Why the US could not shake off the Middle East
Lessons from a pivot to Asia that never comes
Janan Ganesh
© Carl GodfreyIt is 80 years old now but still one of the more arresting images of the photographic age.
On board the USS Quincy, an ailing Franklin Roosevelt meets King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia (or Ibn Saud, as the Anglo-American world knew him).
And so begins, or at least deepens, the US role in the Middle East. Consider it FDR’s parting gift.
“You shouldn’t have,” some would say, including men as dissimilar as Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
Both of those presidents were first elected as sceptics of American involvement in the region.
The botched occupation of Iraq was just one reason to turn elsewhere.
At home, green tech and a shale bonanza were lessening the need for Gulf oil.
Besides, there was China to worry about.
Well, here is a progress report on that deprioritisation of the Middle East.
In June, the US attacked Iranian nuclear facilities in Operation Midnight Hammer.
Trump has just agreed the first phase of a delicate Israeli-Palestinian peace, which entails an International Stabilisation Force in Gaza.
At the bare minimum, the US will have to act as a convener and arm-twister of the regional actors, for an indefinite period.
There are still some 40,000 US service members in the region.
What are the lessons of this bipartisan failure to shake off the Middle East?
First, people overrate the role of choice and agency in politics.
External events, not best laid plans, dictate where a country’s attention goes, even a great power’s.
Once the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza began, the US had no hope of remaining aloof, at least not without losing face and therefore credibility elsewhere.
There is a wing of Republicanism that talks of the world as an abacus: fewer resources devoted to Nato must mean more for the “Indo-Pacific”, and so on.
Elbridge Colby, one of Trump’s defence officials, is an example.
The trouble is, the abacus fights back from time to time.
Even now, the administration is said to be finishing off a national security strategy, which will prioritise the western hemisphere more than Trump ever did in his China-focused first term.
Like all geopolitical cogitation about “postures” and “pivots”, it will be taken terribly seriously.
But the lesson of the recent past is that one event somewhere else will intervene, just as the Ukraine war postponed the transfer of US attention to Asia.
A candid president would name the strategy Man Plans, and God Laughs.
A second lesson is that, while much is made of Trump’s personal quest for a Nobel peace prize, nations have egos too.
Perhaps the US chooses to move mountains in the Middle East because it is one of the few places where it still can.
Almost all the countries there need something from the US, whether it’s existential protection or sanctions relief (see Syria earlier this year) or the tech required to craft a post-oil business model.
Contrast this with Vladimir Putin’s ability to resist American pressure.
Knowing that it has such unusual clout in the Middle East, the US would have to be almost inhumanly self-effacing to not assert itself there.
One reason to always discount talk of American “isolationism” is that national pride will tend to get in the way.
Which superpower has ever chosen to give up external influence?
The British and French empires retrenched out of economic necessity.
Japan and Germany had to have their ambitions militarily beaten out of them.
In the Middle East, the US can act out a superpower role that is more and more contested elsewhere.
Notice that a Beijing-brokered deal for Gaza was not even a subject of remote discussion.
The region is something of a portal into the old world of American primacy (even if, as the largest consumer of Middle Eastern oil, China is catching up).
If there is a theme to the century so far, it is the stickiness of things.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, we “knew” that land wars between nation states were giving way to irregular or asymmetric conflict.
Military doctrine was partially rewritten on that basis.
A generation on, there is a land war between nation states, and — how trad — on the European mainland of all places, as though it were 1870 or 1940.
Similarly, when the pandemic struck, people were bearish about the future of cities and in-person contact.
Now, the main gripe about urban life is once again that it is too popular to be affordable.
Restaurant reservations are passed around like samizdat on secondary markets.
America’s failure to leave the Middle East behind is of a piece with this theme.
Given the overwhelming noise and colour of modern news, it takes real intellectual discipline to see how little changes.
In temperament and worldview, there might never have been a presidential transition as sharp as that from Obama to Trump.
Yet both men threw a lot into the Middle East: Obama by seeking to reintegrate Iran as an essential actor, Trump by slapping it down.
Both launched air strikes on Syria, whether against Islamic State or Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Both ended up light years from their original plan (or vague intention) to deprioritise the region, which suggests that structural forces keep the US embroiled.
The “failure” isn’t still being there, it is all the unrealistic talk of disengagement.
A mark of Roosevelt’s greatness is that a meeting he held almost as a tidying up of business before he died ended up binding his 14 successors to the region.
When the 15th promises a change, don’t listen.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario