It is quite understandable that an American president, in his final years in office, thinks seriously about what his legacy will be. What mark his presidency will leave. He would hope to make it to the school history textbooks.
Barack Obama is not exceptional. He is looking to be a man who is remembered for choosing peace and harmony between nations, rather than confrontation and wars. He tried with his neighbouring country Cuba and faraway places like Iran, Ukraine and North Korea, in the hope that his peaceful approach would bring those states into the international mainstream. In this day and age, it is no easy job to do or at least it cannot be done through appeasement. It would take more than that to have a peaceful world. History shows that the price of appeasement is more dear than the price of war in certain situations.
An interview he gave to the New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman on April 5 reveals the extent to which Obama is ready to go in pursuit of diplomacy. His doctrine of ‘engagement’ satisfies Iranian pride, especially after his Secretary of State John Kerry signed the primary agreement with Tehran regarding its nuclear programme.
In an unprecedented move, Obama reprimanded Arab Gulf states for their shortcomings on certain internal and regional issues.
However, Obama has invited the leaders of Gulf countries to a meeting next month in Camp David to discuss the burning issues in the region. As he made his observations, he did not wait till he met them face to face and heard what they had to say. He defiantly gave the wrong information. People in the Gulf were astonished, not because Obama spoke about some important political issues that Arab nations were facing, but because he was very obviously employing double standards. His statement was very strong, his words unusual. He knows that the only force helping Syrian President Bashar Al Assad kill his people is Iran and its allied sectarian forces, who are playing havoc with the security of the region as a whole from Iraq to Syria to Yemen. The double standards do not end there. Surely, the US president and his close advisers read at least a synopsis of the US State Department’s reports on terrorism in the world. Iran is on the top of that list. Even the president himself, in the same interview, referred to the fact that sanctions on Iran, because it supports terrorism, will not be lifted.
On the other hand, a number of surveys conducted in the region show that the most satisfied youths in the Arab world today are those in the Gulf. The main point Obama should know is that Iran dreams of reviving its old empire. The Iranian tactics to achieve that goal are very simple: Destroy the Arab nation-states using either sect or the slogan “death to America”. Both these tactics appeal to some disgruntled groups. The destabilisation started in Lebanon in the aftermath of the long and bloody civil war and was used in Iraq immediately after the US war and later in Syria. Yemen and Bahrain are also targets. So it is not surprising that some Iranian statesmen and commentators publicly declared that Baghdad is the capital of a new Iranian Empire, or that Sana’a is the fourth Arab capital to fall into Iranian hands. So Mr President, who is the aggressor and who is the victim in this region? Obama’s interview was the talk of the town in the Gulf region and it was slammed on social media. Arabs find the comments subjective and irreverent and far from ordinary diplomatic conduct — to the extent that a good number of people here in the Gulf I listened to were saying that the leaders of the Gulf ought to decline Obama’s invitation to go to Camp David.
In fact, the general attitude of US foreign policy regarding the region is being questioned.
Mohammad Al Rumaihi is a professor of Political Sociology at Kuwait University. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@rumaihi42
