Council of Councils
Think Global Health
Online Store
During his trip to the Gulf last week, President Trump went out of his way to abandon what he described as intrusive, ignorant, and much resented U.S. lectures to Gulf nations about their internal affairs.
Here is an excerpt from his remarks in Riyadh on May 13:
This great transformation has not come from Western interventionalists or flying people in beautiful planes, giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs. No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits, like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, and so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves….
More on:
In the end the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening and complex societies that they did not even understand themselves. They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves. Peace, prosperity, and progress ultimately came not from a radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions and embracing that same heritage that you love so dearly. And it’s something only you could do. You achieved a modern miracle the Arabian way. That’s a good way.
These comments are in a fundamental way different from comments made by Secretary of State Rubio in an interview with Bari Weiss on April 22:
Foreign policy – mature foreign policy, realistic foreign policy – requires the balancing of both policy geopolitical considerations, which often involve pragmatism, and some level of idealism – the promotion, for example, of human rights or democracy and things of that nature. So , this sort of balance…. we’re still going to be involved in those things, caring about human rights, but it’s going to be run at the embassy and regional level, not out of some office in Washington, D.C. that has that title….
In geopolitical reality, we are going to have to have partnerships and alliances with countries whose system of government maybe is not like ours, whose view on religious tolerance, for example, may not be like ours. And we may not like that and it doesn’t mean we don’t wish it was different, but we still have to have relations with these countries because it serves a geopolitical purpose, it serves the national interest of the United States….
One final point I would make is we are entering an era in which our foreign policy has to be more focused, more pragmatic, and more balanced, and that is that we have to clearly define what is our national interest, remember what the issue is, and then we have to pursue that. And that means balancing things that in the past weren’t balanced. In the past it was democracy promotion at any cost or human rights promotion at any cost. We’re not abandoning democracy, we’re not abandoning human rights; we’re just saying that has to be part of the overall analysis when we decide where to spend our time and what to spend our money on.
Rubio is trying very hard here to be faithful to his career-long support for U.S. human rights policy while also embracing the Trump approach. Rubio does so by arguing that he is merely being realistic, giving human rights issues proper weight among the goals of U.S. foreign policy when previously “it was democracy promotion at any cost or human rights promotion at any cost.”
More on:
That is false, as Rubio must know. Jimmy Carter, usually held up as the paragon of human rights “at any cost,” spent his first New Year’s Eve as president in Tehran, celebrating with and lauding the Shah. Neither Rubio nor anyone else really believes the United States invaded Afghanistan or Iraq to promote human rights there, much less to promote democracy “at any cost.”
But this line has become a key part of the Trump administration’s approach, and of MAGA foreign policy more generally. That is, it is stated as fact that our foreign policy must place America first now, in contrast to the bad old days when we had a foreign policy that ignored security, financial, and commercial interests to push American definitions of human rights and to promote democracy. There were no such “bad old days,” as Trump himself reminded us in Riyadh when he said “With this historic state visit, we celebrate more than 80 years of close partnership between the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” During those 80 years, the Kingdom has not seen one day of democracy or one single election, but plenty of maltreatment of Christians, Shia, and any dissident who was brave enough to speak up.
Nevertheless, Rubio says he isn’t dumping or condemning concern for human rights. We care, he says, but just have to be realistic.
President Trump took a different line, and his “human rights policy” seems to be “forget about it.” No more lectures from “interventionalists” telling people what to do. No more “trillions of dollars” being spent by “so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits.”
No conditionality here, no call for balancing our human rights goals with other foreign policy objectives. Progress in the Gulf came and will come solely from “embracing your heritage.”
This is wrong in very many ways, but one might start with the UAE—whose success stems from a highly successful combination of embracing both their heritage and modernity. Trump himself visited their Abrahamic House, where a mosque, church, and synagogue share quarters, and had he visited their beaches he’d have seen some very fashionable and quite tiny bikinis. And that is a model of balancing heritage and change that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman seems to be trying to follow. There is nothing in the Saudi heritage that would allow women to travel without the permission of male relatives, for example, or to be out in public without covering their hair, or driving cars, but all of them have come to pass under MbS.
Where all these rulers fully “embrace their heritage” is in their absolute rejection of democracy and in their poor human rights records. Trump has a point in suggesting that their cultures and ours are deeply different: for example, we rejected monarchy in 1776 but the Gulf monarchies are mostly legitimate and have been successful in managing economic transitions and in raising living standards enormously.
And yet: the treatment of migrant laborers is often inhuman. Therein lies a tale. During the George W. Bush years, when I handled the Middle East at the NSC, it came to our attention that in the UAE very young Pakistani boys were being used as jockeys in camel races, because they were so light in weight. When they grew a bit, they were simply expelled back to Pakistan, and while they were in the UAE they were often maltreated and had no rights, protections, or protectors. This was child labor at its worst. So we raised it with the Emirati authorities. They took a look, and told us this was a scandal and they would stop it immediately. So they did, sending those boys home with handsome financial payments—which were also extended to boys who worked in prior years.
Was this a terrible lecture by American “interventionalists,” or worse, “neocons?” Or a good example of U.S. human rights policy at work?
Here’s another story: in the Bush years, we pushed the Saudis—privately—on both the abuses of the “religious police” or “mutawa” and on their restrictions on non-Muslim worship. As to the religious police, we knew that many Saudis including members of elite and influential families also objected to having their children beaten by the “mutawa.” We were pushing on a partially open door. Life for everyone in the Kingdom would be better if the “mutawa” were restrained. Slowly, over time, it happened. Perhaps we helped advance the date with our “lectures.” What damage did that U.S. policy do?
As to practicing non-Muslim faiths, there were thousands of Americans in the Kingdom who could not worship freely- if at all. Catholics could not receive the sacraments because priests were not permitted to enter the Kingdom. Not one church was or is now permitted in the Kingdom. Private Christian gatherings, in private homes on Sunday mornings, were broken up by the police. Little has changed here in the last twenty years, even under MbS. Should the United States be silent about such Saudi policies and the ways they affect the right to worship of our fellow citizens?
Apparently so, if Trump is taken at his word. They’re “embracing their national traditions” all right, and one of those happens to be no freedom of religion. Do we care about the impact on Americans, or for that matter four million Filipino Catholics in the Kingdom?
Why doesn’t Trump get this? First, he does not really think much about the UAE or Qatar as nations with populations, but only about the royals, whom he likes and who treat him so lavishly and well. And that’s not a crazy approach because in those two cases, the actual number of citizens is so tiny. Almost 90% of those living in Qatar and in the Emirates are expatriates—foreigners who can expect no political rights. Saudi Arabia is different: its population is nearly 35 million, and just under 60% are Saudis. Trump seems to forget that while the al-Saud appear to be legitimate rulers in the eyes of the Saudi populace generally, 10-15% of that population is Shia and may not agree. Moreover, while there is zero democracy in Saudi Arabia there is still public opinion—a fact that Trump may ignore but MbS never will. My point is that Saudi Arabia is a country, with tens of millions of Saudis, not a black box that is empty.
This point is crucial when it comes to Iran, with a population now over 90 million. The average age is 32. Only about 2-3% are expatriates. And the repeated mass protest movements—for example in 1999, 2009, 2011-12, 2019-20, 2017-18, and most recently in 2022-23—demonstrate the breadth and intensity of opposition to the Islamic regime by the population. The Trump administration is negotiating a nuclear deal with the regime, but it would be tragic if the United States used any such agreement to abandon support for the Iranian people. Already the Trump administration appears to be abandoning the radio broadcasts—Radio Farda and VOA—and all the other programs by which the United States demonstrates our support for Iranians’ human rights.
Iran is not a black box with an ayatollah on top. When the United States negotiates with agents of the Ayatollah Khamenei, we are dealing with a ruler whose own population would replace him instantly if a plebiscite were permitted, which is why it is not. The same point applies to Russia, or China, or all the other tyrannies with which the United States (as Rubio rightly explained) must deal. When we deal with them, we must always remember that the officials with whom we are speaking represent no one except the ruler, and were never chosen by their fellow citizens. Those citizens exist and U.S. policies should never forget them. In the case of Iran, they are pro-U.S. and they are the ultimate solution to the dangers presented by the Islamic Republic.
The great fallacy of “realpolitik” approaches to world affairs is their lack of realism. They treat countries as nameplates; this was my critique of the Nixon-Kissinger policies that saw Soviet negotiators as “Russia.” Rulers, while they are in power, may sit behind that nameplate or select the people who do, but there remains a real country with a real population that may loathe the regime and sooner or later may rise up against it. The vast repression in Iran (as in China and Russia) shows how well aware of this fact those rulers are.
Second, Trump and his MAGA advisers do not get the point that the association of the United States with the cause of liberty is a great asset for the country. Instead they appear to be embracing realpolitik of the Nixon-Kissinger variety, where embracing dictators and ignoring human rights abuses is thought to have great benefits and no costs. As the example of Carter and the Shah shows, no president has ever pursued a policy of “democracy promotion at any cost or human rights promotion at any cost”—but most have understood that American exceptionalism is connected to the belief in human freedom.
Who cares? President Trump, Vice President Vance, and others in the administration may believe that unconditionally embracing rulers who repress human rights has no effect on our country’s reputation and believe that even if it does, that does not matter. That is certainly not the view of our enemies, who have built vast propaganda machines to blacken the reputation of the United States every day. They wish to destroy that association with liberty and substitute a picture of the United States as an aggressor whose policies create human misery across the globe. They think it matters. It is a mystery why officials in the Trump administration are blind to this, and think U.S. support for people struggling for freedom and human rights is a wasteful and damaging “interventionalism” rather than a reflection of Americans’ deepest beliefs about their country and the fundamental rights of every human being. The support of the United States for liberty and human rights isn’t a problem that needs to be solved or a weakness in our relations with other nations. It’s an asset, and so understood by our enemies as well as our friends. If only our own highest officials understood that too, they would realize that countries are not black boxes with rulers on top but places where hundreds of millions of citizens yearn for basic human rights--and are grateful when the United States shares those goals.