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The Transitions in America, the World, and the Middle East
Remarks to the McLean Foreign Policy Group
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, the Watson Institute for International and
Public Affairs, Brown University
6 December 2016, Washington, D.C.
On January 20,
Donald Trump will become the 45th
president of the United States.
He will confront a changed world.
We are only two-fifths of the way through the interval between the election
and the inauguration, but the ebb in deference to American global leadership is
already unmistakable. It is likely
irreversible.
Both the
primaries and the general election paved the way for this. For two years, the American political elite
shamelessly paraded its xenophobic ignorance, venality, incivility,
militarism, intolerant religiosity, and smug indifference to the
casualties of U.S. foreign interventions before an increasingly dismayed global
audience. The net effect was to raise
serious doubts about the fitness of American democracy to continue making
decisions for the rest of the world. The
outcome of the election has compounded these doubts.
Whatever you
think of Mr. Trump, our president-elect is distinguished by no history of
public service or considered foreign or domestic policy judgments, no
embarrassment about pandering to popular prejudices, and no commitment to
existing U.S. international relationships.
Americans may be prepared to gamble that a leader with these characteristics
can make our country “great again,” but – for the most part – the world is
not. It is now preemptively writing down
its expectations of the United States and preparing to go its own way.
In fairness to
President-elect Trump, he can’t do much about this yet. He is busy putting together his team. So far, it consists of plutocrats, retired
generals, right-wing propagandists, his own children and in-laws, and a
mainstream Republican or two. Neither Mr.
Trump nor any of his current or prospective appointees, with the notable exception
of General Mattis, is known for reflection on statecraft and diplomacy. Those with experience abroad have gained it
by making war on Muslims in the Middle East.
None has experience with Asia, now the world’s center of economic
gravity.
No one, very
likely including the president-elect himself, knows where he and his team will
take America and the world. We must all
wait and see, hope for the best, and do what we eventually can to help the
Trump administration succeed in managing our nation’s affairs. But, while we wait, international willingness
to follow the United States’ lead will continue to slip.
Uncertainty
allows drift, and drift alters the geometry of power. There is a sense abroad that America no
longer intends to give even lip service to the rules it helped compose and that
Americans will exempt ourselves from
participation in collective responses to international challenges. Lack of confidence in future U.S. policies
has already undercut America’s traditional preeminence in global
governance. In the growing leadership
vacuum, China has moved to position itself as the new global spokesman for
action on climate change, further liberalization of trade and investment
regimes, and reinvigoration of the world economy. Many now point to Germany as America's successor
as the exemplar and defender of democracy, human, and civil rights.
US-China
military antagonism continues to grow.
Fears of a global trade war are rising.
Even before American populism kneecapped the TPP,[1]
decisions by the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand had hamstrung the muscle-bound
military leg of America's so-called “pivot to Asia.” Others, even Australia, are now visibly
hedging politically, militarily, and economically against a future regional
order centered on China. Japan and south
Korea are preparing for diminished reliance on American military
protection. Some, though not all, of
these changes might be turned to U.S. advantage. But what is happening in trans-Pacific
geopolitics will clearly make it harder for the incoming administration to
reshape U.S. foreign relations to the benefit of American prosperity and
well-being.
Similar
slippage is evident in Europe. Russia
has pushed back against U.S. efforts to hem it in, rejected subordination in an American-led world order, and turned
southward to the Levant and eastward to China, Japan, and Korea. Ukraine’s future geopolitical orientation is
hard to predict. Brexit has set Britain
adrift and deprived Washington of London’s usually helpful voice in the
European Union (EU). For the first time
since World War II, Europeans are engaged in serious discussion of collective
defense arrangements that would not depend on the United States. Turkey has accepted that it has been spurned
by the EU and has made up with Russia.
It is talking about associating itself somehow with Mr. Putin’s proposed
Eurasian Economic Union, China, or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
If you’re not
at the table, you’re on the menu.
European decisions about relations with Russia, West Asia, and North
Africa are now often made in councils in which America is unrepresented. The Russians and Turks have begun holding
peace talks with U.S.-backed Syrian rebels.
No Americans are involved.
This brings me
to the Middle East, where the United States is currently engaged in cold wars
with Iran and Russia and directly or indirectly in hot wars in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Palestine, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Some people close to the president-elect have
argued that we should declare that we are at war with Islam. An expanding swath of the Muslim world is in
fact being subjected to U.S. drone warfare.
No one knows whether America will now pursue conflict or rapprochement
with Iran, criticize or court the Saudis, halt or redouble efforts to promote
violent regime change in Syria, cooperate with or oppose Russia and Turkey, or
stand with or against the Kurdish enemies of the Turks.
How does the
Trump administration plan to deal with Daesh (the misnamed “Islamic State”) as
it loses territory and its warriors disperse?
Will the United States retain or give up its longstanding insistence on
resolving the Israel-Palestine problem before relocating our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem? Will we embrace or distance ourselves from
the potentially explosive autocracies of Egyptian President Sisi or Turkish
President Erdoğan? There are a lot of
policies and relationships that require urgent review and revision.
What the United
States decides and does about the many issues in the Middle East is likely to
determine America’s standing not just in that region but globally. U.S. policies must take account of the
region’s roles in the world economy, global identity politics, and national
security. And all of these are in rapid
evolution. Business as usual won’t work
in such an environment.
Persian Gulf
and other OPEC member governments now influence but no longer determine supply
levels and set prices in global energy markets. Saudi Arabia has become the swing producer
in OPEC but not in world markets. The global
swing producer is now a mutually competitive class of mostly small and
medium-sized U.S. companies engaged in fracking. Their decisions are driven by demand levels
and interest rates, not politics or government budgetary requirements.
This promises
to dampen price volatility. It will not
diminish the importance to global prosperity of uninterrupted flows of oil and
gas from the Persian Gulf. But the fact
that energy production levels are now driven by markets rather than government
policies gives energy-importing countries less reason to court Middle Eastern
governments. At the same time, it is
forcing those governments to risk instability by attempting the radical reform of
their political economies.
The risks inherent
in change are exacerbated by the fact that Islam has entered a state of internecine
warfare that is reminiscent of the Thirty Years’ War in Christendom four
centuries ago. In some parts of the
Muslim world, sectarian identity has become a matter of life or death. Who is a true Muslim? Who can be branded as an unbeliever? What consequences should or will flow from
these designations? There are as many
answers as there are regions in the realm of Islam, and most are bad news for
those to whom they apply.
The catalyst
for the spreading wars among Muslims and between them and non-Muslims was the US-engineered
regime change in Iraq. Since then,
additional American interventions and escalating drone warfare have helped
sectarian strife to metastasize. There
is a concomitant upswing in Islamist
reprisals for Western attacks and perceived humiliations of Muslims in
Europe, Russia, the United States, and China.
Islamophobia has begun to inspire hitherto well-assimilated Muslim
Americans to join sporadically in carrying out such reprisals.
Islamophobia
has also created a new class of political activists, anti-Semites whose approval
of Israel’s hard-line policies toward
its captive Arab populations makes them strong supporters of the Jewish
state. Meanwhile, for the most part,
Jews in the West remain staunchly committed to humane, universal values. Many – especially younger Jews – are repelled
by the apartheid and police-state cruelties that Israel has come to
exemplify. Wealthy Jewish donors
continue to condition campaign contributions to politicians on their
unconditional backing for Israel’s settlement policies. But popular attitudes toward Israel in Europe
and, to a lesser extent, in the United States, are increasingly
unsympathetic.
Outside the
West, despite much admiration for the abilities and achievements of its Jewish
population, Israel is anathema. Israel's
behavior is becoming an international wedge issue on which the United States is
almost completely isolated. This means
there is an increasingly stark contradiction between the imperatives of U.S.
domestic politics, which dictate one-sided support for Israel, and the demands
of U.S. foreign relations, which require credible American efforts to secure
justice for the Arab victims of Zionism.
Candidate Trump addressed this contradiction by shifting from studied evenhandedness
on Israel-Palestine issues to promising Israel pretty much everything it
wanted, regardless of the obvious collateral damage this would do to other U.S.
international interests and relationships.
As president, will the master of the “art of the deal” follow this
something-for-nothing approach? If so,
then what?
The Middle
East’s Arab Muslim inhabitants currently account for about five percent of the
world’s population but half of its acts of terrorism. Their violent politics are beginning to
infect other Muslims, four-fifths of whom are non-Arab. Domestic tranquility in societies as far from
the Middle East as China, Europe, Russia, and the United States is hostage to
events there. The panicky American
reaction to 9/11 resulted in grave damage to the rule of law both in the United
States and abroad, impaired the U.S. constitutional order, and eroded Americans'
civil liberties. Both our constitutional
democracy and the liberal world order it did so much to create are in serious
jeopardy.
To my mind, the
most important questions raised by the current presidential transition have to
do with likely American reactions to further incidents of Islamist terrorism in
our homeland. It’s worth noting that
the United States is now in a period of special vulnerability. The Obama administration is disintegrating as
its policy officials whiz out the revolving door, leaving their positions
vacant. It will take the Trump
administration months to take hold. What
would Americans do if we are attacked before Mr. Trump has built a competent
government? And who would do it?
Finally, once
the Trump administration has been effectively staffed, confirmed, and
installed, how much weight will it put on the defense of our liberties as it
defends our homeland? The United States
has put in place all of the mechanisms to establish a police state but
implemented only some of them. Donald
Trump will shortly have the power to decide the balance between our freedoms
and our security. On this, I stand with
Benjamin Franklin, who said “those who surrender freedom for security will not
have, nor do they deserve, either one.”
I hope our president-elect agrees.
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