt welcome any alternative to Obama’s consignment of Syria to the tender mercies of Assad and Putin.
Trump’s rhetorical hostility toward Muslims is not welcome. But it might prove more welcome than the eight years of rhetorical peace and actual suffering.