Reading AL Monitor‘s Week In Review, it appears President Trump is being completely outmaneuvered in Iraq by Russian President Putin:
Russian President Vladimir Putin repositioned himself as a key broker of Iraqi energy politics last week, while US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was scolded by the Iraqi government for his comments about Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU).
Given America’s history and assets in Iraq, it seems a reach that Russia could be outflanking the United States in Iraq, as we suggested last week. But while Putin choreographs each move with a wary and calculating eye on Iran and the ever-shifting regional landscape, the United States limits its options by seeing every Iranian move as adversarial and in zero-sum terms, which only serves to frustrate Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who prefers that the United States and Iran not play out their hostility in Iraq.
So in the same week that Tillerson earned a rebuke from Abadi’s office for saying “Iranian militias in Iraq” should “go home” — the prime minister’s statement termed the PMU “Iraqi patriots” — Iraq and Russia signed an expansive energy and economic protocol. The agreement opened discussions of more favorable terms for Russian companies and contractors in Iraq involving electricity and hydropower plants, oil and gas fields, equipment and supplies. The protocol touched on Russian soft loans in support of these projects as long as Russia has the lead in building and running these plants and operations.
Particularly striking is the description of how the United States sees the landscape. While this is not nearly enough information to go on – and I’m not an expert in this sort of thing – it smells like the triumph of false preconception over realism in the State Department. Our preoccupation with Iran can be very injurious if we permit that to limit how we think about the Middle East, and let our inevitable provincialism rule us.
That’s the danger of despising the experts, many of whom have spent their lives learning and evaluating their particular areas of expertise; “down home wisdom,” out of its context, has no application and, in fact, a negative potentiality.
If this bears out as a negative outcome for the United States, we should then consider how Secretary of State’s Tillerson’s management has brought about this result, whether it’s his lack of experience, or his diligent approach to reducing the ranks in the State Department.
I’d rather not hope for this, but this may turn out to be one in a long series of failures for the United States. However, this may be mitigated as most of the energy landscape in Iraq is, of course, oil, and the world is slowly moving away from fossil fuels. If this accelerates, whether through government incentives or a populace that realizes this energy source is not scaling properly, then this failure may not be important as some might assume, except, of course, symbolically.
