I was recently on Ian Masters’ radio show. The host of Background Briefing said something that stuck with me. It’s extraordinary, Masters said, that Donald Trump’s first instinct is to lie. He’s much more comfortable lying than he is telling the truth.

That’s one way of looking it. But I doubt whether the president knows he’s lying. More importantly, I doubt whether he cares. I doubt whether he cares one way or the other, whether a statement is true or false or in-between. The differences just don’t matter.

That they don’t matter to him is something worth exploring. Here’s how I responded to Masters: Normal people like you and me have some degree of respect for the facts. We may have opinions about the fact that it’s raining outside, for example, but we don’t doubt that it’s raining. For people like the president, that’s not how things work.

For people like the president, there is no authority independent of his own ego and self-interest. As a consequence, there can be no deference to the authority of facts. There is literally nothing to defer to. As a consequence of that, there can’t be any such thing as lying. It’s impossible. Whatever he says, true or false, is true by virtue of his saying it. “When the facts do not exist independent of your own ego and your own self-interest, there’s no such thing as a falsehood,” I said, “Everything you say is true.”

When there is no authority independent of your own ego or self-interest, disagreement is intolerable. It’s not possible for there to be differing opinions over the same facts to whose authority each person defers. Au contraire! When there is no authority independent of your own ego and self-interest, disagreement is betrayal. Disagreement is treasonous. Dissent is the enemy.

When a president recognizes no authority independent of his own ego and self-interest, even the American people have no authority. “Democracy” is meaningless, because the people are him. To disagree with Trump — whether administration officials or the press—is to betray the country.

If Trump says it’s not raining outside when it’s clearly raining, then it’s not raining. This is true by virtue of the president having said those words. Now imagine what it’s like working with such a person, being related to such a person, or (dear God) being married to such a person. This is an authoritarian politically as well as personally.

And this is the loneliest man in America.

The poet and essayist Adrienne Rich once said liars are lonely. They are lonely because they don’t want to be seen. Rich, I think, captures something essential about Donald Trump. Yes, the president wants to be the center of everyone’s attention, but remember what Stephen Colbert once said — we don’t really know him. We don’t know his school grades. We don’t know his real skin color. We don’t know his real hair. Everything about this president is unreal: a front, a presentation, a fraud. And there’s probably a simple reason for that, so simple as to be invisible: He’s a scared little man.

Why doesn’t he want to be seen? Why is he so scared?

Let me digress a bit into the history of psychology. For a long time, for most of my lifetime in fact, social scientists and policy makers pinned many of society’s problems on low self-esteem. The solution was nurturing people’s self-worth. If a boy bullied a playmate, boost his self-esteem. If a man acted violently, he might be lashing out due to low or lack of self-esteem. Such fear explained a panoply of social ills. For a generation and more, the goal was devising methods to combat emotional insecurity.

It turns out everyone was wrong, wrote Roy Baumeister.

Fifteen years ago, the renown sociologist wrote for the LA Times: “It was widely believed that low self-esteem could be a cause of violence, but in reality violent individuals, groups and nations think very well of themselves. They turn violent toward others who fail to give them the inflated respect they think they deserve. Nor does high self-esteem deter people from becoming bullies, according to most of the studies that have been done; it is simply untrue that beneath the surface of every obnoxious bully is an unhappy, self-hating child in need of sympathy and praise.”

It’s not fear rooted in insecurity. It’s fear root in self-regard, monumental self-regard. When Trump is proven wrong, he’s exposed. The facade crumbles. He is seen. This can be enormously painful, so painful, he’ll turn a democracy on its head, because democracy and its deference to the authority of truth is literally a source of pain.

Someone must be punished for that pain.

That someone is America.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 31 December 2019
Word Count: 787
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I’m, thinking about Barry, the man I worked under when I was 17. He was the manager of a local Italian restaurant. He was big and ugly and mean. Dumb, too, so dumb he once set himself on fire stripping the paint off a pizza oven with turpentine.

He also wanted to torture a stray dog coming round looking for food. I feared Barry, but I somehow screwed up the courage to stand up for the dog even if I got hurt. In the end, Barry backed down. Assaulting a minor would have been a state crime after all. (For inquiring readers, alas, I do not remember what happened to the dog. Sorry!)

My larger point, however, was that Barry is a quintessential Donald Trump supporter. What motivated him wasn’t ideology or self-interest. What motivated him wasn’t religion or fear. What motivated him was acting violently toward those he believed deserve it. He behaved cruelly because he liked it. Looking for other logical reasons would have been giving more credit to Barry than was needed to understand him.

He told me who he was, and I believed him.

In truth, I don’t know if Barry voted for Trump. He might be dead for all I know. But there are millions of Barrys. They are the fascists among us, veiled sadists whom the majority must continue taking seriously long after the Trump presidency is over. For proof, consider Astead Herndon’s reporting Sunday. The New York Times reporter went to rural Arizona in October to write about Trumpstock, a cultural celebration of the president. If Trump loses next year, a source said while reaching for his sidearm, “nothing less than a civil war would happen. I don’t believe in violence, but I’ll do what I got to do.”

Using Barry as my guide, here are five thoughts on Herndon’s reporting.

It’s not about fear Herndon is one of the few reporters, perhaps the only one, to have said what needs saying. Lots of white Americans who support the president don’t do it despitehis racism, sexism, bigotry and the rest. They support him because of them. “These voters don’t passively tolerate Mr. Trump’s ‘build a wall’ message or his ban on travel from predominantly Muslim countries — they’re what motivates them.”

Sadly, Herndon attributes bigotry to fear, as if to suggest the president’s supporters are afraid of what they don’t understand — as if that fear is why they support Donald Trump. Herndon: “They see themselves in his fear-based identity politics, bolstered by conspiratorial rhetoric about caravans of immigrants and Democratic ‘coups.’”

It’s not about fear, though. Attributing fear to fascism overlooks what fascists are doing: punishing people who are “defying” the “natural order of things,” which is to say, defying whatever it is some white Americans believe is rightfully theirs. For the people at Trumpstock, the election of the first black president upended the natural order.

It all goes back to Obama Herndon’s reporting should finish off the idea that Trump took over the Republican Party. He didn’t. It was already primed for a fascist leader. Whatever “conservatism” used to mean ended after 2008. Herndon’s sources “described a white America under threat as racial minorities typified by Mr. Obama … gain political power. They described Mr. Trump as an inspirational figure who is undoing Mr. Obama’s legacy and beating back the perceived threat of Muslim and Latino immigrants, whom they denounced in prejudiced terms” (my italics).

In 2016, when Trump held rallies in rural Arizona, he emphasized Obama’s middle name — Hussein — to suggest he was a secret Muslim and not an American citizen. The people at Trumpstock were still making a fetish of Obama’s middle name by the time Herndon arrived. One of them was explicit in connecting Obama and Trump. Herndon: “Stacey Goodman, a former police officer from New York who retired to Arizona … said her distrust of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate had led her to Mr. Trump.”

Socialism? They don’t care Thanks to Herndon, it should now be clear these people would not know socialism if they stepped in it. That word is merely one of a number used to express the same emotion, which is rage against undeserving people upending the natural order of things. When the Democrats wanted nothing to do with socialism (2008-2016), they accused them of socialism. Now that they want something to do with “socialism,” they accuse them of socialism. It’s meaning doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is a byword for the enemy. “There is no difference between the democratic socialists and the National Socialists,” said Evan Sayet, a conservative writer who spoke at [Trumpstock]. Democrats, he said, “are the heirs to Adolf Hitler.”

Democrats as devils One of the reasons liberals believe Trump supporters are afraid of what they don’t understand is because they totally “misunderstand” the Democratic Party. They see it as something it’s not — e.g., a bastion of socialism.

But this itself is a misunderstanding. Fascists understand perfectly well what the Democratic Party is: a meaningful mechanism by which Americans who have been without power gain power. That’s the problem. The solution, for the fascists, is characterizing the Democrats as being so evil any action justified in defeating them.

This is why the president’s supporters swim in conspiracy theory. It isn’t just irrational belief in made-believe. To the contrary, it’s quite rational. They are using make-believe to justify whatever they want. Herndon: “Democrats were portrayed as not just political opponents, but avatars of doom for Mr. Trump’s predominantly white voter base and for the country.” Many have embraced the “QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that top Democrats are worshiping the Devil and engaging in child sex trafficking.”

The new Brownshirts When you have given up on the idea of sharing power — which is to say, when you have given up on democracy — then it makes sense, to the fascist, to start organizing in ways outside the norm. Herndon’s reporting should demonstrate that Trump supporters, now and after his presidency is over, constitute a new kind of Sturmabteilung. In plain English, this was the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, the people willing to use violence to advance political objectives. Their enemies, like Trump’s enemies, were so bad, anything was justified. They went around the German countryside assaulting and killing people who stood in the party’s way.

We aren’t there yet, of course, but the Brownshirts took decades to grow into what they became, the SS. We may never witness organized murder quite like that, but Trump supporters don’t need to be that organized. There are plenty of lone wolves out there with plenty of access to plenty of firepower who are highly attuned to the president’s grievances. It may not be a civil war in 2020, but this much is certain.

There will be blood.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 December 2019
Word Count: 1,133
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The time I traded a measure of pain for a clear conscience involved a dog.

It was a stray dog. It roamed between the creek, the cornfield and the pizzeria I worked in. I was real skinny back then. Soaking wet, I was maybe 120 pounds. The manager that day was not. Barry (not his real name) was burly. Pushing 300, at least. Barry didn’t like dogs. That was fine. The problem was he wanted to torture this one.

Barry was like boys I knew growing up in rural upstate. Wild animals were a part of childhood. Wild animals were often entertainment. By that I mean, some people took pleasure in maiming and killing them. I once saw a boy in our trailer park delight in stomping a frog under his boot heel. He thrilled at seeing my horrified face.

I don’t know if Barry did that, but he was looking for fun during long night hours. The dog had come around. Its hunger was an opportunity. Barry made a big deal of his plan. He’d bait it, then kick it to teach it a lesson — don’t come beggin’ ’round here.

I don’t remember all the details, but I remember three.

First was that Barry was intimidating. He was taller than me. He was older than me. He was wilder and angrier than me. He was the kind of adult I knew to whom fear equaled respect. So I feared him, and I showed it. The second detail is feeling this was wrong. It was wrong to kick a hungry animal. It needed food, not punishment. The third detail is deciding I was going to do something even if I suffered for it.

So I squared off with Barry. Jesus God, he was an ugly somebitch. He was dumb, too. That cost him later. There’s a still image in my mind’s eye of him running to the backdoor engulfed in blue flame. He set himself on fire stripping paint off the pizza oven with turpentine. The big dummy forgot to turn off the pilot light. We put him out in the end. When I saw him years later, his face looked the cheese pizza I ordered.

It wasn’t much of a change, honestly. He made his ugly uglier by dry shaving. He claimed it toughed up his skin. He made clear to anyone listening this was a good thing. The result, however, was a fantasia of nicks and blood over which hovered his hard black eyes. With hideous red lips, he said: “So what? Are you going to stop me?”

There are volumes of subliminal meaning in those words. Are you, a skinny teenager, going to stop me, a full-grown man more than twice your size? Are you, someone with no power, going to stop me, someone with power? This is what he was saying without saying. This is what he was asking without asking. He wanted me to say kicking a hungry dog was wrong. He wanted me to deny him the authority he said he deserved.

He wanted to punish me for denying him that authority.

Then, after our eyes locked, something changed. I could see it. Perhaps it was the realization what he wanted was going somewhere he didn’t want to go. Barry was about to commit a crime involving a minor. Was teaching a lesson to the dog — and me — worth the cost of answering to an authority greater than his own? Apparently not.

Barry is a Trump voter. I don’t know for a fact, but I have no doubt. If he wasn’t dead in 2016, or otherwise incapacitated, he voted for the president. If he bothers to, he’s going to vote for Donald Trump again. This is as true to me as the air I’m breathing.

Barry is an example of something some leftists will not admit. Class does not motivate him. Economic justice means nothing. Morality is irrelevant. Some leftist scholars believe liberalism failed to meet Barry’s economic needs, so they voted for Trump. But that’s not it. For millions of Americans like Barry, that cause and effect is not it at all. “Economic anxiety” was a convenient rationale for what they already wanted to do, which was doing what that boy did in the trailer part: stomp other beings. The point isn’t just to be cruel. The point is taking pleasure in acting cruelly to those whom they believe deserve such cruelty. They deserve it for the “crime” of being who they are.

Seymour Martin Lipset understood this in his own way. In 1959, he coined the phrase “working class authoritarianism” to describe “people who formed the base of the Nazi labor unions, the White Citizen’s Councils in the segregated American south, and race rioters in England. These people are “the most nationalistic and jingoistic sector of the population. In a number of nations, they have clearly been in the forefront of the struggle against equal rights for minority groups, and have sought to limit immigration or to impose racial standards in countries with open immigration.”

As Jordan Michael Smith wrote in the journal Democracy in January of 2016, Lipset’s working-class authoritarianism “describes a Donald Trump rally almost perfectly.”

I have no doubt Barry is in the minority of Americans just as I have no doubt he voted for Trump. A majority believes in democracy. A majority, including many white working-class Americans, believe in minding their own business. But the majority has also become complacent or even indifferent to home-grown fascism. The only way to stop it is for the majority to no longer be indifferent. The majority must make a choice.

It must decide to trade a measure of pain for a clear conscience.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 December 2019
Word Count: 952
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The Huffington Post’s Molly Redden wrote a story Christmas Day worth pondering a bit. It was a roundup of news articles since 2017 focusing on Donald Trump as a “lonely” president. With the title “Donald Trump Is The Loneliest Man In America,” Redden’s intent wasn’t sympathy. (Outraged Twitter readers made that mistake.) It was pointing out reporting tropes seeming to convey important information but don’t. At root, Redden said, correctly, these are “rinse-and-repeat stories of palace intrigue.”

At first blush, Redden’s was a throw-away story fit for the slowest news day of the year. But I think it has more value than that. At the very least, it’s an occasion for us to think about why any president is lonely but especially this one. I happen to find the claim entirely believable, however thin the sourcing typically is for these kinds of stories.

Donald Trump resides in a multiverse of lies that separate him inexorably from the human community. Moreover, he doesn’t value the opinions of the people he’s lying to. What he wants is something he can never have: respect from people who know the difference between obvious truth and obvious falsehood. What he wants is to dominate the people whom he can never dominate. And he can never dominate them, because they give deference to the authority of facts and morality more than they do to him.

Trump lives in a box of his own making.

The box may be his television. It should be no surprise one of the most perceptive observers of the Trump presidency has been a TV critic. In Audience of One, the New York Times’ James Poniewozik wrote Trump isn’t so much a human being as the rough outline of a human being, someone who has evolved into his own televised representation, a living avatar. He has, Poniewozik said, “achieved symbiosis with the medium. Its impulses were his impulses; its appetites were his appetites; its mentality was his mentality.”

Before he started his victory speech [late on November 8, 2016], he searched one more time, over the heads of the crowd, for the red light of the TV-news camera, the one thing on Earth that was most like him. It never slept. It was always hungry. It ate and ate and ate, and when it had eaten the entire world, it was still empty.

Trump has always understood what he can do with his fabricated virtual self. That it is flat, two-dimensional and bloodless obscures its potential political power. We don’t talk about this anymore, but during the 2016 campaign reporters spoke often of Trump’s habit of watching himself on TV with the sound off. One takeaway is the televised representation surpassed all other considerations. What he actually said was secondary, if it mattered at all. What mattered was how he said it, and especially how he looked on TV while saying it. This, to my thinking, is how he can still project an image of presidential strength while being, empirically, the weakest president in our history.

That the president has achieved symbiosis with the TV medium may be why so many Americans believe they know him — why so many Americans believe they are like him and thus share his feelings of victimhood — without our knowing much about him. Stephen Colbert, another perceptive observer, said in August that’s the odd thing:

We actually know nothing about him. … We don’t know his school grades. We don’t know his actual skin color. We don’t know what his actual hair is like. We don’t know what he’s worth. We don’t know anything about his conversations with other world leaders. We don’t know anything about him. That’s the odd part. For a guy who likes to always have a camera pointed at him and always talk about himself, there’s very little we can say about him with certainty.

Knowing little about him is to the president’s advantage. But knowing little about him must take a psychological toll. The poet Adrienne Rich once said in 1975’s On Lies, Secrets and Silence that someone who lies is someone who does not want to be seen. “The liar lives in fear of losing control,” she said. “She cannot even desire a relationship without manipulation, since to be vulnerable to another person means for her the loss of control. The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness” (my italics).

The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious. To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with the unconscious. It is like taking sleeping pills, which confer sleep but blot out dreaming. The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

Why doesn’t Trump want to be seen? That’s for later, I suppose. For now, Trump is empty. There is no there there, as Gertrude Stein might have said. There is no man. Only a rough outline of a man. He is adored by millions. He respects none of them.

Is Trump the loneliest man in America?

I think so.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 December 2019
Word Count: 850
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As 2019 hastens to an end, its defining patterns are clear.  The year was marked by two rancorous relationships: between China and the United States and between Turkey and NATO. Then there was United States and the sole superpower’s shape-shifting view of its role in the Middle East and North Africa.

Taken together, the world goes into the 2020s in an extraordinary flux, engaged in something that actress Gwyneth Paltrow and singer Chris Martin once said of the state of their disintegrating marriage: conscious uncoupling.

What might this mean in real terms for the region?

In 2020, the final year of US President Donald Trump’s first term, it’s clear that his promised Deal of the Century is off the immediate agenda. Though the White House said the long-delayed peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complete and had promised its release after Israeli elections in September, that schedule has been disrupted by Israel’s domestic political situation.

Israel’s third election in less than a year looms in March. By then, the US presidential season will be roaring ahead and the focus will narrow to Trump’s re-election campaign through Election Day, November 3.  Accordingly, Trump’s much-hyped grand bargain seems destined to remain a ghostly, unseen presence, at least for the remainder of this presidential term.

Trump all but acknowledged this in his address December 7 to the right-leaning Israeli American Council. Seeming to blame the intractable nature of the conflict rather than his administration’s maladroit diplomacy and partisan attitude towards one party to the dispute, Trump said he had been told that achieving peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians would be the hardest deal of all. “If Jared Kushner can’t do it, it can’t be done,” he declared.

In the new year, US policy on Syria is also likely to remain reflexive and short-term. On December 11, US Defence Secretary Mark Esper told a congressional committee that the reduced US contingent in Syria had a circumscribed focus: “The mission remains the enduring defeat of [the Islamic State] ISIS,” he said, adding “We could consider redeploying… when we feel confident that local security and police forces are capable of handling any type of resurgence.”

Two months after Trump’s decision to pull troops out of northern Syria in a tacit go-ahead to Turkey’s subsequent offensive, Esper admitted that the United States “expected turmoil” as Turkey moved Syrian refugees into the area.

Even as he acknowledged concerns that Turkey was “moving out of the NATO orbit” and towards Russia and engaging in actions “to the detriment of the alliance,” Esper laid out six broad objectives for the US military in the region that served to emphasise the narrow prism of America’s perceived interest.

“The stability of the Middle East remains important to our nation’s security,” he said. “As such, we will continue to calibrate all of our actions to deter conflict, to avoid unintended escalation and to enable our partners to defend themselves against regional aggressors. In doing so, we will preserve the hard-won gains of the past and ensure the security of the United States and our vital interests.”

In the circumstances, it’s fair to ask if the new year will see the United States all but washing its hands of the MENA region. If so, what might this mean?

There are parts of the US approach that accord with a theory put forward by Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani, whose academic research re-envisions global power dynamics. Mahbubani’s latest book bears a somewhat provocative title, Has the West lost it? In it, he argues that the West, which is to say the US-led community of Western countries, must not “lose it” in the impending clash with rising powers. Instead, he argues, the West should adopt a “3M” strategy: minimalist, multilateralist and Machiavellian.

There is something to be said for Mahbubani’s 3M strategy.

Minimalism, which is a call to do less — intervention, fighting unnecessary wars — will not only help regions such as MENA where the West has traditionally meddled to little purpose and great harm but would also prevent the draining of spirits and resources from Western societies.

As for multilateralism, it ties in with a Machiavellian strategy of self-preservation. With most of the world population — 88% — living outside the West, it is wise to prop up global multilateral institutions, Mahbubani argues.

It all makes good sense but the year is closing out with a key multilateral institution — the World Trade Organisation — crippled by the Trump administration. On December 11, the WTO’s trade court became ineffective because Washington has repeatedly blocked judicial appointments since 2017.

All bets are off on what lies ahead in 2020 but it probably won’t be a sober and well-judged 3M strategy on the part of the West.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 December 2019
Word Count: 787
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Richard North Patterson has a long essay in The Bulwark arguing that the president is mentally ill and therefore unfit to govern. Actually, has been unfit. The former chairman of Common Cause said Donald Trump’s “narcissistic personality disorder” has been evident for years even to people inexpert in the workings of the human mind.

Patterson isn’t saying anything new. He’s adding to a growing conversation. What I want to contribute, however, is that this isn’t helpful. We shouldn’t see mental illness where there is plain ordinary sadism. We shouldn’t pathologize Trump’s ignorance, pettiness and greed. If we do, we don’t see what’s in front of us. Evil is rational.

What’s more, pathologizing evil glosses over intent. Trump has done bad things, but he can’t help it. He’s sick! Well, that won’t cut it. Trump and the Republicans are making choices for reasons. Making choices for reasons is rational. Seeing evil as rational, however, is unthinkable for some. So they instead search for mental illness.

If the president is crazy, about half the adult population is crazy. Half the adult population finds ways, even two decades into the 21st century, to rationalize inflicting violence on their own children. Once you understand that something as evil as beating, harming and humiliating children is commonplace, you understand why focusing on mental illness makes matters worse. Evil isn’t crazy. It’s wrong. We should say no.

Since becoming a father, I have known many parents of young children. They, like me, delighted in seeing our kids’ minds flower. They, like me, thrilled at the sight of their learning, experimenting and taking pleasure in small things. We loved them because we needed to love them the same way we needed to breathe. This held true even during those challenging moments when they melted down and lost their goddamn minds.

During these moments is when a parent makes choices that will affect a child pretty much forever. On the one hand, you can offer comfort and soothing words in the near-total absence of understanding in any coherent way what’s happening inside the child’s head. For reasons confounding to grown ups, the fact that the Beanie Boo was blue, and not pink, is real and legitimate cause for thrashing, wailing and sobbing. There’s nothing to be done for it. You can’t make her feelings less intense. You can’t reason with her. All that can be done can be measured in hugs and kisses, and time — time you may not have, but that’s the price of loving unconditionally. You love her because you must love her. Eventually, the very young child comes to her senses.

This requires good faith on the parent’s part, a commitment to believing that the child is not willfully throwing a fit, that she literally can’t not melt down for no reason a parent can identify, and that she does not intend to violate etiquette and other social norms by expressing ingratitude for a Beanie Boo that’s not the right color. Losing her mind is part of the experience of being a toddler, ergo part of the daily challenge of being a tired and bewildered parent. This experience is normal and natural and expected — for the child. For lots of parents, however, it’s not normal in the least.

More normal, more than most realize, is the exercise of bad faith in parenting, intended or not, the commitment to believing the child is willfully throwing a fit, that she is choosing to melt down and otherwise violate etiquette and other social norms due to being given a blue Beanie Boo instead of a pink one. To millions of American parents, such displays of disrespect must be addressed with correction, which is to say punishment, which is to say violence, which compounds the child’s suffering by orders of magnitude she won’t understand until adulthood, if ever. More than 50 percent of parents say they spank their children after three years of age, according to one study.

What are you going to do? Tell them their mentally unfit to be parents? No, they are making choices. Rational but bad choices. Evil requires a moral response, not a medical one. That’s the same conversation we should be having with respect to the president. “Narcissistic personality disorder” is beside the point. Or it should be.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 December 2019
Word Count: 715
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In 2010, Turkey was regarded by some as an exemplary case of economic and internal stability, having weathered the global financial crash better than most other countries. The 2010s were set up for a defining decade as it approached its centenary as a modern state in 2023.

A nascent peace process with Kurdish militants was taking shape and Kurdish civilians enjoyed an unprecedented level of rights with the lifting of restrictions on broadcasting and minority languages, including the opening of a state Kurdish channel — TRT Ses — in 2009.

Istanbul’s Taksim Square was opened for the first time in decades to May Day demonstrators and trade unionists in 2010. “Constitutional amendments granted the right of collective bargaining for public-sector employees,” said Amnesty International, describing it as a major shift towards workers’ rights.

A decade ago, Ankara was beginning to enjoy the keen ties it had worked hard to develop with a host of important regional and international actors (excluding Israel, following a deadly raid on a Turkish-dominated flotilla to Gaza).

In 2009, Turkey signed an agreement to open diplomatic relations with Armenia. With Abdullah Gul as president and Recep Tayyip Erdogan as prime minister backed by a fleet of keen, ideological local politicians spread across Anatolia, the future looked good.

By 2013, Istanbul and other cities in Turkey served as sanctuaries for thousands of Syrians fleeing political and other forms of persecution.

On the streets of Istanbul’s Beyoglu district, Syrian Kurds openly wept at hearing traditional songs, banned in their home country, performed in public for the first time. Syrian intellectuals gathered in teahouses giddily imagining a democratic future for their homeland.

On the economy front, Turkey has undergone enormous change with the building of billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure projects. The Justice and Development Party, which has ruled throughout the decade, is a building party; its mantra: construct new facilities for the masses — trains, housing, bridges, airports and highways — and come election time your seat in parliament will be all but assured.

However, the latter half of the decade has seen Turkey slide into an autocratic grip from which there appears no way out.

Tragically miscued policies in Syria, including allowing rebels, who by 2015 morphed into fundamentalist extremists, over the southern border, contributed to a series of Islamic State attacks in Istanbul, Ankara and elsewhere that year. There has been a return of the decades-long war with Kurdish separatists that continues and which has taken thousands of civilian lives in south-eastern Turkey.

The failed coup in July 2016 triggered one of the most widespread human-rights crackdowns the world has seen in recent years, with hundreds of thousands of suspected opponents of the government detained, many without trial.

Today, Turkey’s economy is flagging. With Erdogan alone at the helm and with no one to stop him driving the country into the ground from his $615 million, 1,100-room palace in Ankara, its international isolation looks set to continue. Incredibly, GDP per capita stands at less than $9,000, around $1,000 less than in 2010 and a staggering $3,500 less than in 2013, the year before Erdogan took over as president.

That means that, despite the widespread availability of easy credit, Turks today are more than one-quarter less well off than they were the year before Erdogan took complete control of Turkish politics. That’s a staggering indictment of the president and the government’s failures. On the street, people are frustrated and jaded, in part because of the constant rhetoric of conspiracy that dominates newspapers, TV and radio but mostly because there’s less money to go around.

Many observers say the troubles engulfing the country are because of events outside Turkey’s control — the war in Syria and consequent refugee crisis and the broader, global move away from emerging markets by investors. They wouldn’t be wrong.

In truth, however, these are minor factors: Syrian refugees, in fact, fuelled major economic growth and development in south-eastern Turkey and in poorer parts of Istanbul. It was Erdogan’s constant meddling in the country’s monetary policies that saw the lira lose most of its value against major currencies (when I moved to Turkey in May 2013, the lira stood at 2.2 to the US dollar. Today, it’s 5.88 and falling).

In 2010, Erdogan’s leading allies were Ahmet Davutoglu, Abdullah Gul and the other visionaries that transformed Turkish politics. Today, as the president continues his hell-bent mission to retain power, they are his rivals — enemies, even. These days Syrians in Istanbul hide from police charged with relocating them to the Turkish hinterland.

In 2017, academic Howard Eissenstat wrote how “One of the core arguments that President Erdogan has offered for expanding his power through constitutional reforms is that further centralisation of authority will increase stability. Yet the experience of the past ten years has demonstrated that the opposite is true.”

Though there are signs that a critical mass may be fed up with the president’s ways, the battle for the future of Turkey has yet to begin and the ten years to come look very grim.

Stephen Starr is an Irish journalist who lived in Syria from 2007 to 2012. He is the author of Revolt in Syria: Eye-Witness to the Uprising (Oxford University Press: 2012).

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 December 2019
Word Count: 837
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Here’s the question at hand — and I guarantee you that you’ll read it here first: Is Donald Trump the second or even possibly the third 9/11? Because truly, he has to be one or the other.

Let me explain, and while I do, keep this in mind: as 2019 ends, thanks to Brexit and the victory of Boris Johnson in Britain’s recent election, the greatest previous imperial power on this planet is clearly headed for the sub-basement of history. Meanwhile, that other superpower of the Cold War era, the Soviet Union, now Russia, remains a well-sauced Putinesca shadow of its former self. And then, of course, there’s the country that, not so long ago, every major American politician but Donald Trump proclaimed the most exceptional, indispensable nation ever.

As it happens, the United States — if you didn’t catch the reference above — has been looking a bit peaked lately itself. You can’t say that it’s the end of the road for a land of such wealth and staggering military power, enough to finish off several Earth-sized planets. However, it’s clearly a country in decline on a planet in the same condition and its present leader, Tariff Man, however uniquely orange-faced he may be, is just the symptom of the long path to hell in a handbasket its leadership embarked on almost three decades ago as the Cold War ended.

Admittedly, President Trump has proved to be the symptom from hell. To give him full credit, he’s now remarkably hard-at-tweet dismantling the various alliances, agreements, and organizations that U.S. leaders had assembled, since 1945, to make this country the Great Britain (and beyond) of the second half of the twentieth century and that’s an accomplishment of the first order.

And keep in mind the context for so much of this: it’s happening in a country that may be experiencing an unprecedented kind of inequality. It’s producing billionaires at a staggering clip with just three men already possessing wealth equivalent to that of half the rest of the population; this, mind you, at a moment when the globe’s 26 richest people reportedly are worth as much as half of everyone else, or 3.8 billion people. And this in a world in which, as the income of that poorest half of humanity continues to decline, the wealth of billionaires increases by $2.5 billion a day and a new billionaire is minted every two days.

Had all of this not already been so and had a sense of decline not been in the air, it’s inconceivable that those heartland white Americans who had come to feel themselves on the losing end of developments in this country would have sent a charlatan billionaire into the White House to represent them (or at least to give the finger to the Washington establishment). And all this on a planet that itself, in climate terms, appears to be in unprecedented decline.

Think of the above as part of what’s come down, metaphorically speaking, since those towers in New York fell more than 18 years ago.

Looking back on 9/11 It’s in this context that we should all look back on what truly did come down that Tuesday morning in September 2001, an all-American day of the grimmest sort. That was, of course, the day when this country was attacked by 19 suicidal hijackers, most of them Saudi, using American commercial jets as their four-plane air force. They, in turn, were inspired by a man, Osama bin Laden, and his organization, al-Qaeda, part of a crew of radical Islamists that Washington had backed years earlier in an Afghan War against the Soviet Union. In response to the events of that day — though it seems unimaginable now — we could have joined a world already in pain, one that had experienced horrors largely unimaginable in this country until that moment, in a kind of global solidarity.

Instead, responding to the destruction of those towers in Manhattan and part of the Pentagon, the Bush administration essentially launched a war against much of the planet. They soon dubbed it a “Global War on Terror,” or GWOT, and key officials almost instantly claimed it would have more than 60 countries (or terror groups in them) in its sights. Eighteen years later, the U.S. is still at war across a vast swath of the globe, involved in conflict after conflict from the Philippines to Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq to northern Africa and beyond. In the process, that GWOT has produced failed state after failed state and terror group after terror group, enough to make the original al-Qaeda (still going) look like nothing at all. And of course, in all these years, the U.S. military, hailed here as “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known” (and similar formulations), lacks a single decisive (or even modest) victory. Meanwhile, everywhere, yet more towers, real or metaphorical, continue to fall; in fact, whole cities in the Middle East now lie in rubble.

The top officials of President George W. Bush’s administration would, at the time, mistake 9/11 for a kind of upside-down stroke of luck, the perfect excuse for launching military operations, including invasions, geared to the ultimate domination of the planet (and its key oil supplies). Via drones armed with missiles and bombs, they would turn any president into an assassin-in-chief. They would, in the end, help spread terror groups in a fashion beyond imagining on September 12, 2001, while their never-ending wars would displace vast numbers of innocent people, creating a refugee crisis of a kind not seen since the end of World War II when significant parts of the planet stood in ruins. And all of that, in turn, would help spark, on a global scale, what came to be known as the “populist right,” in part thanks to the very refugees created by that GWOT. The response to what came down on 9/11, in other words, would create its own hell on Earth.

Who knew back then? Not me, that’s for sure. Not when I started what became TomDispatch 18 years ago, feeling, in the wake of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, that something was truly wrong with our world, that something more than the World Trade Center might be in the process of coming down around all our ears. I can still remember the feeling in those weeks, as I saw the mainstream media’s focus narrow drastically amid nationwide self-congratulatory celebrations of this country as the greatest survivor, dominator, and victim on the planet. I watched with trepidation as we began to close down to the world, while essentially attempting to take all the roles in the global drama for ourselves except greatest evil doer, which was, of course, left to Osama bin Laden.

I still remember thinking then that the Vietnam years had been the worst and most embattled in my lifetime, but that somehow this — whatever it turned out to be — would be so much worse. And yet whatever I was sensing, whatever I was imagining, wouldn’t prove to be the half of it, not the quarter of it.

If you had told me then that we were heading for Donald Trump’s version of American decline and a corrupt global gilded age of unprecedented proportions, one in which showmanship, scam, and self-serving corruption would become the essence of everything, while god knows what kinds of nightmares — like those subprime mortgages of the 2007 economic meltdown — were quietly piling up somewhere just beyond our view, I would have thought you mad.

The second 9/11 All these years later, it’s strange to feel something like that moment recurring. Of course, in this elongated Trumpian version of it, no obvious equivalent to those towers in New York has come down. And yet, over the three years of The Donald’s presidency, can’t you just feel that something has indeed been coming down, even as the media’s coverage once again narrowed, this time not to a single self-congratulatory story of greatness and sadness, but to one strange man and his doings.

If you think about it, I suspect you can feel it, too. Looking back to 2016, mightn’t you agree that Donald Trump rather literally embodied a second 9/11? He certainly was, after a fashion, the hijacker-in-chief of that moment, not sent by al-Qaeda, of course, but… well, by whom? That is, indeed, the question, isn’t it? Whom exactly did he represent? Not his famed “base,” those red-hatted MAGA enthusiasts at his endless rallies who felt they had gotten lost in the shuffle of wealth and politics and corruption in this country. Perhaps, of course, the al-Qaeda of that moment was actually another kind of terrorist crew entirely, the one-percenters who had mistaken this country’s wealth for their own and preferred a billionaire of any sort in the White House for the first time in history. Or maybe, as a presidential hijacker first class, Donald Trump simply represented himself and no one else at all. Perhaps he was ready to bring a whole system to its knees (just as he had once bankrupted those five casinos of his in Atlantic City), as long as he could jump ship in the nick of time with the loot.

On that first 9/11, those towers came down. The second time around, the only thing that came down, at least in the literal sense, was, of course, The Donald himself.  He famously descended that Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in June 2015, promoting a “great wall” (still unbuilt years later and now, like everything The Donald touches, a cesspool of corruption) and getting rid of Mexican “rapists.”

From that moment on, Donald Trump essentially hijacked our world. I mean, try to tell me that, in the years since, he hasn’t provided living evidence that the greatest power in human history, the one capable of destroying the planet six different ways, has no brain, no real coordination at all. It’s fogged in by a mushroom cloud of largely senseless media coverage and, though still the leading force on the planet, in some rather literal fashion has lost its mind.

No wonder it’s almost impossible to tell what we’re actually living through. Certainly, in a slo-mo version of 9/11, Donald Trump has been taking down the nation as we’ve known it. Admittedly, unlike Bolivia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and other such places on this increasingly unsettled planet of ours, true civil strife has (yet) to break out here (though individual mass shootings certainly have). Still, the president and some of his supporters have begun talking about, even threatening, “civil war” for our unsettled future.

On the first 9/11, the greatest power in history struck out at the planet. The second time around, it seems to be preparing to strike out at itself.

Was 11/9 the original 9/11? Perhaps this is the time to bring up the possibility that September 11, 2001, might not really have been the first 9/11 and that Donald Trump might actually be the third, not the second 9/11.

In a sense, the first 9/11 might really have been 11/9. I’m thinking, of course, of November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall, that symbol of the Cold War, a divided Europe, and a deeply divided world, suddenly began to be torn down by East and West Germans. Believe me, in our nation’s capital, it was an event no less unexpected or shocking than September 11, 2001. Until that moment, Washington’s political class and the crew who ran the national security state had continued to imagine a future dominated by a never-ending Cold War with the Soviet Union. The shock of that moment is still hard to grasp.

Looked at a certain way, that November the people had hijacked history and Washington’s response to it would be no less monumentally misplaced than to the 2001 moment. Once the key officials of George H.W. Bush’s administration had taken in what happened, they essentially declared ultimate victory. Over everything. For all time.

With the U.S., the last standing superpower, ultimately victorious in a way never before imagined, history itself seemed to be at an end. The future was ours, forever, and we had every right to grab it for ourselves. The world in which so many of us had grown up was declared over and done with in a wave of self-congratulatory backslapping in Washington. The planet, it seemed, was now our oyster and ours alone. (And if you want to know how that turned out, just think of Donald Trump in the White House and then read Andrew Bacevich’s new book, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.)

It’s in this context that Trump’s could be considered the third hijacking of our era. Given his sense of self, his might even be thought of not as the 1% hijacking moment, but as the .000000001% moment.

And be prepared: the next version of 9/11, however defined, is guaranteed to make Osama bin Laden and his 19 hijackers look like so many pikers. Depending on what tipping points are reached and what happens after that on our rapidly warming planet, so much could come down around humanity’s ears. And if so, that moment in 2015 when Donald Trump rode an escalator down into the presidential contest to the tune of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” will look very different — because it will be far clearer than it is even now that he was carrying a blowtorch with him.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).

Copyright ©2019 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 December 2019
Word Count: 2,245
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BEIRUT — A delegation of state-sanctioned Syrian journalists arrived in Riyadh in mid-December, invited to a meeting of the Arab Journalists Syndicate for the first time since bilateral relations between Syria and Saudi Arabia were suspended in August 2011.

That coincided with reports that the Saudi Embassy in Damascus and the offices of Saudi Airways were being refurbished in preparation for reopening.

Just days earlier, the UAE charge d’affaires in Damascus was quoted as saying that the United Arab Emirates was looking forward to a return of calm to Syria “under the wise leadership of President Bashar Assad.”

That was shortly after Arab countries issued back-to-back statements fiercely condemning the Turkish invasion of the north-eastern Syria that started October 9.

Earlier this year, a delegation of Syrian lawyers was hosted in Amman, followed by a visit by Syrian Parliament Speaker Hammouda al-Sabbagh to the Jordanian capital.

The snail-paced Arab normalisation with Syria began with the reopening of the UAE Embassy in December 2018, followed by those of Jordan and Bahrain. The Syrians reciprocated, muting their criticism of Saudi Arabia in state-run media outlets, focusing only on the Turkish threat, which was music to the ears of leaders in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

Syria notably stayed out of the Jamal Khashoggi controversy in 2018, with not a single word said against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz. When asked about him at a news conference, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said Khashoggi’s death was of no interest to him.

“It seems that Syrian-Saudi governmental relations are now moving forward,” said Mustapha al-Sayyed, a Syrian political commentator based in Dortmund, Germany, aimed at curbing both Iranian and Turkish influence in Syria. “Moscow is the main drive behind this re-engagement,” he said, adding that the Kremlin hopes to reduce Syria’s economic and military dependence on Tehran.

The Russians had pushed for the reopening of the Syrian-Jordanian border, giving Syrian products safe passage to the Arab Gulf and a lifeline for the cash-strapped Syrian economy.

After the United States announced it was withdrawing troops from Syria, Russia hoped that, by regaining oilfields from the Kurdish fighters east of the Euphrates River, the Syrian government would become less dependent on Iranian oil. That aspiration was interrupted by US President Donald Trump’s last-minute decision to keep US troops at the Syrian oilfields, ostensibly to prevent an Islamic State comeback.

Saudi officials believed they could lure the Syrians away from Iran, repeating a strategy that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed had carried out — with limited success — in Iraq. Instead of trashing the post-Saddam leaders of Baghdad as agents of Iranian expansionism, he reached out to them, one after another, courting them with red carpets in Riyadh and Jeddah.

The Saudi crown prince signalled prominent Iraqi allies of Tehran, such as Muqtada al-Sadr, Ammar al-Hakim and then-Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, with the sole aim of creating a threshold in Iraqi politics and not leaving the Iraqi stage wide open to Iranian meddling. He seemed convinced that he could do the same with Damascus.

The Saudis were left out of the Astana process, which monopolised Syrian affairs in the hands of Russia, Turkey and Iran. They were excluded from the recent UN-led constitutional talks that started in Switzerland last October and from the Russia-approved Turkish safe zone between Ras al-Ayn and Tal Abyad.

Last year, Bahraini Foreign Minister Khaled bin Ahmed al-Khalifa took the initiative, warmly embracing his Syrian counterpart at the UN General Assembly. The footage — not surprisingly — was aired exclusively on the Saudi Al Arabiya channel and not on Syrian state-run television. He then appeared on Al Arabiya saying: “We deal with the Syrian government and not with those trying to bring it down.”

The Bahraini foreign minister noticeably used the word “government” instead of “regime,” adding that it was inconceivable for Arab countries to be excluded from the entire political process in Syria.

One week later, a favourable interview with the Syrian president was run in the Kuwaiti-newspaper al-Shahed, in which Assad praised Kuwaiti Emir Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah. Weeks later, then-Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir travelled to Damascus, the first Arab head of state to visit the Syrian capital since 2011. Many speculated he was carrying a goodwill message from Saudi Arabia, to which he was allied in the war on Yemen.

Gulf countries reopened their embassies but did not provide direct financial aid or investment to Syria, fearing US sanctions. That prompted Assad to travel to Tehran in February 2019, triggering a series of economic agreements between the two countries, in infrastructure, telecommunications, housing and agriculture.

Arab countries expressed willingness to restore Syria’s membership in the Arab League and invite it to the 2019 Arab Summit in Tunisia but that did not happen because of a veto from Qatar — still at daggers drawn with Damascus.

It was decided that Syria could return to the league but only after it fulfilled two conditions: the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 2254, which calls for the start of a political process, and to distance itself from Iran. While the first has sluggishly kicked off with the constitutional talks in October, Syrian-Iranian relations remain fully intact.

Sami Moubayed is a Syrian historian and author of Under the Black Flag (IB Tauris, 2015).

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 December 2019
Word Count: 858
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ISTANBUL — Turkey is increasingly relying on military capabilities in its foreign policy, triggering regional and international tensions — the latest being with Russia over potential troop deployment in Libya.

Largely isolated in Europe and the Middle East, with Qatar as the only staunch ally, Ankara is flexing muscles in Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean and now in Libya.

Ankara seems to be on a collision course with Moscow over Turkey’s plans to deploy troops in support of the Islamist-backed Tripoli government. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan assailed the presence of the Russian private military company Wagner in Libya on the side of Libyan National Army Field-Marshal Khalifa Haftar.

“Through the group named Wagner, they are literally working as Haftar’s mercenaries in Libya. You know who is paying them,” Erdogan was quoted December 20 by broadcaster NTV. He added: “It would not be right for us to remain silent against all of this.”

Russia earlier said it was “very concerned” by the possible Turkish troop deployment in Libya, the Interfax news agency reported.

Erdogan recently stated Turkey was ready to send troops to Libya to back the internationally recognised government in Tripoli, which is already a recipient of Turkish military support.

“We will be protecting the rights of Libya and Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean,” Erdogan told A Haber television channel on December 15. “We are more than ready to give whatever support necessary to Libya.”

Citing military sources, the internet publication Haberturk reported that Turkey may build a military base in Libya like the ones in Qatar if the Libyan government asks for a Turkish troop deployment. Feasibility studies for the Libyan base had been completed, Haberturk columnist Cetiner Cetin wrote. There was no official confirmation.

The Turkish government said it is trying to make its voice heard in a region where conflicts pose threats on Turkey’s doorstep and where other players ignore Turkish interests but the approach is not winning Turkey any friends and is a far cry from the idea of having “zero problems with neighbours” that is the official mantra promoted on the website of the Turkish Foreign Ministry.

Mustafa Gurbuz, a non-resident fellow at Arab Centre in Washington, said an alliance between Erdogan, Turkish nationalists and the country’s military leadership is part of the reason for the militarisation.

“Erdogan’s nationalist allies are pushing for military activism in the Eastern Mediterranean against Greece over Cyprus,” Gurbuz said by e-mail.

To some extent, military power has always played a role in Turkey. Its fighter jets and ground troops have been confronting militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in northern Iraq since the 1990s but, in recent years, unilateral military action has become a much more regular feature of Turkey’s foreign policy, putting the country on a collision course with neighbours, regional powers and other NATO members.

When Erdogan spoke October 1, during parliament’s opening session of the new legislative term, he greeted “security forces that proudly hoist our flag in Syria, Iraq, Qatar and many other places.”

Since 2016, Turkey has staged three military interventions in Syria. In November, Erdogan announced the construction of a second military base in Qatar. Turkish soldiers are deployed in Somalia. Lately, Ankara added a drone deployment in the Turkish part of Cyprus.

A decade ago, soft power and the “Turkish model” of a “Muslim democracy” were at the centre of Turkey’s foreign policy.

“It set an example for the rest of the Middle East as a Muslim nation that was democratic, secular, integrated into the world economy and part of key Western institutions like NATO,” Turkey analysts Gonul Tol and Birol Baskan, of the Middle East Institute in Washington, wrote last year. “The Middle East welcomed the ‘new Turkey’ and its newfound involvement in the region.”

Turkish soap operas became hit shows throughout the Middle East and Turkey received an increasing number of tourists from the region.

The picture has changed, however. Eruptions of violence, such as the Syrian war on Turkey’s southern border, demonstrated the limits of soft power. In Syria, Erdogan ended his friendship with Syrian President Bashar Assad and started support for rebels fighting against Damascus. Turkey’s bond with the Muslim Brotherhood and its neo-Ottoman rhetoric alienated governments in the Middle East while Ankara’s relations with the European Union and the United States soured.

“Behind Turkey’s increasing military activism is the fall of what was once called the ‘Turkish model,’” Gurbuz said.

On Turkey’s domestic scene, a decrease of voter support for Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party has made the president reliant on nationalist allies who secure a pro-government majority in parliament and have pushed him to the right.

Gurbuz said Erdogan’s slide towards authoritarianism and his lack of non-nationalist political partners in Ankara have strengthened the influence of nationalist bureaucrats and the Turkish military in foreign policy matters. Some of his new allies promote a Eurasianist vision that argues Turkey should seek closer cooperation with Russia and China. Others are nationalist followers of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founder.

“The shift in Syrian policy, for example, was an outcome of Erdogan’s new alliance with Eurasianist, nationalist and Kemalist generals,” Gurbuz said.

Turkey’s latest Syria intervention triggered a confrontation with the United States because Washington has been supporting the Kurdish People’s Protection Units militia in northern Syria, a group seen as a terrorist organisation by Ankara. At the same time, Turkey threatened military action to stop gas exploration by other countries off Cyprus, driving up tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Ankara says its robust style is designed to make other players listen to the Turkish position. When a recent controversial maritime agreement between Turkey and Libya sparked EU criticism because it ignored what Greece regards as its own territorial waters, that was exactly the outcome intended by Ankara, a Turkish official said.

“With this signature, we can negotiate,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It created an opportunity to negotiate.”

Some observers say it is doubtful that the abrasive approach will turn out to be to Turkey’s advantage.

“When a country’s diplomatic style is confrontational, what do you get? Confrontations,” Simon Henderson, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote in an analysis for the Washington publication the Hill. “It has become Turkey’s signature style.”

Thomas Seibert is an Arab Weekly contributor in Istanbul.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 December 2019
Word Count: 1,038
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