Under Trump, the US’ interventionist policy towards the Middle East has reached a new low

The Gregorian year and decade are off to an awful start, so let us pray for a better beginning to the Year of the Rat. 

The United States’ resort to political assassination in the case of Iran’s major general Qassem Soleimani was an appalling breach of law, convention and common sense. It showed that the world’s most powerful state no longer respects the rules which have governed interstate relations. American exceptionalism has reached a new low and one which invites tit-for-tat retaliation.

In practice, Iran is likely to have more sense than to try to “take out” Soleimani’s US counterparts, for example, the top brass of the US Central Command, whose forward base in Qatar is presumably behind the US attacks on the Shia militias operating against Islamic State in northern Iraq.

The assassination of Soleimani was carried out on Iraqi soil against the wishes of the (elected) Iraqi government, which has cooperative relations with Iran. For sure, Iran has been interfering in Syria and Iraq, but no more than the US.

The world has now witnessed 40 years of sporadic US interventions in this region: from covertly supporting Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran to mounting an invasion of Iraq, justified by blatant lies about weapons of mass destruction, and latterly opposing or supporting varying factions in Syria and Iraq.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has trashed the nuclear agreement with Iran supported by Europe, Russia and China. The only beneficiary of 40 years of rising chaos has been another exceptionalist state, Israel, with official US support for Benjamin Netanyahu and his overtly racist laws.

As Trump targets Iran, North Korea’s Kim would be wise to lie low

It is no wonder that Iran’s desire to push the US out of the region may even have some support among traditional US allies. Qatar, host to US forces, was quick to send condolences to Iran after Soleimani’s killing, and Oman’s new monarch was congratulated by President Hassan Rowhani and quick to engage with Iran.

The Saudis kept silent, worried that their backchannel talks with Iran to cool the situations in the Gulf and Yemen would go into reverse. Iraq itself wants to remove US troops, who may refuse to go.

Of course the US will not be pushed out of the region by Iran, any more than US sanctions will bring regime change to long-suffering Iranians. But US global influence is deservedly lowered by its reckless and erratic behaviour in this region, often assisted by a mainstream media which laps up administration propaganda today as at the time of the Iraq invasion.

Geraldine Brooks, a distinguished writer who had been Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal at the time of the Iran-Iraq war and the US downing of an Iranian airliner, recently wrote of howling “in frustration” at inaccurate references to events she reported and general media ignorance of recent history.

Soleimani killing a reality check for China’s Middle East aspirations

The US in the hands of Trump, Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper is out of control and needs to be put back in its box, and obliged to return to established norms. Otherwise it can expect assassination to become the new norm.

On this side of the globe, China too needs to be put back in its box and induced to observe international rules. Unfortunately, the sense that China is too big and too old to bother with such foreign ideas is flourishing under President Xi Jinping.

Thus Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo had to drop by its Natuna islands with a significant part of its navy and air force before China would withdraw a fishing fleet and coastguard vessels from the 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone off the Natunas.

These waters come within the infamous nine-dash line defining China’s claim to most of what is now generally known as the South China Sea. But this line, which extends about 2,000km from the southern coast of Hainan, has no basis in history prior to the 1930s and has never been accepted by either the littoral states of the region or other major countries.

It is based on lies in the same way the Iraq invasion was. Unfortunately it will be difficult for an increasingly xenophobic China to abandon its claims, even though Indonesia’s archipelagic borders and exclusive economic zone are recognised by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration also ruled that none of the rocks and islets the disputed Spratly group qualify for an exclusive economic zone.

Yet China’s ability to divide and rule its neighbours is fraying. Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia are showing increasing signs of coordinating their responses with regard to their sea boundaries. The Philippines’ eagerness to be bought by Chinese promises of investment are unlikely to survive Rodrigo Duterte’s administration.

As for the Taiwan question, China’s refusal to admit the legitimacy of two Chinese states increasingly sounds like Hitler’s objectives of annexing Austria and Sudetenland in 1938 to bring all Germans into one state. Or to put it another way: if China could accept two Germanies and still accepts two Koreas, why not two Chinas? Or are the Chinese too exceptional to accept that one people can have two different political sovereignties?

Philip Bowring is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator