To start with, the notion of a “Muslim world,” in terms of government policy directions, would have been rather difficult. There is, of course, a worldwide community of Muslim believers (the ummah, as Muslims themselves note), and there are 48 countries in the world where Muslims are a demographic majority. But huge numbers of Muslim populations exist in countries where they are not majorities, India being the most significant: there are more than 200 million Muslim Indians, which makes it the third largest Muslim national population in the world. To have a “Muslim world” government policy of any sort, particularly for a non-Muslim government such as the United States, would be, and was, fraught with structural difficulties. Leaving aside that issue—and presuming that, for example, Obama’s speech was about “Muslim majority countries,” just for the sake of argument—there are still problems in crafting common policies that would apply to countries stretching from West Africa to East Africa, to the north of Asia to Southeast Asia, and parts of Europe, all with very different socio-political-economic situations.
But leaving those issues aside, one can simply look at the seven topics that the speech was meant to have addressed: Israel/Palestine, violent extremism, democracy, nuclear weapons, religious freedom, women’s rights, and economic development. It’s hard to see how there is any positive legacy with regards to any of these in terms of U.S. policy.
Was there any U.S. governmental policy that took seriously the need for economic development in Muslim-majority countries, and prioritized that in terms of engagement between Washington, DC, and those capitals? If there was, this wasn’t done on a wide enough scale to be presumed a “Muslim world” policy. As for Muslim women’s rights, these were not priorities for the Obama administration itself, let alone administrations that followed it—a generally U.S.-sympathetic academic study of how U.S. foreign policy viewed Muslim women since 9/11 onwards concluded: “Beyond improving the image of the United States among Muslim peoples, Obama’s main policy goals in the Islamic world were to find Osama bin Laden and to extricate the United States from two unpopular wars as quickly as possible. His increasingly tepid support for Afghan women’s equality troubled feminists and others.”1 This was the case in Afghanistan, where women’s rights had often been instrumentalized in Washington, DC, to support the U.S. military position, let alone the case in other Muslim-majority states. In the final analysis, the United States eventually departed Afghanistan in a rather ignominious and hasty fashion in any case, and the Taliban regained power.
On religious freedom, the picture is not as poor as on women’s rights, but hardly a “legacy.” An analysis from the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) noted in 2023 that “the US government is still struggling with the question of how to effectively institutionalize expertise and capacity relating to strategic religious engagement.” Another USIP piece indicated that “increasing polarization at home could threaten to undermine long-running bipartisan consensus on the issue's importance.” As Islamophobia in the United States becomes more mainstreamed—which undoubtedly has been the case, which even the Biden administration has recognized by recently drafting a National Strategy to Combat Islamophobia—it becomes rather difficult to imagine that the United States can effectively and credibly lobby for religious freedom internationally.
But perhaps the most devastating critique of “legacy-building” of the Cairo speech resides within the issues of violent extremism, democracy, and Israel/Palestine. On violent extremism, the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and public policy institute at New York University, concluded that countering violent extremism (CVE) programs domestically have “focused only on Muslims, stigmatizing them as a suspect community.” Even CVE practitioners noted that “far-right extremism is deeply entrenched across” the United States, and that the United States had yet to “vigorously deploy its capacities” in order to “dramatically reduce the number of recruits buying into violent extremist ideology.” Other experts, commenting on the present state of play on the issue, agree: “I’m not optimistic that the scale of investments that the United States has made on this problem or the way we define it has a chance at really making a difference here.” Among international efforts, DC’s CVE programs have come under fire as well, with organizations such as the International Crisis Group finding critical issues that ought to be addressed.
When we look at support for democratic processes in Muslim-majority countries, it’s difficult to argue that this is a priority for U.S. policymakers, nor has it been since the Cairo speech. An academic study on the topic published in 2019 noted that the Obama administration itself on democracy promotion, despite early noise about supporting democratic movements in the Arab world during the Arab Spring, eventually “reverted to well-established repertories emphasizing stability, relationships with autocrats, and counterterrorism”2; succeeding administrations did not change that.
As I write this piece, U.S. governmental policy on Israel/Palestine is perhaps the worst testament to the Cairo speech. Obama said in 2006:
On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people—Muslims and Christians—have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they've endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations—large and small—that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. And America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.
Fifteen years on, all those issues are tremendously worse. Israel’s government has unilaterally excluded the very idea of a Palestinian state, defying even the rhetoric of the current U.S. president. The dislocation Obama mentioned has been repeated multiple times: Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced many times as a result of the Israeli bombardment of the territory. The “daily humiliations” have been exceeded, as Israeli forces kill large numbers of Palestinian civilians using U.S.-supplied weapons and restrict humanitarian aid even amid famine-like conditions, despite DC protestations. Indeed, Israel currently stands in the dock at the International Court of Justice facing allegations that are so serious, 15 out of 17 judges found it plausible that the Palestinians’ right to not be subjected to genocide could be threatened. If there is a legacy to be mentioned here, it is that U.S. policy on Israel/Palestine has become progressively more and more problematic—a topic explored in great detail in a Brookings book, aptly titled Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump (2019).
There were positive outcomes of the Obama presidency, but any objective appraisal in that regard would find its encouraging achievements to have been mostly domestic rather than foreign; on the latter, it is difficult to find a long-lasting affirmative impact, except when comparing to much worse that took place thereafter. But if using Obama’s own bar, by referring to his Cairo speech of 2009, the judgement cannot be particularly upbeat.
Notes
1 Kelly J. Shannon, U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 176.
2 Mieczyslaw P. Boduszynski, US Democracy Promotion in the Arab World: Beyond Interests vs. Ideals (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Press, 2019), xi.
