Trump’s Middle East Commerce Clause

The Return of Bush-Baker?

There are many who fear that the Trump Mideast policy is a return to the Obama days, but they are those with a short memory. Trump is not Obama and there is no real fear that Trump will welcome the Moslem Brotherhood or even the Iranian Shiite regime as the future of the middle east. Rather, what the President’s Mideast policy most resembles is the Bush-Baker Mideast policy of oil money, investments and profits. If this is the way it all shapes up it will be irony of ironies since the MAGA crowd are the mirror image of Bush I Republicans. Bush-Baker is the antithesis of all that Trump is and if he is really adopting their Mideast policy the MAGA base will end up not being so happy.

The question that should be asked is where is this all going and where do the Gulf states stand on commerce versus religion? In previous decades, Saudi Arabia was very involved in spreading radical Islam by setting up and funding madrassas and other “educational” institutions in the Moslem world. The spreading of Wahabi Islam was their priority and the west was only there to help fund it – along with their lavish lifestyles. Israel was to be destroyed as it stood on what was Islamic land – dar al-Islam. Something changed though over the last decade as Bin-Salman rose in Saudi Arabia and the UAE became a self-consciously western style country interested in being a financial and tourist center.

The Obama-Biden tilt towards Iran threatened the Saudi-UAE plans and moved them closer to Israel for economic and security reasons. Israel was the only country in the region with the military capabilities to hold off the Iranian menace and the only country in the region with the technological knowhow to help them move into the first world – UAE as a replacement for Hong Kong in the financial world and Saudi Arabia as the banker of the world. That didn’t mean that Islam was put on the back burner only that they were willing to reform in order to save their own regimes. The result of their extreme Islam was not a Saudi backed Islamist movement serving the needs of the kingdom but an out of control Al-Qaeda and then ISIS, modelled on the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood and not the Saudi Madrassa. A revolution eats its own children is that one cliché that turns out true every time and they all understood it.

But then came October 7 – an embarrassment for Bin-Salman and the UAE and then the decimation of Hezbollah and the consequent fall of the Assad regime and the Shiite crescent. Iran no longer threatened Jordan and Jordanian-Saudi border and the Hijaz – that area of Saudi Arabia that contains Mecca and Medina. Gone was iron-fisted control Iran had over Lebanon. All was not good but a vision of a non-Shiite, non -Iranian middle east began to take shape. This was all thanks to Israel of course but now Israel seemed less necessary. The Gulf Arabs, while still fearing the Iranian mullahs, were asking themselves, in their usual cowardly fashion, if a nuclear Iran was really all that bad if Iran didn’t control any territory outside of their own country? How necessary now was Israel, especially since they didn’t have to deal with a quarrelsome US administration that was secretly in love with the Iranian mullahs?

The Bush-Baker Mideast policy, taken straight from the Arabists in the State Department felt Israel was a thorn in their side although they understood that as a democratic country they couldn’t let it fall even after the end of the cold war. Bush-Baker didn’t have Netanyahu yet to deal with but they had Yitzchak Shamir, a true principled right-winger who had no patience for the Texans. But it was also a policy that had no problem going to war in order to drive Saddam out of Kuwait and to protect Saudi Arabia. Commerce is what is worth spilling blood over – even American blood.

Trump is cut from a different cloth although his concentration on commerce instead of “balance of power” puts him closer to Bush-Baker than Obama-Biden. The Obama-Biden policy wanted a strong Moslem country to balance Israel in order to pressure Israel into recognizing a Palestinian state. Bush-Baker also wanted a Palestinian state but commerce took preference. For President Trump, commerce is what can bring peace since building is much better than destroying. Also, the current administration understands that Gulf oil money will be invested somewhere and they want to keep it out of China. China has been making strong moves around the region and while they are succeeding in Iran and Egypt the Gulf Arabs have been hesitant. The Gulf Arabs understand than investments in China do not yield the same profits and liquidity that investments in the US do. They expect security in return and that is the one thing they could not get from Obama-Biden.

There are three questions now. Will Trump give them the security guarantees they need? Where is Qatar in all of this as they are not a friend of the west and have not given up on a global Islamic revolution? Lastly, will they deal with radical Islam in the region (and globally)?

The last question is important because “commerce” will never solve the problem of radical Islam and that means the Qatar, too (the second question) needs to be dealt with differently. The US can receive many gits from Qatar and sign as many deals as they want but as long as they are still the main sponsors of global Jihad, they are just enabling terror. The attempt to solve radical Islam with commerce has failed time and again and no amount of Trumpian charm or artistry will change that. The willingness to deal with radical Islam as a non-commercial problem puts Israel front and center since the issue that is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian war is radical Islam -of both the Sunni and Shiite version. Will Israel be joined by the United States in destroying Iranian nuclear facilities or at the least in facilitating the overthrow of the Islamic regime? Will America’s main commercial partners and investors be willing to stand up to and help destroy global jihad in spite of the fact that it also helps Israel?

Will Israel be “permitted” to fight and destroy the Islamists on their borders? This includes Gaza and the West Bank and to a certain extent Syria. The Syria issue is not only Al-Julani (who is meeting with Trump). Even assuming he is a reformed Islamist who does not want to use Syria as a Jihadi base (an assumption that one should not easily make) there are tens of thousands of foreign Jihadis still in Syria and who were key players in the overthrow of the Assad regime. They have nowhere to go and nothing to do other than fight. No country, certainly not their country of origin wants a group of young, violent men who have been radicalized and trained to fight against whatever infidel is available – and there always will be infidels available. Even if they are from radical Islamist countries like Afghanistan, let alone a country like Indonesia, they will not be permitted back as all they will do is destabilize whatever government is there. These tens of thousands of young men will either stay in Syria and fight to destroy the infidel – Allawis, Druze, Christians, Kurds or Israelis – or go to some other country to do the same. It could be that Al-Julani is that one jihadi who has reformed himself, but there won’t be another 20 or 30 thousand like him. Beware of the “new” Syria. That is why its borders need to be redrawn.

Israelis are scared that Trump will be Obama III but that fear is misplaced. The fear should be if Trump becomes Bush-Baker II in the middle east and abandons Israel in the name of “commerce”. It is well known that both the Trump and Witkoff children have vast business dealings with the Gulf Arabs, including Qatar and that Trump likes expensive gifts like free Air-Force 1’s – but will that come at the expense of Israel? Will it lead to a “deal” with Iran that includes Gulf money investing there and more and more “commerce” be at the expense of allowing Iran to continue to be a week from a nuclear bomb? Each president has promised that Iran will not become nuclear under their watch, but no one has yet stated that they won’t become nuclear under any future president’s watch.

Israel needs to wake up to the new reality that Trump is trying to build and to make sure that he understands that while commerce can solve many conflicts it can’t solve one that is based on a radical form of a globalist religion that favors nihilism and violence over comfort and peace. Israel has to beware of a neo-Bush-Baker foreign policy that will leave it out on the cold. The gulf Arab states need to beware of cowardly concessions to jihadists and Iranian Mullahs. The United States has to beware of commercializing all problems or history will come back and slap it in the face.