“America has lost.” Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte used this phrase last October when announcing his split from the United States and his country’s realignment toward China.
The fate of the United States in the Philippines mirrors its foreign engagements over the last eight years, particularly in the Middle East. The irony, of course, is that the U.S. has in fact achieved successes in many places, including the Middle East, during this period – al Qaeda core has been significantly reduced, ISIS is being routed out of Mosul and soon from Raqqa, and we have defined two objectives in Syria (unseating Assad and countering ISIS there) that we have pursued consistently without committing U.S. boots on the ground. And yet, the Obama Administration has been branded by the world community and popular opinion as having failed in its foreign policy.
Today, the Middle East, and especially Syria, is the new testing ground for both the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy and quite possibly the relevance of the United States in the world. To be sure, the U.S. has failed in at least one concrete way in Syria – of having abandoned millions of displaced persons and having stood on the sidelines as half a million people have been killed. But Syria has also become the epicenter of where geopolitical balance will be defined for years, if not decades, to come, with the layered power struggles that have evolved (between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his people, between jihadi groups, between Turks and Kurds, and between Russia and Iran on one hand and the United States on the other). It is there that the new Trump Administration has an opportunity to start the process of geopolitical rebalancing correctly by first understanding why the United States has lost on the world stage.
This brings us to three questions that face the new administration given the course of our foreign policy: How should the U.S. balance between exercising force and restraint; advocating clear objectives and being adaptive to changing circumstances; and determining when to act to further our objectives and those of our allies.
It is not a question of action versus inaction; rather, it is a matter of taking actions – steps to reach an objective – and making gestures – steps aimed at shaping the environment in which actions are taken. Being able to not only articulate and carry out policies but also to communicate with a range of audiences – allies, partners, enemies – is key to making those policy choices effective.
During its eight years in office, the Obama Administration ignored gestures and focused on actions – actions that reflected a set of principles irrespective of events on the ground. These principles included supporting popular sentiments during the Arab Uprising in toppling local governments (except in the case of the Iranian Green Revolution in 2009), drawing down the U.S. military presence overseas, and relying on regional powers to share responsibility over regional issues.
Principled actions are crucial in leadership, but they need to adapt to new circumstances – especially when those circumstances were caused by those very same actions. So, even though its support of popular protests worked moderately well in some cases (in Tunisia, for example), the Obama Administration refused to realize (or in the Syrian case, realized too late) that these actions may not work in all cases. When those actions were likely to marginalize allies (for example, the Iran nuclear deal), the Obama Administration did not make gestures to allies and partners to reassure them.
Many of these actions were captured in an adjective that took off during the Obama years, “transactional.” Transactional relationships among states – especially absent meaningful gestures – are probably no more fulfilling than transactional relationships among people, and there is likely little faith and interest in their results.
Here is where the Trump Administration has opportunities to not only pursue new decisions in foreign policy, but to lay the groundwork for how those decisions will be received (and therefore applied) in the region. While it transacts in foreign policy actions, the Administration could also pursue a parallel course of extending foreign policy gestures. Gestures – which need to be made to both allies and enemies – require more effort, are more tailored, and need not be tied to an immediate demand or outcome. Where they can be effective is in defining the spaces in which policy decisions take place, by communicating consistently with the partners whose support is needed to ensure that those policies do not produce unintended second- and third-order consequences.
Gestures can be especially effective in a region where context is often more important than substance, and whose conflicts are based around perceptions of those contexts. For example, whatever the foreign policy objectives and effects of the nuclear deal are on Iran, it also served as a gesture to the Gulf States; namely of marginalizing them by creating a perception of an emboldened Iranian hegemon. The same is true of the counter-ISIS campaign – however effective coalition actions in Iraq and Syria against ISIS, it is in successful gestures of the U.S. towards the region’s Sunnis that lasting blows to the group can take place.
To take these two foreign policies as examples, the Trump Administration has opportunities to rebuild relationships with key allies in the region by focusing not only on how it prosecutes foreign policy actions (of enforcing, eliminating, or amending the Iran nuclear deal, or of how it fights ISIS) but the contexts of these actions. Successfully pursuing these two agenda items in the Middle East requires simultaneously renewing outreach to Sunni states, building regional strategies and terms of cooperation on issues related to counterterrorism and preserving shared interests. It is these gestures aimed at relationships that will lay the foundations for successful and lasting transactions.
Investing in credibility will require not only that the Trump Administration pursue its foreign policy actions, but also create opportunities for gestures to both allies and enemies. It will be an extra effort, but will ensure that any gains it makes can grow as it moves towards a relational rather than a transactional approach to foreign policy.
The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the U.S. government.
