https://www.thenational.ae/uae/comment/trump-administration-may-have-no-choice-but-to-pick-its-poison-1.615109

After only six months in office, US president Donald Trump seems to be confronting the almost impossible choice of enduring either serious legal jeopardy or initiating a major political crisis. Either could derail his fledgling administration.

American allies, including in the Gulf, should have no illusions about the implications of the unenviable catch-22 conundrum Mr Trump faces. These spreading and interlocking quagmires could easily paralyse the White House, including on foreign policy. They are already contributing to unstable presidential conduct and bitter infighting among officials.

The legal threat is posed by special counsel Robert Mueller, the universally respected former FBI director now tasked with investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence.

But the potential threat is hardly confined to Russian meddling in the election. Recent history demonstrates that investigations into one matter – for example, Bill Clinton’s questionable land deals in Arkansas – easily lead to the discovery of unrelated misconduct, in that case his illicit affair with a White House intern.

Even if Mr Trump and his team did nothing wrong during the election, what about all their business dealings in recent years, including major international loans and land deals? There is a good reason he hasn’t released his tax returns and is reportedly infuriated that the investigation will surely examine these financial matters, especially involving Russian banks.

Mr Trump is increasingly acting like someone with a great deal to hide. Given time, Mr Mueller and his highly accomplished team will almost certainly discover what that might be.

The potential serious jeopardy for Mr Trump, or others in his inner circle, seems obvious and confirmed by his own apparent panic. Therefore, if the investigation continues, they are probably facing an eventual legal calamity, quite possibly involving criminal charges.

The solution to this massive threat is obvious, but could produce even more dire political upheaval. The American presidency confers a great deal of power, but there are limitations. The president cannot directly fire a duly appointed special counsel, who can only be dismissed by the Justice Department, and for good cause, as explained in writing.

Hence Mr Trump is, for now, completely checkmated. His attorney-general, Jeff Sessions, had no choice but to recuse himself from all matters regarding the last election in which he was a surrogate for the Trump campaign. Therefore, not only is Mr Trump unable to fire Mr Mueller, so is Mr Sessions.

That would have to be done by the deputy attorney-general, Rod Rosenstein. However, it is a virtually unthinkable scenario. After all, Mr Rosenstein appointed Mr Mueller following Mr Trump’s initial effort to quash Russia-related inquiries by improperly firing former FBI director James Comey, and his unseemly attempts to unfairly blame Mr Rosenstein for that fiasco.

Mr Trump has therefore been lashing out at Mr Sessions, trying to berate and humiliate him into resigning so that his replacement can kill the Mueller investigation.

But the attorney-general is refusing to quit and key Republican leaders have said they will not tolerate any summary effort to dump Mr Sessions or Mr Mueller. Democrats and Republicans have pledged to use procedural means to block any “recess appointment” designed to avoid the Senate confirmation process for a new attorney-general and also promised to demand assurances of protection for Mr Mueller from any potential replacement for Mr Sessions

Therefore, if Mr Trump tries to resolve or forestall this apparent looming legal jeopardy by first replacing the Attorney General and then quashing the Mueller investigation, it would initiate a massive political crisis with both parties in Congress reminiscent of the last days of Richard Nixon.

Along with Mr Sessions, many other senior administration officials seem to be living on borrowed time, either because they can’t function effectively in the chaotic Trump environment or because their enemies are plotting to have them dismissed.

The most recent, though surely not last, sacrificial victim is former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus. He was sacked after a stunningly foulmouthed tirade against him and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon by Mr Trump’s new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci. It provided an unsurprising but disturbing glimpse into the administration’s metastasizing ugliness and dysfunctionality.

This singularly ineffective White House coexists with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. But Republicans seem unable to pass even their most cherished goals, including repealing the Obamacare health insurance laws. Last week, three separate Senate Republican efforts to undo Obamacare all failed.

Yet this same Republican Congress is effectively moving to tie the president’s hands on Russia sanctions and is considering legislation requiring a judge to review any effort to interfere with special counsel investigations.

Slowly but surely, Mr Trump is losing the confidence of leading Republicans, particularly in the Senate, who are criticising, defying and confronting him more openly by the day.

At the centre of this maelstrom – and confronting a daunting double-bind – uneasily sits the new president.

Mr Trump is trapped. He faces probable serious legal jeopardy to himself or those very close to him. But he can only stop it by initiating a political crisis that would probably implode, and certainly permanently cripple, his presidency in only its first year.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/the-profound-ideological-clash-at-the-heart-of-the-rift-between-the-gulf-and-qatar-1.609031

At issue is the character, role and future of the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Islamist groups across the region

The confrontation over Qatar’s policies is being misunderstood in parts of the international community as merely a parochial and petty “spat” between local rivals. But, to the contrary, this complex dynamic reflects a profound and region-wide ideological struggle being waged in three key areas of the Arab world: Qatar in the Gulf, Gaza in the Levant, and Libya in North Africa.

At issue is nothing less than the character, role and future of the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Islamist groups across the region.

The military-led removal of Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi from office in 2013, and its aftermath, plunged Brotherhood parties throughout the Arab world into an existential crisis. Indeed, the traditional Brotherhood movement – established in Egypt in the 1920s and structured around an essentially Leninist methodology of urban revolutionary vanguardism – seems to be disintegrating.

Many Brotherhood groups are seeking to adapt and remain viable by evolving into legitimate, post-revolutionary and effectively post-Islamist conservative political parties. These include Ennahda in Tunisia, the Justice and Development Party in Morocco, the mainstream Brotherhood in Jordan, large elements of Al-Islah in Yemen, and similar groups in Kuwait and elsewhere.

Muslim Brotherhood members who find such moderation intolerable are instead being pulled towards far more fanatical groups like Al Qaeda, ISIL or other Salafist-Jihadist terror organisations.

Between the imperative of moderation and the lure of extremism, the familiar but dwindling conventional Muslim Brotherhood movement has just a few, albeit significant, remaining redoubts.

Qatar’s deep-pocketed soft power and media empire, featuring Al Jazeera, serves as the Brotherhood’s bankroll and megaphone. Hamas’s rule in Gaza is the Brotherhood’s last de facto government and primary territorial enclave. And Brotherhood affiliates in Libya remain potent fighting and political forces.

But all three are now being simultaneously challenged by non-Islamist Arab powers. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, for example, are involved in pressuring both Qatar and Hamas, and combating radicals in Libya.

The Palestinian Authority, Egypt and Israel are directly pressing Hamas to loosen its grip over Gaza and its almost two million long-suffering Palestinian residents.

Egypt and Israel tightly control movement in and out of Gaza. Western restrictions on dealing with Hamas, widely designated to be a terrorist organisation, have greatly hampered humanitarian and development work. The UN says living conditions have become “more and more wretched” during the decade of Hamas rule.

Now, fed up with Hamas’s recalcitrance, the PA has imposed additional measures, squeezing both Gaza’s beleaguered population and their rulers. If Hamas insists on violently enforcing a monopoly of power in Gaza, the PA is saying, it must bear the costs itself.

Hamas demands the PA finance Gaza’s electricity, but Ramallah has cut payments to Israeli suppliers. It also slashed the salaries of some public employees and prisoners’ families, among other measures.

Hamas is exhibiting clear signs of stress. In April it floated a new “charter” that is more moderate than, but does not abrogate or replace, its hideous 1988 founding document. Hamas thus now has two operative formal mission statements, one for its radical base and another for everyone else. No one is fooled.

Hamas historically relies on support from Turkey and, especially, Qatar, where the “new charter” was unveiled.

But Turkey has resumed close relations with Israel. With its political attention turned inward, Turkey now serves more as a refuge for marooned Brotherhood leaders than a potent patron. Doha faces bigger problems than Ankara, and can do little to shore up Hamas.

In Libya, the third major front in this ideological confrontation, Qatar’s clients – mainly affiliated with the Brotherhood and the “Libya Dawn” militia that dominates Tripoli – are also struggling. General Khalifa Haftar’s anti-Islamist “Libyan National Army,” supported by Egypt and the UAE, recently consolidated control over Benghazi and several crucial oil terminals, as well as its base in Tobruk.

As with the crises involving Qatar and Hamas, the battle in Libya in part represents a confrontation between some of the last viable remnants of the traditional iteration of the Muslim Brotherhood versus Arab forces opposed to radical Islamism.

If Qatar is forced to abandon its pro-Brotherhood policies, Hamas is compelled to loosen its grip on Gaza and anti-Islamist forces consolidate control over key areas of Libya, then it may be very difficult for the familiar Brotherhood movement of the 20th century to remain politically functional for much more of the 21st.

Such developments would surely fast-track an emerging binary choice facing Muslim Brothers. They can follow the pragmatic path of Rachid Ghannouchi and Ennahda, and become post-revolutionary, and essentially post-Islamist, legitimate conservative Muslim political parties. Or they can go the violent way of Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi and ISIL, and join nihilistic, and essentially psychotic, terrorist groups.

There are numerous facets and particularities to the Qatar crisis and the struggles over Gaza and Libya.

But the ideological clash embedded in all three regarding the viability and future of the traditional revolutionary and subversive, but only strategically violent, Muslim Brotherhood – as opposed to the emergent alternatives of the developing legitimate post-Islamist conservative Muslim parties or the universally reviled ultra-terrorists – is certainly the most regionally and historically consequential.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/us-president-s-rhetoric-presents-a-radical-and-deliberate-underestimation-of-america-s-power-and-prowess-1.352574

Donald Trump’s Warsaw speech last week outlined the theoretical framework of his emerging foreign policy. It also reinforced the impression that he frequently assumes Washington operates from a position of largely imaginary vulnerability and weakness.

Consequently, Mr Trump’s America is unnecessarily surrendering global leadership and competitive advantages, and voluntarily embracing premature decline.

In his inaugural address, Mr Trump painted a surreal, virtually post-apocalyptic landscape of “American carnage”, describing devastating disasters of decay, dissipation, poverty and crime.

Some parts of the country are struggling and many residents of benighted areas voted for Mr Trump. But, at the broad national level, this account of desperate American deterioration is almost entirely imaginary.

True, the United States is in a protracted period of relative decline, but from two unsustainable positions of global dominance that were indisputably historical anomalies.

First, following the Second World War, the American economy enjoyed historically unprecedented international competitive advantages. As the industrialised world eventually recovered and the postcolonial world slowly developed, this unique global economic dominance proved unsustainable. Second, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States emerged as the sole remaining superpower. While American strength remains unmatched in military and technological terms, almost worldwide military primacy was another historical contingency, and will prove no more sustainable than unrivaled global economic domination.

Nonetheless, it’s absurd to conclude that, because other countries are now developing their own international military and economic clout, the United States is therefore a weak or besieged country.

On the contrary, American annual growth still outstrips that of most other developed economies. Washington’s military power remains unrivaled, and is still capable of prevailing in virtually any imaginable conflict. In higher education, technology, economic and other key indicators, the United States, albeit in relative decline from these unparalleled heights, is still the only great global power.

You’d never believe that listening to Mr Trump. His Warsaw speech was essentially the internationalisation of his dystopian inaugural address, but instead of “American carnage”, he described a generalised West, supposedly under siege, that must urgently unite to defend its civilisation from shadowy, largely unspecified, threats.

Jingoistic accounts of the defence of Polish nationalism were proffered as a synecdoche for safeguarding a supposedly besieged “western civilization” (in which, historically, westerners have rarely included Poland). Sub-Reaganite phrases, meant to inspire, were weird and downright Quixotic.

The existential threats Mr Trump targeted included, in descending order of mortal peril, Islamist terrorists, Russia and even the West’s own civil servants.

TS Eliot argued Hamlet fails as a play because it provides no “objective correlative”, wherein events in the drama justify the emotions being expressed by the characters and evoked in the audience. Mr Trump’s imagining of a weak, bankrupt America in freefall is a much better example.

This nightmarish fantasy has informed a range of policy missteps, including abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership, apparently because impoverished Americans can’t afford long-term trade planning and must rummage through global scrapheaps to grasp at any immediate and ephemeral “wins”.

Consequently, Europe and Japan are forming their own giant economic bloc without American participation, while China is developing another under its influence in Asia.

The same presumed weakness explains leaving the Paris climate accord and inviting Russia to determine the future of Bashar Al Assad in Syria. The crisis over Qatar is cast as a “family issue,” thus far to be resolved without significant American input either way.

Retired diplomat James Dobbins recently argued this is primarily just a familiar politically and historically frequent cyclical iteration of American “retrenchment”, seeking a respite from the rigours of global leadership before a reluctant re-embrace of Washington’s international role.

Walter Russell Mead, the preeminent living scholar of American foreign policy traditions, sees Mr Trump’s outlook as essentially “Jacksonian” blood-and-soil nationalism that was a major feature of American debates until the Second World War and is now making a major comeback.

Both arguments are extremely compelling, but neither fully explains the persistent subtext of American and now western decline and weakness.

Clearly a third element is at work. Beyond neo-isolationist retrenchment and nativist Jacksonian nationalism, Mr Trump typically speaks and acts as if he were the leader of a poor and weak power rather than a strong and wealthy one.

Unfortunately, a barely-disguised subtext to Mr Trump’s rhetoric sometimes flirts with “clash of civilisations” Western chauvinism, anti-immigrant xenophobia and even white supremacy. Passages in his Warsaw speech invoking the alleged historic uniqueness and superiority of western civilisation, were unmistakable.

Whether Mr Trump is deliberately pandering to cultural chauvinism and racial supremacy or cynically invoking nonexistent crises to pose as a saviour is anyone’s guess.

Less mysterious is the deep damage to American interests, and profligate squandering of real advantages, that is rapidly accumulating through this radical underestimation of what are, in reality, Washington’s still unrivaled global military, economic and technological prowess.

http://www.agsiw.org/existing-agreements-u-s-leadership-emerge-keys-resolving-qatar-standoff/

As the crisis regarding Qatar’s relations with four other key Arab countries – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt – enters its second month, the recent meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo appears to offer a new framework to resolve the standoff. The representatives of the four countries imposing severe restrictions on diplomatic, trade, travel, and communication ties with Qatar met in Cairo to consider their next steps. Qatar had rejected a list of 13 demands the countries had presented, however the foreign ministers did not take any practical steps to escalate the confrontation. To the contrary, they refined their expectations in six newly articulated “principles” that could facilitate mediation by Kuwait, the United States, and others, and centered their demands firmly on the implementation of agreements from 2013 and 2014 already accepted by Qatar.