by Dr. Alex Joffe
One of the many startling attributes of the Trump presidency is the tendency his statements and policy decisions have to produce inadvertent moments of clarity.
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| President Donald Trump, US Air National Guard photo by Staff Sgt. Tony Harp - released via Air Force Special Operations Command |
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,324, October 27, 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The American withdrawal
from Syria has produced chaotic results – but as with many aspects of
President Trump’s presidency, it offers an opportunity to view realities
with a new clarity. The nature of Turkey under Erdoğan, European
weakness, and the unwillingness of America to support indecisive
military missions have been revealed. These realities demand new
approaches to European defense and to Middle Eastern engagement and
disengagement.
One of the many startling attributes of the Trump
presidency is the tendency his statements and policy decisions have to
produce inadvertent moments of clarity. By cutting through practical and
rhetorical niceties, Trump forces the US and the world to confront
inconsistent and malfunctioning policies, often creating new ones in the
process. The invariable outrage forces situations to be looked at
directly, as does the reactive antipathy from Trump’s many adversaries.
Syria is no exception.
It is a strange, almost Leninist dynamic of
“heightening the contradictions.” Trump’s advocacy of a secure US border
created a reaction that clarified the positions of the left wing of the
Democratic Party (and most of its presidential candidates) as favoring
open borders and fundamentally opposing the core ideas of sovereignty
and citizenship. The trade confrontation with China produced a cascade
that rudely exposed the degree to which corporations have sold their
souls to the Communist Party – most recently the craven kowtowing of the
National Basketball Association and its players over Hong Kong. The
endless investigations of Trump’s alleged corruption, such as Russiagate
and now Ukrainegate, have primarily exposed the corruption of the
Clinton and Biden families and other rent-seeking Democratic grandees,
and demonstrated the degree to which the media-entertainment-technology
sector is a unified entity dedicated to the “resistance.”
The chaos unleashed by Trump’s sudden shift in
American policy toward Syria now joins these examples. Neither the
wisdom nor the morality of the US withdrawal are the issue, though they
will be debated for years to come. But the reactions to the American
withdrawal are clarifying in the present moment, and should help guide
policy in the future.
Four points may be cited.
For the first time, even after the dubious “coup”
that decimated Turkish civil society, the Turkish leadership under
Erdoğan and the AKP is being broadly acknowledged as a brutal ethnic
religious imperialist regime with revanchist aspirations. NATO
membership and electoral results notwithstanding, Erdoğan’s is a
neo-Ottoman regime that uses everything from air strikes to “little
green men”-style paramilitaries to execute its goals of territorial
reconquest and crushing of Kurdish national movements.
Indulged and courted by both Obama and Trump, the
Erdoğan regime has already befuddled if not unraveled NATO, aligned with
the Iranians and Russians, threatened Greece, and used the migrant
weapon against Europe in pursuit of both long-term ideological goals and
short-term financial blackmail. Islamist in concept and deed, Erdoğan’s
Turkey almost certainly cannot be enticed or pressured to rejoin the
Western fold. Blithe talk about “kicking Turkey out of NATO” remains
beside the point. The primary issue is to isolate Erdoğan
internationally and within Turkey, and prepare long-term plans against
the possibility of an expansionist neo-Ottoman Turkey over the next
decades. New US sanctions – long prepared in anticipation of a moment
that has now arrived – should be supplemented by support for Turkey’s
opposition sectors.
Second, as if more proof were needed, European
states and the EU as a whole have been shown to be both unwilling and
unable to engage with issues that affect them directly. They cannot
project meaningful force to protect populations, territory, or anything
else, adopt punitive policies of any severity, or even defend themselves
against ISIS, except as a domestic security issue. Halting European
military exports to Turkey, which is largely self-sufficient militarily,
is a small gesture.
Europe’s failure of will over Turkey must be
coupled with German eagerness to continue trade with Iran and energy
dependence on Russia, general European unwillingness to sanction Iran’s
nuclear abuses, and inability to comprehensively address the migration
crisis – except to punish Eastern European states that do have controls.
The fabric of the postwar European alliance was challenged long before
Turkey’s invasion of north Syria. The US is expected to provide
leadership and military forces and to respond unquestioningly to
European moralizing. A comprehensive rethinking of US defense policy
with respect to Europe is therefore long overdue, NATO included.
Third, one of the most clarifying reactions to the
Turkish invasion was that much of the US electorate applauded the US
withdrawal and resents elite hypocrisy, Turkish brutality, and European
weakness. It is an inescapable fact that the experts and media
mouthpieces who created the incoherent US Syrian deployment under Obama –
and then decried it under Trump – are now defending it.
The lesson is that without clearly stated policies
based on US interests rather than emotional appeals to “protection” or
vagueness about “capacity-building,” and an explicit, calibrated
approach that includes an exit strategy, the US electorate will no
longer support open-ended protective, much less nation-building,
missions. After three Middle Eastern wars and two failed efforts to
reconstruct Muslim states, enough is enough. Experts have failed to
assess, design, and execute plans that benefit American security, and
regional actors have failed to take advantage of US-provided
opportunities to create decent states. Moralizing about American
exceptionalism, responsibility, and credibility – derided only yesterday
as imperialism and a century ago as mission civilisatrice – rings hollow.
US citizens may see the region with greater
clarity than the experts. What are some of its features? “Tribes with
flags” cannot build nation-states without brutality toward their own
populations, minorities, and neighbors. Syrians will now writhe under an
old-fashioned and familiar yoke of violent competition among Russia,
Iran, Turkey, and Syria, while the Chinese will continue to gain
financial control over states, industries, and regions. This is a new
Great Game in which the US must participate –selectively.
What then are some elements of a new American
approach to the Middle East? The most compelling Western interests are
preventing the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, preventing
mass migration that will further undermine the cohesion of Western
states including the US, protecting energy sources that underpin the
global economy, and possibly the protection of the remaining Christian
minorities. These are new and old concerns.
New borders are necessary for a de-globalized
world. In this scenario, Israel, Greece, and India are frontline states
that need to emphasize their own defense. Their defense should also be a
Western priority, along with that of the European continent itself. It
is unclear how to do this in an era of European moral and policy
collapse. Only patient articulation of US interests, and their
extrapolation onto like-minded societies that are willing to act in
their own defense, will convince the US electorate to contribute. Waving
the bloody shirt will not.
But rebuilding a Western defense alliance first
means coming to grips with intractable problems: European demographic
transformation and rejection of nationalism, Chinese imperialism,
African overpopulation, and the seemingly irredeemable nature of many
Muslim societies. As in the case of China, the theory has long been that
Western engagement with the Middle East along with rising standards of
living would drive secularization and liberalization. That has not
uniformly proven the case. Perhaps disengagement is part of the answer.
Meanwhile, American allies would be well served by rethinking the nature
and tone of their relationships with a hegemon that is fed up, but that
respects self-reliance.
Alex Joffe is a Shillman-Ingerman Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a senior non-resident fellow at the BESA Center.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/clarity-amidst-chaos-the-implications-of-trumps-syria-policy/
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