Despite Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric, talk of banning Muslims from America, and open hostility towards Syrian refugees, he has some supporters in the Middle East. Authoritarian governments see him as a strongman figure who will make deals with other strongmen like themselves.
Some of the Gulf elites hope that, as a tough-talking Republican, he will be harder on Iran than Barack Obama. Trump called the deal struck by Obama on Iran’s nuclear programme a “disaster” and “the worst deal ever negotiated”.
Conversely, the revolutionary establishment in Tehran welcomes Trump’s election because it thinks this will accelerate what it sees as inevitable US decline. For many others – probably the majority of Middle Easterners – there is simply a sense that neither candidate had much to offer the region, and that US leaders are all largely the same.
Trump’s varied and contradictory statements on Middle East policy, lack of a policy or military track record, and very limited team of foreign policy advisers have left a blank canvas on to which these different observers can project their own wishful thinking.
Had Hillary Clinton won, her foreign policy positions would have been unusually predictable, given her extensive track record and an advisory team full of familiar faces. By contrast, Trump’s foreign policy positions on many issues are uncertain, and have been underanalysed, as so much of the professional foreign policy analysis world has, wrongly, judged him to be stupid, mad and incapable of winning.
Some conclusions can be drawn, however. Trump has repeatedly expressed his respect for strongmen, saying that even “bad guys” such as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi could be useful in fighting terrorism. In past interviews he praised China for the Tiananmen Square crackdown while criticising Mikhail Gorbachev for losing control of the Soviet Union.
The Guardian
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