\u201cThis week in #Kuwait, Secretary Tillerson and the US delegation will join other governments & members of the private sector to discuss ways to facilitate the large-scale reconstruction taking place in #Iraq,\u201d the U.S. Embassy in Iraq tweeted before dawn on Feb. 12. Just a few hours later, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted out his own priorities: \u201cThis will be a big week for Infrastructure. After so stupidly spending $7 trillion in the Middle East, it is now time to start investing in OUR Country!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The success against the Islamic State group in Iraq stands as one of the crowning foreign policy achievements of President Trump\u2019s first year in office. True to his word, President Trump intensified U.S. counterterrorism operations upon taking office, galvanizing a global coalition to destroy ISIS across Iraq, including in the northern city of Mosul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By November, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi felt confident enough to tweet: \u201cWe finished Daesh [ISIS] militarily in Iraq and liberated our towns and cities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today, ISIS no longer controls large-scale territory in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This sets up a major test for the Trump administration \u2014 an opportunity to operationalize its concept of burden-sharing. To date, the Trump administration has continued large-scale humanitarian and stabilization assistance to Iraq. As the president\u2019s tweet suggests, however, he has no intention of spending U.S. taxpayer money on the next phase in Iraq: reconstruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Recently, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert reaffirmed that policy. \u201cOur policy posture has changed since previous administrations \u2014 remember, we used to be in the whole nation-building [business]. The United States government is not doing that any longer,\u201d she stated. \u201cWe see that it\u2019s best for the countries and best for the region, too \u2014 and U.S. taxpayers \u2014 to have other people participate in the reconstruction, large-scale reconstruction of these countries.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson began laying the groundwork for this shift well before the reconstruction conference in Kuwait this week. For the past month, he has sought to ease Saudi concerns of an Iranian takeover in Baghdad<\/a> in the hopes of winning a reconstruction commitment from Riyadh. And despite declining to pledge public money, the U.S. worked assiduously to facilitate the participation of more than 2,300 private companies, including many American firms, at the conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even so, the rebuilding of Iraq has a Sisyphean quality to it: After spending billions of dollars on reconstruction last decade, U.S. partners are weary to sink money into the country yet again.<\/p>\n\n\n\t