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During Trump’s weird Middle East trip this week, in between fawning over US-labeled terrorists, receiving lavish gifts, and spilling the tea on his cute new crush, he made an interesting speech that perked up the ears of anti-war activists.
“A new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts and forging a future where…people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence. We don't want that.
And it's crucial for the wider world to know this great transformation has not come from Western interventionists or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.
No. The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.”
We spoke with award-winning journalist and media critic Sana Saeed to ask: Is any of this actually true? Will Trump really end the era of neocons, and does his refusal to include Israel on this trip signify a change in policy? Subscribe to hear our full conversation with Sana, and find a preview of our talk above.
Useful Idiots: What are your thoughts on Trump's recent visit to the Middle East and the idea that this is a new era, that Trump is circumventing both neocons and Israel, and that things are really shifting?
Sana Saeed: Israel is not on the back burner. Even Trump himself has said everything that's happening here is actually good for Israel. This whole idea that Trump is no longer interested in Israel as an ally is an interesting thing to say as we still continue to aid the bombs that rip apart Palestinian families in Gaza. Palestinians continue to be starved by the Israeli government, backed and supported by the U.S. government. And we continue to see the repression of speech, pro-Palestine speech, anti-genocide speech, here in the United States.
And so people are really missing what is happening here: Zionists are not being pushed to the side. They're being brought back in, but it's going to be through a way which is normalized and clandestine initially. Just give it a few weeks, maybe a month, and it's going to be obvious what's going on.
Useful Idiots: Trump said interventionists and neocons have not helped free the Middle East. And that's the extent of his critique of them. He doesn't, for example, explicitly call them out for destroying societies by invading them like the Iraq invasion. He said we don't want bombing in the Middle East but he's supporting bombing people out of existence in Gaza. It doesn't sound to me like the sea change that some people are taking from this.
Sana Saeed: I'm old enough to remember when President Obama gave the Cairo speech. He was saying what the future of the region could look like, what the relationship between the United States and Middle Eastern countries could look like. I think words are nice, sure, but nothing that Trump is actually saying is accurate.
We have to understand that intervention is not simply military. Intervention looks like a lot of different things, including economic intervention. Trump is saying ‘no Western intervention, no nation builders coming in and telling you how to run your countries.’ That's also a very clear message that we're not going to tell you how to treat your citizens. We're not going to tell you how to treat the dissidents in your countries. We're not going to tell you what to do with all these weapons that we're selling to you and giving to you. We're not going to tell you to do any of that because so long as we have a business agreement, we're good. So long as you've normalized with Israel, we're good.
The purpose is to assure regional Gulf allies, in particular the UAE and Saudi Arabia, that don't worry, we’re not coming for you on human rights abuses. We're just interested in the bottom dollar line. I get the desire for excitement, but we have to remember that these countries are not allies on our side either. If our side is anti-imperialist, is anti-genocide, is for Palestinian liberation, these are not the countries that are on that side.
Subscribe to hear the full interview with Sana Saeed on how the New York Times skillfully justified Israel bombing a hospital this week, a media critic’s guide to reading an IDF propaganda tweet, and an explanation of the unfolding conflict between Israel-backed India and Pakistan.
Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Meet Trump's Awkward New Crush
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