Trump and the Middle East: 'Barking Dogs Seldom Bite'.

• Author: Krieg, Andreas
• Position: ARTICLE

ABSTRACT In drafting its Middle East policy, the Trump administration appears to depart from the soft power rhetoric of the Obama years, seemingly favoring a more hawkish, hard power approach to dealing with America's most important interests in the region: the defeat of ISIS and the containment of Iran. While many regional partners hope for a radical U.S. foreign policy shift after years of perceived American disengagement, Trump seems to be constrained by path dependency. He inherits a region in turmoil, a public adverse to regional military engagements for peripheral interests, and a major strategic discrepancy between ambition and capability. Consequently, the new White House will be forced to continue Obama's policy of delegation and multilateralism.

Introduction

When the 45th President of the United States was sworn in after a lengthy, heated, and highly emotional campaign, few commentators and analysts in the West believed that Donald Trump had the personality, expertise, or experience to lead the most powerful country in the world. In the Middle East, however, policy makers and commentators were ironically less critical of the business tycoon from New York who had repeatedly lashed out verbally at Arabs and Muslims alike. Despite this rhetorical abuse, Middle Easterners from Egypt over the Levant to the Gulf hoped that a more hawkish and militaristic U.S. President would bring an end to Obama's policy of multilateral retrenchment, soft power diplomacy, and indecisive overseas commitments.

After a hundred days in office, however, it remains to be seen to what extent Trump can actually meet these expectations. Without a clearly formulated foreign policy strategy, and hampered by an overreliance on the Pentagon and a disintegrating State Department, the Trump administration has so far been unable to show any sign of radically rewriting U.S. policy in the Middle East. Quite the contrary, Trump seems to return to old American orthodoxies in the region: embracing the myth of authoritarian stability, as well as an almost unconditional support of Israel and the Arab Gulf amid a containment policy against Iran. This policy unfolds against the backdrop of the Obama legacy, which had "rightsized" America's role in the Middle East, leaving local partners and allies widely to their own devices to solve their own problems.

Obama had realized that in an apolar, globalized world, no one state could shape the conflicts that have widely become privatized with state and non-state actors operating in a transnational sphere. In a post-Realist anarchy of warlords, war profiteers, terrorists and rebel groups, even the United States with its overwhelming firepower is unable to dominate international affairs, which have become more and more unpredictable and uncontrollable. Obama entered office realizing that in this new era, the lack of a tangible antagonist exposed the formulation of a national security strategy to subjective securitization, whereby threats were no longer constructed on the basis of palpable evidence of intent and capability, but instead based on risks. U.S. foreign and security policy had become an exercise in risk management, whereby in conflicts of choice across the globe the president had to trade off the political risks of inaction against those of overreaction. The consequences of trying to mitigate the unknown within a global sphere of uncertainty confronted the president with a paradoxical reality in which the lines between rationality and hysteria became blurred. The American public developed an ever higher demand for security, while at the same time displaying an ever growing aversion to overseas commitments and casualties. Consequently, Obama, aware of the intellectual challenge of establishing a link between military engagement overseas and national security at home, limited the United States' military footprint in the Middle East. (1)

In this paper, I argue that the Trump administration's posture in the Middle East will largely be defined by path dependency (2) rather than radical policy shifts. The reason is that first, Trump inherits a weakened region largely left to its own devices by the Obama administration. In Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, the United States has few options left to actively shape the outcome of these conflicts, in part because the surrogates and proxies Obama had employed were unable to hold their ground against their Russian and Iranian counterparts. Second, the new administration has so far responded to growing regional uncertainties with unpredictability and lack of a coherent strategy. An 'America First' policy, though not necessarily isolationist, when applied to the Middle East means that only vital U.S. interests will be secured, most notably against global jihadism and Iran. Third, the United States has forfeited its hegemony as the last superpower amid an increasingly anarchic transnational context where conventional military power is unable to contain the various risks and threats emanating from an ever longer list of contenders. The Trump administration faces huge gaps between ambition, intention, and capability in the new global reality of the 21st century. The overreliance on hard power proposed by the new White House will be unable to secure America's interests in the region in what appears to be a lack of credible soft power engagement.

Obama's Legacy in the Middle East

Like Donald Trump, Barack Obama was under the burden of the legacy his predecessor left behind. A financial crisis, an extraordinary budgetary deficit, and a tainted foreign policy reputation weighted heavy on Obama when he assumed office in 2009. (3) He had won the campaign inter alia with the promise to end the highly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while ensuring that the United States would not get pulled back into the quagmires of the Middle East. Unlike the Bush administration, Obama was adamant that the U.S. needed to "rightsize" its commitments overseas due to lack of funds, public willpower, and a capacity to fight 'everywhere wars.' (4) Instead, Obama's weapon of choice was supposed to be America's soft power: protecting U.S. values and interests in cooperation with local and regional partners. 'Multilateral retrenchment' meant that he had "to curtail the United States' overseas commitments, restore its standing in the world, and shift burdens onto global partners." (5)

According to this worldview, the U.S. would always prefer the diplomatic over the military lever of power. (6) Obama imagined the U.S.' engagement with the Middle East to be founded on mutual understanding and respect. In his famous Cairo speech, he delivered a clear message that the United States were partners and friends of the Muslim world who could rely on each other. America's impact on the region was supposed to be increasingly transformational, i.e. leveraged with the proverbial carrot rather than a stick. (7) In Obama's idealist remarks in Cairo, references to cultural relativism, the promotion of human rights, liberalization and democratization were on the forefront. (8)

Obama accepted that despite being the most powerful country in the world, the United States could not be more than a primus inter pares in an anarchic, globalized world. Any intervention, whether military or diplomatic, would require the consent and support of regional partners. The 2015 National Security Strategy stated that "the threshold for military action is higher when our interests are not directly threatened. In such cases, we will seek to mobilize allies and partners to share the burden and achieve lasting outcomes." (9)

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Burden sharing, or the externalization of the burden of warfare to partners and local surrogates, became a key feature of an increasingly pragmatist foreign policy approach to the Middle East. (10) Obama's initial aversion to commit to the region was challenged by the reality of the unfolding crises during the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS. Obama realized that he had to respond, but without vital interests concerned, any response had to be measured and delivered with the smallest U.S. footprint possible. He asserted in a 2015 press conference that, "ultimately, it's not the job of ... the United States to solve every problem in the Middle East. The people in the Middle East are going to have to solve some of these problems themselves." (11)

Leading from behind proved to be highly ineffective, however, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets in late 2010 calling for more socio-economic security and political liberalization. Overwhelmed by the events, the Obama administration failed to deliver on its promise to become a driver for sociopolitical transformation in the region. When Middle Easterners called for U.S. leadership, Obama was unwilling to grant more than moral support. Only in Libya, where intervention appeared cheap and protestors well organized, did the Obama White House allow for a limited, multilateral military intervention. (12) The operation was short, did not involve American ground troops, and widely relied on the support of NATO and Arab partners who were unable to assume the leadership void that Obama had left.

In Egypt and Syria, the administration applied "salami tactics," waiting to see how events on the ground would evolve. (13) Obama lacked a decisive strategy providing the administration and its agencies with a clear vision of how to transform a region shaped by authoritarianism into one more responsive to communal and individual interests. Washington's indecisiveness, both in terms of rhetoric and action, provided others with a momentum they could exploit. Obama's unwillingness to enforce "redlines" beyond the use of diplomacy had a particularly detrimental impact on events in Syria. Russia and Iran could maneuver with impunity, becoming complicit in the atrocities committed by the Assad regime, while U.S. partners such as Turkey...