A mere few weeks after Oct. 7, 2023, a respectable and highly influential think tank published a policy recommendation regarding the “public relations crisis” that the United States had been facing in the Arab and Muslim world, in which the author, Farah Pandith, opined that “many regional leaders feel an urgent need to support Palestinians, as well as try to build agency and domestic popularity – perhaps to fortify their un-democratic rule.” Crucially, she had written these lines immediately after noting that “even though several leaders in the region are generally pro-West and have relations with Israel, their people remain strongly opposed to any diplomacy with the country and remain outraged over its military actions in Gaza.” Perhaps Pandith was not sharp enough to notice the nonsense in these adjacent analyses. She had to comment on the absurdity that by not adopting policies in line with the wishes of their people, those leaders were fortifying what would be their “un-democratic rule.”
The origins of Pandith’s “concerns” can be traced back to the early decades of American involvement in the region. As early as 1958, former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower talked about pretty much the same “crisis” as follows: “We have a campaign of hatred against us, not by the governments, but by the people.” Of course, addressing the root causes of that “campaign” would have been ridiculous; what needed to be done instead was to improve the empire’s “public relations” strategies – that is, to ensure the effectiveness of propaganda, a word that has fallen out of fashion since Edward Bernays, the founder of the modern field of public relations, wrote a book with that title.
More than a year after Pandith penned that article, with a new emperor in the White House, the “crisis” remains unresolved. And Pandith’s “regional leaders” seem as determined as ever in "fortifying their un-democratic rule.” They have repeatedly rejected Trump’s plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, for instance, despite the emperor’s insisting that they would eventually come to their senses and accept the public humiliation. Last weekend, Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement condemning “the proponents of these extremist ideas.” This further demonstrated how arrogant and “extreme” it is of the U.S. to demand and expect complete subservience from the Arab and Muslim world, especially considering that the U.S. is no longer the empire that it used to be, as U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted in a recent interview.
That the U.S. is no longer the empire it used to be is perhaps best seen in its lack of concern for its global image. Trump’s attacks on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have solidified this shift in attitude, signaling that there is no longer a need to improve the global image of the empire as long as it is equally capable of accomplishing its agenda. In particular, it is of no importance whatsoever to the current U.S. government what the people of the region think or how they perceive the U.S. as long as it succeeds in implementing its regional policies. Yet it is of immense importance to those “regional leaders” what their people think and how they perceive their leaders (and, in particular, how they perceive the relationship between their leaders and the empire).
As ironic as it may be, those “regional leaders” are effectively more democratic than the leaders in Europe are for a reason. By putting themselves in a relationship of self-destructive dependence on the empire, European leaders have long forsaken their ability to seek alternative policies even when their people demand it, whereas Pandith’s “regional leaders” seem at least to “reserve the right” to consider other options. And perhaps the influence of China has encouraged them in their thinking.
One wonders how long this arrangement can persist. If the empire no longer cares about its global image and expects total submission without pretense, if Europe has settled into the comfort of obedience despite the growing gap between its leaders and its people, and if the “un-democratic” leaders of the Arab and Muslim world are the ones actually compelled to respond to public sentiment, then the conventional vocabulary of geopolitics is due for a radical update.
