Riyadh Reality

It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good.   Donald Trump’s Saudi speech yesterday rang a few bells and I couldn’t help but think about the contrasts that his speech evoked.

First off, amidst the turmoil in Washington, I couldn’t help but consider the irony of Donald Trump travelling to the Middle East for a few days of relative tranquility.

The second contrast was that the Trump Administration was accorded more respect from Muslims in Riyadh than it did on a U.S. college campus with a Catholic affiliation, as students walked out of Mike Pence’s commencement address.

The third contrast was the contrast between the deals that Trump is doing versus the deals of the Obama Administration in the Middle East.  Obama cut a deal with Russia to get chemical weapons out of Syria—and that deal resulted in Russia’s deep involvement in the Middle East and Syrian children dying horrible deaths (and Obama incredibly still asserting that it took political courage NOT to bomb Syria).   Obama also cut a deal with the Iranians and we ended up with no U.S. jobs and $400 million in new weapons for Hezbollah, and no real change in Iranian behavior.  Trump cut an arms deal with the Saudis that will end up creating jobs in the U.S. and providing a counterweight to the Iranians in the region.

The contrasts aside, Trump’s speech did two very, very important things that have been largely overlooked by the press.  First is his announcement that Islamic terror is simply not tolerable. This policy statement is huge for the West.   We have grown accustomed to Western leaders like Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron and the mayor of London asserting that “terrorism is just part of living in a big city.”  Trump’s speech flatly rejected the surrender to terror, and said that, “terror must be driven out,” and that, “there can be no coexistence with this violence.  There can be no tolerating it, no accepting it, no excusing it and no ignoring it.”  While the West has more or less grown to accept it, Trump rejected the barbarity of terror in his speech.

Second, without being overly explicit, Trump laid out a vision for an Islamic reformation and renaissance.  He talked about the relative youth of Middle Eastern society (65% under the age of 30), and recalled its rich natural resources and vibrant culture.  His most potent line, “This region should not be a place from which refugees flee, but to which newcomers flock.”  This part of his speech was, I thought , the most important and starkly contrasted with Obama’s Cairo speech in which Obama blamed the U.S. for much of the dysfunction in the Middle East—colonialism and Western exploitation had created victim nations.  Trump put responsibility right back where it belonged—with those peoples and governments, and told them we would be eager to partner with them to rid them of the scourge of Islamist terror and improve their societies.  For all the rhetoric in the campaign, he did a good job of drawing a distinction between Islam and Islamism.  He correctly called out Iran as a principal sponsor of terror and properly categorized Hezbollah and Hamas along with ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Sure, he didn’t talk much about human rights or women’s rights—hopefully, that will come on another day. But on the whole, it was a very good speech and laid out not only the U.S. policy shift away from Iran, but some concrete measures to go forward. 

It could very well be that Trump turns out to be a much better foreign policy president than a domestic one.