![]() ![]() All this was accompanied by the ominous, all-too-familiar mutterings of regime change emanating from secretary of state Mike Pompeo and hawkish national security adviser John Bolton. The leading state sponsor of terrorism and accused of being ‘murderous’. So, when withdrawing from the nuclear deal, Team Trump talked in language redolent of the liberal interventionism that had led the US into catastrophic wars in the Middle East and beyond. The Trump administration’s antagonism towards Iran captures well the degree to which Trump, for all his supposed audacity, has remained in thrall to the US foreign-policymaking establishment, throbbing as it is with the interventionist impulse. The extent, that is, to which Trump has continued in the long US foreign-policy tradition of fearing and scapegoating China hating and antagonising the Iranian regime and, above all, using foreign policy as a means to project the US’s, and with it the president’s, world-shaping moral mission – or ‘shouldering the burden of global order’, as arch liberal interventionist Robert Kagan put it. And, perhaps most damaging of all, Trump has waged a verbal and trade war against China, continuing what his predecessor Barack Obama began with his administration’s so-called pivot to Asia from 2009 onwards, which was really a pivot away from China.īut then that is what has been characteristic of the worst aspects of the US’s foreign policy under Trump - namely, the extent to which it has been a continuation of what had gone before. Trump has also immersed the US deeper in its decades-long animus towards Iran, abandoning the nuclear deal in the summer of 2018 and then, a year-and-a-half later, ordering the execution-by-drone of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. It effectively greenlit Turkey’s attack on the US’s one-time allies, the Kurds – a brutal betrayal of precisely those who had given so much to roll back and defeat ISIS. The decision, at the behest of NATO ally Turkey, to withdraw troops from northern Syria was unforgivable. ![]() This is not to suggest Trump is some sort of President of Peace, or that his reign has been an unqualified success. ![]() No despotic states reduced to failure and civil war. But there have been no significant conflagrations. Sure, there have been photo-ops with North Korea’s tinpot dictator Kim Jong-un, bellicose outbursts on Twitter, and a shameful escalation of drone strikes on overseas targets. Indeed, Team Trump’s foreign-policy approach, as capricious and vainglorious as it has sometimes been, has lacked, well, drama. But nevertheless, it does seem that at the end of Trump’s first and possibly only term in office, he has brought a measure of stability to the region. And the establishment of peaceable relations between hitherto antagonistic states might simply deepen and exacerbate tensions elsewhere in the Middle East, as Iran moves to counter what looks like the creation of an anti-Iranian bloc. The Palestian one being the most prominent. Make no mistake, it would be quite an achievement for Trump to broker the normalisation of relations between Israel and its Gulf-state neighbours after decades of animosity. ![]()
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