'US isolationism could affect Jordan'

By Jakob Jessen

AMMAN - A return to isolationist politics in the US could have grave implications for Jordan as well as the entire Middle East, according to a veteran US correspondent.

Christopher Dickey, Middle East chief editor of Newsweek magazine, made the comments in a lecture at Columbia University Middle East Research Center (CUMERC) on Wednesday.

Dickey, who is a former Cairo bureau chief for the Washington Post, raised concerns about the political discourse in the run-up to the November 2 midterm election in the US, a campaign that has focused almost entirely on domestics issues.

“For the last eight or nine years, foreign policy, foreign affairs, the Middle East, has been a huge issue for Americans,” he said, citing the financial crisis, the right-wing, anti-tax Tea Party-movement and entertainment-obsessed news media, as contributing factors to an increasingly inwardly American discourse.

“Right now, in the United States, you wouldn't know that any other part of the world existed. Including - and especially - the Middle East,” Dickey added.

For Jordan, American negligence will “not necessarily” have immediate implications, he explained, but in the event of a major crisis, Jordan - and indeed, the entire region - risks being side-lined, he added.

“[In that case,] Jordan will find it has a very little constituency in the United States in the broader political circles,” Dickey said, predicting that the Kingdom “may find itself, as it has often had to do in the past”, going to its friends in the region to get support in America.

Dickey, a correspondent with more than 25 years of experience in Central America, Europe and the Middle East, described the isolationist tendencies as a returning fixture in the “cycles” of US foreign policy throughout the last century.

“We go out to save the world every so often - World War I for instance - and then when it comes to engaging the world after WWI, becoming part of the League of Nations, we go 'no, that's their problem',” Dickey said, citing the period after the fall of the Soviet Empire as “one of the most recent examples”.

“The net result was genocide in Rwandaة genocide in Bosnia... the collapse of Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban and the creation of Al Qaeda,” Dickey argued, charging that the US did “next to nothing to stop” the momentum of the Oslo Accords from falling “apart in the middle of the decade”.

Dickey’s lecture, based loosely on his October 25 Newsweek cover story ”America Turning Inwards”, is the first in a series hosted by CUMERC.

29 October 2010

Source: The Jordan Times.
Link: http://jordantimes.com/?news=31384.