Trump has done the worst damage in foreign policy, and Biden won't be easy to fix
In the debate and confrontations that preceded the American elections, Donald Trump and his supporters have spent a lot of effort to strengthen the level of circulation of what in these 4 years has become a mantra: the now former (?) American president would be a anti-militarist leader, who broke with the US warmongering tradition. Many even went so far as to define him as a pacifist, others to actually nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The idea that the president of the first global power can promote peace and at the same time travel daily on the thread of inciting hate speech, or worse, is already fascinating for him. Peace is obviously not a goal to be crossed, as Trump often seems to conceive it, but a transitory condition that depends on maintaining a balance between forces, on the coexistence of different presuppositions, which are continually subject to change. Affirming that an entire religion (Islam) "hates us", or announcing that they are ready to commit war crimes in an enemy country, certainly does not contribute to maintaining these premises.
However, in an age when it seems possible to say everything and the opposite of everything, despite that everything remains perpetually online, it is not surprising that utterances such as those mentioned have been declassified in notes of color, in detail. Or, sometimes, considered as a clue to Trump's sophisticated strategy, which in words makes war - to put pressure or to show off - but in fact makes peace. It therefore seems appropriate to focus on these facts, which like the above statements do not have much to do with the pursuit of peace, and will define Trump's legacy in West Asia and North Africa.
Trump claimed that he is "little loved by the military industrial complex, because they want to go to war, so the companies that sell arms are happy". The detail is that in accusing this military complex he accused himself.
During his presidency, the defense budget increased again; the sale of arms abroad has increased (56 billion in 2018 against 33 in 2016); and, above all, he himself appointed three different defense secretaries who have direct ties to the military industry: first Jim Mattis (General Dynamics), then Pat Shanahan (Boeing) and finally Mark Esper (Raytheon). Nearly half of the senior executives in the Defense Department are tied to military contractors. At the same time, the United States unilaterally abandoned the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF), the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty.
If you stay on the surface, in the dimension where peace is simply the opposite of war, Trump has dealt with the same conflicts that Obama has dealt with, and inheriting the same - Iraq and Afghanistan - that the latter he had inherited from Bush jr. The constant in the Middle East seemed to be the lack of an organic long-term vision, the result of his muscular and mercantile approach to politics, which ended up making the (many) decisions made inconsistent with each other, in the context of an escalation of tensions regional.
In Afghanistan, he negotiated an agreement with the Taliban for the withdrawal of about 3,400 of the 12,000 American soldiers, with the promise to withdraw more if the Taliban - at a new peak of negotiating power and presence in Afghanistan - were to respect certain conditions, such as not to give refuge to jihadist formations. A first step taken enormously late and presented as historic, but which marks an almost twenty-year failure, especially if we consider the price in terms of human lives: 10,000 Afghan civilians killed in 2019, in line with the last six years. In any case, the Taliban announced their endorsement of Trump for the presidential election a few days ago.
Between 2019 and 2020, the United States deployed another 14,000 troops in different theaters, while in Syria - contradicting his own muscular approach - Trump "let it go" to Russia and changed his mind four times about the withdrawal of troops from the north of the country. Country, to then decide to recall the largest contingent just as the Turkish operations against the Kurdish formations began, up to that moment used by the US itself as infantry in the war against Isis.
In Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Somalia in particular, the United States uses drones, which have killed tens of thousands of civilians since the Obama presidency. According to a 2018 report, Obama in the first two years of his presidency launched 186 strikes with drones between Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan; during the same period, Trump ordered 238. Of these, according to the AP, 176 were launched in Yemen (where Obama ordered 154 in eight years), while Amnesty International in March 2019 denounced "a smokescreen of impunity" , speaking not too covertly of war crimes, in reference to the 100 strikes with dozens of civilian victims, carried out in Somalia between 2017 and 2019.
It is perhaps no coincidence that in those days of March Trump had revoked a provision decided by Obama, which required intelligence to report and make public the number of civilians killed in American drone attacks, and to approve the most important operations only with the consent of all security agencies. The following month, Trump vetoed a resolution adopted by Republicans and Democrats to end US involvement in the Saudi ally's war on Yemen, after donating some $ 12.5 billion in military aid to Riyadh a year earlier. - almost the entire defense budget of the regional rival, Iran, which supports the Yemeni Houthi rebels.
Not even 6 months had passed since the massacre of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who in 2017, a critic of the Saudi regime and the intervention in Yemen, had exiled himself to the United States. Arrived at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul for some personal practices, Khashoggi is murdered by agents sent by the heir to the throne Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS), and his body torn to pieces.
Several American senators are asking for measures against Riyadh but Trump, in a press conference on October 18, says: "I know that we are talking about different types of sanctions but the Saudis are spending 110 billion dollars (a figure that later turned out to be false, ed) in military equipment, on things that create jobs in our country ”.
On the other hand, in an electoral rally in 2015, Trump with the air of a businessman said that "I like the Saudis very much, how could I not like them? They buy apartments from me for 40-50 million dollars ”. In confirmation of the joint cover-up of the Khashoggi case, journalist Bob Woodward in January 2020 reported the words of the American president on the responsibilities of MBS: "I saved his ass. I convinced Congress to stop, to let it go ”.
As a seal of the friendship between Trump, MBS and Egyptian President Al Sisi - in Egypt a year earlier Giulio Regeni disappeared, joining the thousands of Egyptian disappearances - the iconic snapshot of the three who simultaneously put their hand on a crystal ball in May 2017, inside the new "Center for the fight against extremism" in Riyadh, the capital of a Kingdom where the Wahhabi literalist interpretation of Islam officially applies, the ideological food of most jihadist organizations .
Donald Trump conceived international relations as business relations and, far from having an interest in progress and peace in the Middle East, he traced it all back to a struggle for domination over the opponents which he willingly "contracted out" to Riyadh, contributing to further geopolitical polarization in the claim to corner Tehran. Consistent with what he had announced in the electoral campaign - and in the suspicion that the decision was made above all to claim choices opposed to Obama, as done with Obamacare, without proposing alternatives.
In May 2018 he unilaterally abandons the historic agreement on Iranian nuclear power reached by Tehran with the 5 + 1 countries, reintroducing pervasive sanctions on the Iranian economy that Mike Pompeo explicitly links to the American desire to ensure that "the regime chooses to listen to us, if not he wants his people to eat ”. The American withdrawal inevitably confirmed all the paranoia of the Iranian regime about Washington's unreliability and bad faith, and will complicate any future agreement. Consequently, Trump's almost friendly attitude towards North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who in the meantime pursues both a long-range missile program and a nuclear program for military purposes, is emblematic.
With Iran, Trump risks sudden military escalation when he decides to assassinate in Baghdad, in January 2020, the Chief of the IRGC Al Quds Forces, the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, fundamental in the war against Isis but the main obstacle to American interests and Saudis in the area, given its influence over anti-American militias active in Iraq. Soleimani is essentially the victim of an attack while in Iraq with a diplomatic passport, at the invitation of the Iraqi government, and is inside a car traveling on the public road of the civilian airport. Consequently, Iraq - whose Parliament after Soleimani's murder voted to withdraw American troops - has never been so "far" from Washington in the past 20 years.
An operation with a media value, rather than a strategic one, also because there are many who argue that Soleimani, by virtue of the aforementioned influence, was paradoxically the only one capable of "disciplining" and bringing together the militias under a central command, which may now be less controllable and animated by a growing share of fanaticism and hatred. That an aggressive approach would be attempted with Iran - which had already paid very little in the past - was understood by some appointments in key roles: John Bolton, Jim Mattis, Mike Pompeo and Michael Flynn (to which Rudy could be added Giuliani) have always been explicit promoters of a coup in Iran.
Similarly Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman (senior adviser, former international negotiator and ambassador to Israel, respectively) are staunch supporters of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and at various levels involved in what has been termed the "deal of the century ”(where a“ deal ”requires at least two parties to agree), ie a plan by Trump and Netanyahu to institutionalize the Bantustanization of the Palestinian territories, as well as legitimize Israeli unilateralism.
The "deal" was rejected by the Palestinian authorities and has polarized civil society even more, which in 2018 had already experienced the humiliation of the proclamation of Jerusalem as the indivisible capital of Israel and that of the move of the American embassy from Tel Aviv, without forgetting the cut in funds that Washington allocated to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
Just as the "deal of the century" attempts to formalize apartheid and legalize the factual reality of the Israeli neocolonial project, becoming a sad and dangerous diplomatic failure, the "Abrahamic agreements" are in a certain sense a consequence of this failure , and follow the same logic: the "normalizations", mediated by the US, between Israel and some Gulf States (Bahrain, United Arab Emirates), to which was then added that with Sudan (not without blackmail by Washington), they do nothing but write down reports that for years had been based on collaboration and the strategic alliance in an anti-Iranian function.
From the media point of view, a clumsy attempt to convince the world that Israel "makes peace" with the "Arab countries". Who, having long since abandoned the Palestinian cause, in signing these agreements end up supporting the goodness of the “deal of the century” itself, exacerbating tensions both with Iran itself and with the civil societies of other Arab countries.
By inverting the terms of the famous phrase of the Roman writer Vegetio, it could almost be argued that these "peace agreements" have the ultimate function of preparing and making a war more likely in the medium term. A horizon that Trump - morbidly hostile to any step taken by the previous administration, opposed to multilateralism and supporter of a new form of exceptionalism - never seems to have considered.
