Middle East expert, former US envoy to the region under presidents George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, now adviser to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank, Dennis Ross was attending the second international conference organized by November, in Paris, by the think tank Elnet which works for the rapprochement between France and Israel.
Page Contents
How to explain the current American withdrawal from the Middle East?
Donald Trump embodies isolationism and unilateralism, recurring trends in American history. After the first world war, the United States made a retreat with serious consequences. Following the Vietnam War (1955-1975), the country has refocused on domestic issues. This "Vietnamese Syndrome" weighed until the Gulf War in 1991. Today, this retreat is a backlash of our interventions in Afghanistan (in 2001) and in Iraq (2003), whose effects are deep and every day more tangible.
Isolationism and unilateralism are close concepts without being identical. The isolationism, pushed to the extreme, becomes pacifism refusing any intervention. Unilateralism means, for its part, the refusal of alliances and the obligations that they imply: it is then a question of privileging its interests in the short term.
Donald Trump does one and the other …
Yes. He claims that the United States does not need to be in the Middle East, where, according to him, they would have spent $ 7 trillion. This statement is fanciful: the real cost is around $ 2 trillion (Approximately EUR 1 800 billion)which is already considerable. According to his vision of the world, since the Russians, the Iranians and the Turks want to take care of Syria, then, let them take care of it! He says it openly.
After oil tanker attacks in the Strait of Oman (in June)he had tweeted in substance: "We do not depend on oil from the Near East; let those who need help solve this problem. This is also what a good part of the American public thinks, tired of these interventions which are expensive, in dollars as in men, and which did not make positive changes.
What are the consequences of this withdrawal?
The most serious consequence is the emptiness it causes. Most often, the void is filled by hostile forces that pose a direct threat to our interests and those of our allies. This implies that in the end, we will have to intervene for longer durations, in more difficult and more expensive conditions, since we will have left the field.
