Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Marine One, with President Trump aboard, flies past the Washington Monument, January 9, 2020.
It’s become almost cliché to cite Donald Trump’s 2015 insight—that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s like incredible”—to explain today’s events. But it comes up so often because the intense personal loyalty Trump has received from the Republican base is such a critical influence on the Republican Party and the dynamics of our current political situation. We seldom think of it as a force that could be used for good, however. And right now, the crisis with Iran is showing us what an opportunity Trump has lost to use that loyalty to truly reshape American policy in the Middle East.
When he ran for president, Trump was truly a different kind of Republican, in that he criticized the Iraq War (falsely claiming he had been a fierce opponent of it all along, naturally) and declared his intention not to start any new wars in the Middle East. The nation-building required after you invade and lay waste to a small country a few thousand miles away seemed to strike him as a real drag, requiring not just resources but the attention he’d rather spend on more fun things like building border walls.
Lest he be painted as some kind of wimp by his Republican opponent, Trump adopted the most psychotically bellicose tone he could when it came to foreign affairs, threatening to “bomb the shit out of” ISIS, advocating the use of torture, and saying we should murder the families of suspected terrorists. His voters laughed and cheered.
But little changed with regard to Middle East policy after Trump took office.
Yet he had the critical tool to effect a change, had he tried. It was immediately clear that the loyalty of his base had translated into loyalty from elected Republicans, not so much because they truly worshipped the ground he walked on (though some do) but because they felt their own survival depended on it. Lindsey Graham didn’t transform himself from a hostile critic of Trump to an enthusiastic lickspittle because he realized what a great man the president is. He did it because his South Carolina constituents would stand for nothing else, and it was the best way to forestall a primary challenge from the right.
In state after state and district after district, Republican officeholders know that the only viable course for them is to support Trump no matter where he goes. Trump has also shown that views that the Republican elite believes in fervently, like free trade, are not necessarily shared by the party’s voters.
Which means that pretty much anytime Donald Trump wants, he can change what the Republican Party holds as dogma. If tomorrow he decided to support, say, an increase in the minimum wage, what would happen? There would be some grumbling on the right, but his voters would quickly decide that they supported it all along, and one Republican in Congress after another would proclaim their intention to stand by him in his heroic effort to boost the economy.
So had Trump arrived in office with a well thought out idea of how he’d like to reorient the American posture toward the Middle East, he could have done it. Instead, what we have is a policy that is just as aggressive as that of his predecessors, with the only difference being a reluctance to go all-out and start a new war or two.
But it could have been different. Trump could, for instance, have declared that while Iran has a repressive regime that foments instability as it seeks to enhance its own position as a regional power, it doesn’t actually pose a direct threat to the United States. He might even have said that the United States has no particular interest in taking sides in the ongoing conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, another country with a repressive regime that foments instability as it seeks to enhance its own position as a regional power.
Trump could have challenged the entire presumption of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East, that it is a region so vital to America’s security that we must become militarily involved in every conflict that arises there, maintain a constant military presence in the region, and periodically mount a disastrous invasion.
In other words, Trump could have actually acted on his supposedly “isolationist” impulses.
Whenever Trump talks about the Middle East, his desire to pull away comes through. “We are independent, and we do not need Middle East oil,” he said in his speech last week. That’s a misunderstanding of how global oil markets work, but it still suggests this question: So why do we care so much what happens there, to the point where we’re willing to sacrifice American lives trying to achieve one political outcome over another?
If the Middle East doesn’t demand our constant attention—and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars and who knows how many American lives in the future—because we need to guarantee the flow of oil, and it’s no longer an arena where we’re playing out the Cold War, then why should we care whether Saudi proxies or Iranian proxies prevail in Yemen, or how much influence Iran has over Iraqi politics? If the Iraqi government wants us to leave, why are we saying no? It certainly isn’t because we’re trying to ensure the triumph of freedom and democracy.
The answer is complicated, of course, but Donald Trump doesn’t deal in complexity. And if the most important answer is simply that we’ve been trying to shape the Middle East to our liking for decades so we can’t stop now, that’s just the kind of thing Trump loves to challenge and upend.
So Trump could have looked at the Middle East not as a series of discrete conflicts from which he’d like to extricate us one at a time, but as an area that demanded a fundamental rethinking of the goals and tactics of American foreign policy. There are any number of new visions of that foreign policy he could have embarked on. And it’s not as though he’s resistant to sweeping foreign policy change; he has effectively tried to dismantle the very idea that the United States should be enmeshed in a system of alliances that enable cooperative action.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that Trump would have engineered any kind of withdrawal from the Middle East wisely or competently. Of course he wouldn’t. But he isn’t even trying. Instead, it’s likely that his term will end with our status there pretty much what it was when he began (with the exception of the places where he has made things less stable and more complicated). And it’s hard to argue that anything good has or will come of that.
