Alliances and Power Politics in the Trump Era

America In Retreat?

Maud Quessard, Frédéric Heurtebize, Frédérick Gagnon, Maud Quessard, Frédéric Heurtebize, Frédérick Gagnon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030372576
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030372583
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Gobierno estadounidense

This volume examines the evolution of US foreign policy since Donald Trump's accession to the presidency and the strategic challenges confronting the United States in a changing geopolitical environment. Trump has delivered on his promises to break with past policies and this has, for the most part, revealed a policy of retrenchment that has jeopardized US alliances. The book focuses on the current state and future of transatlantic relations, on Washington's policy in the Middle East and Africa, on the administration's use of the economic weapon in international relations, but also on the American response to the return of great power competition in the face of an assertive China and resurgent Russia. The contributions gather the inputs of a transatlantic community of scholars combining academics, think-tank fellows, former policy-makers and administration officials from both sides of the Atlantic.

America’s Retreat in the Middle East and Africa

© The Author(s) 2020

M. Quessard et al. (eds.)Alliances and Power Politics in the Trump Erahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37258-3_5

Begin Abstract

“If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem”

Antoine Coppolani¹

(1)

History Professor, University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, France

Antoine Coppolani

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

The least one can say is that President Donald J. Trump has not forgotten Jerusalem, or Israel, since his election in November 2016. In a few months, he took multiple decisions in favor of the Hebrew state. While his predecessors had steadfastly refused to do so, he moved the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In that same month of May 2018, he announced the US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed in Vienna on July 14, 2015, a move which was a top priority for the Israeli government. President Trump also announced the closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization mission in Washington and the end of US funding to the United Nations Reliefs and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

This series of decisions raises questions about Trump’s approach to the Middle East, and its implications for the region. With great fanfare, the Trump administration announced the conclusion of the “deal of the century,” the so-called “ultimate deal” which would bring peace to the Middle East and would return the Promised Land to the land of milk and honey. In reality, it seems to be only a pretext for the time being, for another of Trump’s strategic objectives: to reassure Israel, and to ease tensions between the Hebrew state and the Sunni states. And maybe to strike another “deal of the century”, a new “Strategic Alliance in the Middle East,” reminiscent of the 1955 Baghdad Pact. The difference being that this alliance could eventually include Israel, formally or informally.

How could this miracle be accomplished? By removing the Palestinian question, but also through fear of a common enemy: Iran, whose “Axis of Resistance” and land route linking it to the Mediterranean are a cause for concern for both the Israelis and the Sunni Gulf States.

A “Deal of the Century” as Improbable … as It Is Useful

To some extent, Kissinger’s famous maxim about Israel—“Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic policy considerations”—applies to Donald J. Trump.¹ At first glance, the American President has little interest in the Middle East, apart from domestic policy considerations. Trump ran on a program of “America First” that leaves little room for an interventionist Middle East policy. According to his entourage, quoted by Adam Entous in a feature for the New Yorker, Trump views the Middle East as a source of trouble, in every sense of the word, and has no firm philosophical outlook on what has been happening there for centuries.² The immediate priority, in Trump’s mind, would be not to intervene or even to disengage. This was confirmed after he came to power. For example, according to Martin Indyk, on April 13, 2018, when Trump announced very limited French, British, and American missile strikes against chemical weapons installations in Syria, the American president was in fact outlining a Trump doctrine for the Middle East. This doctrine, according to him, is indeed that of relative disengagement. Better (or worse) still, according to Indyk, Trump is following in Barack Obama’s footsteps: the doctrine of “leading from behind” has never been so relevant! “No amount of American blood or money can build lasting peace and security in the Middle East, it is a troubled place,” Trump declared.³

With respect to the Arab–Israeli conflict, the first declarations made by Trump during the election campaign gave a similar impression. At the end of 2015, he addressed an audience that in theory should have been his: the Coalition of Jewish Republicans. However, instead of cheers, his speech provoked some mockery and even booing. It is true that there was uneasiness from the outset, when he addressed the Jews present, regarding Iran, proclaiming that he was an outstanding negotiator, just like them.⁴ Tensions continued to rise: booing broke out as Trump refused to comment on the indivisibility of Jerusalem as the capital of the Hebrew state. While he agreed that Israel made many sacrifices in past efforts to achieve peace, he said he didn’t know whether it was really determined to make peace, to take the last step, at the cost of additional sacrifices. The same was true of the Arabs, as Trump admitted that he knew very little about their leaders and did not work with them.

Donald Trump’s relations with Israel and the American Jewish community warmed considerably when he delivered his speech to the AIPAC in March 2016. A speech summarized by his repetition of “I love Israel.”⁵ In the same speech, Trump indicated that his priority would be Iran. With his usual modesty, he claimed to have studied the Iran issue in “great detail” (“I would say actually greater by far than anybody else”). His conclusions? Iran, a sponsor of international terrorism, was rewarded with 150 billion dollars, while giving little in return. He therefore stated as his top priority his desire to “dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran,” laying out a three-point plan. First, to oppose Iran’s attempts to dominate and destabilize the region, from Syria to Yemen, through the Golan Heights (where he accused the Iranians of trying to open a new front against Israel) and Gaza (where he accused Iran of supporting Hamas and Islamic Jihad). Secondly, he promised to annihilate the international terror networks set up by Iran. Finally, before dismantling the nuclear deal, he pledged to enforce it strictly, more than ever before. He referred to the specific issue of Iran’s ballistic missile capability, which in his view had increased since the signing of the JCPOA. Indeed, the issue of ballistic missiles is an undeniable weakness of the JCPOA. For this reason, the United States insisted that the UN Security Council adopt Resolution 2231 on July 20, 2015, a few days after the signing of the agreement; it includes certain elements of previous resolutions, and specifically establishes a provisional ban (eight years) on Iran’s work in the field of nuclear delivery systems and imposes a five-year moratorium on the delivery of conventional weapons to Tehran.⁶

During the election campaign, Trump gave the impression that he did not have a specific policy on the Arab–Israeli conflict. Indecision, incompetence, lack of interest, or on the contrary, “constructive ambiguity”? It is difficult to decipher which; perhaps all of them combined. In any case, at the Republican Jewish Coalition, in December 2015, he expressed his wish to act as an impartial mediator. A few months later, at a campaign meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, he refrained from assigning responsibility for the conflict and its impasse to either side, saying he wanted to play the role of the “neutral guy.”⁷ However, this stance was in itself, confusing. On the one hand, as Aaron David Miller wrote, the myth of the “honest broker,” the role that the United States could or should play in the search for peace in the Middle East, is long gone. The United States has tended to become, on the contrary, “Israel’s lawyer.”⁸ On the other hand, not concerned about contradicting himself, Trump, on other campaign stops, did not hesitate to place the historical responsibility for the failure of negotiations on the Palestinians. Affirming that Israel had agreed to sit at the negotiating table without preconditions for years, and saying that at Camp David in 2000, Ehud Barak made “an incredible offer, maybe even too generous,” which Arafat rejected—an offer that was repeated in 2008, when Ehud Olmert had made an equally generous proposition. As for Secretary of State Kerry’s proposals, according to Trump, Mahmoud Abbas did not even bother responding to them.⁹

Significantly, thanks in particular to the efforts of two of Trump’s close advisors, Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman, the Republican Party had adopted a platform that no longer referred to a two-state solution in the Middle East, a few days before at its convention in Cleveland, Ohio. The text was resolutely pro-Israeli and excluded the imposition of any solution on Israel. Trump tweeted that the platform was “the most pro-Israel of all time,” and he was probably not wrong.¹⁰ Four years earlier, the same party’s platform had proposed the creation of two democratic states, existing side by side in peace and security: a Jewish state with secure and defensible borders, Israel with Jerusalem as its capital, and Palestine. The change that occurred at the beginning of 2016 actually reversed the developments of the last quarter-century: the two-state solut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• Strained Alliances
• America’s Retreat in the Middle East and Africa
• Power Competition in the 21st Century
• The End of Trade Multilateralism and the Impact of Economic Warfare on Alliances
• Back Matter