By David K. Shipler
There is an
intriguing quality about President Trump, one that makes him a laughing stock
at one moment, a loose cannon the next, and a breath of fresh air to many of
his supporters. He is completely untethered to history—to the history of his
own country, to the histories of other countries he deals with, to the history
of carefully constructed US policy, and even to the history of his own pronouncements.
He has no
compunction about contradicting himself, as he has in recent days about Islam,
and he seems content to address a problem as if it were a blank slate without a
long background of messy complications. Unburdened by the expertise of
scholarship or diplomacy—which he obviously didn’t tap for his Mideast trip—his
statements to Sunni Arab leaders in Riyadh and to Israeli and Palestinian leaders
in Tel Aviv and Bethlehem sound simplistic, devoid of all the hand-wringing
doubts that specialists in the region would include.
That might be a good thing if it
meant cutting past the burdensome histories that weigh down the region. You
might call that creative naïveté. But it’s hard to see much prospect in Trump’s
bumper-sticker approaches. Both sides want peace, let’s do a deal. All sides
want to defeat terrorism, let’s blame Iran and ready our billions in American
arms. Let’s give Arab despots the green light to suppress their domestic
oppositions in the name of fighting terrorism. Let’s conveniently forget that
the Saudi hosts developed Wahhabism from which al-Qaeda’s ideology flourished.
Let’s not analyze the endemic, local wellsprings of radicalism but rather—as
the writer Robin Wright has noted in criticism—portray it as some alien
invasion that can be expelled “out of this earth,” as Trump urged the Muslim
leaders gathered in Riyadh.
