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middle east
Trump Envoy Ripped for Claim That 'Benevolent Monarchy' Is Best for Middle East
"The US labels dictators and monarchies benevolent when their behavior is aligned with US interest and when their behavior isn’t aligned with US interest they are despots," said one critic.
Dec 08, 2025
Tom Barrack, President Donald Trump's ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria, faced backlash Monday after arguing that US-backed Middle Eastern monarchies—most of which are ruled by prolific human rights violators—offer the best model for governing nations in the tumultuous region.
Speaking at the Doha Forum in Qatar on Sunday, Barrack, who is also a billionaire real estate investor, cautioned against trying to impose democratic governance on the Middle East, noting that efforts to do so—sometimes by war or other military action—have failed.
“Every time we intervene, whether it's in Libya, Iraq, or any of the other places where we've tried to create a colonized mandate, it has not been successful," he said. "We end up with paralysis."
"I don’t see a democracy," Barrack said of the Middle East. "Israel can claim to be a democracy, but in this region, whether you like it or not, what has worked best is, in fact, a benevolent monarchy."
Addressing Syria's yearlong transition from longtime authoritarian rule under the Assad dynasty, Barrack added that the Syrian people must determine their political path "without going in with Western expectations of, 'We want a democracy in 12 months.'"
While Barrack's rejection of efforts to force democracy upon Middle Eastern countries drew praise, some Israelis bristled at what they claimed is the suggestion that their country is not a democracy, while other observers pushed back on the envoy's assertion regarding regional monarchies and use of what one Palestinian digital media platform called "classic colonial rhetoric."
"The reality on the ground is the opposite of his claim: It is the absence of democratic rights, accountable governance, and inclusive federal structures that has fueled Syria’s fragmentation, empowered militias, and pushed communities toward separatism," Syrian Kurdish journalist Ronahi Hasan said on social media.
Ronahi continued:
When an American official undermines the universal principles the US itself claims to defend, it sends a dangerous message: that Syrians do not deserve the same political rights as others and that minority communities should simply accept centralized authoritarianism as their fate.
Syria doesn’t need another foreign lecture romanticizing monarchy. It needs a political system that protects all its people—Druze, Alawite, Kurdish, Sunni, Christian—through genuine power-sharing, decentralization, and guarantees of equality.
"Federalism is not the problem," Ronahi added. "The problem is denying Syrians the right to shape their own future."
Abdirizak Mohamed, a lawmaker and former foreign minister in Somalia, said on social media: "Tom Barrack made public what is already known. The US labels dictators and monarchies benevolent when their behavior is aligned with US interest, and when their behavior isn’t aligned with US interest they are despots. Labeling dictators benevolent is [an] oxymoron that shows US hypocrisy."
For nearly a century, the US has supported Middle Eastern monarchies as successive administrations sought to gain and maintain control over the region's vast oil resources. This has often meant propping up monarchs in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran (before 1979), the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar—regardless of their often horrific human rights records.
While nothing new in terms of US policy and practice in the region, the Trump administration's recently published National Security Strategy prioritizes "flexible realism" over human rights and democracy and uses more candid language than past presidents have in explaining Washington's support for repressive monarchs.
"The [US] State Department will likely need to clarify whether Barrack’s comments represent official policy or personal opinion," argued an editorial in Middle East 24. "Regardless, his words have exposed an uncomfortable truth about US foreign policy in the Middle East: the persistent gap between democratic ideals and strategic realities."
"Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this episode is what it reveals about American confidence in its own values," the editorial added. "If US diplomats no longer believe democracy can work in challenging environments, what does this say about America’s faith in the universal appeal of its founding principles?"
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Israel's Air-Power Colonialism
Like the British empire before it, Israel is attempting to dominate the Middle East from the skies.
Oct 14, 2025
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nomination of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his hands already crimson with the blood of innocent Iraqis, to run post-war Gaza, brings to mind a distant era when London sent its politicians out to be viceroys in its global colonial domains. Consider Blair’s proposed appointment, made (of course!) without consulting any Palestinians, a clear signal that the Middle East has entered a second era of Western imperialism. Other than Palestine, which has already been subjected to classic settler colonialism, our current neo-imperial moment is characterized by the American use of Israel as its base in the Middle East and by the employment of air power to subdue any challengers.
Swarming
The odd assortment of grifters, oil men, financiers, mercenaries, white nationalists, and Christian and Jewish Zionists now presiding in Washington, led by that great orange-hued hotelier-in-chief, has (with the help of Germany, Great Britain, and France) built up Israel into a huge airbase with a small country attached to it. From that airbase, a constant stream of missiles, rockets, drones, and fighter jets routinely swarm out to hit regional neighbors.
Gaza was pounded into rubble almost hourly for the last two years, only the first month of which could plausibly have been justified as “self-defense” in the wake of the horrific Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Even the Palestinian West Bank, already under Israeli military rule, has been struck repeatedly from above. Lebanon has been subject to numerous bombings despite a supposed ceasefire, as has Syria (no matter that its leader claims he wants good relations with his neighbor). Yemen, which has indeed fired missiles at Israel to protest the genocide in Gaza, has now been hit endlessly by the Israelis, who also struck Iranian nuclear enrichment sites and other targets last June.
Some of the Israeli bombing raids or missile and drone strikes were indeed tit-for-tat replies to attacks by that country’s enemies. Others were only made necessary because of Israeli provocations, including its seemingly never-ending atrocities in Gaza, to which regional actors have felt compelled to reply. Many Israeli strikes, however, have had little, if anything, to do with self-defense, often being aimed at civilian targets or at places like Syria that pose no immediate threat. On September 9, Israel even bombed Qatar, the country its leaders had asked to help negotiate with Hamas for the return of Israeli hostages taken on October 7.
Tel Aviv is now shaping governments of the Middle East simply by wiping their officials off the face of the Earth or credibly threatening to do so.
In short, what we’re now seeing is Israel’s version of air-power colonialism.
Typically, its fighter jets bombed the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on August 28, assassinating northern Yemen’s prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahwi, along with several senior members of the region’s Houthi government and numerous journalists. (Israeli officials had previously boasted that they could have killed the top leadership of Iran in their 12-day war on that country in June.)
In reality, Tel Aviv is now shaping governments of the Middle East simply by wiping their officials off the face of the Earth or credibly threatening to do so. Israel has also had an eerie hand in shaping outside perceptions of developments in the region by regularly assassinating journalists, not only in Palestine but also in Lebanon and as far abroad as Yemen. However, by failing to come close to subduing the region entirely, what Tel Aviv has created is a negative version of hegemony rather than grasping any kind of positive leadership role.
Negative Imperialism
The massive June bombardment of Iran by Israel and the United States, destroying civilian nuclear enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow, came amid ongoing diplomatic negotiations in Oman. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has the right to enrich uranium for civilian uses and no credible evidence was presented that Tehran had decided to militarize its program. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) condemned both sets of strikes as severe violations of the United Nations charter and of its own statutes. They also posed public health concerns, mainly because of the release of potentially toxic chemicals and radiological contaminants.
Those attacks, in short, were aimed at denying Iran the sort of economic and scientific enterprises that are a routine part of life in Israel and the United States, as well as Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Several of those countries (like Israel) do, of course, also have nuclear weapons, while Iran does not. In the end, Tehran saw no benefit in the 2015 nuclear deal its leaders had agreed to that required it to mothball 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program. Indeed, President Trump functionally punished the Iranian leadership for complying with it when he imposed maximum-pressure sanctions in May 2018—sanctions largely maintained by the Biden administration and in place to this day.
Those dangerous and illegal air strikes on Iran should bring to mind 19th-century British and Russian resistance to the building of a railroad by Iran’s Qajar dynasty, a form of what I’ve come to think of as “negative imperialism.” In other words, contrary to classic theories of imperialism that focused on the domination of markets and the extraction of resources, some imperial strategies have always been aimed at preventing the operation of markets in order to keep a victim nation weak.
After all, Iran has few navigable waterways and its economy has long suffered from transportation difficulties. The obvious solution once upon a time was to build a railroad, something both the British and the Russians came to oppose out of a desire to keep that country a weak buffer zone between their empires. Iran didn’t, in fact, get such a railroad until 1938.
In a similar fashion, 21st-century imperialism-from-the-air is denying it the ability to produce fuel for its nuclear power plant at Bushehr. The United States, Europe, and Israel are treating Iran differently from so many other countries in this regard because of its government’s rejection of a Western-imposed imperial order in the region.
Popular movements and revolts brought the long decades of British and French colonial dominance of the Middle East to an end after World War II. The demise of colonialism and the rise of independent nation-states was, however, never truly accepted by right-wing politicians in either Europe or the United States who had no interest in confronting the horrors of the colonial age. Instead, they preferred to ignore history, including the slave trade, economic looting, the displacement or massacre of Indigenous populations, the mismanagement of famines, and forms of racist apartheid. Worse yet, the desire for a sanitized history of the colonial era was often coupled with a determination to run the entire deadly experiment all over again.
The framers of the ill-omened Global War on Terror’s nightmares in Afghanistan and Iraq during the administration of President George W. Bush would openly celebrate what was functionally the return of Western colonialism. They attempted to use America’s moment as a hyperpower (unconstrained by great power competition after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991) to attempt to recolonize the Greater Middle East.
Predictably, they failed miserably. Unlike their 19th-century ancestors, people in the Global South are now largely urban and literate, connected by newspapers and the internet, organized by political parties and nongovernmental outfits, and in possession of capital, resources, and sophisticated weaponry. Direct colonization could now only be achieved through truly genocidal acts, as Israeli actions in Gaza suggest—and, even then, would be unlikely to succeed.
“We Destroyed the Villages by Air Patrols”
No wonder imperial powers have once again turned to indirect dominance through aerial bombardment. The use of air power to try to subdue or at least curb Middle Easterners is, in fact, more than a century old. That tactic was inaugurated by the government of Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti during his country’s invasion and occupation of Ottoman Libya in 1911. Aerial surveillance pilot Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti fitted detonators to two-pound grenades, dropping them on enemy camps. Though he caused no injuries, his act, then seen as sneaky and ungentlemanly, provoked outrage.
The ruthless British subjugation of Palestine, aimed at—this should sound eerily familiar today—displacing the Indigenous population and establishing a European “Jewish Ulster” there to bolster British rule in the Middle East, also deployed air power. As Irish parliamentarian Chris Hazzard observed, “Herbert Samuel, hated in Ireland for sanctioning Roger Casement’s execution and the internment of thousands following the Easter Rising in 1916—would, as Britain’s first High Commissioner in Palestine, order the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of Palestinian protestors in 1921 (the first bombs dropped from the sky on Palestinian civilians).”
The most extensive use of aerial bombardment for imperial control, however, would be pursued by the British in Mesopotamia, which they derogatorily called “Mespot.” The fragile British occupation of what is now Iraq from 1917 to 1932 ended long before imperialists like then-Secretary of State for War, Air, and the Colonies Winston Churchill thought it should, largely because the armed local population mounted a vigorous resistance to it. A war-weary British public proved unwilling to bear the costs of a large occupation army there in the 1920s, so Churchill decided to use the Royal Air Force to keep control.
Unlike genuine international leadership, the Frankenstein monster of negative hegemony in the Middle East stirs only opposition and resistance.
Arthur “Bomber” Harris, a settler in colonial Rhodesia, who joined the British Air Force during the first World War, was then sent to Iraq. As he wrote, “We were equipped with Vickers Venon and subsequently Victoria aircraft… By sawing a sighting hole in the nose of our troop carriers and making our own bomb racks we converted them into what were nearly the first post-war long-range heavy bombers.” He did not attempt to gild the lily about his tactics: “[I]f the rebellion continued, we destroyed the villages and by air patrols kept the insurgents away from their homes for as long as necessary.” That, as he explained, was far less expensive than using troops and, of course, produced no high infantry casualty counts of the sort that had scarred Europe’s conscience during World War I.
Colonial officials obscured the fact that such measures were being taken against a civilian population in peacetime, rather than enemy soldiers during a war. In short, the denial that there are any civilians in Palestine, or in the Middle East more generally, has a long colonial heritage. It should be noted, however, that, in the end, Great Britain’s aerial dominance of Iraq failed, and it finally had to grant that country what at least passed for independence in 1932. In 1958, an enraged public would finally violently overthrow the government the British had installed there, after which Iraq became a nationalist challenger to Western dominance in the region for decades to come.
Of course, Harris’ air power strategy, whetted in Mesopotamia, came to haunt Europe itself during the Second World War, when he emerged as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command and rose to the rank of air chief marshal. He would then pioneer the tactic of massively bombarding civilian cities, beginning with the “thousand bomber” raid on Cologne in May 1942. His “total war” air campaign would, of course, culminate in the notorious 1945 firebombing of Dresden, which devastated eight square miles of the “Florence of Germany,” wiping out at least 25,000 victims, most of them noncombatants.
Terror from the Skies
In the end, the way Bomber Harris’ deadly skies came home to Europe should be an object lesson to our own neo-imperialists. At this very moment, in fact, Europe faces menacing drones no less than does the Middle East. Moreover, unlike genuine international leadership, the Frankenstein monster of negative hegemony in the Middle East stirs only opposition and resistance. Despite Israel’s technological superiority, it has hardly achieved invulnerability. Poverty-stricken and war-ridden Yemen has, for instance, managed to all but close the vital Red Sea to international shipping to protest the genocide in Gaza and has hit Israel with hypersonic missiles, closing the port of Eilat. Nor, during their 12-day war, did Iran prove entirely helpless either. It took out Israel’s major oil refinery and struck key military and research facilities. Instead of shaking the Iranian government, Israel appears to have pushed Iranians to rally around the flag. Nor is it even clear that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium was affected.
Most damning of all, Israel’s ability to inflict atrocities on the Palestinians of Gaza (often with US-supplied weaponry) has produced widespread revulsion. It is now increasingly isolated, its prime minister unable even to fly over France and Spain due to a fear of an International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest. The publics of the Middle East are boiling with anger, as are many Europeans. In early October, Italy’s major labor unions called a general strike, essentially closing the country down to protest Israel’s interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla, a group of ships attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. As with Bomber Harris’ ill-starred domination of Iraq, terror from the skies in Gaza and beyond is all too likely to fail as a long-term Grand Strategy.
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Gaza: The Peace of the Genocide Alliance
The great war may be coming to an end, but the violence of occupation, apartheid, and territorial expansion is not.
Oct 14, 2025
With the silence of the guns, hope grows that Israel's genocide in Gaza may have come to an end. Hostages and prisoners from both sides have already been exchanged, and Israeli forces have begun to withdraw to the first ceasefire line in the enclave.
Much-needed aid supplies are once again reaching the humanitarian disaster zone, where an artificially created famine is raging, via the border crossings. Meanwhile, in Egypt, representatives of the US, European countries, Arab states, and Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority have been discussing the next phases of the ceasefire.
At the same time, survivors and those who have been displaced multiple times are returning to where they once lived—to the apocalyptic ruins of their homeland. Among them is Gaza resident Fidaa Haraz. Like many others, she is now wandering around Gaza City, against a backdrop that resembles destroyed Berlin after World War II: “I’m walking in the street, but I do not know where to go, due to the extent of the destruction. I swear I don’t know where the crossroads is or where my home is. I know that my home was leveled, but where is it? Where is it? I cannot find it. What is this? What do we do with our lives? Where should we live? Where should we stay?”
At least 92 percent of Gaza's infrastructure has been destroyed or severely damaged by Israel, over 61 million tons of rubble are piling up in the coastal strip, including hospitals, schools, and mosques, heavily contaminated and turned into hazardous material by unexploded ordnance. It will take many years, probably generations, to dispose of it and rebuild. It is the miserable and long aftermath of genocide.
US President Donald Trump is being credited with ending Israel's more than two-year massacre of the Gaza population. He pressured Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas to accept his “deal.” In fact, Hamas had already agreed to similar conditions for a ceasefire over a year ago. But Israel prevented the agreement and killed Hamas leader and negotiator Ismail Haniyya, while the US under Biden and then Trump continued to supply weapons for the genocide and blocked a ceasefire in the UN Security Council with its veto.
What has changed in recent months is that, while the Palestinians could not be persuaded to “voluntarily leave” their homeland and Hamas was by no means defeated militarily, the Netanyahu government has increasingly become a burden for Trump due to its various regional escalations.
Due to the bombing of the ceasefire talks in Qatar, a close ally of the US, and pressure from his own MAGA movement, Trump felt increasingly compelled to rein in Tel Aviv.
The accusation from conservative and right-wing circles in the US, prominently articulated by Tucker Carlson or US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, is that Israel is drawing far too much attention to itself and damaging US interests (i.e., those of the American business class) with its bombing of Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, while the Trump administration has more important things to do, such as fighting for an authoritarian-fascist social order and declaring economic war on the rest of the world. They demand: “America First.”
The growing protests in Western industrialized countries, with hundreds of thousands, even millions on the streets—from Great Britain to Italy and Spain to the Netherlands and Germany, forcing their governments to make concessions— the opposition of large parts of the so-called Global South to the Gaza massacre and the associated isolation of Israel have caused costs to rise for the US as well as for Netanyahu.
However, we should not be under any illusions: the possible end of genocide, starvation, and humanitarian destruction does not mean that peace will ensue. For peace is more than the absence of constant military bombardment, marauding ground troops, and kill zones.
The great war may be coming to an end, but the violence of occupation, apartheid, and territorial expansion is not. For example, settlement projects in the West Bank continued at an accelerated pace during the Gaza war.
We should also remember what the status quo was before October 7, 2023, when the Hamas attack occurred, which Trump's peace plan not only renews but actually exacerbates. Because now it means Israeli occupation plus military-backed foreign administration for an indefinite period. Later, according to the plan, the corrupt Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which is hated by many Palestinians, will be handed control of Gaza by Trump and Co.
The occupation will therefore continue, with all its consequences. In 2023 alone, until the Hamas attack, an average of one Palestinian per day was killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the occupied territories, including many children. A total of over 200 victims in the first seven months of that year. The Western media has become accustomed to turning a blind eye to Israel's ongoing human rights violations, the many minors held in torture prisons without charge, and the violent occupation regime, which the International Court of Justice has ruled to be a violation of international law.
When journalists report on the crimes in the occupied territories, they become targets of the “most moral army in the world.” Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a US citizen well known in the Arab world, was killed in 2022 by Israeli soldiers who shot her in the head while she was reporting, even though she was clearly wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet marked “Press.” Israel denied the case, and the US swept it under the rug.
All of this will continue. Nor will future Israeli military actions in Gaza be prevented by ceasefires. In total, before the Hamas attack, there were five Gaza wars, which are in reality massacres of an enclosed population, with thousands of civilians killed: 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021. You can literally set your watch by it. Afterwards, a ceasefire was always agreed upon until Israel again deemed it necessary to “mow the lawn,” as the regular decimation of resistance in Gaza against the occupation is referred to in Israeli security circles.
Since Israel's Six-Day War in June 1967 and the conquest of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula, US-Israeli peace plans have also been adopted at regular intervals. Virtually every US president, with the exception of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, has produced one. None of them have come to anything. Trump's 20-point plan is the most substance-free of them all, as political analyst Norman Finkelstein said on Al-Jazeera.
The other plans at least referred to international documents such as UN Security Council Resolution 242 after the Six-Day War, which calls on Israel to withdraw from all occupied territories and to recognize the sovereignty, political independence, and right of every state “to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” Or they referred to the territorial borderline (“green line”) as the basis for a two-state solution in sync with the international community.
None of this is included in the Trump plan. It is simply 20 short points, without any references or coherence. There is not even any mention of whether Israel will continue to occupy the Gaza Strip by controlling its land, sea, and air borders. It simply assumes that this “norm” will not change.
The rights of Palestinians are absent from the plan, except for a vague formulation at the end: if the residents of Gaza and the Palestinian Authority behave properly (“Gaza re-development advances and when the PA reform programme is faithfully carried out”) — which, of course, will be judged by the US and Israel — then “the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.”
Such meaningless statements are not worth the paper they are written on. Israel has repeatedly rejected a Palestinian state within internationally recognized borders, like they are implicit in UN Resolution 242. For 50 years, this peace has been offered by the Arab states and the Palestinian side. Israel has blocked the solution also in the rare cases of bilateral negotiations by at most presenting unviable cantons. Meanwhile, over the decades, illegal settlements and walls have created facts on the ground, and fertile land in the West Bank and around Jerusalem has been unlawfully appropriated.
It is obvious that there is no willingness to hold those responsible for the genocide and their accomplices in Washington, London, Paris, or Berlin accountable, or even those in the executive suites of companies that profit from Israel's violence – because who would enforce this internationally?
At the same time, the US regularly uses its veto when the solution is put to a vote in the UN Security Council, while the Netanyahu government, with the support of the Knesset—and also in line with an increasingly rejectionist population in Israel—has now openly declared that it will no longer allow a Palestinian state. Israel and the US are completely isolated internationally on this issue. Hence, in order to appease the Western liberal public in particular, vague talk of Palestinian statehood is again used: a rhetorical facade with no political value, pretending “goodwill” where there is none.
There will be no peace without justice. As long as the root cause of the crisis in the Middle East—an end to occupation and apartheid, a viable state for the Palestinians within internationally recognized borders—is not seriously addressed, there will continue to be violence and, at best, a peace of the graveyard.
To this day, we do not know how many people in Gaza have actually been killed, how many more will die as a result of the famine and genocide (some estimates put the final death toll at hundreds of thousands), and how many will be scarred for life by mutilation.
However, it is obvious that there is no willingness to hold those responsible for the genocide and their accomplices in Washington, London, Paris, or Berlin accountable, or even those in the executive suites of companies that profit from Israel's violence—because who would enforce this internationally? The states that support Israel essentially rule the world and all have blood on their hands. This is nothing new, see the “war on terror” or the Indochina wars of the US.
What is now to be decided and implemented is good if it ends the mass deaths in Gaza. But it remains a peace of the perpetrators and a genocide without accountability, with which the survivors have to live.
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