Victoria Jones PA Wire/PA Images. All rights reserved.America’s new president,
Donald J. Trump, has yet to fully articulate his foreign policy strategy – or
to at least unify
the divergent views of his cabinet – but one thing is abundantly clear: the
next four years are going to be a far cry from the Obama Doctrine.
For the people
of Bahrain, a key US ally in the Arab Gulf, this is cause for both apprehension
and optimism.
From his
campaign to his first week in office, Trump has shown little interest in
promoting human rights at home or abroad, instead often specifically advocating
for violations of international law. It is profoundly disconcerting for
pro-democracy activists and human rights defenders in the Middle East and North
Africa to hear Trump praise
the likes of Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, and Muammar Gaddafi – the same
autocrats they’ve risked their lives to resist.
Still, many of
President Obama’s lofty promises for the region fell far short of expectations.
In May 2011, just after Bahrain’s Al Khalifa monarchy violently suppressed the
country’s pro-democracy uprising, for example, Obama emphasized
America’s commitment to human rights reform and peaceful reconciliation.
“The
only way forward is for the government and the opposition to engage in a
dialogue, and you can’t have a real dialogue when parts of the peaceful
opposition are in jail,” Obama said, instructing his State Department to
prohibit arms sales to Bahrain until it had demonstrated significant progress
toward rectifying the political crisis.
More than five
years and a whole presidential term later, however, the Obama administration
failed to make good on this initial stand. Rather, since 2011, it largely just stood by.
In some cases,
the administration even allowed itself to be outmaneuvered by a Bahraini
government eager to restore its international image in the absence of real
reform.
During Obama’s
penultimate year in office, Bahraini officials managed to reverse America’s
strongest bargaining position – and eliminate much of its leverage – with
little more than slight of hand. Playing to American calls to implement the
recommendations of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI), a
committee of international jurists tasked with investigating abuses perpetrated
in 2011, the Bahraini government made several reform-minded overtures,
including the release of prominent political leader Ebrahim Sharif.
The US promptly took
the bait and lifted
a punitive arms ban it had imposed in the aftermath of the 2011 crackdown,
restoring weapons sales to the Bahraini army and national guard. State
Department officials cited
“meaningful progress on human rights and reconciliation,” such as Sharif’s
release.
But, in a
shamelessly lazy bait and switch, Bahraini authorities rearrested Sharif just
weeks later, almost instantly reneging on whatever deal had been struck. As
would become characteristic of the Obama administration’s last two years of
engagement with Bahrain, it criticized
the decision but did nothing – content for Bahrain to have its weapons and its political
prisoners too.
America’s return
on this failed deal has only gotten worse in the months leading up to the Trump
presidency.
As the campaign
kicked into high gear over the summer, so too did the Bahraini government’s
renewed assault on dissent, religious freedom, and independent civil society.
Among other abuses, since May 2016 Bahraini authorities have exiled
prominent rights activist Zeinab al-Khawaja, denaturalized
and prosecuted the country’s Shia religious leader Sheikh Isa Qassim, judicially harassed more than 75
Shia clerics for offenses related to free expression and assembly, rearrested leading human rights
defender Nabeel Rajab on charges stemming from his activism, and dissolved
the largest political opposition group in Bahrain, Al-Wefaq National Islamic
Society.
Most disturbingly,
on 15 January 2017 – days before Trump assumed office – Bahrain inaugurated a
new era of its own: for the first time in two decades, the government executed
three of its own citizens on politically-motivated charges. Sami Mushaima, Ali
Al-Singace, and Abbas Al-Samea were shot to death by firing squad after being
tortured into providing false confessions related to a 2014 bombing attack on
the police.
Like hundreds of other cases of torture in Bahrain, the government
did not investigate these abuses; rather, it stripped
the men of their citizenship in trials rife with due process violations and
expedited their case through the appeals track, holding the executions just one
week after Bahrain’s highest court confirmed the sentence and only a month
after a lower court had done the same.
Bahrain and the
US are allies and partners in the fight against terrorism, a mission that will
surely center on President Trump’s international agenda. But the Bahraini
government has repeatedly and increasingly demonstrated its willingness to
eschew domestic reconciliation for violence and instability, even using its
broken counterterror legislation as a weapon against internal dissent.
It is clear what
Bahrain gets out of this partnership – but is the US truly benefiting?
President Trump,
a businessman devoted to the “art of the deal,” has declared
he will “pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of
the past,” even if that means retooling alliances as longstanding and fundamental
as NATO. “Our goal is stability,” he says, not “toppl[ing] regimes and
overthrow[ing] governments.”
If this is the
case, then there is no better time for the president to renegotiate terms with
Bahrain than now. Before unchecked oppression turns stability to a pipe dream, the
Trump administration must indeed learn from the mistakes of its predecessors
and finally play that last and most powerful bargaining chip: the US Navy’s
Fifth Fleet base in Manama.
Congress has
previously requested
contingency planning to relocate the base should Bahrain’s political situation
continue to deteriorate, but we’re now reaching a fever pitch of repression.
President Trump must show allies that even Obama referred
to as “free riders” – like Bahrain and its domineering neighbor, Saudi
Arabia – that the US is willing to seriously reconsider the necessity of the
facility and, by extension, the deeper conditions of the partnership.
If Obama’s lip
service to human rights masked the true transactional nature of the
relationships between America and its autocratic allies in the Gulf, perhaps Trump’s
professed penchant for hard-nosed bargaining could at least put the US back in
the driver’s seat.
Moreover, with
Trump’s supposed dedication to an isolationist, “America 1st” foreign policy,
far-flung security arrangements – epitomized by a facility like Manama’s Fifth
Fleet base – may no longer be vital to America’s interests.
From that position
of strength, the president would be wise to ensure that any continuing
partnership with Bahrain does serve
America’s ultimate interests in the region, which remain stability-cum-democracy and human rights.