Reimagining the Middle East
Reimagining the International Environment: Part III
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and
Public Affairs, Brown University
6 April 2017, Providence, Rhode Island
This is the third of three lectures. The first spoke to shifting patterns of great
power relations and their global implications.
The second addressed evolving balances of power in Asia in light of
China’s and India’s return to wealth and power.
“From now on,”
President Donald Trump declared in his inaugural address, “it's going to be
only America first, America first!” If
so, no region stands to be more affected than West Asia and North Africa --
what Americans call "the Middle East." America’s interests there are now entirely
derivative rather than direct. They are
a function of the self-appointed roles of the United States as the warden of
world order, the guarantor of other nations’ security, the shepherd of the
world economy, and the custodian of the global commons. If America is now to look out only for
itself, it has little obvious reason to be much involved in the Middle East.
The United
States is a secular democracy. It has no
intrinsic interest in which theology rules hearts or dominates territory in the
Middle East. It is not itself now
dependent on energy imports from the Persian Gulf or the Maghreb. For most of the two-and-a-half centuries
since their country was born, Americans kept a healthy distance from the region
and were unharmed by events there. They extended
their protection to specific nations in the Middle East as part of a global
struggle against Soviet communism that is long past. What happens in the region no longer
determines the global balance of power.
U.S. wars in
the Middle East are -- without exception -- wars of choice. These wars have proven ruinously expensive
and injurious to the civil liberties of Americans. They have poisoned American political culture
with various manifestations of xenophobia.
Islamophobia has transitioned
naturally to anti-Semitism and other forms of racism and bigotry. In the region itself, American military
interventions have produced more anarchy than order, more terror than
tranquility, more oppression than democratization, and more blowback than
pacification.
More than in
any other region, America’s misadventures in the Middle East illustrate the
need for the United States to decide whether it is the vindicator only of its
own interests or the champion and protector of all the world’s prosperity and
security. Can America go its own way or
must it keep commitments it made under different circumstances in the
past? Are Americans accountable for the
damage their interventions have wrought, or free to leave to others the task of
remedying the miseries they helped create?
In essence,
these choices come down to whether the United States needs to deploy its power on
a worldwide basis or just carries on doing so because it did in the past and
still can. The state of affairs in the
Middle East affects America's global power.
The region is where Africa, Asia, and Europe converge. It is a way station or choke point on air and
shipping routes between Asia and Europe.
It is where the world’s energy supplies are concentrated. It is the point of origin of the three
Abrahamic religions and the driver of global contention between them.
The freedom to
transit the Middle East is central to the ability of the United States to
project its military power around the
world. Cooperative relations with the
nations of the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, and/or Iran are necessary to assure
their facilitation of overflight for U.S. warplanes and passage through the
Suez Canal, by the U.S. Navy. The
hostile state of U.S. relations with Iran makes Saudi Arabia and Egypt the
logistical linchpins of America’s worldwide military reach. If the United States remains committed to
military operations all over the world, it must stay politically and militarily
engaged with at least these two nations.
Disengaging from them would imply a decision to greatly reduce America's
global footprint and reach.
U.S. allies and
partners everywhere defer to the United States in part because they count on
its unique ability and demonstrated willingness to use force to assure
untrammeled global access to Persian Gulf energy supplies. These constitute about 28 percent of world
energy production. They are a decisive
factor in fueling global prosperity. In
practice, the only international defender of global access to these resources
is the United States.
Fracking and
horizontal drilling techniques have made the United States once again an energy
exporter. Oil and gas shipments from the
Persian Gulf now both complement and compete with oil and gas from America. Yet, preventing the disruption of access to
Persian Gulf energy is a service that the United States continues to provide
free of charge to the global economy.
America does not ask the principal consumers of these exports – China,
the EU, India, Japan, and Korea – to assume or even share the burden of
assuring their own energy security.
Arguably, this deprives these countries of reasons to build navies that
might rival that of the United States and thus helps to preserve America’s
global military primacy. But it’s hard to see what other U.S. interest it now
serves.
What costs and
benefits would accrue to the United States from phasing in arrangements to
share responsibility with others for managing threats to global security and
prosperity from the Persian Gulf?
Clearly, as Asian navies expanded into what has long been an almost
exclusively American operational area, the United States would lose its
regional monopoly on naval power. But,
relieved of the burden of protecting the supply lines of others, the U.S. Navy
might be freed to focus on areas and issues with more direct effects on
American interests. If “it’s going to be only America first,” this
tradeoff calls out for systematic examination.
So, of course,
do America’s wars in the region. They
include the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen,
as well as the conflicts in the Sahel
escalating combat with a disorderly jumble of transnational Islamist
movements has spawned. None of these
military operations is authorized by a congressional declaration of war that justifies the commitment of U.S. forces, sets parameters
and objectives for their uses of force, and establishes a legal state of war. Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United
States Constitution requires such a declaration to make wars of choice
legal. The Constitution’s assignment of
the war power to the Congress is unequivocal and fundamental to the separation
of powers.
Notwithstanding
this, all current American wars are presidentially ordained, permitted but not forthrightly
endorsed by Congress, and subject to no effective oversight by anyone other
than the nation's generals. Such is
American militarism. None of these wars
has a coherent purpose. In none is the
United States now in a position to determine the outcome. In none is any end in sight.
Perhaps it’s
time for the President to demand that the Congress step up to its responsibility
under the Constitution and either declare war or, by failing to do so, make it
clear that he must focus on extricating
America from the unconstitutional forays into foreign quagmires he has
inherited from his predecessors.
If the Congress
can muster the will to reexamine the wars it has negligently tolerated, it
should begin by belatedly asking how and on what terms they will conclude. What are America’s objectives? Are these objectives feasible? What would constitute success? When might it come? How much would it cost to achieve and consolidate
it? Where the U.S. objective has basically
come down to avoiding obvious defeat, what must be done to minimize the
consequences of failure? And how are
Americans to pay for the debt their ever-widening wars are running up?
Recall that,
during the George W. Bush administration, the neo-conservatives who launched
these wars claimed that they would pay for themselves. The cost of U.S. interventions in West Asia
and North Africa is now at least $6 trillion in outlays and obligations . . .
and counting. Infinite credit card
rollovers are not a safe financial strategy for either individuals or nations. But the United States is still financing its
wars by pyramiding debt.
The president
and members of Congress might also usefully reconsider the pseudo-strategy the
United States has adopted to deal with anti-American terrorists with global
reach. Military campaign plans are a
component of strategy, not a substitute for it.
The thesis that “we must fight terrorists over there so we won't have to
fight them here” is an article of faith in much of the country. In practice, however, this has turned out to
be about as sensible as a protracted effort to protect Americans from being
stung by hornets by poking hornets' nests.
The more boots on the ground and drones in the air, the greater both the
backlash and the blowback.
About 4 million
Muslims have perished since 1990 as a direct or indirect result of U.S.
policies and interventions.[1] Since the turn of the century, the death
toll among the Muslims of the Middle East from the U.S. “Global War on Terror”
is at least 1.3 million and perhaps as many as 2 million people, the vast
majority of them civilians. Terrorists,
whether home-grown or imported, are “over here” because Americans are “over
there” killing, wounding, and humiliating their kin, their loved ones, and
others of their faith.
The vigorous
embrace of populist Islamophobia by America’s leading politicians alienates and
radicalizes mainstream Muslims at home
as well as abroad, multiplying the ranks of those with a passionate desire for
revenge against America and its allies and protégés. It promises to deny the United States
indispensable Muslim allies in combating the Jihadi backlash. As the U.S. area of counterterrorism
operations expands, Islamist extremism spreads concomitantly. Many expect a further metastasis of terrorism
once the so-called Islamic Caliphate loses its territorial footholds in Iraq
and Syria and its followers disperse.
Nothing the United States is now doing lessens this probability.
If putting
“America first” is to mean anything at all, it must stand for configuring U.S.
policies to “insure domestic Tranquility,
provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the
Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” as the preamble to
the Constitution of the United States prescribes. But current U.S. policies toward the Middle
East raise the threat of domestic terrorism, increase the danger of foreign
attack on the American homeland, foster a garrison mentality that corrodes
American liberties, and pile debt on future generations of Americans. It is time to consider whether policies of
restraint might not yield better results than those produced by promiscuous
meddling, exuberant arms sales, and military adventurism. It is time for the United States to review
existing relationships with both security partners and adversaries in the Middle
East. Americans need to determine how best to reconfigure and
recalibrate these relationships to serve U.S. interests.
U.S. interests
themselves are also badly in need of review.
The Cold War is long over.
Regional rivalries between Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia have replaced
US-Soviet contention and Arab nationalism as the drivers of events in the
Middle East. Intra-Muslim sectarian
warfare is spreading. Terrorism with
Middle Eastern connections has become a global obsession. The role of the region’s abundant resources
of oil and gas in world energy markets has diminished. Longstanding U.S. policy projects have been
effectively abandoned. These include
efforts to
broker peace between Israelis and Palestinians, to democratize Middle Eastern
societies, and to exclude Russian power from a role in the region’s
affairs.
The central
objective of U.S. policy in the Middle East has long been to achieve regional
acceptance for the Jewish settler state in Palestine. American diplomats have doggedly sought a
political basis for a reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians that
could provide sustainable security for Israel and facilitate broad Arab normalization
of relations with the Jewish state.
The
international community originally approved the creation of a Jewish state in
Palestine as part of a proposed partition of Palestine into two states.[2] After decades of expansion, Israel has
successfully precluded a two-state resolution of its conflict with its captive
Arab populations. There is now de facto a single state in Palestine. A government that is democratically elected
by Israeli Jews exercises various degrees of tyranny over Muslim and Christian
Arabs. This is a formula that assures
continuing Palestinian resistance, the alienation of the world’s nearly two
billion Muslims from Israel, and the corrosion of both democracy and
traditional Jewish values in Israel.
The Jewish state
has evolved since its founding. It has
left behind it both the humanism that inspired Zionism and the universal moral
precepts traditionally espoused by Judaism.
The perception that Israel no longer shares values it once aspired to
exemplify is increasing its international isolation, especially from Jews in
Europe and the United States. But
American diplomacy no longer even pretends to seek to halt Israel’s triumphant
march toward existential implosion despite the obvious negative consequences of
this for the security and international influence of the United States.
Regional
rivalries have somewhat eroded the determination of Arab states to keep their
public distance from Israel. Saudi
Arabia and some other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) share Israel’s
fear of Iran and its policies. This has
provided a basis for an increasingly overt anti-Iranian intelligence
partnership. It has also led to cooperation
between Israel and Saudi Arabia to manipulate U.S. politics so as to hamstring
any American impulse to pursue rapprochement with Iran. But Israeli Jewish racism, cruelty to captive
Arab populations,[3]
and relentless hate-filled propaganda against Islam impart a moral taint that
makes normal relations with Israel anathema to most Muslims. These inhumane aspects of Israeli behavior provide a potential basis for an otherwise-unimaginable
Arab, Persian, and Turkish united front against the Jewish state.
American
indifference to the human rights violations that are integral to Israel’s
despotic rule over Palestinian Arabs has added to longstanding doubts about the
sincerity of the American commitment to human rights and democracy. Such doubts are, of course, far from
new. There have been many instances in
which the United States transgressed its own values abroad by supporting
dictatorships or seeking the overthrow of elected regimes it saw as
problematic. In the Middle East, the
list begins with the ousting of the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953 and
concludes with the overthrow of the Hamas government in Palestine in 2006 and
the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt in 2013.
But there has
never been any doubt about the ideological sincerity and dedication of the NGOs
and individuals engaged in democracy and human rights promotion. In recent years, Egypt, Israel, and some
other Middle Eastern countries have inadvertently paid tribute to the
effectiveness of NGO advocacy of democratic norms by passing laws and
regulations banning them from either engaging in it or supporting local NGOs
that do so. Now, judging by the
president’s proposed budget cuts downgrading non-military instruments of statecraft, both uppity democrats and sordid
authoritarians abroad can rest easy.
America is going out of business as a values exporter, whether by means
of peaceful persuasion or by force.
Meanwhile,
after a few decades' vacation, Russia has elbowed aside the United States as
the most influential external power in the Levant. It did this with skillful diplomacy,
supported by a very limited deployment of its armed forces to Syria. Russian military intervention made common
cause with Iran and Hizbullah as well as the Shiite regime in Baghdad, reinvigorated
the Syrian government’s armed forces, and rolled back its Islamist and
Western-supported insurgent enemies. In
the process, it simplified the political choice in Syria to one between secular
autocracy and religious tyranny. (Which would you prefer, an irreligious
dictatorship or a fanatic theocracy?) And
it has brought the war in Syria to the
beginning of its end. Russian
intervention has finally made credible a peace process incorporating all
factions with power on the ground in Syria, including the Asad government. But, in keeping with Washington’s new disdain
for diplomacy, the United States is not part of this effort.
Moscow’s
willingness to stand by President Asad has been calculated to show all in the
Middle East that, unlike the United States (which readily abandoned Hosni
Mubarak in Egypt), Russia can be counted upon steadfastly to back its protégés. Russia has test-driven its new weapons
systems in Syria, showing them off to prospective purchasers. In both Syria and Libya, it has made itself
part of the solution to Europe’s refugee crisis.
Moscow has built
a quasi-alliance with Tehran against Sunni extremism. After a bad start with Turkey, it has worked
out an entente (a limited partnership)
with Ankara, undercutting Turkey’s alliances with both Washington and
Riyadh. Russia's achievements are a
potent reminder that, when used in support of diplomacy and well-defined
political objectives, commitments of force do not have to be overwhelming to be
effective, as the “Powell Doctrine” in the United States asserts.
What is the
hierarchy of U.S. interests in the Middle East in the new circumstances? It can no longer be headed by the quixotic
objective of making peace between Israelis and Palestinians. It must consider
the consequences for the United States as well as Israel and its Arab and
Persian enemies of the end of hopes for peace and Israel’s increasing
alienation from the international community.
It must incorporate a reaction to the putative nuclear arms and
undeniably real ballistic missile races between Iran and Israel. It must recognize and deal with the danger
that this competition will drive others in the Middle East to acquire nuclear
weapons. It must inform an American
response to the perils and opportunities presented by Russo-Iranian cooperation
against Jihadism. It must address the
rise of Iranian influence in the region and the consequences of the escalating
politico-military and ideological rivalry between Iran, Saudi Arabia and
the GCC that this is driving. It must realistically assess and exploit the
implications for the United States of the opening for Arab-Israeli entente this
rivalry has created.
A ranked order
of U.S. interests in the Middle East must acknowledge the region’s centrality
to global power projection by the United States. It must provide criteria for assessing the
costs and benefits of close association or antagonism with the governments of
significant local powers, like those of Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi
Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and the U.A.E. It
must take a hard look in particular at
the advantages as well as the costs of better relations with Iran.
It must
consider the benefits of trade with the countries of the Middle East, including
the importance of weapons sales to Arab countries to sustaining the defense
industrial base in the United States. It
must address the impact of the return of Russia and Turkey to active
involvement in the region’s affairs. Formulating
policies that deal with these multiple complexities will require focus and
determination as well as strategic vision and diplomatic skill.
Over the course
of decades, Israel has systematically eliminated alternatives to continued
Jewish oppression or eventual expulsion of the non-Jewish inhabitants of all of
the Holy Land. It has discredited the
“peace process” and left no room for diplomacy.
It has made brokering friendly
relations between the “Jewish state” and its neighbors practically infeasible. Israel's behavior is delegitimizing it and
its policies both in the region and internationally, while devaluing the
regional and global reputation of the United States.
There is no
military answer to these quandaries. It
is a waste of time and money to pretend that U.S. gifts of weapons and money to
Israel can eventually provide one. But
it is difficult to see any opening for diplomacy as long as U.S. taxpayers
continue to make it possible for Israel's government to pursue policies it finds
electorally expedient, despite their counterproductivity.
No one now
believes that America has the wisdom, empathy, or objectivity to craft a peace
between Israelis and Palestinians. Washington
is justifiably regarded as the principal enabler of Israel’s policies,
including its defiance of international law, its rejection of Arab peace
initiatives, its militarism, and its repeated assaults on Gaza, Lebanon, and
Syria. The United States has been able
to sustain close relations with Arab states in the past despite its close ties
to Israel because it has been able to present itself as devoted to making peace
between Palestinians and Israelis. It
can no longer credibly do so. Sadly for all
concerned, peace in the Holy Land is now a diplomatic write-off. This debilitates American prestige and
significantly diminishes the clout of the United States not just in the region
but more widely.
It is in
everyone's interest to limit nuclear proliferation
in the Middle East. Israel currently has
a nuclear monopoly there. The United
States does not find that threatening.
Others understandably do. No
policy that ignores this reality can hope to do more than delay others in the
region from offsetting Israel's nuclear
arsenal with their own similar deterrents.
The taboos of
domestic U.S. politics can and often do obscure foreign realities. They cannot erase them. To the extent that other countries fear
Israeli or U.S. attack, on the model of the unprovoked 2003 American invasion
of Iraq, their incentive to develop their own nuclear deterrent capabilities is
increased. The United States must either
find a way to assuage these threat perceptions or be prepared to accept that others
in the region will copy Israel by eventually going nuclear.
The principal
beneficiary of U.S. military interventions and Israel’s attacks on its
neighbors in the Middle East in recent decades has been Iran. The American overthrow of the Taliban and
Ba`ath regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq removed the most powerful threats to the
security of the Islamic Republic. The
U.S. Army then installed a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. Israel’s 2006 assault on Lebanon gave Iran’s
ally, Hizbullah, a hammerlock on Lebanese politics. Its several massacres of Palestinians of Gaza
have left them dependent on Iranian support.
If curbing Iranian influence is a valid policy objective of the United
States, the Trump administration must find new policies to replace those it
inherited. Doing this will require
insisting that Israel take American interests, not just its own (as it sees
them), into account as it acts.
A common
concern about Iran has driven Israel, Saudi Arabia, and some other Arab states
toward ententes (limited partnerships for limited purposes, perhaps for limited
periods of time). On their face, these
partnerships are in the American interest.
But – with no U.S. participation in them – will they support U.S.
interest? They could instead drag
America into wars it does not want and cannot sustain.
This
uncertainty demands candid private dialogue with regional capitals. The Saudi and Emirati-led war in Yemen is a
relevant example of this problem. So is
potential Saudi facilitation of an Israeli assault on Iran. Iran, allied Shiite militias in Iraq,
Lebanon, and Syria, and Russia seem to be coming together in a loose coalition
to counter Israel, Sunni Islamism and the United States. Such a division of the Middle East would place
the United States perpetually in harm's way for interests not its own.
Relations
between the states and non-state actors in the Middle East are complex. Imagining that any participant in the
region’s politics is either all good or all bad is a costly error. The relevant question is not the character of regimes but
the extent to which they share specific interests coinciding with those of the
United States. If they do, it is a
mistake for America to rule out cooperation with them. If their interests are opposed to those of
the United States, it is foolish to pretend that they are “allies" and, as
such, entitled to across-the-board American support.
The United
States must now reckon not just with politico-military dynamics within the
Middle East but with the rising influence of countries on its periphery, like
Turkey and Russia, and others farther away, like China and India. The Islamist Jihadi threat spans the Muslim
world, four-fifths of which is non-Arab. The primary victims of its violent politics are
Muslims. But intro-Muslim sectarian
strife is more and more spilling over into the non-Muslim world.
This gives the
international community a vital interest in containing and extinguishing Islamist
extremism. To do so requires addressing
it on the political and ideological level as well as through law enforcement
and military operations. Military
operations alone have been and will continue to be ineffective.
Without the
cooperation of key Muslim societies – both Shiite and Sunni – no strategy
combining political, law enforcement, and military actions is feasible. Without coordination between the United
States, Russia, China, the European Union (EU), India, and religiously
authoritative Muslim allies no effective strategy can be carried out. Without the United States or the leadership
it has until recently provided, it is hard to see how such coordination can be
realized.
To sum up, Americans
have arrived at a moment in which the Middle East they have long imagined no
longer exists and the actions they are taking no longer yield the intended
results. A fundamental reexamination of
the premises and purposes of U.S. policies in the region is in order. The complexities of such a review would be
formidable. But policies based on past
rather than current realities will only get the countries of the Middle East
and the United States into even more trouble than they are already in. American policies in the Middle East, as
elsewhere, must spring from unflinching analysis of the current situation, be
disciplined by a clear-eyed view of American interests, and put those
interests – not those of others – first.
[1] “Body Count,” a report on Casualty Figures After 10
Years of the “War on Terror – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,” Physicians for
Social Responsibility, Washington, DC, Berlin, Ottawa, March 2015. Available at:
http://www.psr.org/assets/ pdfs/body-count.pdf
[2] The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s account of UNGA Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947 is
available at www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/ foreignpolicy/peace/guide/ pages/un%20general%20assembly% 20resolution%20181.aspx. The Palestinian account is at http://www.1948.org.uk/un- resolution-181/
.
[3] These elements of Israeli policy and practice are
thoroughly documented in a recent report of the UN Economic and Social
Commission for East Asia, “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and
the Question of Apartheid,” which can be accessed at
go.ynet.co.il/pic/news/ israeli-practices-palestinian- people.pdf
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