Trump's Simplistic Strategy on Jihadism
By Robin Wright
By Robin Wright
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, in 2001, President George
W. Bush went to the Islamic Center in Washington to dampen fears of a clash of
civilizations between the Islamic world and the West. “The face of terror is
not the true face of Islam,” he said. “Islam is peace.”
President Barack Obama’s main speech to the Islamic world,
in 2009, called for a “new beginning” between Muslim and Western nations,
noting “civilization’s debt to Islam.” Declaring to Cairo University students
that “we also know that military power alone is not going to solve the
problems,” he, too, envisioned political and economic solutions to countering
extremism.
Donald Trump took a starkly different tack during the
campaign. “I think Islam hates us,” Trump told Anderson Cooper, on CNN,
fourteen months ago. He told both MSNBC and Fox News that he’d be willing to
close mosques in the United States. At
the Presidential debate last October, in Las Vegas, he was particularly
critical of Saudi Arabia. “These are people that push gays off buildings,” he
said. “These are people that kill women and treat women horribly, and yet you
take their money.”
On Sunday, on his first trip abroad as President, Trump
tried to hit the reset button in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. He
heralded Islam as “one of the world’s great faiths,” and his visit as the
beginning of “a new chapter” between the United States and the Islamic world.
In a palace of dazzling opulence, he spoke to dozens of leaders assembled by
the Saudis from the Arab and Muslim world. In turn, the oil-rich kingdom, which
is weathering its own political and military turmoil, treated him like royalty,
with billboards across the Saudi capital covered with Trump’s face.
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