Hope and change. These words have been the trademark of the Barack Obama administration since the days of its electoral campaign. In what became known as the Yes, We Can Speech, presidential candidate Obama declared: “Yes, we can, to justice and equality. Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.” Besides characterizing Barack Obama’s statements, ideas of hope and change also dominated campaign ads, bumper stickers, T-shirts, and pins. The leitmotif of the Obama team’s public rhetoric was one emphasizing its willingness to represent a turning point from the previous George W. Bush administrations. 1
On 4 June 2009, standing before a predominantly Muslim audience at Cairo University, Egypt, President Obama stated:
I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo […] We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world […] [T]ension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam […] This has bred more fear and mistrust […] This cycle of suspicion and discord must end […] I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect. 2
The Cairo Speech will probably be remembered as the most famous example of President Obama’s public commitment to set a new beginning with the Muslim world. However, Obama’s public outreach to Muslim communities started before his signature speech in Cairo. In January 2009, during his Inaugural Address, the US president had already notified Muslims that the USA would “seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” After that, two months later in Ankara, while addressing the Turkish Parliament, President Obama declared: “The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam […] We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect. We will listen carefully, we will bridge misunderstandings, and we will seek common ground. We will be respectful, even when we do not agree.” Upon taking office, the US president had openly committed his administration to mend the (mis)perceptions existing between the USA and the Muslim world. The primary goal of this research is to investigate whether the first Obama administration succeeded or not in setting a new beginning in US–Muslim relations. More to the point, we are going to assess the extent to which President Obama’s foreign policy represented a paradigm shift in the traditional US foreign policy toward the Muslim world. 3
In Cairo, along with promising to set a new beginning, Obama also acknowledged that previous US foreign policies toward the Muslim world had spawned fear and mistrust and had generated a cycle of suspicion and discord. The findings of two different 2007 survey polls showed the degree of suspicion and discord that existed at the time between Americans and Muslims around the world. The first survey, on Muslims’ attitudes toward the USA, revealed that an average of 75.5 % of respondents in Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia (four predominantly Muslim countries) had a negative view of the US government; 79 % of respondents thought a US foreign policy goal was to weaken and divide Islam; and 64 % believed that the USA wanted to spread Christianity in the Middle East. The second survey investigated the attitudes of Americans toward Muslims and Islam. According to its findings, 35 % of Americans (up from 29 % in 2002) had a negative view of Muslims; a plurality of 45 % believed that Islam encouraged violence more than other religions (39 % disagreed with such a statement); and when asked to describe their impression of Islam in a single word, 40 % of respondents chose the word “fanatical.” This was the distinctly ill-relationship between the USA and the Muslim world President Obama inherited when he took office. 4
Obama’s message of hope and change was warmly welcomed by domestic and international public opinions alike. Domestically, the US public gave him an initial approval rating of 68 %; placing Obama near the top of the list of the US presidents elected after World War II (WWII) (at the same level of President Dwight Eisenhower and only behind President John Kennedy, who obtained a higher rating of 72 %). Internationally, the Nobel Committee awarded Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009, notably only a year after his inauguration. Moreover, Barack Obama’s election to the US presidency had a positive effect on the image of the USA around the globe. A noticeable exception was that of the Muslim world where the US image showed very little signs of improvement. However, even in Muslim countries where the USA remained usually unpopular, significant percentages of the people polled expressed personal confidence in the newly elected US president. For example, in Egypt and Jordan, where the favorable ratings of the USA were only at 27 and 25 %, respectively, 42 and 31 % of the respondents to a 2009 poll said they were confident President Obama would “do the right thing in world affairs.” 5
How did President Obama manage to raise such high expectations? Why did his message have such strong appeal?
Certainly, change and hope are common features of electoral campaigns, not only in the USA but all over the world. Almost every candidate to a political office is ready to criticize the policies of his or her predecessors and to pledge to be different, although they often end up following very similar paths. Whatever the ability of a politician to be different, words of change and hope hold an especially solid grip in times of crisis. A country may perceive a crisis when it is experiencing a serious challenge to its military might, to its economic power, or to the integrity of its fundamental values. As of 2008, the USA was experiencing a mixture of them all. The long and costly military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq showed the limits of the US capability to undertake two simultaneous regional armed conflicts. US economic supremacy was increasingly challenged by both new competitors (especially China) and a huge and growing federal debt. The US image as the most efficient model of economic development had been tarnished by the global financial crisis that many observers saw as primarily American made. Finally, some policies of the G.W. Bush’s Global War on Terror, as for example the use of interrogation techniques considered by many as torture, were deeply at odds with the perception of the USA as the global champion of democracy and human rights. Meanwhile, the international community was also experiencing a time of crisis. Indeed, as argued by academic John Gaddis, the administrations of G.W. Bush thought the necessary response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the USA was a “shock and awe” strategy aimed at shaking up the very foundations of the international system. However, Gaddis continued, such a strategy had not included a necessary “reassurance” part intended to put the pieces of the international system back into place. Additionally, in 2008, the world had just started to witness what would eventually be a long period of marked global economic decline, referred to by some as the Great Recession. Given such a gloomy picture, it is little wonder that promises like we can heal this nation and we can repair this world were enthusiastically welcomed. 6
Nevertheless, simply assuming that the eight years of the G.W. Bush presidency were entirely responsible for the grim situation would be both morally unjust and scientifically inaccurate. Particularly, the tension President Obama referred to in the Cairo Speech was the result of several decades, and not years, of US foreign policies toward the Muslim world.
When it comes to foreign policy, in fact, US presidents have always wrestled to find an acceptable balance between the protection of the strategic national interest and the promotion of the ideal national interest. Although both constitute the US national interest broadly defined, the history of the USA is punctuated by examples where the pursuit of strategic interests—realist and socio-economic ones—conflicted with the advancement of ideal interests—values and ideas. 7 There is an extensive literature supporting the view that such a conflict has been especially evident, although not unique, in the case of the US foreign policy toward the region of the Greater Middle East. 8 According to former US Ambassador Mark Indyk et al., when dealing with the Greater Middle East “every [US] president since Franklin Roosevelt has struck that balance in favor of the [strategic] national interest, downplaying the promotion of America’s democratic values because of the region’s strategic importance.” Similarly, Middle East expert Kenneth Pollack noticed that “in the Middle East, Washington set [the promotion of ideal interests] aside, both because it feared that their application to the Middle East would produce Arab States inimical to American interests and because we [the USA] always had immediate concerns in the region that required the cooperation of America’s [autocratic] Arab allies.” 9
At least two assumptions about the promotion of US ideal interests in the Greater Middle East lie behind the US tendency to support autocratic regimes rather than backing democratic reforms in the region. 10
The first assumption is that more democratic political systems in the Greater Middle East will eventually empower public opinions largely hostile to US policies, and, consequently, make US cooperation with Middle Eastern governments much more difficult. For a long time, in fact, the USA pursued Middle East policies that were highly unpopular among local populations; text-book examples are the longstanding US unconditional support for Israel and the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Successive US administrations were effective in advancing such unpopular foreign policies while maintaining collaborative relations with autocratic Middle Eastern rulers. US officials feared that more democratic political systems could have the negative effect, from a US perspective, of creating Middle Eastern leaderships more responsive to local public opinions and less accommodating to US preferences. The second assumption about democracy in the Greater Middle East concerns the implicit belief among US policymakers that Muslims and Islam are somehow incompatible with democracy. Jeane Kirkpatrick, US ambassador to the United Nations (UN) in the early 1980s, made this untold assumption public when she reportedly said: “The Arab world is the only part of the world where I have been shaken in my conviction that if you let people decide, they will make fundamentally rational decisions. But there, they do not make rational decisions, they make fundamentalist ones.” The fact that, over time, Islamist movements became the most popular oppositions to the autocratic regimes of the Greater Middle East only reinforced concerns in the USA about Muslims’ incompatibility with democracy. Meanwhile, local rulers skillfully nurtured and used US fears for their own benefit. They systematically warned US policymakers that the only alternative to their pro-West (although undemocratic) rule would be the rise to power of anti-West Islamic fundamentalists. Therefore, successive US administrations, deeply wary of Islamic fundamentalism, found it convenient to support autocratic, but friendly, regimes over democracy promotion. Of course, not all US officials accepted the two previous assumptions as the best conceptual lenses through which the USA should view democracy in the Greater Middle East. Many area experts and diplomatic personnel in the field repeatedly tried to provide a more nuanced analysis of the complex realities of the region. However, their views generally failed to gain traction among US policymakers. As a result, from the end of WWII, the USA pursued a Middle East policy that favored the maintenance of cordial relations with autocratic regimes over the promotion of democratic reforms; at least when the former was perceived in Washington as being instrumental to protect US strategic interests in the region. 11
Perhaps unexpectedly, it was precisely the first G.W. Bush administration that represented an exception, although brief, to this default position. In November 2003, President G.W. Bush stated:
Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo. 12
Two years later, during a trip to Egypt, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reaffirmed the same concept: “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Throughout the Middle East the fear of free choices can no longer justify the denial of liberty.” Despite the initial enthusiasm, the G.W. Bush administration rapidly abandoned its so-called Freedom Agenda when faced with Islamist electoral gains in Egypt and Palestine; in particular after the Islamist group Hamas, deemed a terrorist organization by the White House, won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and formed a distinct government in the territory of the Gaza Strip. Disillusioned by events in Egypt and Palestine, the G.W. Bush administration reverted to the more familiar policy of favoring the protection of US strategic interests over the promotion of US ideal interests. 13
As a consequence, the US policy toward the Greater Middle East has been ...