• Home
• /
• Opinion

Arab nations can do with more tact to make Trump see reason

Engaging the US president in friendly prodding and polite conversation have yielded good results.

When it comes to dealing with US President Donald Trump, the most effective approach may very well be a dictum attributed to the British statesman Winston Churchill: "Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war."
For proof, one need look no further than US Senator Lindsey Graham's recent interactions with the White House. Braving the taunts of the Twitterati, Graham wrote on December 31: "I learned a lot from President @realDonaldTrump about our efforts in Syria that was reassuring." And after a lunch with Trump, he said the president "told me things I didn't know that make feel a lot better about where we're headed in Syria."
To be sure, Trump has not explicitly reversed his decision on US troop withdrawal from northeastern Syria, which he announced with a tweet on December 19. Nor has he confirmed that Graham's three objectives - "1) Daesh is permanently destroyed. 2) Iran doesn't fill in the back end, and 3) Our Kurdish allies are protected" - will be met before "any withdrawal from Syria". But it does seem Trump has caved in to mounting pressure, backtracking from his original order of a military pullout within 30 days.
Whether it was Graham who "learned a lot from" Trump or the other way round is a little secret they can keep for their autobiographies. But what is for certain is that the South Carolina Republican (and other like-minded people who have Trump's ear) achieved a lot more through friendly prodding and polite conversation than could have been accomplished by publicly berating and embarrassing the president.
Of course, the departure of two senior officials - Pentagon Chief General Jim Mattis and the administration's anti-Daesh point man Brett McGurk - in protest against his Syria decision was a loss that Trump could not gloss over. But whereas the resignations and the attacks in the form of tweets and opeds ran the risk of making an indignant Trump hunker down for a long fight, those who opted to be discreet must have reckoned they had a better chance of winning him over to the same point of view.
To be fair to Trump, the Syria withdrawal flip-flop is not the first time he has changed course in response to domestic outrage and pushback from world leaders. And while it is a tad late to undo the reputational damage caused by his original plan, Trump's new promise to protect the Kurdish and Arab members of the anti-Daesh coalition will at least be useful for them to work out a viable security arrangement. Negotiations between them and the Assad regime need no longer be conducted in a mighty rush under the shadow of Turkish and Syrian guns, which would enable the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) to stick to its objective of self-administration.
In some perverse way, Trump's leadership style may have actually caused more harm to the SDC's many enemies by sowing confusion and disrupting their plans. As it turned out, the celebrations in Ankara, Tehran, Damascus and Moscow and the praises heaped on Trump by Washington's top foes for announcing the military withdrawal were premature.
Equally risible were the fire-and-brimstone warnings given last month by Turkey's foreign minister and defence minister respectively to France and the Kurdish members of the coalition. As for the notion that their boss had discovered a cool trick to upend a pillar of US policy in the Middle East, it was simply too good to be true.
The tactic of engaging with Trump instead of offending him may not always yield the desired results, but it is something the Palestinian leadership should perhaps keep in mind. His controversial recognition in December 2017 of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, followed by the transfer of the US embassy from Tel Aviv, cannot be undone now. But in retrospect, it was perhaps another case of Trump, lacking the pragmatism and wisdom of his predecessors who used to waive a 1995 Congress decision twice per year, being misled by ideologues who wanted to reshape the regional rules to their own advantage.
None of this is to say that heads of government and top officials should muzzle public opinion or suppress their own views about Trump just to avoid a negative counterreaction. Social media channels, especially Twitter, are now a recognised platform for world leaders, policy planners and decision makers to sound off without fear or favour on matters of national and global importance. Their informed and honest opinions, not the snarky takes of media mavens on Trump's every tweet, are what really counts.
Nevertheless, given that America's allies and partners in the Middle East and beyond have to fight every day to save a fragile world order with the White House occupant they have, it makes sense for them, particularly those for whom even a tweet can be the thin end of the wedge, to avoid being unduly combative in their dealings with Trump in their own best interest. To expect him to reclaim America's global leadership may not be realistic, but as Syria's Kurds have shown, where there's a will to make sure Trump gets the right advice before it's too late, there's a way.
Arnab Neil Sengupta is an independent journalist and commentator on Middle East