By George Alexandrou, Contributor and History graduate from King’s College London
Through the ascension of Joe Biden to its presidential seat, the Oval Office has seen a return to relative normalcy from the years of Donald Trump. No longer is the presidency so shrouded under the shadow of volatility and vulgarity. Yet, normalcy, within the realm of politics especially, is not necessarily a good thing. Albeit unsurprisingly, President Biden’s opening moves in the Middle East threaten the continuing reality of US intervention in the region, of which is only now made more palatable by the preceding administration’s more unilateral and belligerent approach to foreign policy.
In dealing with Iran, Trump notoriously withdrew the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, more commonly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, in 2018. By leaving the accord, Trump managed to not only draw the scorn of rival powers, namely Russia and China, but also to alienate its closest European allies. In their own words, EU representatives and the foreign ministers of France, Germany and the UK stated that they held ‘regret and concern’ towards the US withdrawal, to which they reemphasised their commitment to the ‘preservation and maintenance of financial channels and exports for Iran.’ In doing so, these representatives defied Trump alongside his threats against European businesses, demonstrating just how deeply unpopular and isolated his Iran policy was.
Almost as if this were not enough, a year and a half later Trump ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force. While avoiding all-out war, the assassination still elicited near-unanimous calls from other G20 states for restraint and de-escalation of tensions in the region. Few nations went the whole way in referring to the assassination as illegal, yet the dubious nature of the action’s justifiability, coupled with the fact that the US executed it alone, does indicate that it was far from a measured and multilateral response to an immediate Iranian threat.
In contrast to Trump’s ‘hard power’ foreign policy, Biden has so far taken to what has been referred to as a ‘smart power’ approach. In collaboration with Iraq, President Biden has ordered airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias in Syria to respond to a rocket attack against U.S and coalition forces in the city of Erbil. Rather than, in the vein of Trump, retaliating against Iran directly, Biden opted instead to focus on its proxies who were the immediate perpetrators of the attack. Without escalating tensions to almost warlike proportions akin to Trump, Biden, in the words of Ben Rich, signalled ‘US resolve to stand up’ to the leadership in Tehran.
That such policy is referred to as ‘smart’ indicates greater approval for Biden’s approach than that of Trump’s. In fact, the initial New York Times report of Biden’s airstrikes directly compared Biden’s airstrikes to Trump’s actions against Iran, referring to the former as the ‘more measured’ of the two. If there is criticism for Biden’s Middle East policy among experts, it is not with regard to his multilateralism and temperance but, rather, that he has not yet engaged enough. And it is within these attitudes where the problem lies; however smart or measured US Middle East policy in these coming years may be, it will remain, nonetheless, a continuation of the nation’s unpopular legacy in the region.
Indeed, unpopularity characterised much of Trump’s Middle East policy throughout his term. Amongst the very few occasions where the former-President elicited criticism from the decidedly populist sections of his base came with his decision to launch the 2017 Shayrat missile strike in response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Khan Shaykhun. Far-right figures such as Anne Coulter, Richard Spencer and Paul Joseph Watson expressed condemnation for the attack, claiming it to be a violation of Trump’s ‘America First’ campaign pledge to stay out of Middle Eastern wars which did not directly involve the U.S. More generally, only a slim majority of Americans reportedly supported the action and many of those who did not turned to nationwide protest.
The very fact that Trump campaigned upon a pledge to bring American troops back home from what he referred to as ‘endless war’ speaks to the unpopularity of intervention. During his first campaign, Trump dismissed evidence of his own support for the Iraq War as ‘mainstream media nonsense’ and weaponised Hilary Clinton’s 2002 Senate vote to authorise the conflict as a means of painting her as an establishment hawk like any other. Illustrating this, the former-President expressed doubt as to whether there was not a ‘country in the Middle East that Hillary Clinton didn’t want to invade, intervene or topple.’ As to how effective the isolationist promises and hawkish portrayal of Clinton were, one study has found that, in 2016, ‘Trump made significant electoral gains’ in high-casualty communities ‘that were exhausted and politically alienated by 18 years of fighting.’
Trump’s successful use of anti-war rhetoric against Clinton generally followed a similar pattern to that of his predecessor Barack Obama. Vying between each other for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama criticised Clinton for voting in favour of declaring Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organisation, accusing his Democratic rival of giving George W. Bush a ‘blank check’ to take military action against Iran, as Clinton had done in 2002 in the case of Iraq. ‘It speaks,’ Obama stated, ‘to how we will make decisions going forward,’ clearly insinuating that he was the less hawkish choice between the two.
Once the nomination was settled, Obama then set his sights on his Republican contender, the late John McCain. As Trump did, Obama situated his foreign policy as oriented outside of the establishment his opponent represented. In a speech, Obama asserted that he would not belong to the ‘Washington group think’ that had led America into Iraq. The Democratic candidate would then go onto say that there was no ‘military solution in Iraq and there never was,’ claiming that, as President, he would begin to move troops out immediately so as to end the war.
Ultimately, Obama was on the popular side of this issue, with 54% of Americans in 2008 believing that the ‘decision to use military force in Iraq’ was the wrong decision and only 34% believing it was the right thing to do. Almost ironically, Trump, who otherwise sought to represent himself as Obama’s antithesis, followed the latter’s tried and tested blueprint of winning an election by exploiting the public’s disapproval of large-scale interventionism in the Middle East. That Obama’s rhetoric could be replicated almost a decade later speaks to the fact that the American people have long since been critical of their nation’s role in Middle Eastern affairs.
In essence, US government policy in the Middle East has been, by and large, unpopular among the Americans. It is scantly necessary to touch on how it is viewed beyond the domestic sphere, where much of the world still lives with the painful legacy of the juntas, coups and wars supported or at worst orchestrated by US state organs such as the CIA and NSA. Without conscious and explicit revaluation and redefinition of its aims and methods in the Middle East, the US under Biden should not be allowed to use the Trump years to rehabilitate and resurrect its ‘normal’ proceedings in the region, an approach which both the American people and wider world has altogether rejected.