Here in Chicago in the home base of US President Barack Obama, there is much discussion about his future prospects in two years’ time, and how his Democratic Party will fare in the mid-term congressional elections in November. At several conferences and lectures I have attended in the United States in the past two weeks, the question often comes up about how Obama has fared to date with his policies in the Middle East. The consensus among scholars and experts seems to be that it is not easy to make a decisive assessment right now.
The reasons are that Obama has been doing so many things in the region that none have come to fruition or fully played themselves out sufficiently to say whether they have failed or succeeded. In cases like Arab-Israeli diplomacy, the United States has not fully clarified what it is trying to do or what its own positions are on some of the critical issues. More importantly, the criteria that Arabs use to assess him might be very different from the criteria an American, Israeli or Turk might use. So rather than trying to assess or pass a verdict on Obama in the Middle East, perhaps it is more useful to more modestly try to chart out exactly what he is trying to do and what his concerns and priorities may be.
It is probably safe to assume that eight major issues in the Middle East stand out as important ones for US national strategic interests: In no particular order of importance, they are oil and energy flow security; Israel’s security; the situation in Iraq and the US withdrawal from it; fighting terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction; the war in Afghanistan; public diplomacy and outreach to the Islamic world; the nuclear and other issues related to Iran; and Arab-Israeli peace-making.
Two important points strike me about this list. The first is that all these issues are linked to one another (at least in the eyes of most Middle Easterners) in a cycle of confrontations, threats and opportunities, so it is impossible to isolate one issue and try to deal with it on its own. Obama himself stated boldly (and General David Petraeus repeated before Congress) that the continuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the perception that the United States tilts towards Israel, hurt US strategic national interests, especially when the US is engaged in military operations in the region. The second point is that, in a very impressive and ambitious manner, Obama has tried to initiate strategies on all of these issues simultaneously, which is more striking than it is feasible. He has made progress in some areas more than others.
One of the important lessons that Obama and his team should have learned by now is that the United States fights these battles with one hand tied behind its back. The US is severely handicapped by a significant lack of credibility that is a direct consequence of its own foreign policy incompetence in the Middle East in the past several decades, especially the past decade. Most people and political movements, and a few governments, in the Middle East neither respect nor fear the United States. More and more of them routinely defy the US, or actively resist it when it suits their purposes. At one point the US found itself facing defiance and pushback simultaneously from Arabs, Israelis, Turks and Iranians, all of whom for their own reasons refused to comply with certain American requests, suggestions, threats or demands. The US has a massive military machine that it can use at will in the region, especially via remote controlled drones and missiles; but it has a seriously degraded and limited ability to accomplish any clear goals using old-fashioned diplomacy, soft power, and engagement with the locals across sectors like economics, security, diplomacy, civil society, education, and science and technology.
So the priority for the United States in the first instance, Obama may have calculated, was to restore its full toolbox of diplomatic and political tools and options, so that it has real capabilities and impact when addressing substantive issues. It may be that its brisk, high-level and sustained work on mediating Arab-Israeli peace-making is designed not to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict in the short run, but to restore the perception of the US in the region as a credible, even-handed mediator and political actor. It may be that all that we have witnessed in the past 20 months has aimed primarily to revive the role and capability of the US as a serious diplomatic actor, after it had allowed itself to lapse into irrelevance or impotence. In that respect, it is succeeding. We shall soon find out if its procedural advances will be followed up shortly by substantive advances.
*Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.
The reasons are that Obama has been doing so many things in the region that none have come to fruition or fully played themselves out sufficiently to say whether they have failed or succeeded. In cases like Arab-Israeli diplomacy, the United States has not fully clarified what it is trying to do or what its own positions are on some of the critical issues. More importantly, the criteria that Arabs use to assess him might be very different from the criteria an American, Israeli or Turk might use. So rather than trying to assess or pass a verdict on Obama in the Middle East, perhaps it is more useful to more modestly try to chart out exactly what he is trying to do and what his concerns and priorities may be.
It is probably safe to assume that eight major issues in the Middle East stand out as important ones for US national strategic interests: In no particular order of importance, they are oil and energy flow security; Israel’s security; the situation in Iraq and the US withdrawal from it; fighting terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction; the war in Afghanistan; public diplomacy and outreach to the Islamic world; the nuclear and other issues related to Iran; and Arab-Israeli peace-making.
Two important points strike me about this list. The first is that all these issues are linked to one another (at least in the eyes of most Middle Easterners) in a cycle of confrontations, threats and opportunities, so it is impossible to isolate one issue and try to deal with it on its own. Obama himself stated boldly (and General David Petraeus repeated before Congress) that the continuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the perception that the United States tilts towards Israel, hurt US strategic national interests, especially when the US is engaged in military operations in the region. The second point is that, in a very impressive and ambitious manner, Obama has tried to initiate strategies on all of these issues simultaneously, which is more striking than it is feasible. He has made progress in some areas more than others.
One of the important lessons that Obama and his team should have learned by now is that the United States fights these battles with one hand tied behind its back. The US is severely handicapped by a significant lack of credibility that is a direct consequence of its own foreign policy incompetence in the Middle East in the past several decades, especially the past decade. Most people and political movements, and a few governments, in the Middle East neither respect nor fear the United States. More and more of them routinely defy the US, or actively resist it when it suits their purposes. At one point the US found itself facing defiance and pushback simultaneously from Arabs, Israelis, Turks and Iranians, all of whom for their own reasons refused to comply with certain American requests, suggestions, threats or demands. The US has a massive military machine that it can use at will in the region, especially via remote controlled drones and missiles; but it has a seriously degraded and limited ability to accomplish any clear goals using old-fashioned diplomacy, soft power, and engagement with the locals across sectors like economics, security, diplomacy, civil society, education, and science and technology.
So the priority for the United States in the first instance, Obama may have calculated, was to restore its full toolbox of diplomatic and political tools and options, so that it has real capabilities and impact when addressing substantive issues. It may be that its brisk, high-level and sustained work on mediating Arab-Israeli peace-making is designed not to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict in the short run, but to restore the perception of the US in the region as a credible, even-handed mediator and political actor. It may be that all that we have witnessed in the past 20 months has aimed primarily to revive the role and capability of the US as a serious diplomatic actor, after it had allowed itself to lapse into irrelevance or impotence. In that respect, it is succeeding. We shall soon find out if its procedural advances will be followed up shortly by substantive advances.
*Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.
distributed by Agence Global
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