In the narrow perspective of Donald Trump, when his simply drawn lines of conflict—of good and evil, of winners and losers—cause him problems because reality is more complicated, his usual response is to draw the lines even more narrowly.  Something of this has been happening with relations in the Persian Gulf.  As of the time of his trip, the projected image was of a grand coalition that could join in eternal hostility toward the forces of evil, with Iran at the center of those forces.  When the more complex reality soon reasserted itself in the Qatar imbroglio, Trump’s immediate inclination was to narrow the lines of conflict some more while keeping them just as simple, and to side with the Saudis while dumping on the Qataris.

There is a parallel with how Trump responds to challenges domestically and within his own administration—always narrowing, and casting out those whom he may have lauded before but then no longer fit the simple vision.  If Qatar, notwithstanding that U.S. military base, has to go the way of Chris Christie and Michael Flynn, then, in Trump’s view, so be it.

Discourse in Washington, especially at its partisan and blame-shifting worst, has long found ways to attribute conflict and disorder in the Middle East to this or that U.S. president.  Often, as is true as well of events in other regions, the attribution of events, for good or for ill, to the U.S. president gets overstated.  But it is not an overstatement that a posture of stoking tensions and division rather than of encouraging their de-escalation, of swearing eternal hostility to a major regional state, of screwing up opportunities for rapprochement within the region, and of forgoing the United States’s own opportunities by bad-mouthing the nuclear agreement with Iran and refusing to build on it in addressing other issues, is making the security situation in the Persian Gulf worse.  That’s bad for the denizens of the Gulf and bad for the United States.

Image: Qatar flag. Flickr