WhatsappAs a follow-up to my piece from earlier in the week, I want to touch on the reasons for Trump’s sudden about-face in regards to hobnobbing with terror leaders. For those shocked by all of this, you have every right to be shocked. Since we know that Trump wouldn’t ordinarily back a Jihadist, especially one that has American blood on his hands, something else must be going on.
Trump’s Middle East foreign policy rests on two groups staying in balance with one another.
The first group is the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood coalition of Turkey and Qatar. Syria is, by extension, a Turkish project and a forward colony in the same vein that north Cyprus is. Trump is aware of this and would like to see Erdogan’s Turkey exert control over Syria (from behind the scenes) and eventually Lebanon.
The second group is Israel and the non-Muslim Brotherhood Sunni states that include Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Bahrain. Jordan and Egypt are too unpredictable for the US to include in either category.
Trump sees Turkey as a key player in the region and one that has the ability and will to reassert its control over a wide variety of peoples as it once had. Understandably, this sort of thing scares the non-Muslim Brotherhood Arab countries and Israel, and that is what Trump wants. By recreating a bogeyman in Erdogan, Trump is hoping to force the others to sign up to the US President’s vision of an economic corridor running from India through the Gulf and Israel and ending up in Europe.
As far as Trump is concerned, Syria is too much of a mess to ever be functional on its own, so better that Erdogan and Turkey run the show from behind the scenes than allow it to break apart into statelets. This of course, runs counter to Israel’s viewpoint that sees Erdogan as an arch enemy.
Trump’s plan is not about safeguarding real peace in the Middle East - it is the ultimate America First strategy. As I noted in my previous article, Trump wants to reorient global trade away from China. To buy calm in the region, Trump is willing to feed Syria and possibly Lebanon to the emerging Sunni caliphate, after all with “peace” at hand Trump can start focusing on what he thinks the real threat is - China.
