BY STEVE COLL
President Barack Obama is sometimes described as a foreign-policy “realist.” It’s an abstract, imprecise label, but when it is laid on Obama, it is intended to describe his cold-eyed emphasis on core American interests, rather than, say, on the promotion of rights or democratic politics abroad. In fact, Obama and his advisers have ardently promoted human rights abroad. Yet there is no denying their occasional expedience.
The most recent example came on June 22nd, in Cairo, where Secretary of State John Kerry posed smilingly with Egypt’s newly elected, coup-making, dictatorial president, Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, who has presided over an increasingly grotesque series of show trials, leading to the convictions of his opponents in the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as journalists, including a trio of Al Jazeera reporters who were sentenced to prison two days after Kerry’s appearance.
Kerry condemned that verdict even as the U.S. State Department released $575 million in military aid to Egypt. That money will only entrench Al-Sisi in power and reinforce his evident opinion that he need not make concessions. In the case of Egypt, at least, the Obama Administration seems to have concluded that it must accept what it cannot change, for the sake of regional stability and Israel’s security.
American Presidents have been accommodating Middle Eastern despots in the search for stability for decades, and there is nothing in Obama’s touch that can redeem such compromises. Yet that is not the only valid criticism of the Administration’s situational realism in the region. Another is that it has often been unrealistic.
Early in the President’s second term, for example, the Administration expended months of frenzied activity in pursuit of a fresh start to Israel-Palestinian talks on a two-state solution. That proved quixotic. The Administration also expended months of frenzied activity trying to organize peace talks in Geneva between supposed moderate rebels and proxies for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s barrel-bombing war machine. That didn’t work out, either.
The Middle East has a way of exposing the vanities of all foreign-policy thinkers. Yet the current situation in Iraq marks a particular low point for the Obama Administration. While trying to prop up Baghdad’s teetering government, the Administration is searching for a way to exclude or work around Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who governs as a sectarian Shiite and in whom the Administration understandably has no confidence. Yet by sending three hundred military advisers to Baghdad without first resolving the Maliki problem, the United States is also signalling, however unintentionally, that it will take Maliki’s side against Iraq’s Sunni minority—even, if it must, to the extent of forging a tacit alliance with Syria and Iran against the Sunni radicals of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham. The United States has talked to Iran about such military coöperation; and last week, Assad sent fighter planes from Syria to bomb rebel positions inside Iraq, winning praise from Maliki. Simultaneously, the Obama Administration has asked Congress for $500 million in aid to arm supposedly responsible Sunni rebels fighting Assad. This is not subtlety; it is absurdity.
Why has it come to this? The Obama Administration is not responsible for the Middle East’s sectarian conflict or Iraq’s gathering despair. And the prospect of Baghdad’s fall to ISIS was an emergency that seemed to require quick action, however awkward the alliances involved.
Yet the contradictions accumulating in American strategy—committing to Maliki but not committing to him; allying with Syria and Iran but not allying with them; arming the Sunni rebels in Syria but not arming them decisively—do require more of an accounting than just, “Forget it, Jake; it’s the Middle East.”
One problem is that, ever since the Syrian war broke out, the Administration’s containment strategy has been reactive and improvised: its central principle seems to be the avoidance of the use of force. The policy lacks a realistic design.
It also seems possible that the Administration has trapped itself in its search for a nuclear grand bargain with Iran. There is nothing more seductive in Middle East policymaking than the dream of authoring a transformational deal, as Jimmy Carter did at Camp David. The conditions for such a deal with Iran—one that might end thirty-five years of mutual enmity, cap Iran’s nuclear program, and reduce the odds of an atomic arms race in the Middle East—have lately seemed riper than in some time.
It is hard to evaluate how well the secret talks are going. But it is clear that the Administration is deeply invested in them. This has constrained its ability to take action in Iraq or elsewhere that would undermine Iran’s confidence in American good faith. By bargaining so intently with Iran, the Administration has also confused or angered historical American allies—Israel, of course, but also Saudi Arabia, Iran’s wealthiest opponent in the spreading Sunni-Shia conflict.
Is a grand bargain with Iran still realistic? A virtue of realism—in the ordinary meaning, not the doctrinal one—is that it argues for confronting and accepting hard truths. The Obama Administration’s record at least raises the question of whether it is being honest with itself about where these talks are headed and what price it is paying for them.
There was a time when, during a crisis like the one in Iraq today, American collaboration with Saudi Arabia would lie at the heart of Washington’s strategy. But September 11th, the Iraq war, and now the Iran negotiations have left both parties to that Cold War-era security-for-oil alliance cynical and wary. President Obama visited Riyadh in March, seeking to mend relations; if a new era of trust and goodwill emerged from that trip, though, it is not detectable. Kerry visited the kingdom last week; the Saudis later pledged $500 million to the United Nations to aid Iraqi war victims of all sects. Yet the Saudis remain doubtful about the American strategy in Iraq.
No system of ideals can be threaded through this mess. The question is how to protect the most innocent lives through the promotion of stability. The increasingly doubtful, and as yet undemonstrated, project of a multiethnic power-sharing government in Baghdad should be questioned as an organizing priority.
It will take years of effort, containment, and luck to stabilize Iraq and Syria—and to prevent catastrophic terrorism from spreading beyond their increasingly notional borders. That work will require a durable, reliable coalition. In statecraft, as in life, it is useful to be clear-eyed about who one’s friends really are—to identify those who will put themselves at risk for one’s interests in a crisis, apart from protecting their own. There is serious trouble brewing for the United States—not just in Iraq and Syria, but in Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, which may be destabilised by the spreading conflict.
To confront Iraq’s atrocities, suffering, and instability, it may be time for the United States to round up the old Sunni-secular motorcycle gang and ride. It’s a motley group, to be sure—grayer, a little more prone to fits of paranoia than in its Cold War youth—but it still constitutes a coalition of U.S.-led historical allies with enough common interests to coöperate to at least prevent ISIS or its ilk from crossing borders to hijack airplanes, blow up hotels, or destabilize additional capitals. And it is a coalition that offers more promise than Maliki’s government or its allies in Iran or Syria. It certainly has a better shot at creating pressure for an inclusive Iraqi government, constraining Iran, separating ISIS from Sunni secular tribes, and managing a regional refugee crisis.
The American inner circle these days still includes Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey; other important allies are Qatar, Bahrain, the Kurdish Regional Government, Oman, Lebanon, and Kuwait. As always, operating quietly but essentially, there is Israel. There is Al-Sisi’s Egypt, buoyed by fresh arms shipments, and yes, Saudi Arabia, whose government has turned hard on Al Qaeda and has the potential to help deflect, temper, or delegitimize ISIS.
This is a well-resourced network of largely stable states that is already allied against jihadis. There are risks. Money and weapons have reached ISIS and other Sunni jihadi rebels from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Sunni Gulf states—these weak but wealthy kingdoms, situated in populous Iran’s shadow, regard the Sunni-Shia conflict as existential and, in some quarters, ideologically imperative. To relieve pressure at home, the Gulf countries may turn a blind eye when their jihadis go off to blow themselves up in someone else’s country.
There are rivals and human-rights violators in the old gang, too, but in the main, these states seek stability and the (self-enriching) status quo. Many of them have been steadfast, if at times resentful, ambivalent or befuddled, allies of the United States since the nineteen-seventies or earlier. This does not seem an especially realistic time for the Obama Administration to reinvent power alliances in the Middle East. Realism, best understood, is a strain of common sense. Here is another: when you are in trouble, listen to your friends.
Above: John Kerry meets with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri, in Cairo. Photograph by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty.
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