This post collects sage advice for US policy toward the Middle East: one aspect of US foreign policy that could really use a jump-start.
First, a new analysis by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Middle East Scholars Marina Ottoway and Mohammed Herzallah assess the diplomatic efforts of Arab regimes seeking to fill the power vacuum left by the absence of a strong regime in Iraq and ineffectual U.S. policy.
According to the policy brief, titled “The New Arab Diplomacy: Not With the U.S. and Not Against the U.S.,” Arab countries are undertaking diplomatic initiatives that clearly contradict U.S. policy, because they no longer trust the U.S. capacity to contend with escalating regional crises. The authors argue that even Arab countries traditionally aligned with the United States are no longer willing to follow Washington's lead on policies toward Iran, Lebanon, or Hamas.
Here are some of the authors’ conclusions:
•While new Arab diplomatic initiatives may contradict current U.S. policy, they may not contravene long-term U.S. interests.
• Arab regional diplomacy lacks an overarching vision and is instead based on a desire to reduce imminent threats.
• Influence in the Arab world has shifted to the Gulf and the change is likely permanent due to increased oil wealth and the crises engulfing other regions.
• The United States and Saudi Arabia, historically close allies, often hope for the same outcome in regional conflicts but pursue different strategies. In trying to contain Iran, Saudi Arabia seeks to avoid confrontation through diplomatic engagement, while the United States favors isolation. Saudi Arabia promotes reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas as a necessary step in the Israeli,Palestinian peace process, while the United States refuses to recognize Hamas.
In the end, the authors state that: “whether the policies of these (Arab) countries will diverge from those of the United States depends as much on U.S. choices as on theirs."
Second, from the Arab world, an opinion piece by Rami Khouri, editor-at-large of The Daily Star (Lebanon), offers advice for US policy in the Middle East. He devised a list of ten principles and policies that he believes should define American policies in the Middle East. Here's a sampling:
1. Politically engage all legitimate actors: The American tendency to boycott or try and destroy major players in the region, like Hizbullah and Hamas, is childish and counter-productive. All those whom the United States has held at arm's length have tended to become stronger in the region — partly by garnering public support for defying and resisting the United States….
2. Seek peace, security and prosperity for all according to a single standard: Foreign powers in the Middle East must give Arabs, Israelis, Iranians and Turks fully equal weight in terms of their rights and interests, rather than giving some countries priority or even exclusivity in areas like security, nuclear technology, etc.
3. Use multilateral engagement mechanisms more than unilateral military means or threats: The UN and its agencies offer useful, legitimate and effective mechanisms to address contentious issues if they are used regularly, and not whimsically or opportunistically.
4. Be consistent on core issues across the region: Double-standards in enforcing UN resolutions or international conventions, or promoting freedom and democracy, badly erode American credibility, respect and efficacy, severely curtailing US impact and influence over time…”
Finally, an expert on Middle East affairs offers some more general pointers studying the region. Fred Halliday, after teaching Middle Eastern affairs at the London School of Economics for more than 20 years, retired from teaching in March. The latest issue of the LSE alumni magazine includes an essay Halliday authored titled “Shaping the Middle East,” based on a farewell lecture he gave at the university.
In the essay, Halliday offers 5 pointers on how a Westerner should approach studying the Middle East. First, he says one must understand the history of the region: “We need to see the region not in its millennial abstraction and mystifi cation, but as, like Europe, Latin America and East Asia, a product of modern international economic, political and social forces.”
Second, Halliday emphasizes that, as in the study of other regions, the starting point for the study of the Middle East should be the nation-state.
The state, Halliday says, consists of “the institutions of coercion, administration and territorial delimitation: it is states that shape identities, religions, economies. There is no such thing as the Middle Eastern state, the oriental state, the Arab state, the Islamic state: there are entities which rule, coerce, tax, spend, mobilise, in the modern regional and international context in which they find themselves.
And, equally importantly, it is the desire to control the state, or else to set up their own separate state, as today with the Kurds, Palestinians and Southern Sudanese, and earlier with the Zionist movement in Palestine, that explains the politics of opposition groups, be they democratic, authoritarian or insurrectionary.”
Third is culture: “In the Middle East as elsewhere, issues of culture and religion do matter in explaining political attitudes and behaviour. But culture broadly defined, including religion, does not in itself explain modern politics, social behaviour or international relations… Far too much of the study of the contemporary Middle East takes culture as a given, and as, in social science terms, an independent and explanatory variable, instead of seeing it as itself shaped by modern, domestic and international forces…”
Fourth is the oft-forgotten factor of economics: “If one wants to understand why and how external powers have dominated, partitioned, controlled and intervened in the Middle East, then economic factors remain central to the story, not only in regard to oil and gas extraction, which form the largest industries and the most traded commodities in the world, but also in regard to markets, and, of enormous if often only partly visible importance, to the recycling and reinvestment of oil revenues.”Finally it is imperative to grasp the role that different political actors play in the region. Here Halliday specifically warns against assuming that the region always acts as an integrated whole. He says:
“Even as regional forces are at play, be it in regard to nuclear weapons, migration flows or terrorism, the 25 countries of the region remain distinct and in some ways separated from each other, a system of interacting units but not a homogenous whole.This means that with specific conflicts, such as the Arab-Israeli dispute, or the Iran-Iraq war, or now the multi-layered war in Iraq, we should be careful how far we see these conflicts as dominating, or defining, the region as a whole."
Sage advice on a region of supreme importance for US foreign policy.
