When Barack Obama decided to speak to “the Muslim world” shortly after he took office, he did so from the then-stable though barely beating heart of the Arab world: Cairo.
Next month, almost five years later, he will visit Riyadh, the capital that seeks to claim its place as the new centre of the Arab world. He will be greeted very differently this time. The past five years have utterly reshaped the Middle East, and reshaped America’s perceptions of and role in the region.
After Mr Obama’s state of the union address last week, in which the outside world was barely mentioned, and Iran and Syria only briefly discussed, critics argued that the Middle East expected more from a president who came into office with big plans to change America’s relationship with the Muslim world. The Middle East wants more, they said, from Mr Obama.
But what does he want from the Middle East? With the 2016 election looming, what does the US president want from the region? The answer is three things: small victories, no wars and a peacemaker’s legacy.
Mr Obama has two more years, perhaps even as little as 19 months, before the campaigning for the 2016 presidential election begins. He won’t be standing, but he will be doing all he can to make sure a Democrat wins it. And that will mean his record over the previous eight years will be scrutinised.
Mr Obama, then, is like the proverbial man chased by a lion: he doesn’t have to outrun the lion, he just has to outrun the other guy. And the other guy is George W Bush, who led the US into one disastrous war and into another that has become America’s longest conflict. Mr Obama believes it will be enough to demonstrate how different he is to his predecessor.
That means no wars.
The US’s involvement in Libya passed well, but the subsequent murder of the US ambassador caused big domestic problems for the US president.
Mr Obama won’t take that risk in an army campaign as fraught as Syria. Given the strength of the Syrian military, it is hard to imagine a military campaign passing without casualties from Nato.
In the wars he is fighting, small victories will be sufficient. And so Mr Obama has presided over the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, will preside over their withdrawal from Afghanistan, is dragging the Israelis and Palestinians together and is seeking dialogue with all sides in the Syrian conflict.
No matter that Iraq is still feeling the repercussions of America’s disastrous occupation, or that Afghanistan might be in dire trouble if US troops leave prematurely, or that even senior Israeli politicians are sceptical about the intentions of their main foreign supporter, or that the Syrian conflict can’t be solved by words alone.
None of that matters. The criticism that Mr Obama is disengaged on the Middle East is mistaken: he is intensely focused, it’s just that he is focused on disengaging. The tragedy of Syria is that the war came at the wrong time in the US electoral cycle.
What Mr Obama must realise is that none of these conflicts can be solved piecemeal. They require a big, overarching solution – precisely what his predecessor believed he could supply in the Middle East, and an idea that failed.
It is just possible that Mr Obama has realised this and has decided to put all his diplomatic eggs into the basket of rapprochement with Iran. That, if one were inclined to be generous, could prove very farsighted, for two strategic reasons, both linked to the next election.
There is, firstly, the big, obvious legacy of bringing in (or at least appearing to bring in) Iran from the cold after more than three decades of enmity. That would be a fine legacy for a US president and Mr Obama would sell it as a victory for his skills as a peacemaker. What better contrast with George W Bush than to use jaw-jaw on Iraq’s neighbour – and come out victorious. That would solidify his legacy as a peacemaker.
The second is that better relations with Iran could just bring about a host of small diplomatic breakthroughs across the Middle East – in Iraq, in Syria and in Lebanon. Those breakthroughs would not solve the Syrian civil war or Iraq’s sectarian issues, but would be enough for Mr Obama to suggest that the problems of the region were intractable and that he, at least, had made small steps forward.
Unfortunately that would also be disingenuous.
The US president wants to go into the 2016 election able to say that, in contrast to the last Republican president, he pulled the US out of two big wars and stopped their entry into a third. That’s a good thing for Obama. It’s a tragedy for Syria.
For what Mr Obama wants from the Middle East and what the Middle East needs from the US are two very different things. What plays well in Peoria will not play well in Palestine, or in Aleppo or in Baghdad.
In the five years since Mr Obama spoke in Cairo, the US has not been disengaged, it has simply made bad decisions. It was a bad decision to support Iraq’s prime minister Nouri Al Maliki even as he pursued a nakedly sectarian agenda. It was a bad decision to seek a nuclear deal with Iran behind the backs of US allies in the Gulf. And it was a bad decision not to support the Syrian rebels before the uprising became a proxy regional war.
Doubtless, Mr Obama will hear these views expressed in Riyadh. But they will not change his mind. Barack Obama has spent so many years trying not to be someone else, he is unlikely to become his own man now.
On Twitter: @FaisalAlYafai
