WANA (May 16) – Trump’s idea is clear and straightforward. Whether he will achieve it by the end of his presidency is a matter of time—so we withhold judgment for now. He—or more accurately, the powerful current in the U.S.—claims that over the past few decades, capital has flowed out of America, mostly to East Asia. The justification was that the region had certain advantages, leading to American technology and products being manufactured in China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and beyond. The U.S. itself supported this idea.

 

But Eastern countries—and others like Brazil and India—now have the capacity to pose an economic threat to U.S. power by 2050. Trump’s core idea is to bring capital back to America. He cannot match China’s power head-on, so he turns to tariffs as a means of leverage.

 

But where should the U.S. compensate for the loss? From the Middle East. Trump has referred to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE as “cash machines” in the past. Today, he’s making that promise a reality. He is using the wealth of this region to fill America’s deficits and debts. Will he succeed? We must wait and see. After all, eight years ago, he signed a $450 billion deal with Saudi Arabia and famously declared: “I milked the cow.” Yet by the end of his presidency, only $91 billion of it had materialized.

But there’s a deeper issue here. For decades, Western development theories were imposed on us, and professors in Iran’s humanities fields—political science, economics, and so on—insisted that political development must come before economic development. Later, they said the two must go hand in hand.

 

They argued: the Islamic Republic has not achieved political development, and therefore cannot attain economic development either. Political freedoms, free parties, elections, civil rights, a free press, and an active civil society—these were held as prerequisites for economic growth. Didn’t they say that without these, economic development is impossible? So what happened? Does Saudi Arabia hold free elections? Does it have a free press? Have you forgotten Khashoggi? Has political development been implemented in Saudi Arabia? Do its people even have the right to choose? Do they have a free parliament? None of the political development indicators exist there.

 

Just like during the Shah’s rule in Iran—when foreign journalists criticized his authoritarian regime, he would reply: “What do hungry people know of freedom?”—but never addressed why people remained hungry in the first place.

 

So here’s the central question: After decades of insisting on those theories, have you now abandoned them all for the sake of a few multi-billion-dollar arms deals, and Boeing and Tesla contracts? Wasn’t political development supposed to come before economic development? So is economic growth possible without political freedom after all?