World ‘failing’ to meet development goals: UN chief

ATLANTA, Georgia: Prominent US-based Arab commentators reacted to Thursday night’s debate between President Joe Biden and challenger Donald Trump with a mix of disapproval and disappointment, saying the front-runners were “lacking substance.”

Biden and Trump participated in a CNN-hosted debate at the network’s Atlanta headquarters without a studio audience and in a format that cut off microphones when the candidates ran out of time to speak or interrupted each other.

Amal Mudallali, a former Lebanese journalist and diplomat who was Lebanon’s permanent representative to the UN, was disappointed with the performance of both candidates, calling it “the saddest debate I’ve ever seen in America.

“It wasn’t really a debate,” Mudallali told Arab News. “It was just name-calling, and it was personal attacks.”

She added: “Even when you had questions about very important issues, the answers were either for the candidate to stumble or for the other person to change the subject or not answer the question.”

Indeed, many of the rare conversations about Middle East issues seemed to be personal attacks, lacking a deep and honest discussion of policy.

During the debate, Trump criticized Biden’s border policy, claiming it allows terrorists to enter the US. “Right now we have the highest number of terrorists coming into our country,” he said.

“All the terrorists all over the world, not just in South America, all over the world.” They come from the Middle East, everywhere, from all over the world. They are arriving. And this guy just left it open.”

Trump also singled out people his administration killed while he was president, including Daesh leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani.

Biden fired back at Trump, saying, “Iran attacked American troops and he did nothing.

Trump also claimed that Hamas would never have carried out the Oct. 7 attack on Israel if he had been president because the Palestinian militant group’s Iranian backers would not have had the means under his tough sanctions regime.

“Israel would never have been attacked in a million years by Hamas.” You know why? “Because Iran broke up with me,” he said. “I wouldn’t let anyone do business with them.” They ran out of money. They were broke. They had no money for Hamas. They had no money for anything. There is no money for terror.”

The approach to US policy toward Iran appears to be an area where Biden and Trump differ, with the former preferring to try to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions through an Obama-era deal he helped broker and the latter favoring a “maximum pressure” campaign. .

“The point of greatest difference between President Trump and President Biden is certainly Iran,” Firas Maksad, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told Arab News.

“One favors more pressure and containment, while the other prefers diplomacy and trying to accommodate Tehran’s regional ambitions.”

Given the tone of the debate, Mudallali felt that neither candidate had won.

“There are no winners in this debate,” she said. “There is only one loser, and that is the United States of America which does not have a better candidate or better candidates who rise to her role in the world, to her importance, to her ability.”

Mudalalli said that what was “little discussed” about the conflict in Ukraine and the violence in the Middle East, including the war in Gaza and arms exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah along the Lebanese border, was the “most disappointing part” of the debate.

“At a time when you have two major conflicts in the world, in Europe and in the Middle East, where thousands of people are dying in Gaza, 37,000 and thousands and thousands of people in Ukraine, you see that the foreign policy debate in this debate was shallow. He wasn’t there,” she said.

“There was no debate, no vision of America’s role for peace, of how we’re going to end these wars, how we’re going to end this tragedy that’s going on.” It was really, really, really sad to see that, to see that there was no real foreign policy debate.

“There is no attempt to present to the world a vision for the day after or the day after and how America and its role can contribute to ending these two conflicts.”

Rana Abtar, a Washington-based talk show host for Ashark News, echoed the sentiment of many commentators, saying that the debate primarily highlighted Biden’s limitations as a candidate.

“During this debate, it was obvious that President Biden was struggling with his speech and performance,” Abtar told Arab News. “This will definitely not help him with voters who have serious doubts and questions about his age.”

However, Abtar said Trump’s performance had its flaws. “Trump, as usual, performed better. But he got many facts wrong,” she said. “This will not help him with independent voters.” He needs their votes to win this election cycle.”

Abtar said the debate was largely focused on domestic issues. “As expected, we heard a lot about the economy,” she said. “This is the number one issue that the American voter cares about.”

“We’ve heard a lot of talk about immigration, a lot of attacks from President Trump on Biden, about the performance of the Biden administration when it comes to immigration, and we’ve heard a lot of talk about abortion. This is mainly to attract female votes. Both Trump and Biden are trying to win the female vote in order to win the election in November.

“What was also interesting was the focus on the African-American vote, and this is also a very important vote for both candidates to win the election in November.”

As a result of the focus on domestic issues, Abtar said neither candidate had substantially addressed foreign affairs.

“Both candidates were asked a lot of foreign policy questions,” she said. “We heard a lot of talk about Russia and Ukraine.”

“Trump, as expected, attacked President Biden when it comes to his policy towards Russia.” He claimed that the war in Ukraine would not have happened when he was in power. In turn, Biden fired back, and he talked about Trump’s threats to leave NATO during his presidency.

“But the main issue that was presented was obviously the war in Gaza, and Trump was not very clear on his position on a Palestinian state.”

Abtar said Biden has also been vague about his Middle East stance, leaving regional observers none the wiser about the likely direction the administration will take if the incumbent is returned to office.

“When it comes to Biden, he talked about his plan on the ceasefire, on the release of the hostages, but his plan wasn’t clear in his statements either,” Abtar said.

“So in reality we heard two very vague statements from the candidates, from the current president and the former president, without any substance, any policy.”

Referring to the Biden administration’s Gaza peace plan, which was first unveiled in May but has yet to be accepted by Israel and Hamas, Abtar said little is known about potential next steps.

“Even though Biden has presented this plan and this proposal, he seems to have reached an impasse,” she said. “The answers in this regard were not clear.

Outlining his peace plan during the debate, Biden said “the first phase is treating the hostages for a ceasefire” and “the second phase is a ceasefire with additional conditions.”

He went on to say that he supplies Israel with everything they need, minus the 2,000-pound bomb, because “they don’t work very well in populated areas. They kill many innocent people. We provide Israel with all the weapons it needs and when it needs them.

Joyce Karam, a veteran journalist and senior news editor at Al-Monitor, was also stunned by Biden’s poor performance.

“This was a very bad debate for President Joe Biden,” she told Arab News. “I can tell you as someone who interviewed Biden when he was vice president and covered him in previous races, and saw him in multiple debates, this was definitely his worst.”

“The decline in his performance was obvious – the voice, the style, the delivery.” The American president looked weak and only looked weak.

Karam believes that Trump came out on top in part because of the weakness of Biden’s performance.

“There is a consensus among observers that Donald Trump won this debate and won easily, not because he offered popular policies or visionary ideas, but because Biden was incoherent,” she said.

“Sometimes you just couldn’t understand what he (Biden) was saying, and he just couldn’t finish a sentence.”

Now, the question among many commentators is whether the Democratic Party will rally behind Biden’s candidacy or seek a last-minute change in its candidate to run for president in November.

“I’m not sure that these two men (Biden and Trump) will debate again, or that Biden will end up being the Democratic nominee,” Karam said.

“The chatter has already started that Biden may have given up on a second term and announced that he has changed his mind and will not run for re-election.” And then we might see an open Democratic convention in Chicago.

Returning to the subject of the conflict on Thursday night, Karam said the 90-minute debate lacked “a lot of substance” on many issues, including the Middle East and the conflict in Gaza.

“The economy, social issues, health care, Medicare, the deficit were the most talked about, which is typical of these occasions,” she said. “However, what we saw, especially from Trump, was a lot of clichéd statements, and from both candidates, we didn’t really see much substance when it came to the Middle East.”

In one of the most memorable moments of the debate, Trump said that Biden “became like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him because he is a very bad Palestinian. He is weak.”

Reacting to the comment, Karam said: “Trump accusing Biden of being a ‘bad Palestinian’ is just another level, and Biden didn’t have very convincing answers when asked about ending the war in Gaza and supporting Israel.” Those were the same talking points from the candidates that we’ve heard over the last few months during the campaign.”

Karam said there has been “little real debate on the big issues surrounding American foreign policy” and on issues such as how Trump will achieve his stated goal of ending the war in Ukraine. Instead, there was a lot of “lofty talk, a lot of cliche statements, very little substance.”

There was also “little about the global power competition between the US and China. There was next to nothing about the future of American presence and influence in the Middle East, and absolutely nothing I heard about Iran’s nuclear program.

Regardless of who ends up securing the keys to the White House in November, the Middle East Institute’s Maksad believes some sort of normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be a priority for any new administration.

“There are few things that enjoy bipartisan consensus in America these days, but the importance of fostering greater regional integration in the Middle East, with potential Saudi-Israeli normalization as a centerpiece,” he said.