The Middle East in the New World Disorder
Remarks to the Worcester World Affairs Council
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and
Public Affairs, Brown University
11 December 2017,
Worcester, Massachusetts
Not so long
ago, Americans thought we understood the Middle East, that region where the
African, Asian, and European worlds collide.
When the Ottoman Empire disintegrated in World War I, the area became a European sphere of influence with
imperial British, French, and Italian subdivisions. The Cold War split it into American and
Soviet client states. Americans
categorized countries as with us or against us, democratic or authoritarian,
and endowed with oil and gas or not. We
acted accordingly.
In 1991, the
Soviet Union defaulted on the Cold War and left the United States the only
superpower still standing. With the
disappearance of Soviet power, the Middle East became an exclusively American
sphere of influence. But a series of
U.S. policy blunders and regional reactions to them have since helped thrust
the region into chaos, while progressively erasing American dominance
In the new
world disorder, there are many regional sub-orders. The Middle East is one of them. It is entering the final stages of a process
of post-imperial, national self-determination that began with Kemal Atatürk’s
formation of modern Turkey from the rubble of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. This process is entrenching the originally
Western concept of the nation state in the region. It led to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s repudiation of
British overlordship and overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt in 1952, Ayatollah
Khomeini’s rejection of American tutelage and replacement of the Shah with the
Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, and the misnamed “Arab Spring” in 2011. Its latest iteration is unfolding in Saudi
Arabia.
In the Middle
East, as elsewhere, regional rather than global politics now drives
events. The world is reentering a
diplomatic environment that would have been familiar to Henry John Temple, 3rd
Viscount Palmerston, who served nineteenth century Britain as secretary of war,
foreign affairs, and prime minister. In
his time, the core skill of statecraft was manipulation of regional balances of
power to protect national interests and exercise influence through measures
short of war.
Palmerston
famously observed that in international relations, there are no permanent
friends or permanent enemies, only permanent interests. In the new world disorder, with its
narcissistic nationalism, shifting alignments, and wobbling partnerships, this
sounds right, even if national interests are also visibly evolving to reflect
fundamental shifts in their international context. Palmerston’s aphorism is a reminder that the
flexibility and agility implicit in the hedged obligations of entente – limited
commitments for limited contingencies – impart advantages that the inertia of
alliance – broad obligations of mutual aid – does not. One way or another, it is in our interest to
aggregate the power of others to our own while minimizing the risks to us of
doing so.
To cope with
the world after the Pax Americana and to put “America first,” we Americans are
going to have relearn the classic vocabulary of diplomacy or some new, equally
reality-based version of it. If we do,
we will discover that, in the classic sense of the word, we now have no
“allies” in the Middle East. The only
country with which we had a de jure alliance
based on mutual obligations, Turkey, has de
facto departed it.
Today, Ankara
and Washington are seriously estranged.
Turkey is no longer aligned with the United States on any of our major
diplomatic objectives in the region, which have been: securing Israel,
excluding Russian influence; opposing Iran; and sustaining strategic
partnerships with Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.
Americans can no longer count on Turkey to support or acquiesce in our
policies toward the Israel-Palestine issue; Syria; Iraq; Iran; Russia; the Caucasus;
the Balkans; Greece; Cyprus; Egypt, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries; the
members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; NATO; or the EU.
Having been
rebuffed by Europe, Turkey has abandoned its two-century-long drive to redefine
its identify as European. It is pursuing
an independent, if erratic, course in the former Ottoman space and with Russia
and China. The deterioration in EU and
US-Turkish relations represents a very significant weakening of Western
influence in the Middle East and adjacent regions. As the list of countries Turkey affects
suggests, this has potentially far-reaching consequences.
Meanwhile, U.S.
relations with Iran remain antagonistic.
American policy blunders like the destabilization of Iraq and Syria have
facilitated Iran’s establishment of a sphere of influence in the Fertile
Crescent. Our lack of a working
relationship with Tehran leaves the United States unable to bring our influence
to bear in the region by measures short of war.
U.S. policy is thus all military, all the time. The White House echoes decisions made in
Jerusalem, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi. It no
longer sets its own objectives and marshals others behind them.
For our own
reasons, which differ from country to country, Americans have unilaterally
taken under our wing a variety of client states, some of which are each other’s
historic antagonists. Our commitments
have not changed despite the fact that the regional context of our
relationships with our client states and their orientations and activities are
all in rapid evolution. Other than
Turkey, the United States has never had a Middle Eastern partner that has seen
itself as obliged to come to our aid or, indeed, to do anything at all for us
except what might serve its own
immediate, selfish interests. The obligations
all run the other way – from us to them.
During the 1947
- 1989 Cold War, American policy focused on the strategic denial of the Middle
East to the Soviet Union. Part of the
zero-sum game approach this objective entailed was the designation of the Shah
of Iran as our principal security partner in the Persian Gulf. His overthrow caused us to shift to reliance
on Saudi Arabia. The desire to block the
Soviet Union also inspired our commitment to protect Israel from its
Soviet-aligned neighbors.
In September,
Paul Pillar spoke to you with characteristic brilliance about the never-ending
issues between Israel and Palestine. I will limit myself to adding a bit of
regional, strategic, and diplomatic context to what he said. I’d be happy to revisit the issue, among
others, when we have a chance to exchange views.
The
Euro-American embrace of Zionism after World War II was motivated in large
measure by a felt need to atone for the horrors of the Holocaust, which we
sometimes forget was an atrocity perpetrated by European Christendom, not
Middle Eastern Islam. The establishment
of an expansionist, externally-supported Zionist state in Palestine immediately
became a major driver of radicalization in the region and among the world's
Muslims. The Arab reaction to Israel’s
mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs was to seek revenge on ancient communities of Arab Jews in their
midst, inducing them to flee to Israel.
Universal
opposition to Zionism continued to fuel anti-Americanism and revolutionary
agitation in the Middle East. This
facilitated Soviet influence-building there and threatened the ability of
conservative Arab and Iranian governments to justify continued alignment with
the West. In the 1993 “Yom Kippur War,”
the massive resupply of Israel by the United States saved it from defeat but
caused most Arab states to break relations with Washington. The American answer to Arab antipathy was the
launch of shuttle diplomacy and a so-called “peace process” between Israel, the
Palestinians, and Arab states.
But once the
Cold War ended, the endlessly unproductive “peace process” lost its most
compelling strategic rationale: the diplomatic outflanking of America’s Soviet
enemy. In the first decade of the
twenty-first century, with no Soviet threat left to drive it, the “peace
process” petered out. American
presidents no longer saw a persuasive reason to endure the domestic political
pain involved in mediating between Israelis and Palestinians. Washington went through the motions for a
while and then stopped. This led both
the Arabs and Israel to reappraise the United States and its role in their
region.
In retrospect,
the “peace process” was a highly effective diplomatic equivalent of sleight of
hand, diverting international attention from Israeli obduracy, displacing Arab
rage at Zionism’s ongoing humiliations of Arab honor, and providing political
cover for Israel’s relentless dispossession of the Palestinians from both their
homes and their homeland. With American
collaboration, Israel was able to use diplomatic pseudo-events and showmanship
to string along hopes for Palestinian self-determination even as it eroded the
basis for anything other than Palestinian capitulation to eternal subjugation
or exile. (Whether or not this will
ultimately prove to be a wise survival strategy for Israel is an open
question.)
But, when the
“peace process ended, no one could miss
the fact that it had been all travel and no arrival. It had not brought peace to the Holy Land,
had not secured Israel against the resentments of its Arab neighbors at its
imposition on them by British imperialism and its subsequent, repeated
humiliations of them, had not achieved regional acceptance for Israel or
stabilized Arab-Israeli relations, had not enabled Palestinian
self-determination, and had not prevented the gradual transformation of the
Israel-Palestine struggle into a war of religion. In terms of its stated objectives, the so-called
“peace process” was at best a bust and at worst a fraud.
In the end, the
“peace process” dishonored and discredited American diplomacy both globally and
in the region. The unilateral American
recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of a democratic Israel that exercises
tyranny over six million Palestinians has disqualified further American
mediation. More ominously, it has left Palestinians
in the Holy Land and those forced to seek refuge abroad with no route to
self-determination other than violence.
There is no
reason for us to expect Palestinians to be less resolute in their pursuit of
freedom than Christians were in seeking to expel Muslims from Spain, or Irish
nationalists were in their efforts to cast out their British oppressors, or
Jews were in reestablishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Spanish and Irish Catholics achieved their
objectives only after 800 years of uncompromising, violent struggle. Jews kept alive a dream of return to their
mythic homeland for almost two millennia.
What ultimately happens in Palestine will be determined by relations
between the parties there, not by Americans or Europeans. The path to a stable outcome now looks to be
twisted, bloody, and long.
As this century
began, the catastrophes wrought by the post-9/11 American interventions in
Iraq, Libya, and Syria fatally tarnished the U.S. reputation as a longstanding
champion of international law and humanitarianism. The liberal elite in America greeted the
surrender of our authoritarian protégé, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, to
mob rule in Cairo with evident glee. To
others who had relied on American support, this made the United States look not
just untrustworthy but perfidious.
This impression
only grew when the U.S. acquiesced in a military coup against the
democratically elected but singularly inept Muslim Brotherhood government in
Egypt. Toothless American demands for
Israel to end ethno-religious discrimination and land grabs irked Israelis. Its inefficacy further undermined U.S.
credibility among Arabs. American
condemnations of gender apartheid meanwhile annoyed Arabs without persuading
them to embrace feminism. The
Islamophobic hate speech pouring out of U.S. media plays well in Israel. It is deeply offensive to Muslims
everywhere.
The U.S.
decision to join other external powers in an Iran nuclear deal vehemently
opposed by Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E. just added to the angst of
American client states in the Middle East.
De facto U.S.
facilitation of greatly enhanced Iranian
influence in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria left the Gulf Arabs feeling encircled and
Israel feeling vulnerable. Iran’s
efforts to detach Yemen from Saudi Arabia’s sphere of influence added to the
Gulf Arab sense that they were under siege by Iran The American inability to reverse Iranian
gains in regional influence convinced all of America’s protégés that they had
to become more self-reliant. They saw
Washington’s marshaling of the world’s leading powers at the negotiating table
with Tehran as an implicit downgrading of their importance and acceptance of Iran’s
status as the region’s greatest power.
America's
client states judge that they are now dealing with a patron in increasing
internal confusion over the nature and scope of its engagements abroad. They are uncomfortable pinning their safety
or their ambitions on a partner in such a state of disarray. The result is a now-well-advanced drive by
every American client state in the Middle East to diversify its international
relationships to offset and dilute continuing dependence on the United
States.
At the same
time, the United States has come to be seen by Israel and the Gulf Arabs as
manipulable – a nation of unparalleled military strength with no strategic
compass, transparently venal politics, and no apparent ability to distinguish
its own interests from those of others it has unilaterally undertaken to
protect. American client states seem
confident they can recruit their patron to support their strategies and absorb
the risks of their policies. "I know
what America is," Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has said. "America
is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won't
get in the way." He has shown he
knows what he’s talking about. And how
about the snow job the Saudis did on President Trump in his first foray abroad
last May? America is now everywhere
treated as the follower, not the leader, in its relationships with Middle
Eastern states.
The latest
peoples to suffer disillusionment with America are the Kurds and Palestinians,
who had allowed themselves to become dependent on U.S. support. It has become apparent to both that the
United States will no longer invest in policing the region, much less in
shaping and enforcing a regional order conducive to Kurdish or Palestinian
statehood. Meanwhile, with its
unilateral decision on Jerusalem, Washington has just handed the wedge issue of
their dreams to nations and movements seeking to gain influence at American
expense in both the region and the broader Muslim world.
The major
external beneficiary of receding American influence to date has been Russia,
which has added arms sales and military as well as diplomatic cooperation with
Egypt, Israel, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the U.A.E. to
strengthened ties with Iran and Syria.
But China is in the wings, and under pressure to take the stage. It will likely do so through participation
in the reconstruction of Syria as part of its “Belt and Road Initiative.” And, these days, where China goes, India is
sure to follow. India has historically
seen Arabia and the Persian Gulf as closely connected to its security and
well-being.
In Syria,
Russia demonstrated an independent capability to conduct a limited intervention
in the Middle East. It also showcased
the weaponry it has for sale. Sales are
up and Moscow has just added basing rights in Egypt to those it had in
Syria.
The United
States remains the only external power with the capacity to project massive
force into the region. But, since the
Gulf War of 1990-91, our military interventions there and in adjacent areas
have consistently failed. This has
played a large part in causing most in the region to view America not as the
solution to their problems but as a major source of geopolitical turmoil and
religious strife. Polls show that people
in the Middle East now regard the United States as the greatest menaces to
peace they face.
Within the
Middle East, Iran has been the major beneficiary of America's strategic
blunders. Iranian gains have pushed the
Saudi-Emirati Gulf Arab diarchy and its allies into an unprecedentedly violent
response The UAE has intervened
militarily as far away as Libya. Both the
UAE and Saudi Arabia supported the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood
government in Egypt and they have bankrolled the military dictatorship that
succeeded it. They have been merciless
in their efforts to dislodge Iranian influence from Yemen. More recently, they have sought to bring
Qatar to heel.
Initially, in
the “Mashriq“ (the Arab East), the Saudis sought to rally Sunnis against
Iranian-aligned Shiites. More recently,
they have downplayed sectarianism and focused on the Iranian geopolitical challenge. To the satisfaction of the United States,
this has led them to reach out to Shiite-dominated Iraq as well as to Israel.
The Middle
East, like American society, has been reshaped by Washington’s post-9/11
decisions to invade, occupy, pacify, democratize, and otherwise transform
Afghanistan and Iraq. Sixteen and
fourteen years after the United States first launched these wars, they sputter
on with no end in sight. The heavy toll
on our troops is well known, if not much felt by the American citizenry in
whose name they are fighting. So far,
over 2,400 American and almost 1,140 allied troops have died
in Afghanistan and over 20,000 Americans have been seriously wounded
there. Almost 4,500 American soldiers
have been killed and nearly 1 million injured in Iraq.
The damage to
American society is less often tabulated.
These fruitless and counterproductive wars have so far cost the United States at least $5.6 trillion,
with the potential, even if we were somehow able to end them today, to rise to
more than $7.9 trillion. We have paid
for our lurch into widening warfare in the Muslim world with a combination of
borrowed money and disinvestment in domestic physical and human
infrastructure. The result is not
just the imposition of a crushing burden
of debt on our posterity, but lost growth and declining U.S. economic
competitiveness.
The domestic
tranquility of societies in the Middle East has been upended. That of the United States has also been
disturbed. Americans have become
accustomed to life under surveillance and in an endless state of apprehension
about acts of terrorism. This condition
has, entirely predictably, eroded our liberties, aggrandized the presidency,
and reinforced cowardly herd instincts in Congress. It has helped to impoverish the U.S. middle
class while enriching the military-industrial complex and the “cost-plus
capitalists” who feed on rake-off's from government outlays. These are structural alterations to the
American republic and way of life that will affect both for decades.
Meanwhile,
almost no one in America seems to be paying attention to the death toll among
the Muslim inhabitants of the countries we have invaded or to the impact of
this on the attitudes of their co-religionists elsewhere. Some entirely
plausible estimates suggest that the United States has been directly or
indirectly responsible for 4 million untimely Muslim deaths since 1990. The most conservative estimate – that of
three dozen scholars associated with Brown University’s Watson Institute –
calculates that at least 370,000 people have so far perished in America’s 21st
century wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. 600,000 more have died in Syria in conflict
catalyzed by the US-sponsored anarchy in neighboring Iraq and fueled by
American weapons, training, bombing campaigns, and commandos.
Over the same
period, with U.S. financial and material support, Israel has killed over 1,100
Lebanese and about 7,000 Palestinians, only a minority of them combatants. Since 2015, the United States has been a
co-belligerent in the bloody Saudi-Emirati intervention in the civil war in
Yemen. There, some 10,000 Yemeni
civilians have perished and at least four times as many have been wounded
amidst a humanitarian crisis that rivals those in Gaza or Syria.
All this leaves
a lot of Arab and Pashtun families and individuals obsessed with how to avenge
the deaths of those dear to them at the hands of Americans or American protégés
like Israel and Saudi Arabia. But the
inflammatory effects of U.S. interventions are not limited to Arabs and
Pashtuns. As the so-called “global war
on terror” has progressed, so has the metastasis of anti-American “terrorism
with global reach.”
The United
States now has military operations of one sort or another underway in
Afghanistan, Cameroon, Chad, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, the
Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Uganda, and Yemen.
Very likely, this is an incomplete list of the wars and
co-belligerencies ordained by successive presidents. It should concern Americans that these wars
are without exception violations of the
United States Constitution, which requires that wars of choice be declared by
Congress, not authorized by the president.
And it seems certain that there are more wars to come.
Seventeen
percent of U.S. Special Forces are currently deployed in Africa, where their
primary mission is to help fight armed apostles of political Islam. (Uganda is an exception. There the problem is “political Christianity”
in the form of the Lord’s Resistance Army.)
The Middle East has become the malignant center of a spreading contagion
that has infected the souls of both Americans and the world's nearly two
billion Muslims.
The military
defeat of the so-called Islamic Caliphate has excised a cancerous growth from
the body politic of the Muslim umma
but left its causes and related malignancies unaddressed. There is no reason to expect they will halt
their metastasis. The very measures the
United States has taken to combat Muslim anti-Americanism are spreading it.
The good news,
if it can be called that, is that the counterproductivity of American
counterterrorist practices and Washington’s ineffectiveness in isolating Iran
have brought about shifts toward self-help by American client states. Some of these have considerable potential. Saudi Arabia, for example, has taken the lead
in forming a pan-Islamic anti-terrorist military alliance. It has declared war on the extremists whose
distortions of Islamic theology have dishonored and brought disrepute to the
doctrines of the 18th century Salafist, Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab,
whose teachings are the founding principles of the Saudi state.
As part of this
new focus, the Kingdom is sharpening the theological differences between its
official interpretation of Islam and the deviant ideology of groups like Al
Qaeda and the so-called “Islamic State.”
Saudi religious and social practices are becoming more tolerant and less
illiberal. There is a battle going on
for the rejuvenation of Islam. Riyadh
now champions a more moderate and less militant version of the faith than in
the past.
In many ways,
Saudi Arabia appears to be going through a revolutionary transformation
analogous to that in Turkey under Atatürk a century ago. It has moved from consensual decision-making
in a system with widely dispersed authority to a concentration of power in its
king and his heir apparent. This has
kicked changes previously underway into high gear.
The Saudis are
re-engineering their economy to rely on the private production of goods and
services, rather than royalties from oil and gas. They are reshaping their labor market to
reduce reliance on foreigners and to increase opportunities for women. They are building new industries, including
an armaments industry that will reduce their dependence on imports. And, having decided on a course of self-reliance,
they are no longer risk averse in their foreign and military policies toward
their region.
All of these
changes are taking place amidst intensified geopolitical interaction among
Iran, Israel, the Saudi-Emirati diarchy, and Turkey. Novel as it seems to us, Palmerston would
have seen the emerging pattern of international differentiation as normal. The nations of the region are showing that
they can cooperate with each other when they see it as in their interest to do
so, despite differences that make them fierce opponents on other matters. For example, the Saudis and Emiratis now
openly conduct intelligence liaison and coordinate their anti-Iranian lobbying on Capitol Hill with Israel. At the same time, they remain at loggerheads
with Israel on other issues, like Kurdish or Palestinian
self-determination. Turkey cooperates
with Iran on Kurdish matters, despite being on opposite sides in Syria. And so forth.
How are
Americans to cope with this situation, in which we have commitments but no
followers in the Middle East? How are we
to prevent regional rivalries from embroiling us in the wars of others in which
we have no intrinsic interest? How are
we to adjust our policies to take account of the changes in the regional
geometry that defines our interests?
The Cold War is
over. There is no contest with another
great power to threaten American influence.
Such spheres of influence as there are in the Middle East reflect the
rivalry between Israel and the Gulf Arabs on the one hand and Iran or Turkey on
the other. U.S. involvement in this
rivalry is a matter of choice, not an imperative derived from global
strategy. Strategic denial of the region
to an external great power is no longer a relevant objective. Americans need to rethink our aims in the
Middle East.
The United
States no longer leads and protects a bloc of countries threatened by another
bloc, as was the case in the Cold War.
Americans ourselves have no need for energy imports from the region. We
are once again oil and gas exporters, in competition with Middle Eastern energy
producers. There is no inherent reason why we alone should remain responsible
for guaranteeing the access of our Cold War allies of China and India to
Persian Gulf oil and gas supplies. What
burden-sharing is now appropriate and how can we move toward it?
Thanks to
persistent American diplomacy at Camp David and elsewhere, Israel no longer
faces a credible military threat from any neighbor. With no regional challenger to its military
supremacy, Israel has felt free repeatedly to invade Lebanon, to pummel Gaza
from the air, and to threaten to bomb Iran.
The hostility to Israel of Iran, Arab states, and Turkey is the
consequence of Israel’s own decisions not to define its borders and to persist
in dispossessing and denying the franchise to the Palestinian Arabs it
rules. Why should the United States
support the continued expansion of the Zionist state or the consolidation
of its version of apartheid?
The United
States subsidizes Israel, guarantees its security, and vetoes efforts by the
international community to hold it accountable for its multiple violations of
international law. This enables Israel
to pursue a diplomacy-free, exclusively military strategy for survival in a
region where, despite the seventy years it has had to do so, it has made no
friends. Israel uses the support and
weapons it receives from the United States for its own purposes. Jerusalem pays no heed to the interests or
views of the United States – and sometimes actively contradicts or ignores them
– as it initiates and conducts its military operations. This is a relationship in need of review and
recalibration.
Finally, the
United States badly needs to rethink our overall approach to the world’s
Muslims and the lands they inhabit. We
should by now have learned that poking hornets’ nests is not the best way to
discourage them from coming after us. We
need to stand back and ally ourselves with those in the Muslim world who are
seeking to restore Islam to its traditional tolerance, social justice, and
compassion for the disadvantaged. The
straight path of Islam, not drone warfare, is the answer to Muslim deviance and
disquiet.
We live in an
age of fake news and fake leadership. It
will not be easy to rediscover reality and redirect our policies to deal with
it. But the alternative to doing so is
to see our friends and enemies in the Middle East maneuver in ways that risk
mounting damage to all concerned, including the United States.
Our
difficulties are compounded by the extent to which political correctness and
partisanship impede civil dialogue. Israel
is a foreign country, not an ethno-religious identity. But no one can offer constructive criticism
of Israel and its policies without being smeared as an anti-Semite. No one can propose exploring common interests
with Russia without being accused of overlooking its alleged intervention in
our internal affairs. No one can suggest
dialogue with Iran without being dismissed as advocating appeasement. No one can advocate cooperation with Saudi
Arabia or the Emirates without being indicted for ignoring the ongoing tragedy
in Yemen.
In the end, to
formulate and pursue productive policies in the Middle East, we must first
restore civil discourse at home. Only
then can we intelligently define our national interests and objectives there. Only then can we hope to achieve affordable
security in the new world disorder.
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