The Middle East has not been easy on US presidents over the past seven decades. Historically, support for Israel and its right to exist within defensible borders has been tenuously balanced against the need to defend shipping lanes for oil and otherwise protecting world energy supplies. But the difficulties faced by previous US administrations pale in comparison to those created by the challenges of today’s Middle East.
Israel is still there, but it has become a much more difficult ally. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of the US Congress in March, at the invitation of President Obama’s domestic opponents, has subjected a key foreign-policy issue to the distortions of America’s deep and disabling partisan polarization.
Meanwhile, ensuring secure oil supplies and shipping lanes has become more complicated, because the US must now play the entire chessboard of Arab issues. Worse, it has sometimes seemed to be playing blindfolded, with significant gaps between local realities and policymakers’ understanding of them.
When the Arab Spring began four years ago, the US pushed instinctively for regime change in Libya, Syria and Egypt, while defending the new constitutional order in Iraq. The results should be read as a cautionary tale for those seeking instant gratification through regime change. Though some leaders were removed, what followed has been even worse. The main effect of regime change has been strengthening of sectarian identities and weakening of existing nation-states’ prospects for survival.
And now high-stakes negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program have been superimposed on the complexity of Arab issues. The Obama administration has been accused of wanting the agreement too much, of being unwilling to walk away. But if that charge is true, it is not because Obama desperately wants to fulfill the pledge that he made early in his 2008 election campaign: To negotiate with America’s enemies and find common ground.
By all accounts, Iran is a society deeply divided between those who want their country to be a respected member of the international community and those for whom Iran’s international status is better served through a nuclear-weapons program. The international sanctions that have been imposed on Iran would appear to aid the latter, rather than the former.
There is scant evidence to suggest that sanctions have done anything to slow Iran’s nuclear program. Moreover, as is often the case, sanctions may have done more to decimate the middle class and further weaken the least powerful than to motivate Iran’s leaders to seek a deal.
For many Americans, the showdown with Iran is a bilateral struggle, a kind of replay of nuclear talks with the Soviet Union. In some respects, the US Senate’s insistence that it play a role in approving the nuclear deal reflects a kind of back-to-the-future mindset: Surely if the SALT and START agreements were legally binding treaties between two states, so must an agreement with Iran.
But the agreement being negotiated with Iran is multilateral, involving all of the UN Security Council’s permanent members, plus Germany. Part of Obama’s job is to ensure that the American people understand that the agreement’s fate is not only about the US.
And the so-called parties to the talks are not the only countries with a large stake in the outcome. The Arab world has grown increasingly anxious as it contemplates a nuclear deal. Heightened sectarian conflict, together with Iran’s audacious meddling in Arab countries, has greatly increased skepticism in the region about any agreement. Indeed, Iran’s religious leaders have made no secret of their desire for regional hegemony, if not leadership of the Islamic world. Arabs view the nuclear talks as being about something far more fundamental than arms control. With the Arab world in turmoil, could the US be seeking an alternative strategic framework in the region, in the form of a renewed partnership with Iran?
For many Americans with bitter memories of Iran, that scenario may be unappealing, to say the least. The US is actively courting the Arab world. Indeed, America’s tacit support for the Saudi Arabia-led military campaign in Yemen suggests the lengths that the US will go to address Arab anxieties.
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The writer is the former US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia. ©Project Syndicate
