Good Read: What America Keeps Getting Wrong in the Middle East

I have been asked to speak about the geopolitical dynamics of the Middle East, the realignments occurring among states there and the prospects for the achievement of renewed stability in the region. I’m tempted to suggest that you read my latest book, America’s Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East. So much has gone wrong that it is hard to be either brief or optimistic.

Two hundred and eighteen years ago today, Napoleon was preparing to take Malta. His purpose was to clear an obstacle to his seizure of Egypt for revolutionary France. He was able to invade Egypt on July 1, 1798. Napoleon’s campaign there and in Palestine kicked off a two-century-long effort by the West to transform the Middle East. European imperial powers and, latterly, the United States, have repeatedly sought to convert Arabs, Persians and Turks to the secular values of the European Enlightenment, to democratize them, to impose Western models of governance on them in place of indigenous, Islamic systems, and more recently to persuade them to accept a Jewish state in their midst.

This experiment in expeditionary, transformative diplomacy has now definitively failed. The next administration will inherit a greatly diminished capacity to influence the evolution of the Middle East. Amidst the imbecilities of our interminably farcical election season, it has proven expedient to blame this on President Obama. If only he had bombed Syria, repudiated his predecessor’s agreement to withdraw the U.S. military from Iraq, refused to compromise with Iran on nuclear matters, knuckled under to Netanyahu, or whatever, the old order in the Middle East would be alive and well and the United States would still call the shots there.

But this is nonsense. Our estrangement from the Middle East derives from trends that are much deeper than the manifest deficiencies of executive and congressional leadership in Washington. Americans and our partners in the Middle East have developed contradictory interests and priorities. Where shared values existed at all, they have increasingly diverged. There have been massive changes in geoeconomics, energy markets, power balances, demographics, religious ideologies and attitudes toward America (not just the U.S. government). Many of these changes were catalyzed by historic American policy blunders. In the aggregate, these blunders are right up there with the French and German decisions to invade Russia and Japan’s surprise attack on the United States. Their effects make current policies not just unsustainable but counterproductive.

Members of the Anonymous hacker collective have been waging a long campaign against sympathizers of Islamic State on Twitter, but now there’s a new effort to shame and humiliate them with porn.

One Anonymous member, WauchulaGhost, has spent the past few weeks hijacking Twitter accounts of loyalists to Islamic State (aka, ISIS or Daesh), defacing their profiles with porn images and exposing their IP addresses.

In the wake of the horrific mass shooting at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, carried out by a loyalist of Islamic State, WauchulaGhost has been targeting the Twitter accounts of Islamic State sympathizers tweeting about the Orlando massacre.

Russia won in Syria thanks to President Barack Obama’s inaction. The Middle East unraveling of the past decade is due in no small part to America not listening to her allies in the region. Never mind President Donald Trump’s Muslim-bashing rhetoric, he may just be a better partner.

For months, leaders of America's Arab allies in the Mideast have telegraphed this view of the world, and it helps explain why the gilded palaces of the troubled, war-torn region are the few places on the planet — outside Russia — where Trump has been more popular than the president he succeeded.

This is the case Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri laid out in an exclusive interview for The Global Politico at the end of a weeklong visit to Washington. The tone was measured, but taken together his comments amount to a striking and stark indictment of Obama and much recent U.S. policy in the Middle East. “The unfortunate consequence of not acting” there, Hariri argues, has been Russia’s restoration as a regional heavyweight, the resurrection of Bashar Assad’s bloody regime in Syria and the failure to produce an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

“Clarity,” the prime minister says, and the hope for a more decisive approach is the reason why he and other Arab leaders prefer Trump, despite the bombast and uncertainty the first six months of his presidency have unleashed. Unstated, but by all accounts just as significant, is the expectation that Trump will take a more hawkish approach toward Syria’s backers in Iran, and Hariri repeatedly brought up concessions Obama made toward Tehran to get his nuclear deal as an example of how the U.S. lost its way in the region.