El Imperio del
Caos sigue su política exterior a tono con su mote. Esto tiene sus
consecuencias, no se vayan a creer: el mundo oscila de acuerdo con el tono de
los tweets del loco de turno en la Casa Blanca. No parece que la cosa tenga un
futuro promisorio, y harían bien los gobernantes de Medio Oriente en ir tomando
nota. El artículo que sigue es de Rami G. Khouri para el sitio web Information
Clearing House:
Título: Arab
Violence, Volatility, and Vulnerability in the Era of Trump
Texto: Of the
many fascinating reports in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury book on the Donald
Trump White House, perhaps most troubling for Americans and for the world were
the new insights into how the United States today shapes its Middle East
policies. After spending the last three months in the U.S. and interacting with
numerous people and organizations that deal with Mideast issues, I see several
problem categories in Trump’s Mideast actions.
The key ones are:
the adolescent and personalized nature of how pivotal officials engage with
Middle Eastern leaders, based on personal chemistry more than studied national
strategic realities; Washington’s working to change Arab leaderships like
trading Monopoly properties; the massive sway that extremist, pro-ultranationalist
Zionist American donors have in the White House; the disdain that Trump and his
associates seem to feel for Arab leaders and countries; the exaggerated and
dominant fears of Iran that shape U.S. policies; and, the presumptuous, mostly ignorance-based
and unilateral decisions on critical issues such as the status of Jerusalem.
The quotes in the
book are not a comprehensive overview of U.S. policy-making in the region or
the world, to be sure, but the consistency and tone of the sentiments expressed
by White House officials — especially former chief strategist and American
White-ultranationalist Steve Bannon — reflect a manner of decision-making in
the most powerful office in the world that should frighten us all. (The key
quotes in the book are in this report by Middle East Eye:
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-president-donald-trump-middle-east-what-we-learned-from-michael-wolff-book-fire-and-fury-1505120232).
The bottom line
for me is that major decisions on existential issues that impact the lives of
600 million people in the wider Middle East are being made largely on the basis
of policy preferences among the Israeli and Saudi Arabian leaderships, and
intermediated by mostly ignorant, and often very young and inexperienced American
officials like Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The revelation
that President Trump’s White House last year managed Middle Eastern issues
mainly through the Israeli, Saudi Arabian, and Egyptian leaderships, with an
overarching desire to push back Iranian influence in the region, helps explain
why the United States finds itself in confusing situations across the Middle
East. It has mainly crisis-managed relations through the lens of security and
militarism, and often with mixed successes.
The main problem
with the Israeli-Saudi-Egyptian combine as Washington’s preferred entry point
into the Middle East is that these four counties’ leaders appear to be totally
blind to the conditions, rights, sentiments, and aspirations of the 400 million
people in Arab countries, and the other 200 million Middle Easterners in
surrounding states. These four states’ steadfast attempts to maintain “security
and stability” by using massive military and police force — alongside stringent
limits on citizen political, social, and economic rights — has achieved exactly
the opposite of what was desired.
Never before has
the Arab region been so fractured, violent, volatile, and vulnerable to the
whims of desperate citizens, powerful autocrats, renegade militants, durable
terrorists, and predatory foreign militaries. And for good measure, Iran’s
influence in the region continues to expand in places, as does that of Turkey
and Russia, making a mockery of the American approach to Middle Eastern issues.
U.S.-backed Israeli, Saudi Arabian, and Egyptian policies in the region are
among the leading causes of the tensions and conflicts that plague us all, but
they are not solely to blame, due to many other problematic policies by Arab,
Iranian, Turkish, Russian, British, and other countries.
Last month’s
decision by Washington to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital captures in
one fell swoop everything that is wrong and destructive about the Trump
approach. It ignores existing international law and UN resolutions that reflect
a powerful global consensus; it totally dismisses the sentiments of the
hundreds of millions of Muslims and Christians in the Middle East who see Arab
East Jerusalem as the rightful capital of a future Palestinian state living
alongside Israel; and, it makes this decision unilaterally, and mainly on the
basis of domestic political commitments to rightwing pro-Zionist lobbies and
political donors like Sheldon Adelson, who has pushed hard for this move.
I thought the
most striking revelation in the book was the quote by Steve Bannon that Jordan
should take control of the West Bank and Egypt of the Gaza Strip, saying the
U.S. should “let them deal with it — or sink trying.”
Such disdain
towards two long-standing Arab allies of the U.S. like Jordan and Egypt should
be a red flag to all leaders in the region who might want to rely on the U.S.
as a consistent partner. It is more apparent now that the Trump governance
system in the U.S. is likely to please pro-Israeli American political donors
more than it would consider the interests of its other friends and allies, or
the dictates of international law and UN resolutions. This is a sure recipe for
greater strife and suffering in the Middle East, which can only spread
dangerously to other parts of the world.
It should also be
a warning sign to Arab leaders that they should wake up and figure out how to
regain and exercise their own sovereignty, in order to ensure the well-being of
their own citizens. Otherwise, they will wake up one day and realize that they
have become little more than properties on a Monopoly board that adolescent
airheads in the White House buy, sell, and discard at the whim of wild men in
the U.S. waving campaign donation checks.
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