TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - It's hard to find US President Donald Trump saying a bad word about the "strong men" and authoritarians of the Middle East.
He's called Saudi Arabian leader Mohammed bin Salman "fantastic" and "brilliant," saying "what he's done is incredible in terms of human rights and everything else."
This year alone, Saudi Arabia executed more than 240 people, often without due process, human rights organizations report.
As for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, the US ambassador to Turkey recently described Trump's relationship with the increasingly autocratic Turkish leader as a "bromance."
"He's a tough cookie — but he's my friend," Trump enthused during an October meeting with Erdogan, who has most recently been in international headlines for jailing opposition politicians.
"I don't know why I like the tough people better than the soft, easy ones," Trump mused at the same meeting.
A new attitude toward Middle East's authoritarians
Past US governments have tended to condition military deals and aid in the Middle East on human rights and democratic policies — or at least paid lip service to those ideals. But according to this month's update of the US National Security Strategy, that's no longer the case. The document is regularly updated by different administrations and outlines changing priorities.
In the 2022 version, prepared for former President Joe Biden, it said that in the Middle East, the US would "support and strengthen partnerships with countries that subscribe to the rules-based international order" and will "demand accountability for violations of human rights."
The Trump administration's update, published in early December, makes no mention of human rights and only notes "the rules-based international order" once. Regarding the Middle East, it simply says America must stop "hectoring these nations — especially the Gulf monarchies — into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government."
In that same document, European "forms of government" are not given the same grace. The Trump administration might intend to stop "hectoring" the Middle East but in Europe, it apparently plans to wage what the European Council on Foreign Relations described last week as a "culture war" by, for example, supporting right-wing, anti-EU political parties.
Why does Trump prefer Arab royals to EU leaders?
"Donald Trump's personalized style of decision making and his authoritarian instincts make him far more of a natural 'strong man' than conventional democratically-elected leaders," said Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Middle East fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.
"Trump's affinity for leaders in the Middle East, and especially in the Gulf, may be rooted in an appreciation of certain similarities in their policymaking style as well as the transactional basis of the relationships they build," he told DW. "Gulf leaders also have the advantage of falling outside the camps of traditional US allies or adversaries, occupying a 'safe space' of transactional albeit close partners."
As Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King's College London, wrote shortly beforeTrump visited the Gulf in May this year, "Trump's transactionalism finds a natural home in the Gulf. The premise is simple: you get what you pay for. There is no pretense of shared destiny, values, or ideals... That is exactly how the tribal monarchies of the Gulf manage their relationships."
Qatar famously gifted Trump a $400 million airplane earlier this year, while the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have made extravagant promises to invest hundreds of billions into the US economy.
Aspirational? Trump appears to like the idea of himself as king
It could also be that Trump appreciates the lack of constraints on political action that authoritarian leaders in the Middle East have, Coates Ulrichsen added, something "Trump himself has sought to achieve, especially in his second term in office."
Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar are run by royal families who formulate their own laws, won't brook political dissent and, because they don't have democracies, don't depend on citizens' favor to stay in power.
In February, Trump referred to himself as a royal on social media. Official White House social media accounts later shared the quote with an AI-generated image.
'Neo-royalty' transforming international system
A newly published paper in the journal International Organization, written by professors Stacie Goddard at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and Abraham Newman at Georgetown University in Washington, supports that opinion. It views Trump's affinity for Middle Eastern "strong men" as part of an emerging system of "neo-royalism."
The academics define neo-royalism as "an international system structured by a small group of hyper-elites who use modern economic and military interdependencies to extract material and status resources for themselves."
"Trump's vision of absolute sovereignty, his reliance on a clique composed of family members, fierce loyalists, and elite hyper-capitalists guides not only US foreign policy, but his ordering of international relations itself," they write. "Consistent with neo-royalism, Trump sees certain leaders as holding something akin to monarchical sovereignty and has prioritized relations with [them]."
So it's not necessarily about personalities, it's about the appeal of the "model of governance," Newman told DW.
Of course, systems based on royalty are not new, Newman and Goddard point out. They have existed for centuries and the Gulf monarchies have coexisted with democratic nation states for decades.
But what is happening now is "once-in-a-generation transformation of the international system," Newman argued.
The paper notes that other countries have also moved toward a kind of system dominated by elites, including Turkey, India, Hungary, China and Russia. But now that the US — with its economic and military might — is heading in that direction too, the idea is spreading, as other world leaders, including Europeans, are forced to play the same game, it says.
"We were very clear in this text that this [neo-royal] order is not yet consolidated," Newman said. In order for it to more fully take hold, it must undermine the current liberal rules-based order, he explained. That's part of the reason why the EU — seen as a prime representative of that order — is under attack and part of the reason why Trump favors the Gulf monarchies, he said.
"In this [neo-royal] system you're legitimated through exceptionalism," said the political scientist. "That's why you're the absolute ruler. So whose approval do you want?" he asked. That of other "absolute rulers," of course. "And the Middle East is fertile ground for that."
"What's important if you're going to promote this [neo-royal] alternative, you have to normalize the behavior, legitimatize it," Newman concluded. "These actors — Erdogan, the House of Saud, or UAE, or Qatar — can provide that legitimacy. They offer Trump a way of saying 'this is normal, what I'm doing is normal.'"
Read: Trump's New "America First" Security Strategy: What to Know
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