Riad Tabbarah

During his campaign for president, and the first three months of his presidency, Donald Trump was the champion and the main stoker of American Islamophobia. He proposed a total ban on Muslims entering the United States during his campaign and, after becoming president, he tried twice and failed to ban citizens of seven, then six, Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. During the campaign, he claimed that, “Muslims hate us ... a tremendous hatred,” and promised to close some mosques. He proposed to implement a database and special identification cards for American Muslims. Saudi Arabia was not spared of course, as it was blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks, with “secret papers” to prove it.

Suddenly, in April of this year, all this changed drastically, and suddenly. This change culminated in the May summits in Saudi Arabia. To begin with, Mr. Trump was the first president in the history of the United States who inaugurated his first trip abroad by a visit to a Muslim country, Saudi Arabia. He authorized the sale of over a billion dollars worth of sophisticated weapons to a state, he had claimed, that masterminded Sept. 11. He thanked “the magnificent Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” and assured the world that “this is not a battle between different faiths, different sects, or different civilizations. ... This is a battle between Good and Evil.”

What happened? Are we seeing Trump 1.0 morph into Trump 2.0, a completely different software? In a sense, the answer is yes. This is why.

Trump, it is well known, has no doctrine on foreign affairs and, indeed, has very scant knowledge of the political world and its complications. His mentor during the presidential campaign was Stephen Bannon who sees history as a struggle between Islam and Christianity. Bannon believes that past Christians understood the nature of this conflict and managed to stop the spread of Islam in Poitiers, France. But the present Judeo-Christian civilization has failed in this respect, as evidenced by the spread of Islam in Europe. Bannon is also an anti-globalist, actually, a “nationalist” who created the isolationist slogan of “America First” and advocated the breakup of NATO, the EU and the multilateral trade agreements. Trump was so impressed by his mentor, he not only adopted his slogans, he appointed him as his strategic adviser and as member of the Principals Committee (regular attendees) of the National Security Council (NSC) team.

Bannon became soon in conflict with the globalists inside Trump’s administration, a group which included, among others, the NSC head, Gen. H.R. McMaster, the Secretary of Defense James Mathis and the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. In direct contrast with Bannon and his cronies, this group of more sober officials had openly advocated rapprochement with the Sunni Arab states in the Middle East to combat Daesh (ISIS) and the Nusra Front, and the strengthening of NATO and the EU. In April, the balance of power tilted toward this latter group. Bannon and his allies had gotten Trump in trouble with the failed proposal of a ban on citizens of Muslim majority countries entering the U.S. and also on the failed repeal of Obamacare. More important, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the husband of his favorite daughter Ivanka, dropped his support for Bannon and joined the generals. So on April 5, Bannon was removed from the NSC, and otherwise sidelined.

As a result, “America First” and its isolationist underpinnings receded to the background. On the recommendation of the generals, 59 Tomahawk missiles struck Syria on April 7, two days after Bannon was banished. A MOAB bomb, the biggest non-nuclear device in the U.S. arsenal, and never used before, was dropped on Nangarhar province, a remote rebel area in Afghanistan, just a week later. Although the planning of his May trip have started before April 5, the real work was probably done in the seven weeks that followed that date. It is of course significant that his first trip abroad included three summits in Saudi Arabia, all with leaders of Muslim countries (Saudi Arabia, the Gulf countries and the countries of the Islamic Cooperation Organization), followed by meetings with NATO and the EU that he had wanted disbanded.

This was a dizzying change in foreign policy for a democracy. Such a change may happen after a seismic event like Sept. 11, but this time it was due to a change in the ideology of the group, within the administration, that controlled the mind of the president. Indeed not unlike a change of software.

But a change from a basically isolationist doctrine to a globalist one comes with a price. Trump’s “alt-right” and other white supremacist supporters, elected him because he was going to make America white again. The Christian Right supported him, in spite of his divorces and womanizing, because he was going to ban Muslims from coming and make America Christian again. The “nationalists” supported him because he was going to have an inward-looking realist policy, which does not waste time and resources on international development or military adventures. And many supported him because he was going to turn history around and stop cultural integration. To please these groups, he toughened his stance toward the end of his trip when it came to the meetings with the NATO and G-7 partners. He declared Germany as “very bad” for having a big trade surplus with the United States. He emphasized the failure of some NATO members to pay 2 percent of their respective GDPs, the set minimum payment, toward the budget of the organization. In a speech in front of a Sept. 11 and Article 5 Memorial at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, he refused to affirm commitment to Article 5, which stipulates that the NATO allies will come to the help of any member under attack when it is invoked. (Ironically, Article 5 was invoked only once, on the occasion of the Sept. 11 attack). And in a tour of NATO headquarters, he, at one point, rudely shoved the Prime Minister of Montenegro to the side in order to take a place in front of all the other leaders.

But neither Trump’s shifting toward the globalists at the beginning of his trip win him support among liberals, nor did the theatricals at the end of his trip stop the decline in the support of his core groups. His already low approval ratings fell significantly during May, according to most polls. In attempting to satisfy both sides, he apparently fell in the crack.