{"id":53120,"date":"2020-01-24T14:30:26","date_gmt":"2020-01-24T03:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=53120"},"modified":"2020-01-24T14:28:23","modified_gmt":"2020-01-24T03:28:23","slug":"the-us-cant-deal-with-china-while-its-mired-in-the-middle-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-us-cant-deal-with-china-while-its-mired-in-the-middle-east\/","title":{"rendered":"The US can\u2019t deal with China while it\u2019s mired in the Middle East"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u2018Great nations do not fight endless wars\u2019, US President Donald Trump declared<\/a> in his 2019 State of the Union speech. He had a point: military entanglements in the Middle East have contributed to the relative decline of American power and facilitated China\u2019s muscular rise. And yet, less than a year after that speech, Trump ordered the assassination of Iran\u2019s most powerful military commander, Qassem Soleimani, bringing the United States to the precipice of yet another war. Such is the power of America\u2019s addiction to interfering in the chronically volatile Middle East.<\/p>\n

The US no longer has vital interests at stake in the Middle East. Shale oil and gas have made the US energy-independent, so safeguarding Middle Eastern oil supplies is no longer a strategic imperative. In fact, the US has been supplanting Iran as an important source<\/a> of crude oil and petroleum products for India, the world\u2019s third-largest oil consumer after America and China. Moreover, Israel, which has become the region\u2019s leading military power (and its only nuclear-armed state), no longer depends on vigilant US protection.<\/p>\n

The US does, however, have a vital interest in resisting China\u2019s efforts to challenge international norms, including through territorial and maritime revisionism. That is why Trump\u2019s predecessor, Barack Obama, promised a \u2018pivot to Asia\u2019 early in his presidency.<\/p>\n

But Obama failed to follow through on his plans to shift America\u2019s foreign-policy focus from the Middle East. On the contrary, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate staged military campaigns<\/a> everywhere from Syria and Iraq to Somalia and Yemen. In Libya, his administration sowed chaos by overthrowing strongman Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. In Egypt, Obama hailed<\/a> President Hosni Mubarak\u2019s 2011 ouster.<\/p>\n

Yet in 2013, when the military toppled Mubarak\u2019s democratically elected successor, Mohamed Morsi, Obama opted for non-intervention, refusing<\/a> to acknowledge it as a coup, and suspended US aid only briefly. This reflected the Obama administration\u2019s habit of selective non-intervention\u2014the approach that encouraged China, America\u2019s main long-term rival, to become more aggressive in pursuit of its claims in the South China Sea, including building and militarising seven artificial islands.<\/p>\n

Trump was supposed to change this. He has repeatedly derided US military interventions in the Middle East as a colossal waste of money, claiming<\/a> the US has spent $7 trillion since the 9\/11 terrorist attacks. (Brown University\u2019s costs of war project puts the figure at $6.4 trillion<\/a>.) \u2018We have nothing\u2014nothing except death and destruction. It\u2019s a horrible thing\u2019, Trump said<\/a> in 2018.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the Trump administration\u2019s national security strategy recognises China as a \u2018strategic competitor\u2019\u2014a label that it subsequently replaced<\/a> with the far blunter \u2018enemy\u2019. And it has laid out a strategy<\/a> for curbing Chinese aggression and creating a \u2018free and open\u2019 Indo-Pacific region stretching<\/a> \u2018from Bollywood to Hollywood\u2019.<\/p>\n

Yet, as is so often the case, Trump\u2019s actions have directly contradicted his words. Despite his anti-war rhetoric, Trump appointed war-mongering aides like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has been described<\/a> as a \u2018hawk brimming with bravado and ambition\u2019, and former national security adviser John Bolton, who in 2015 wrote an op-ed titled<\/a> \u2018To stop Iran\u2019s bomb, bomb Iran.\u2019<\/p>\n

Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that Trump has pursued a needlessly antagonistic approach to Iran. The escalation began early in his presidency, when he withdrew the US from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (which Iran had not violated), reimposed sanctions, and pressured America\u2019s allies to follow suit. Furthermore, since last May, Trump has deployed 16,500 additional troops<\/a> to the Middle East and sent an aircraft-carrier strike group<\/a> to the Persian Gulf, instead of the South China Sea. The assassination of Soleimani was part of this pattern.<\/p>\n

Like virtually all of America\u2019s past interventions in the Middle East, its Iran policy has been spectacularly counterproductive. Iran has announced that it will disregard the nuclear agreement\u2019s uranium-enrichment limits. Trump\u2019s sanctions have increased the oil-import bill of US allies like India and deepened Iran\u2019s ties with China, which has continued to import<\/a> Iranian oil through private companies and invest<\/a> billions of dollars in Iran\u2019s oil, gas and petrochemical sectors.<\/p>\n

Beyond Iran, Trump has failed to extricate the US from Afghanistan, Syria or Yemen. His administration has continued to support the Saudi-led bombing campaign against Yemen\u2019s Houthi rebels with US military raids and sorties. As a result, Yemen is enduring the world\u2019s worst humanitarian crisis<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Trump did order troops<\/a> to leave Syria last October, but with so little strategic planning that the Kurds\u2014America\u2019s most loyal ally in the fight against the Islamic State terror group\u2014were left exposed to an attack from Turkey. This, together with his effort to strike a Faustian bargain with the Afghan Taliban<\/a> (which is responsible for the world\u2019s deadliest terrorist attacks), threatens to reverse his sole achievement in the Middle East: dramatically diminishing IS\u2019s territorial holdings.<\/p>\n

Making matters worse, after ordering the Syrian drawdown, Trump approved a military mission<\/a> to secure the country\u2019s oil fields. The enduring oil fixation also led Trump last April to endorse<\/a> Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar, just as Haftar began laying siege to the capital, Tripoli.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration is unlikely to change course anytime soon. In fact, it has now redefined the Indo-Pacific region as extending \u2018from California to Kilimanjaro\u2019, thus specifically including the Persian Gulf. With this change, the Trump administration is attempting to uphold the pretence that its interventions in the Middle East serve US foreign-policy goals, even when they undermine them.<\/p>\n

As long as the US remains mired in \u2018endless wars\u2019 in the Middle East, it will be unable to address in a meaningful way the threat China poses. Trump was supposed to know this. And yet, his administration\u2019s commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific seems likely to lose credibility<\/a>, while the cycle of self-defeating American interventionism in the Middle East appears set to continue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Great nations do not fight endless wars\u2019, US President Donald Trump declared in his 2019 State of the Union speech. He had a point: military entanglements in the Middle East have contributed to the relative …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":482,"featured_media":53125,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[52,1428,218,31],"class_list":["post-53120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-china","tag-donald-trump","tag-middle-east","tag-united-states"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe US can\u2019t deal with China while it\u2019s mired in the Middle East | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-us-cant-deal-with-china-while-its-mired-in-the-middle-east\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The US can\u2019t deal with China while it\u2019s mired in the Middle East | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u2018Great nations do not fight endless wars\u2019, US President Donald Trump declared in his 2019 State of the Union speech. 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