Trump’s Islam speech sounded like Obama
The president’s softer stance on Muslims is all about courting the Saudis and facing down Iran
Long before his election, Donald Trump tweeted: “Tell Saudi Arabia and others that we want (demand!) free oil for the next 10 years or we will not protect their private Boeing 747s.” One wonders what was going through the president’s head yesterday, as verses from the Koran were played before his first overseas speech in Saudi Arabia.
As a candidate, he had declared that “Islam hates us”; as president, he sought to impose a travel ban directed at Muslim-majority countries and surrounded himself with advisers who saw a clash of civilisations. Now, he found himself urging Muslims to join hands with the US to defeat terrorism.
How did he square this circle? There was, undeniably, a moderation. Were one to lay out passages from Trump’s remarks alongside those from Barack Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009, it would be difficult to tell some apart. Of course, Trump’s language was blunter and more effusive. But many of the ideas were the same: America was not at war with Islam, the Muslim world had to drive out extremists, and partnership was essential.
Just as Obama had asked that extremists be “isolated and unwelcome in Muslim communities”, so Trump asked Islamic countries four times to “drive them out”. He did not embarrass his hosts by demanding that they “pay up”. Nor did he make sweeping criticism of Islam, instead noting that “95 per cent of the victims of terrorism are themselves Muslim”.
In part, this moderation was lubricated by petrodollars. Trump hailed the “blessed news” that the US and Saudi Arabia had signed $400billion of agreements, including a $110 billion arms deal, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. But the real glue between Trump’s administration and the Arab states is found elsewhere.
Trump promised “a coalition of nations who share the aim of stamping out extremism”. Such a coalition exists. It is called the Global Coalition Against Daesh and it was formed in 2014. By and large, it worked. Isil was stripped of territory and left clinging to a handful of cities. Arab states provided bases, but their role was negligible. They conducted a minuscule number of airstrikes, soon turning their attention to a war that would devastate Yemen. Why?
The answer can be found in one word: Iran. Arab states watched with horror as Iran-backed Shia militias dominated the fight against Isil, indulged – in Saudi eyes – by an Obama administration eager to protect its nuclear deal with Iran.
So Trump’s speech was, above all, a picking of sides. “The Iranian regime has been the spearhead of global terrorism,” declared Saudi Arabia’s King Salman yesterday. Trump agreed, saying it had “fuelled the fires of sectarian conflict and terror”. It is this subject, more than anything, that unites the ideologues and pragmatists at the White House. They hope that by siding unambiguously with their Arab allies against Iran, those allies will in turn step up the fight against jihadists.
There are many ways in which the US could aggressively push back at Iran’s influence in the Middle East. Some, such as disrupting flows of Iranian money and arms to Hizbollah, should be welcomed. But others, such as targeting Iran-backed militias in Iraq, could not only disrupt the ground campaign against Isil but also provoke retaliation against the growing number of US troops in the region. The irony is that Trump’s speech came a day after the election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani over rivals who would have been more aggressively anti-american.
It would therefore be a mistake to think that this speech was about the Muslim world as a whole. A majority of Muslims live not in the Middle East, but in the Pacific; the world’s three largest Muslim populations are in Indonesia, Pakistan, and India. So while Trump framed his remarks as coming from the “heart of the Muslim world”, it is wrong to cast this absolutist monarchy, with its harsh, austere vision of Islam, as the essence of a religion that includes dozens of democracies – Indonesia, Senegal, or Tunisia – with far more progressive views of women’s rights, religious freedom, and political competition. That distinction underlines why this speech was really less about religion than about plain geopolitics.