Historically, the midterm elections in the US have often changed the power dynamics between the White House and the Congress, which has prompted US administrations to modify their approach to foreign affairs. In the recent past, there have been a number of such important foreign policy developments that have taken place as a result of electoral setbacks during the midterms.  

In 2006, the sweeping victory of the Democrats in the congressional vote prompted the Bush administration to alter its approach in Iraq, pushing for a US troops surge and seeking to appease the Iranian regime.

Then the resurgence of the Republicans in the 2010 midterms (which won them the House of Representatives) predisposed then-President Barack Obama to back the military intervention in Libya a few months later – a decision he would later consider as “the worst mistake” of his presidency. And again, after the electoral defeat the Democrats suffered in November 2014, the Obama administration switched gear and started pursuing much more seriously a nuclear deal with Iran, which was meant to serve as the president’s lasting foreign policy legacy.

The Trump administration might go through similar policy shifts or adjustments after the November 6 vote. If the polls are accurate this time around, the Democrats are slated to win the House of Representatives by a narrow margin, while the Republicans are expected to retain their control of the Senate.

Whatever the outcome, the midterm elections are likely to have both direct and indirect consequences for the US foreign policy in general and more specifically in the Middle East.

Changes in Congress

The direct consequences have to do with the change in dynamics inside the US Congress and the relations between the executive and legislative branch.

There will be a change of guard in the Senate with the passing of armed services committee chair John McCain and the retirement of foreign relations committee chair Bob Corker, two outspoken critics of the current administration who will be succeeded by Trump loyalists Jim Inhofe and Jim Risch respectively. 

However, there are still Senators Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul (neither of whom are running for re-election in these midterms). All three have been occasionally critical of the White House and all have sway on foreign policy affairs.

If the Republicans retain control of the upper chamber (and quite likely they will), there is still no guarantee that they will not challenge Trump’s approach to the Middle East, especially when it comes to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Rubio and Graham are pressing the Trump Administration to do more on US sanctions against Iran, while Paul has been warning about the implications of exiting the Iran nuclear deal. In the aftermath of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, all three have called for harsh measures to be taken against Saudi Arabia, which Trump is reluctant to do. There have even been suggestions that the Republicans in Congress could “break” with the White House on this issue.

And of course, in the unlikely scenario that the Democrats take the Senate as well, this challenge would be that much bigger. The Democrats would be more aggressive in pressuring the Trump administration to take action against Riyadh and to revert to a more calibrated approach towards sanctions on Iran.

Moreover, if the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, they are likely to use their oversight prerogatives to sway policy-making one way or the other. It is likely that the House will seek to press the Trump administration to halt US arms exports to Saudi Arabia and use it as a leverage to end the war in Yemen. The Trump administration’s recent call for a ceasefire in Yemen by the end of November is an attempt to pre-empt this expected development.

A Democrat-dominated House is also likely to push for cuts in the defence budget. The funding for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), which finances the US wars in Iraq and Syria, is expected to significantly decrease in 2019, which means

the White House will be limited in its ability to militarily deter Iranian influence in the Middle East.

Increasing focus on foreign policy

Electoral setbacks in midterm elections usually lead to a Congress that tends to disrupt the domestic affairs agenda of the White House. In this sense, the Trump administration is likely to focus more on foreign policy in the period between the midterm election and the start of the presidential campaign in mid-2019.

This is likely to push Trump to finally reveal details of the peace plan he announced for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While the president has talked extensively about his intentions to bring the Israelis and the Palestinians to the negotiating table, he has given almost no concrete details on what he will propose to the two sides. Re-starting talks, however, would entail challenging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be ready to make significant compromises, something Trump has been reluctant to do so far. There might be potential frictions between the two if Trump gets serious about launching peace talks before the end of his first term.

The White House is also likely to continue exerting pressure on Iran but will most likely be criticised by conservatives in Congress for not getting tougher in implementing the sanctions and by the left for risking a potentially costly confrontation with the Iranian regime. Trump is also expected to make another attempt to re-engage with Moscow, but his efforts will most likely be thwarted by Democrats in Congress who are convinced the Kremlin intervened to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election.

Congressional opposition to any rapprochement with Russia could also foil any progress on resolving the Syrian issue and restarting peace talks between the opposition and the Assad regime. The US-backed Arab-Israeli axis against Iran might also suffer setbacks in the final two years of Trump’s presidency if pressure in Congress to take action on Saudi Arabia continues.

Beyond these direct and indirect consequences of the midterms, there are also several possible wild card developments that could take place in the weeks following the vote. Defence Secretary James Mattis might resign, which would alter the power dynamics inside the Trump administration and push it further to the right. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation could also be a game changer for the next US Congress if it found that there was enough evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia or of obstruction of justice by the president.

While we should expect the White House to get more engaged in the Middle East after the midterm election, the general character of its foreign policy in the region is expected to remain more or less the same: more tactical than strategic and more unpredictable than coherent.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania – One hundred years ago, on November 11, 1918, the armistice brought an end to WWI in Europe. 

For the countries of East Africa, however, the war would go on for another two full weeks.

From 1914, British Empire soldiers fought a four-year guerrilla campaign against a small German force in East Africa.

On November 25, 1918, Allied and German forces received and accepted the terms, bringing an end to four years of conflict that had cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of African soldiers and civilians over 750,000 square miles – an area three times the size of the German Reich. 

Historian Kathleen Bomani grew up in Tanzania and had been the classroom expert on the First World War. 

“I knew it in and out,” she says, “or so I thought”.

Now, she is showing her exhibition “What Happened Here” in Dar Es Salaam as part of the WWI centenary. 

Remembrance of WWI remains largely European, even within Tanzania.

Kathleen Bomani, historian

It was in her twenties that Bomani realised that not only had the war raged in Tanzania, Zambia and Burundi (then German East Africa), but that it had lasted the entire duration of the war in Europe, and brought comparable devastation.

She had questions. Why was the war considered a sideshow to the trench warfare in Europe? And what traces were left of the fighting? So she travelled through Tanzania, following the routes of African soldiers and carriers, to explore their histories.

Al Jazeera: What happened in East Africa during the First World War? Was it different from the fighting in Europe? 

Kathleen Bomani: To understand the scale of the conflicted area, you have to imagine German East Africa as a colony made up much of today’s Burundi, Rwanda and the majority of Tanzania. 

The size and nature of the land meant that the fighting took on a completely different style. 

There was less trench warfare. Instead, the Germans and the Allies chased each other up and down the region, often at a pace of 30km a day. 

They levelled villages for supplies and enlisted civilians as soldiers to fight and carriers to shift their supplies. Most soldiers and porters died from malnutrition, fatigue, malaria, tsetse fly and black fever, rather than bullets.

Significantly, the war occurred just seven years after one of the largest acts of resistance against colonial rule, the Maji Maji Uprising. 

As a result, the German forces utilised guerrilla tactics that had been successful to them.

Al Jazeera: What was the cost?

Bomani: For German commander Paul Van Lettow Vorbeck, the East Africa campaign was as a distraction, with the aim of drawing Allied troops away from the fronts in Europe. 

Britain leaned on forces from across its colonies: troops from Ghana, Nigeria, the West Indies, Jamaica, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa. 

Together with Allied forces of Belgium and Portugal, their numbers made up 150,000 soldiers. German forces numbered around 25,000.

More staggering was the number of carriers needed over the four years, at a total of more than one million. 

And wherever soldiers went, they recruited more. The official loss of life was around 105,000 although these numbers are almost certainly downplayed.

Fundamentally, the deaths of carriers were seen as dispensable and not accurately recorded. We may never know how many Africans died during WWI. 

Al Jazeera: You have travelled around Tanzania exploring the traces of the war left on the region. What do they look like?

Bomani: There are no official cemeteries for African soldiers and carriers and there are few traces of the battlefields. 

What have endured are large German colonial buildings that became quickly abandoned after 1918: a hospital in Tanga, disused train stations in Mwanza, a fort in Lindi and impressive houses for German governors.

The first thing you notice about these buildings is that they are statuesque. They were built to last. 

The Germans had clearly intended to keep its colony for a long time, like the British after them. 

The second is that they are all empty. These are prime locations, often beachfront or strategic, very public spaces. Despite that, they have not been used. They carry a feeling of unreconciled trauma. 

Al Jazeera: You explain in your exhibition that the traces of the war are different in the south of Tanzania…

Bomani: In the south, it is hard to find any trace of the battles. Even at the place of one of the bloodiest battles, Mahiwa, where the death count reached the thousands in just three days, there is little trace of WWI. 

There is, however, a church, which would have been a Christian mission from the same era. Such churches kept records of daily life in the run-up to the war: they recorded villagers selling all their livestock so they would have enough money to flee, they recorded student numbers in school plummeting.

Carriers were fully aware that this conflict was fundamentally a colonial project.

Meanwhile, British missionaries wrote opportunistically about the lands and congregations of German missions that would become available to them after the war. Across the southern highlands, these records give a sense of the scale of the war, and that the people in its path universally acknowledged its force. 

Al Jazeera: How do you feel, finding these traces of WWI?

Bomani: On the one hand, it is good these traces exist, or you would have a hard time convincing yourself that the War happened here. 

On the other, these traces left as they are have not been discussed or unpacked, and so remembrance of WWI remains largely European, even within Tanzania. They are not monuments, but monoliths that signal the colonial past. 

Al Jazeera: You say in your exhibition that researching WWI has become a personal undertaking. What do you mean by that?

Bomani: I am Sukuma, a people from northern Tanzania. Traditionally, Sukuma are farmers and they use music to pace themselves through agricultural work. 

Through the years of the centenary, I looked into some of the songs focused on those that came from WWI, when Sukuma were heavily recruited as carriers and soldiers by German forces.

While Europe marks 100 years of remembering, we Africans are now just opening that chapter. While the centenary is almost over, it is not too late.

One song that struck me has the lyrics: 

‘Boulders fighting one another on the plain/ the Germans and the English/ they run about taken to flight/ because of cattle’.

The ‘cattle’ line means assets: resources, land, livestock, money. In other words, the carriers were fully aware that this conflict was fundamentally a colonial project.

I was struck too by the subversive power of the songs – they contradict the image of the loyal askari soldier, which was used as propaganda throughout wartime. They are a record of the larger African experience during WWI, and it is important to preserve them even as agricultural methods change. 

Al Jazeera: How is the WWI history usually remembered in Tanzania? Why do you feel this is important to the future of the country?

Bomani: There are usually memorial services, often in war cemeteries on November 11, instead of the 25. I have visited these cemeteries in Dar es Salaam, Tanga, Moshi, Iringa and there is no acknowledgement of the African soldiers and carriers. 

The lack of acknowledgement underscores how vital the Black Lives Matter movement is today. Because even in celebrating one of the most well-known events in history, there still has been a level of omission loss to African lives.

Al Jazeera: Has it been any different for the centenary? 

Bomani: This year the University of Dar es Salaam is hosting a conference on German colonial history and experts will be putting themselves to the task of discussing some of the uncomfortable truths of the war in Africa. 

There is new talk of including the East Africa campaign in the school curriculum. Ultimately, the nation is beginning to address it and move forward. While Europe marks 100 years of remembering, we Africans are now just opening that chapter. While the centenary is almost over, it is not too late.

China’s mass detention of ethnic Uighurs and its crackdown on civil liberties will likely figure high on the agenda on Tuesday when countries meet at the UN in Geneva to review Beijing’s rights record.

As many as one million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are being kept in extrajudicial detention in China’s far western Xinjiang region, according to estimates cited recently by an independent UN panel.

The centres where they are thought to be detained have come under increasing scrutiny this year, with rights activists describing them as political re-education camps.

Activists said members of China’s Muslim minorities are held involuntarily for transgressions such as wearing long beards and face veils.

In recent weeks, a Uighur businessman who escaped Xinjiang, described to Al Jazeera what he saw inside a camp where a relative was being kept.

Member states of the UN “must send an unequivocal message to the Chinese government that their campaign of systematic repression in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, including the arbitrary detention of up to one million people, must end,” Patrick Poon, China researcher at Amnesty International, said in a statement.

The so-called Universal Periodic Review – which all 193 UN members must undergo approximately every four years – will start with China presenting a report on its rights situation and changes made since it was last in the spotlight in 2013.

During the half-day session, diplomats from around the world will have the chance to raise concerns, ask questions and make recommendations for changes.

‘Egregious human rights record’

“All UN member states have an equal opportunity to press China on its egregious human rights record, and they shouldn’t waste it,” Human Rights Watch’s Geneva director John Fisher said in a statement on Monday.

Some countries have already submitted questions in advance, including the United States, which is leading demands for Beijing to come clean on the Uighur crackdown.

Washington also wants Beijing to provide “the number of people involuntarily held in all detention facilities in Xinjiang during the past five years”.

Beyond Xinjiang, China will also come under scrutiny for other aspects of its human rights record, including a dramatic crackdown on civil liberties and religious freedoms since President Xi Jinping took power in 2012.

In July 2017, dissident activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo died of liver cancer while in police custody.

In 2015, more than 200 Chinese human rights lawyers and activists were detained or questioned in a sweep known as the “709 Crackdown”.

That year also saw five Hong Kong-based booksellers known for publishing gossipy titles about Chinese political leaders disappear before they resurfaced in mainland China.

China’s crackdown on civil society is sometimes felt as far away as Geneva.

In a report published last year, Human Rights Watch accused Beijing of sabotaging UN efforts to promote rights, maintaining that Chinese officials routinely photograph and film activists on UN premises, in violation of UN rules, and bar Chinese activists from travelling to the UN in Geneva.

In the most shocking case, Chinese authorities detained activist Cao Shunli in 2013 as she attempted to travel to Geneva before the last UPR review of China’s rights record.

“Chinese activists have been imprisoned, tortured, and fatally mistreated for the chance to challenge Beijing over its human rights record,” HRW’s Fisher said.

“Governments that don’t seize this opportunity to speak out embolden China, weaken the UN, and demoralise activists struggling across the world to hold Beijing accountable.”

There are few more difficult places for a foreign journalist to report from China than Xinjiang.

Especially now.

Security has been bolstered amid a new campaign, which the government says is aimed at eradicating “Islamic extremism” in a province where more than half the population is Muslim.

Two weeks ago state TV aired pictures of what were described as vocational schools showing Muslim men and women being taught language and job skills. Most were Uighur, a Turkic-language people who are ethnically distinct from the Han Chinese.

China’s leaders argue harsh measures are needed to prevent violence associated with Uighur separatism; violence that, they say, has claimed the lives of hundreds of Chinese people in the past decade.

Human rights groups say the schools are, in fact, a vast network of re-education camps where detainees are held indefinitely without charge and forced to denounce their faith and recite Communist Party propaganda.

The Economist magazine recently described Xinjiang as “the perfect police state”.

During a brief visit there two weeks ago I saw nothing to dispel that view.

‘Kill, kill, kill’

The surveillance is all pervasive. Streets bristle with CCTV cameras. In some cities there are now police posts every 30 metres.

Since I was last there three years ago, there’s a new addition to the vast security network of police and elite special forces; a motley collection of shopkeepers armed with wooden sticks who have been trained in security measures. Twice a day outside their premises they rehearse their defensive drills, sometimes shouting, “Kill, kill, kill.”

In 2015, it was still possible to talk to local people, albeit discreetly. Not now.

For a Uighur to talk to a foreign journalist is to risk arrest. By coincidence, one of the Public Security Bureau officers assigned to tail us – Michael – had been my minder during my previous visit. And this time he wasn’t going to let the Al Jazeera team out of his sight.

He was there to welcome us back as we were attempting to check into a hotel, where I had stayed on previous visits.

The sheepish staff at reception told me my booking had been cancelled on the orders of the local government. A resigned shrug of the shoulders. There was nothing they could do.

Instead we were offered rooms in a government-owned hotel, where uniformed and plain-clothed police lounge in the sprawling lobby.

Sinister, surreal, absurd

Xinjiang today is both sinister and surreal, but occasionally the absurd makes an appearance. The ringtone on Michael’s phone plays George Michael’s I’m Never Gonna Dance Again. George Michael became the soundtrack of our brief stay in Kashgar, because his phone never stopped ringing.

Filming and reporting in Xinjiang has always been tightly controlled. But it’s in overdrive now.

I was forced to delete countless pictures surreptitiously recorded on my iPhone. One showed a security checkpoint, another a padlocked Uighur shop.

In a near-deserted market a giddy trio from local TV turned up. The reporter – like Michael – was also a Uighur. She wanted to interview me about my impressions of Kashgar. I declined.

If I had told the truth our visit might have come to an even swifter end than it did. Undeterred, the TV crew tagged along, meaning our group had now grown to 10, decreasing still further any hopes of talking to someone – anyone.

One question hangs in the crisp autumn air: where are all the young men? China’s government is at last providing some of the answers. After denying the existence of internment camps, state-controlled media now proudly defend the policy; a policy that by many accounts is now being expanded.

Kashgar, closer to Baghdad than it is to Beijing, is the largest Uighur city and is said to have four camps holding 120,000 people. The largest is reportedly in Number 5 Middle School, but I would not get to glimpse even the outside of that school. According to Michael, such camps don’t exist in Kashgar.

‘Love the Party’

Instead of a re-education camp we were shown the outside of the Id Gah mosque, the biggest in China. There’s been a mosque on this site for more than 600 years. Part of its facade is now peeling.

For the mostly Chinese visitors, the mosque is just another tourist attraction. In the recessed entrance armed security guards sit beneath a red banner exhorting worshippers to, “Love the Party, love the country.”

On a wall opposite the mosque, looped images of President Xi Jinping, taken during his trip to Xinjiang in 2014, are projected onto a giant screen. One shows him surrounded by a group of smiling Uighur children.

It was shortly after this trip that more than 40 people were killed during a bombing and knife attack in the provincial capital, Urumqi. The government blamed Uighur separatists, and the crackdown began.

The ancient part of Kashgar remains closed. It was apparently being rebuilt, just as it was the last time I was here in October 2015. Instead we were taken to a faux version of the Old City, complete with cultural performances reflecting distant – as opposed to recent – Uighur history.

It was just after my colleague had taken the classic metaphorical image of a caged bird that the mood of our hosts started to change.

‘Whose side are you on?’

They suspected – rightly – that we weren’t buying into the sanitised narrative. In a small local cafe, where we had stopped for a break, a particularly hostile female official from the local propaganda department demanded to look at everything we had so far filmed.

She turned her ire on my Chinese colleague. “Whose side are you on?” she yelled.

At first we refused her demand. By now there were 15 uniformed and plain-clothed policemen crammed into the tiny cafe. Playing to the gallery, Ms Yang announced loudly: “We need to keep them in Kashgar for further investigation.”

The implication was clear. We would not be allowed to leave unless our material was vetted. At times like this my immediate concern is for my Chinese colleagues. I have a foreign passport. They don’t and have no protection.

We were held for two hours, during which time they inspected every frame we had shot. They managed to ensure our deleted files could not be recovered. It had been a good day for Kashgar’s propaganda department.

The surveillance started even before I had left Beijing.

As an accredited journalist, my name had been flagged the moment I checked in for the flight to Urumqi. Four-and-a-half hours later plain-clothed police were waiting for me in the arrivals hall. Given I appeared to be the only non-Asian face I wouldn’t have been hard to spot.

An hour later the same men appeared in the lobby of my hotel. One even took the room next to mine, presumably to see if I attempted to interview anyone there.

At first they stopped us filming innocuous street scenes. They later relented, but only permitted filming in their presence. “Do not talk to anyone,” we were repeatedly warned.

Security officers favour casual street style with ironic flourishes. My favourite: “Leave Me Alone.”

There was no chance of the Al Jazeera team being left alone in Xinjiang. In the Kashgar hotel there were at least 20 officers in the lobby, there for just one reason: us.

Surveillance state

Official figures show China’s surveillance budget now outstrips the amount spent on defence. I wondered what the cost to Chinese taxpayers had been of the operation to monitor three journalists.

Ordinary Uighurs spend much of their life queuing. Outside Urumqi’s international bazaar, Uighurs and Han Chinese lined up at separate security checkpoints. Uighurs are searched more thoroughly. Naturally, we weren’t allowed to film any of that.

Unlike my previous visit, we also weren’t allowed to film inside a Uighur home. If so, I might have seen if it was true that all knives now have to be chained to walls.

Xinjiang is at the heart of one of President Xi Jinping’s signature economic policies; the One Belt, One Road initiative. The plan envisages revitalising the fabled Silk Road trading routes to link China to Europe and the Middle East through vast infrastructure projects.

But for that ambitious plan to work, Xinjiang has to work.

China’s leaders say Uighurs are benefiting from poverty eradication programmes. On October 24, the People’s Daily reported more than $6bn had been spent on improving the lives of almost two million Uighurs.

But that is still a drop in the ocean compared to what the government is spending on security and surveillance in Xinjiang.

And something else is clearly apparent.

Xinjiang has become another area that is now all but off limits to foreign journalists.