Our Saver-In-Chief

by Hugh Fitzgerald

The White House tweeted: “In today’s Cabinet meeting, President @realDonaldTrump directed each member of his Cabinet to streamline their agency’s budget by 5 percent this fiscal year.”

In a similar vein, Donald Trump finds outrageous the amounts of money the American government spends for defense while other countries, our supposed allies, persist in not contributing their fair share. The most obvious example of this is NATO, whose 29 members promised in 2014 to contribute 2% of their GDP to defense spending by 2024 at the latest, but four years later, only five of NATO’s 29 members have in fact done so — the U.S., U.K., Greece, Estonia, and Poland — and many are far from that 2% goal by 2024 that is fast approaching. In mid-July at a NATO meeting in Brussels, Trump read his fellow members the riot act — after all, the United States spends close to 3.5% of its GDP on defense, much more than twice the NATO average, and he wanted NATO members to get closer to meeting their promised 2% commitment. As a result of his demands, those fellow NATO members came up with $33 billion in new pledges for defense spending, and promised to make sure that hundreds of billions more would soon be committed, as they hastened to meet that 2% goal for 2024. Trump warned them that the United States would not forever endure being seen as NATO’s funder of last resort. Trump’s anger in Brussels concentrated NATO minds wonderfully; the result was a triumph for Trump, and for American taxpayers.

In the same spirit, of saving money and calling on others to do their share, Trump has said the United States will stop making annual payments to support Syria’s stabilization program. This money — $230 million — was to have been spent in cleaning up war-ravaged areas so that Syrian refugees could return home.

In a tweet, Trump wrote: “The United States has ended the ridiculous 230 Million Dollar yearly development payment to Syria.”

“Saudi Arabia and other rich countries in the Middle East will start making payments instead of the U.S. I want to develop the U.S., our military and countries that help us!” he continued.

Who, after all, has the greatest stake in preventing the return of ISIS to Syria, by helping restore the country physically, which would then allow refugees to return home? It is above all the rich countries of the Gulf — especially Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, both fabulously wealthy — for whom ISIS is a worrisome threat wherever it establishes itself. For ISIS appeals to fanatical Believers living the Arab Gulf states, who come to share the view that the ruling families among the Gulf Arabs, though they may go through the outward motions at home of being devout Muslims, are fantastically corrupt and worldly. The news gets out about the behavior of Saudi and other princes on their yachts, or in their European pleasure palaces, drinking and gambling (both forbidden in Islam) — and for the True Believers of ISIS, such behavior is un-Islamic and, therefore, intolerable.

Trump takes the view that if anyone should be helping the Syrians to rebuild the large areas of their country that have been devastated by war, and thereby to entice back refugees whose return to Syria will lessen the economic pressure millions of them have placed on Lebanon and Jordan, it ought to be the Saudis and their deep-pocketed friends. The Saudis and Emiratis may despise Assad, but they recognize that he is no threat to them, while ISIS remains an ideological threat to every Arab regime, for they all fail to meet its strict definition of what a true Muslim state should look like.

There are also fears among the Gulf Arabs of any Iranian involvement in the rebuilding of Syria. The Saudis and their allies want Iranian forces removed from Syria. Their offer of financial aid to Assad, with the promise of more to come if he keeps Iranian military forces out of Syria, is one way to prevent Iran from establishing a new threat to the Arab Gulf states from the northwest.

Trump does not understand why the American government should be expected to help pay for the reconstruction both of a country, and of a regime, that have been consistently hostile to the United States for decades.

When Muslims fight among themselves, the ensuing destruction is, in Trump’s straightforward view, entirely their own affair. It’s not our business, not our responsibility to physically rebuild these countries. Those regional powers who, like the Saudis, have a stake in preventing the resurgence of ISIS, or who want to keep their enemy Iran from establishing permanent bases in Syria, also happen to have huge amounts of oil revenues, and can well afford to make up the sums — $230 million for now — that Trump has decided, as a first step, to withhold.

One hopes that Trump sticks to his guns on not giving any reconstruction aid to Syria. And when other Muslim Arab states come calling in Washington — representatives of Yemen, for example, can be expected if and when the war there comes to an end — seeking American aid to rebuild the country, let’s hope that they are politely shown the door, and given a printout of a Google map displaying the best route from the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, to the Saudi capital, Riyadh.

The United States has spent — wasted, rather — more than $6 trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is back, as menacing as it ever was. In Iraq, the country remains unsettled, with endless jockeying among Shi’as and Sunnis for political and economic power, and the only certain winner in that country — thanks to the American overthrow of Saddam Hussein — turns out to be our mortal enemy, Iran.

When Trump withheld American military aid to Pakistan, because that country continues to support, rather than fight, both the Taliban and the Haqqani network, he did not mince words: he declared in a tweet that the U.S. “foolishly” gave the country more than $33 billion in aid over the last 15 years and got “nothing but lies and deceit” in return. Now the $1 billion in aid Pakistan did manage to get this year is to be slashed to $150 million in 2019. Then he made deep cuts in American aid to the “Palestinians” because of their “pay for slay” stipends to terrorists and their families. And now he has refused to supply Syria with aid for reconstruction, even though the money had previously been approved.

Donald Trump has shown himself to be exactly what the United States needs, after our expensive misadventures in Dar al-Islam. May he keep up the cutting of such aid, in the case of the “Palestinians” ideally all the way down to zero, keep exposing the malevolence of those Muslims who pocket our billions and “smile at us while they curse us in their hearts,” and start directing the Muslim mendicants away from our door to those of their brothers in the umma, in the well-heeled states of the Arab Gulf.

First published in Jihad Watch.