Arguing that the past sixteen years of U.S. conduct toward the Middle East have facilitated the dangerous empowerment of Iran to the detriment of America and its allies, Michael Doran hopes that the president’s visit to Saudi Arabia and Israel this week will signal the beginning of a more effective approach to the region:
We still don’t know the full details of Donald Trump’s approach to the Middle East, but his hard-nosed ethos and willingness to question foreign-policy dogmas offer an opportunity, in principle, to dispel several fallacies that led to these strategic blunders. . . .
[I]t is false that our support for our longtime friends is a cause of instability, and that by distancing ourselves from them while reaching out to our enemies we can make the world a safer place. (It’s an even worse fallacy to imagine that we can create a Middle East without enemies.) And it’s just as wrong to assume we can cleverly pull Russia away from Iran in Syria. The tensions between them are insignificant compared with their shared interest in propping up the Bashar al-Assad regime and eroding American influence.
[Further], the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not the center of gravity in the Middle East, nor is it ripe for solution. President Obama, like President Bush before him, put a lot of effort into resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict—a worthy but useless undertaking that diverted them further from addressing Iran’s regional ascent and, later, Russia’s. . . .
But recognizing mistakes is just the first step. The next requires rejecting the temptation, to which President Obama succumbed, of defining the defeat of Islamic State as the pre-eminent strategic goal. If President Trump destroys the group, but fails at the same time to build a stabilizing regional coalition, his victory will be very short-lived. The next Islamic State will rise from the rubble, and Russia and Iran will exploit the ensuing chaos.
Read more on New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/opinion/trump-doctrine-middle-east.html