DONALD TRUMP’S MIDDLE EAST POLICY

Michael Doran is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He specialises in Middle East security issues. In the administration of President George W. Bush, Doran served in the White House as a senior director in the National Security Council, where he was responsible for helping to devise and coordinate United States strategies on a variety of Middle East issues, including Arab-Israeli relations and U.S. efforts to contain Iran and Syria. He also served in the Bush administration as a senior advisor in the State Department and a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Pentagon. On Thursday 4 April 2019, on a visit sponsored by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, Michael Doran addressed The Sydney Institute to give an assessment of the Trump Administration’s Middle East policies.

DONALD TRUMP’S MIDDLE EAST POLICY

MICHAEL DORAN

Thank you very much for hosting me. Thanks to AIJAC for bringing me to Australia, and thanks to all of you for coming tonight. It is a great pleasure to be here.

You may have heard that in the United States, unlike in Australia, Donald Trump is a controversial figure. He is having a polarising impact on our politics.

 In fact, I saw in a Gallup poll just a few days ago that he is the most polarising president ever. Consequently, everything in the United States now is politicised – and nothing more so than Middle East policy.

In Washington, two different views of the Middle East are vying for supremacy—two different paradigms. It would be a mistake to see the fight between these as simply a political battle for and against Trump, although that is a part of it. Polarisation on the Middle East has been developing for some time now, at least since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Therefore, before I get to Trump and his view, I’d like to sketch for you the history of this polarisation.

For the sake of discussion, I will call the two views the Obama and Trump paradigms. I dub it the Obama paradigm because the Obama foreign policy elite is now acting as a kind of shadow government, a shadow foreign ministry, unlike anything I have seen before in the United States.

When a new president takes over, usually the old team melts away, but with Trump as president, the former Obama officials have organised themselves effectively.  They continue to have influence on legislation and on the press.

You may have read, for example, that John Kerry, the former secretary of state, went to Europe after Trump decided to leave the JCPOA, as the Iranian nuclear deal is also known.  He counselled the Europeans to keep it alive; to keep it on a low burner. Kerry also met with Javad Zarif, the foreign minister of Iran, and counselled Iran to stay in the deal. Kerry’s plan, basically, is to keep the JCPOA alive until 2020 when, if Trump is defeated by a Democrat, the United States can return to the Obama-era relations with Iran. The Obama operatives are working in Washington in a variety of ways to preserve not just the nuclear deal itself but the broader policy architecture that made the deal possible.

So, even though we now have Donald Trump and his foreign policy, we still have a fight between the Obama perspective on the Middle East and the Trump, or Republican, perspective.

To explain how all of this developed, let me go back in time to when Barack Obama was running for president in 2008.  The views that he brought into the White House were not his views alone but owed much to the foreign policy elite’s critique of George W Bush. That critique was encapsulated in something many of you may recall: the Baker-Hamilton Report.

 This was a product of the Iraq Study Group of 2006, a congressionally-mandated report about how to fix American policy in Iraq. The war was going badly, and Congress mandated a study that would propose recommendations to fix the problem.

The study had five major conclusions.  Number one, the Bush administration should pull the troops from Iraq. Number two, it should increase the number of troops in Afghanistan. Number three and four, it should reach out to Damascus and Tehran and seek to negotiate with them about stabilising Iraq. And number five, it should work hard for advances in Israeli-Arab affairs, especially in the Israeli-Palestinian arena.

That is the blueprint for the Obama foreign policy.  Those are the key ideas that Obama brought into the White House, and he never strayed far from them.

Obama famously said, in an interview with David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, that every president gets a paragraph in the history books.  It is very important, when you are president, to know what your paragraph says.  President Obama, I submit, wrote his paragraph on the Middle East before he was ever set foot in the Oval Office. His paragraph was supposed to say that Barack Obama ended the disastrous war that George W Bush had started.

We know that Obama wrote this paragraph before he ever stepped into the Oval Office, because we have a record of a very interesting conversation that took place in 2008, when Obama was the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party.  He made a trip to Iraq where he met with General David Petraeus, the military commander on the ground. Obama told Petraeus, in no uncertain terms, that if he became president he would withdraw from Iraq. When Petraeus protested that the Iranians would then fill the vacuum, Obama said, in effect, “Ho hum”.

When Obama got into office, he was as good as his word. By 2010, Obama had made the key decisions, and he was, by all appearances, comfortable with the Iranians filling the vacuum.

 In keeping with the authors of the Baker-Hamilton Report, he had a very specific understanding of Iran, one that is very common among the foreign policy elite, and one that, I suspect, even some of you may share.

Iran, according to this perspective, is a defensive power. It is weak. It is worried about holding on to what it has. It is a status quo power. It is pragmatic, and, importantly, it shares very significant interests with the United States—such as, for example, stabilising Iraq. The United States has no four-star, vital interest in Iraq. Washington simply wants stability, it wants the oil to flow steadily at reasonable prices.

  And, of course, it needs to ensure that Iraq is not safe haven for terrorism.

Those interests, so the thinking goes, dovetail perfectly with Iran’s interests.  Why, after all, would Iran even want to see a destabilised country right on its border?  So, the United States should be able to come to a deal with Iran on the future of Iraq.  Even if Iran wants to stabilise Iraq in a way that is slightly more advantageous to Iranian interests, the United States can still live with that.

At least that was Obama’s attitude, and the attitude of many of his advisors.  And they believed that Iraq was by no means the only issue on which the United States and Iran had compatible outlooks. Iran also shared with the United States an interest in defeating Sunni radicalism – Al Qaeda and then later ISIS.

This is very important. Since 9/11, many in the US and certainly in the foreign policy elite came to see the defeat of radical Sunni organisations as the number-one priority.

 In the absence of a clear understanding of what US strategy should be, counter-terrorism often trumps every other consideration. The counterterrorism mindset, when taken to an extreme, ignores geostrategic competition among rival powers.  Why can’t the United States find an accommodation with the Iranians and the Russians to defeat the radical Sunni organisations?  We all want the same thing, don’t we?

The major problem with George W. Bush’s foreign policy, as Obama and his cohort saw it, was that it ignored the shared interests with powers like Russia, Iran and Syria.  It created too many enemies in the Middle East. Bush drew a bright red line and said, you are either with us or against us in fighting terrorism, and he put the Iranians and the Syrians on the enemy side of the line.

. But he didn’t stop there.  He then added to the mix his so-called “Democracy Agenda,” once again placing the autocratic Russians on the other side of the red line.

Obama, by contrast, said, “No, no, no, no.  We don’t have to be so categorical about all this.” These are undeniably nasty actors, but we do share interests with them. And if we define our interests more narrowly, as in defeating Sunni terrorism and stabilising the region, well then, we can find common ground to work with the Russians but also the Iranians and the Syrians.

From such thinking did issue the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton Report. It called for pulling the troops out of Iraq, because the war was a mistake to begin with. And it called for reaching out to the Iranians and the Syrians, because they can help us stabilise Iraq.

Now, Obama believed all that.  And he thought that this approach would allow the United States to pull back from the Middle East and avoid further involvement in unwinnable wars. But he still had one big challenge. To put it another way, if your goal is to pull the United States back and, in so doing, come to a compromise with the Iranians about stabilising the region, you still have a big problem, namely, the Iranian nuclear program.

  The American public, much of the American foreign policy elite, and all the key allies of the United States in the region believe that the Iranian nuclear program is a very serious threat to international peace and security. So, if you pick up and leave Iraq and then start cooperating with the Iranians, while doing nothing about their nuclear program, you will have opened yourself to political attack. Obama could not have a functioning partnership or even an accommodation with the Iranians without first doing something about the nuclear program.

That was the thinking that turned the nuclear negotiations with Iran into the centrepiece of the Obama strategy in the Middle East. Obama very cleverly sold the nuclear deal to the American people as a narrow arms control agreement that had no role in a wider regional strategy. When critics claimed that he was actually trying to create a concert system in the Middle East in which the US would work with the Iranians to stabilise the region, the Obama administration would say, “Are you crazy? We’re not trying to do anything like that. We’re simply pursuing an arms control agreement that makes sense in its own terms.”

But Obama’s dream was indeed to work with Iran to stabilise the region. He wanted to park the nuclear dispute to one side so it would not create friction.

That and more. He hoped that the nuclear deal would create a basis, a kind of new model, for how to deal with the Iranians. The deal would prove to Tehran that the United States did not regard relations with it as a zero-sum game.  We did not regard them as an enemy, and we sought to explore the possibility of reaching mutually beneficial arrangements based on a commonality of interest. American leniency toward Iran would engender goodwill in Tehran and thereby generate new opportunities to establish other mutually beneficial accommodations in the future.

While Obama and his officials denied that they saw the nuclear deal as part of a larger rapprochement with Iran, their European partners were less restrained.  They admitted openly that developing warmer relations with Iran was the goal of the joint American-European strategy—and they said it over and over again. The Germans, especially, marched in lockstep with President Obama on this issue and hid none of their hopes for a thaw in relations between the West and Tehran.

But the actions of the Obama administration also belied its words.  Consider, for example, two other steps the Obama team took while negotiating the Iran Nuclear Deal. First, it turned a blind eye to the Iranian and Russian intervention in Syria and to all the killing that intervention generated. Today, we now have over half a million killed in Syria and some 12 million displaced. Most of those are dead or displaced at the hands of the Iranian, Russian and Syrian coalition. But the Obama administration did nothing to deter the coalition. Why? If it had mounted serious opposition, it would have alienated the Iranians and the Russians and risked upsetting the JCPOA negotiations.  Without a nuclear deal, the United States would remain mired in the region, and Obama’s paragraph would be erased.

Secondly, the moment the Obama administration completed the JCPOA, the president and his team brought the Iranians formally into the Syrian negotiations. Clearly, they saw Iran as a partner for stabilising not just Iraq, but Syria too.

So much for the Obama paradigm.  Now let us turn to what I will call the Trump paradigm or better, the Republican paradigm. While Trump’s style is highly diosyncratic, his basic views on the Middle East are mainstream Republican.

The Republicans looked at Obama’s policies toward Iran with horror.  The JCPOA especially mortified them.  The Obama administration, they felt, had revealed to the Iranians that it was desperate to make a deal, even if it meant accepting onerous Iranian terms. As a result, there are, from the Republican point of view, three major problems with the JCPOA.

First, the restrictions the JCPOA places on the Iranian nuclear program are temporary. Some of them last longer, but the meaningful ones last for only a decade, which is not a long time in the life of a nuclear program. These temporary conditions did nothing to convince, for example, the Saudis or the Israelis that Iran had dispensed with its ambitions to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Second, the JCPOA lessened the restrictions in international law on Iran’s ballistic missile program. At the last stage of the negotiation, recognising that the Obama administration was desperate to get a deal, the Iranians demanded that the UN prohibition against their ballistic missiles program must be watered down. As a result, the Security Council stopped demanding that Iran put an end to ballistic missile program and instead began exhorting it to do so.  Legally, there is a big difference between a Security Council command and an exhortation.

Third, the JCPOA turned a blind eye to Iranian imperialism throughout the Middle East. Iran has been building up militias across the region—in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen, all on the model of Hezbollah in Lebanon. In fact, Iran was using Hezbollah to transmit its know-how to these proxies on the ground. The Obama administration turned a blind eye to this spread of Iranian influence in the hopes of courting Iran and turning it into a partner for stability.

The Iranians exploited Obama’s solicitude by expanding their influence. Thus, for example, while the nuclear deal was being negotiated, Iran deepened its intervention in Yemen (with the very results we see before us today).  Tehran was eager to pocket all the gains it could while America was not working to contain it, but it also hoped to prove to the world that the restrictions it had accepted on the nuclear program were not a sign that it was capitulating to America.

When President Trump came into office, he intended to restore deterrence to America’s Iran policy.

 He pledged to counter the Iranians on the ground and, most importantly, to rectify the deficiencies of the nuclear deal.

Before I elaborate further on that point, allow me to note that Trump, for all that he differs from Obama, does share one important quality in common with him. Like Obama, Trump wants his paragraph to say that he kept the Middle East at arm’s length. He, too, does not want to be held responsible for another major US military intervention.

At the same time, however, Trump is committed to containing Iran.  He just doesn’t want to use American ground forces to do the job.

So then how does he hope to succeed? The answer, in a word, is allies. When Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, the first thing he did was make a trip to Saudi Arabia and Israel. And he also started at the same time an effort to improve relations with Erdogan in Turkey.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel are the most significant allies the United States has in the region. They are really the only ones, with the partial exception of the UAE, capable of projecting power beyond their borders. If you know the Middle East, it is very hard to work together with these three powers as members of a coalition, because they do not get along with one another. In addition, they have mismatched capabilities. Having said that, the Israelis and the Saudis do both regard the rise of Iran as an existential threat, and that commonality increases the potential for cooperation between the two.

The Turks, for their part, have a more complex and nuanced relationship with Iran – they are not as hostile to it as the Saudis and the Israelis.  But if Trump can manage to arrest the drift of Turkey away from the West, then he can at least benefit from its sphere of influence.

 The Turks are not opponents of Iran, but wherever Turkish influence is dominant, Iranian influence is weak—and that is a useful thing for the United States if the goal of its policy is to push back against the Iranians.

So, that is basically where we stand with respect to the two different visions that are fighting it out in Washington today. The Obama vision looks at the Middle East as a roundtable, with the United States a sort of the chairman of the board. In the Obama White House, they stopped using the words “allies” and “enemies” when talking about Middle Eastern states.  Instead they talked about “problem sets” and “stakeholders.” So there is, for example, a Syria problem set which you examine and then you ask, “Well now, who are the stakeholders in Syria?” Of course, Iran and Russia are stakeholders, so the job for the United States is to get them around the table and to propose solutions that we might all find mutually advantageous.

 That’s the way to keep the worst elements of the region at bay.

Trump’s view, the traditional Republican view, is that the Middle East is a rectangular table. On one side are America’s traditional allies: Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, to name just some of them. And on the other side are the Iranians, Russians, Hezbollah, and all the other Iranian militias. The goal of the United States in that vision is twofold to elevate the allies of the United States over the Iranian alliance on the other side of the table; and to mediate between the allies on the American side because they do not get along with each other very well.

From 30,000 feet the Trump strategic concept is sound, but its execution is not perfect.

The United States is not really countering Iran on the ground effectively.  The cause of this problem lies in that area of overlap between the Obama and Trump perspectives. Trump, like Obama, is reluctant to deploy the American military, so his ability to counter the Iranians directly is limited to what the allies are willing and able to do. What that means, in practical terms, is that the Israelis are the only ones successfully challenging the Iranians on the ground—specifically, in Syria, where they are very active in carrying out air attacks on Iranian positions.

The Obama administration objected to the Israeli military strikes against Iranian targets.  It took actions behind the scenes to make its objections known to the Israelis while at the same time avoiding a public disagreement with Jerusalem. The Trump administration, by contrast, is openly supportive and this difference has a deterrent effect on the Russians.

But it is still the Israelis who are bearing the brunt of the load and therefore assuming considerable risk.

 The raids sometimes generate friction with the Russians, who are in a military alliance with the Iranians.  In the division of labor between them, the Iranians provide the troops on the ground and the Russians provide the air cover. Thus, when the Israelis strike the Iranians, it can sometimes be deeply embarrassing to Putin.  The Israelis are in regular contact with him, and relations are surprisingly cordial.  But the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is nevertheless relieved to have the United States looming behind him, so that when Putin looks at him he sees not just Israeli power but also American power too. Of course, the Israelis would be even happier if the United States was acting on the ground in Syria in a significant way, against Iran, but that is not going to happen.

The Saudis and Emiratis are also acting against the Iranians on the ground—in Yemen.

The Americans, however, have an ambivalent attitude about that war. They are not as supportive of the Saudis against the Houthis in Yemen as they are of the Israelis against Iran in Syria. This ambivalence is problematic. If we don’t wise up, we are going to find ourselves with a Hezbollah-like organization in Yemen permanently threatening Riyadh with missiles and rockets and permanently threatening Red Sea shipping. The Houthis have already fired on Riyadh and on American and Saudi ships in the Red Sea, so this warning is hardly based on a hypothetical threat.

The Houthis may be the ones pushing the buttons when the rockets are fired, but they are acting under the tutelage of the Iranians. The US has decided so far not to emphasise this point too loudly, because it raises the question as to what it intends to do about it—and Washington is not sure it wants to do much of anything.

There is an analogous problem in Iraq. When Trump took office, he accepted the Obama strategy for defeating ISIS.

 As I said, that strategy was predicated on the notion that Iran can be, if not our ally or partner, at least a power with a common interest in defeating ISIS. So, the US turned a blind eye to the rise of the popular mobilisation units (PMUs) in Iraq which are militias that, to varying degrees, are under the thumb of Iran.

The PMUs played a role in defeating ISIS in Mosul—with the US attacking from the air while the Iranian-backed forces worked from the ground.  The US became, to put it crudely, the air force of Iran. Again, we did not admit to this fact, at times not even to ourselves, because it contradicts our vision of who we are.

But that contradiction still exists—and it is generating some odd situations.  For example, the Israelis, as I noted, have been striking the Iranians in Syria and with some success. Therefore, Iran is now moving capabilities – rockets and missiles – to Iraq, where they are posing a threat to Israel.  The Israelis, however, cannot strike them, because American forces are still present in Iraq. An Israeli attack would cause America problems with its Iraqi friends, who also happen to be friends with the Iranians.

 Although Trump has gone far to eliminate this kind of strategic disfunction, there are nevertheless a number of cases where American policy inadvertently shelters people whom we have otherwise defined as enemies.

Where Trump’s Iran strategy is strongest is in the economic arena. In May 2018, he renounced the JCPOA and re-imposed oil and banking sanctions, and by all indications, they are severely hurting the Iranian regime. But there is no sign it is going to be toppled or “cry uncle” between now and 2020. So, I predict that this general picture won’t change drastically between now and the presidential election in November 2020.

 The contradictions will remain contradictions. The pressure that we are putting on the Iranians, militarily and economically, will also remain in place.  It won’t be until after the election that the Trump administration will consider significant modifications to its existing strategy. And, if Democrat wins, then he or she will take us back to Obama-land.

On that note, please allow me to make a couple of statements about the Arab-Israeli conflict, and then I will open it up for questions.

The key issue on which the two different paradigms clash is Iran. Policy toward Iran is the hinge issue. But the paradigms also have radically divergent understandings of the Arab-Israel conflict and, especially, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I will summarise very quickly. The Democratic or Obama view holds that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is very significant strategically. The major impediment for improving relations between the Israelis and the Palestinians is, moreover Israelis intransigence, especially with respect to settlements on the West Bank.

The Democrats, and particularly the Progressive wing of the party, focus a great deal of attention on Israeli settlements and on depicting the Netanyahu government in Israel as an unacceptable partner for the United States. Now, they may actually believe what they say.  However, they also see that critique as a way of undermining, of delegitimising, one of the most influential actors when it comes to convincing the United States to that Iran is a threat. I speak, of course, of the Israeli prime minister.

Benjamin Netanyahu is extremely influential in America. America listens to him—both the American elite and the public.

 He has a unique status among foreign leaders in America, and his view on Iran runs directly counter to the Obama view. So, the Democratic attacks on him are not just about settlements; they are also, I would say primarily, about Iran. If you can depict Netanyahu as an unacceptable partner for the United States, then you have gone a long way toward delegitimising the Trump view of Iran.

The same is true with respect to Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) of Saudi Arabia. You may have been heard that MBS has done some unpleasant things. There is no doubt about that.

.  But there is also a campaign afoot in Washington to make sure that we never forget that he has done some unpleasant things—and to present them as proof that he is an unacceptable partner to the United States. Those who are stoking the campaign are keenly aware that he is telling the world that Iran is a problem.  They seek, therefore, to silence his voice, and none among them are keener than the former Obama officials, who still hope to base American strategy on a reconciliation with Iran.

The Republican view of the Arab-Israeli conflict is almost a mirror image.  The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from its perspective, is much less significant than the Democrats think. If we got a peace agreement tomorrow between Mahmoud Abbas and Netanyahu, it would not significantly change the position of the United States in the Middle East at all.

The basic balance of power in the region and the challenges that we face would be pretty much the same tomorrow as they were yesterday, even after an agreement.

A peace agreement would only have notable significance for Israel, the Palestinians, Jordan, and Egypt – and with respect to Jordan and Egypt, not even that much influence at all. So, it is actually a rather minor regional problem in the eastern Mediterranean. It has a huge political valence around it for all kinds of cultural, religious, and historical reasons, but this political valence that is out of all proportion to its actual strategic significance.

There is really no way that we can ever bridge these two visions of the Middle East. You have to just make a decision – is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a big deal or not? Is Iran a defensive power or is it an aggressive, hegemonic power? We can argue until we are blue in the face about these issues. I have been doing this for a long time and I usually find that people who think that Iran is defensive cannot be convinced that it is aggressive, and vice versa. We’ll just have to battle this out at the ballot box.