Alexander Langlois
President Trump appears to be embracing the view that the region is best left to manage its own problems.
President Donald Trump is drastically reshaping Washington’s approach to foreign policy in the Middle East. While bellicosity and unpredictability have come to define his personalized approach to foreign affairs, Trump is unafraid to break the traditional norms of diplomacy and statecraft that many argue have long held back both the United States and the Middle East. Should Trump stick to this unusual approach, centralizing a restrained foreign policy recognizing the limits of US power and interests, he could support the region’s leaders as they work to promote a new age of pragmatism and development.
This great transformation has not come from Western interventionists…giving you lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs. No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called ‘nation-builders,’ ‘neo-cons,’ or ‘liberal non-profits,’ like those who spent trillions failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought about by the people of the region themselves…developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies…In the end, the so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built—and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.
This rhetoric is unheard of from a modern US president. While previous attempts to realign US foreign policy priorities and approaches in the region are nothing new, they were never so robustly expressed or acted upon.
There are positive and negative possibilities inherent to Trump’s new foreign policy doctrine. Washington has long overextended itself across the globe, fighting every fight on every continent to influence everything, everywhere, all the time. This overreach has failed to consider real US interests and the capabilities needed to achieve them, resulting in the “Forever Wars” of the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, domestic problems continued to fester and security-first priorities increasingly harmed civil liberties at home.
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