The debate over technical and procedural issues of the Iran nuclear deal may have reached a ceiling. Grossly under-analyzed still is how the United States can effectively protect this strategic investment and other vital interests in the Middle East. The deal notwithstanding, the region is burning and its fires could soon consume this limited arms control accord. Washington needs a comprehensive security strategy for a part of the world whose order and stability, whether we like it or not, will continue to be indispensable for global commerce, nuclear nonproliferation, and transnational counterterrorism.
As I argued in a recent Atlantic Council report called “The New Containment: Changing America’s Approach to Middle East Security,” U.S. policy-makers’ consideration of options for Middle East security strategy should be informed by four inescapable realities:
First, there is no lasting security and stability in the region without real political and economic development. Until the Arab world charts a path forward and starts addressing its rampant political decay, religious hubris, and economic mismanagement, regional security will remain scarce, and challenges such as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), Iran’s destabilizing behavior in the region, and the growth of violent extremism—to just name a few—will continue to present themselves and possibly worsen with time.
We can keep deluding ourselves that the Middle East can achieve higher levels of security without overhauling an Arab state system that has been a major source of instability in the region. Having failed since its formation in the first half of the twentieth century to garner popular legitimacy, accommodate religiously and ethnically diverse communities, and generate equitable economic growth, such a system has finally imploded. This overarching failure or weakness of governance has greatly contributed to insecurity in the Middle East for decades, leading to terrorism, insurgency, and domestic conflict.
Second, the United States neither can nor should be the agent pushing for change in the region; change—at least the peaceful and sustainable type—should almost always come from within. The disastrous U.S. experience in Iraq since 2003 provides enough warning about the consequences of U.S.-led nation-building in the Middle East. Regardless of its intentions, Washington does not have sufficient economic resources, local knowledge, or political commitment to the region to do it right. Like other civilizations in history who underwent difficult and often violent political transitions before them, Arabs will have to go through a process of trial and error aimed at building a just and viable social contract, a process that is likely to extend throughout much of the twenty-first century.
Third, change cannot happen without first addressing immediate and severe security challenges. As critical as good governance is for long-term regional stability, it will currently neither secure nor halt the disintegration of the Middle East. Indeed, even if a long-term Arab reform process were to start now, it will take years to potentially yield positive results. Therefore, it will not solve immediate security challenges such as rolling back ISIS, countering Iran’s asymmetric threat, terminating Syria’s civil war, combating terrorism in Egypt, securing Iraq, ending Libya’s anarchy, and preventing Yemen’s descent into chaos. In fact, if modern European history is any guide, democratization itself (in whatever form it may take in the Middle East) is likely to generate, at least in the short to medium term, greater insecurity and political violence, which, given its current cataclysmic conditions, the region simply cannot afford. Whether we like it or not, so long as states in the region perceive existential threats and prioritize physical security, reform will take a back seat. In today’s extremely volatile regional environment, security is a basic and necessary public good that should be pursued first, though not as an end in itself but as a necessary condition to enable change.
Fourth, the United States cannot address those security challenges alone, and it desperately needs first, regional partners, and second, global allies who have vested interests and military resources in the Middle East.
If you agree with these four realities, including the notion that in this ever more complex environment in the Middle East, there are real limitations to the United States’ ability to shape or influence outcomes, then you would most probably find containment a more cost-effective and sustainable security strategy option for the Middle East. Whatever the United States does in the Middle East, now and into the future, the basic premise and guiding principle should be unequivocal: not to try to fix unfixable problems (and end up making things worse) but to help regional partners lead this necessary period of transition with the least amount of violence and chaos.
A robust U.S. containment approach to Middle East security should have the following six pillars:
One, the prevention of Iran’s possession of nuclear arms and more broadly the spread of WMDs in the region. Nothing messes up the Middle East security puzzle more profoundly than a nuclear-armed Iran. While the historic deal that has been recently reached is not without holes and imperfections, even its most ardent critics concur that it does make it very difficult for Iran to race to the bomb for the next ten to fifteen years without getting caught. The severity of the challenge of convincing Iran to abandon the bomb after the deal expires will mostly depend on Iranian behavior in the region for the next decade.
Two, the deterrence of large-scale military conflict and, if deterrence fails, military intervention on the side of U.S. partners. That is an old U.S. security objective that should continue. Simply put, war is domestic development’s worst enemy and biggest distraction. The United States’ preponderant military presence in the Gulf, its ability to effectively project military power and quickly transfer military assets from other regions, and its willingness to use force should continue to help deter the occurrence of large-scale interstate war in the Middle East. Since the risk of major Arab-Israeli war is much reduced in today’s regional environment, the more likely scenario of interstate war in the Middle East is currently one in which Iran and its allies go to arms with its adversaries—be it Egypt, Israel, or some Arab Gulf states. Many have argued that Obama damaged U.S. credibility when he decided not to take military action against Syrian leader Bashar Assad, despite drawing a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons.
Credibility is essential to deterrence effectiveness, and U.S. deterrence did take a hit following the Syrian episode, but one should not exaggerate its significance or conclude that it caused Iran to feel that it now has license to attack its neighbors. A rational actor more often than not, Iran understands the language of deterrence and knows better than to provoke the United States—the most powerful military on earth. In short, aside from more effective diplomacy, there is little the United States can add to its conventional military deterrent posture in the Middle East to make it more robust.
Three, the stopping of escalation in the event of another war between Israel and Hezbollah, and Israel and Hamas. Since 1991, all high-intensity military conflicts in the Middle East have involved a state and a nonstate actor—a trend that is likely to continue into the future, given the increasing influence of militant non-state actors. Israel’s successive wars over the past few years with Hamas and with Hezbollah have caused a tremendous amount of death and destruction, and could flare up again due to lingering tensions and unresolved issues.
The United States has always urged all parties to preserve the peace, but the reality is that it cannot deter potential conflagrations and specifically stop any side from initially resorting to violence. What the United States can do, once bullets start flying, is actively prevent escalation by taking concrete diplomatic action to stop Israel from using excessive force against Lebanon and the Palestinian people.
Tactical successes notwithstanding, none of Israel’s military operations against Hezbollah and Hamas achieved strategic objectives or enhanced Israel’s security. On the contrary, Hezbollah, and perhaps less so Hamas, rebounded and became stronger after each Israeli military campaign. This does not imply that Israel should ignore or dismiss the military threat posed by Hezbollah or Hamas. However, it does suggest that effective policies of containment against Hezbollah, in consultation with the United States, would work better than military policies that lead to escalation. Hezbollah and Hamas, despite their aggressive rhetoric, are nowhere near capable, by any objective standard, of challenging the existence of the state of Israel.
Four, the reduction of the scope and severity of civil wars.The United States’ military interventions in Vietnam, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq strongly weaken the case that Washington can successfully resolve civil wars. Although not impossible, it is highly unlikely. That Washington has vowed not to intervene in Syria’s ongoing civil war, therefore, should come as no surprise. A U.S. strategy of civil war containment may lack morality or political resoluteness, but in most cases it provides a less costly and more effective option for the United States, local antagonists, and the region.
Containing civil wars essentially requires reducing their severity, preventing them from spilling over to neighboring states, and helping to create the necessary conditions for a political settlement. Containing the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars is currently much harder and costlier than it was a few years ago, though it is not unthinkable. In Syria’s case, many have argued that before scores of jihadists entered the conflict, the international community and specifically the United States had an opportunity to end the civil war by intervening militarily by air to help the moderate rebels topple the Assad regime.
But Washington refused to pursue that option, saying that it preferred that the Syrian government and the rebels to negotiate a solution. As time went on, the fighting escalated, jihadists proliferated, and huge atrocities took place, but Washington continued to resist the use of force. It argued that U.S. military intervention would lead to further chaos and sectarian killing in Syria, given the absence of a viable alternative to Assad. Very few can currently argue against these U.S. claims given the catastrophic conditions in Syria, but many can convincingly say that Washington did very little to prevent those conditions from reaching such terrible levels. If its goal was a political settlement among Syrians, Washington did almost nothing to pursue it. In its Syria calculus, Washington missed the notion that the road to a negotiated settlement goes through a successful U.S. containment strategy whose pillars include training and equipping a secular military opposition; working with allies and neighboring states to stem the flow of foreign fighters across borders; and setting up safe zones and protected, safe-passage corridors in northwest Syria and along the Turkish border, so refugees can return and humanitarian aid can be provided.
The story of U.S. travails in Iraq is not that dissimilar. While the United States has invested much more in building an Iraqi army that can protect the country from internal and external dangers, there is still a long way to go, as evidenced by the Iraqi security forces (ISF)’ embarrassing military performances against ISIS and their failure to halt ISIS’s control of a sizeable chunk of Iraqi territory.
Five, the degrading of violent, extremist groups. It is a truism that achieving a decisive victory against a terrorist organization such as Al Qaeda or an extremist insurgency such as ISIS requires far more than the use of force. Another evident truth is that, because it cannot do it alone, the United States would have to work with its regional partners to ultimately defeat Al Qaeda and ISIS. To help those partners address the underlying conditions that have led to Al Qaeda and ISIS’s rise, the United States should help significantly degrade both groups’ military capabilities.
Six, the limiting of Iranian destabilizing influence in the region.The stationing of powerful U.S. military assets in the Gulf helps deter Iran from attacking or coercing its Gulf neighbors. It also provides some security assurances to U.S. regional partners and contributes to fighting terrorists in and from the region. But very few of those assets are well-suited to deal with Tehran’s ability, which it has honed for decades, to create and work through local, nonstate proxies. Indeed, supersonic and multirole fighter jets, aircraft carriers, missile defenses, and other forward-deployed weapons systems and units are strong deterrents against Iran’s conventional military capabilities, including its expanding missile arsenal, but these tools do not affect or guard against this powerful network of nonstate surrogates that Iran has been developing since the early 1980s.
There has always been a heavy emphasis on external defense in U.S. force posture in the Gulf, but it is about time for the Pentagon to seriously incorporate tools into its posture that boost internal security within the Arab Gulf states. Instead of aimlessly increasing its troop levels in or deploying more hardware to the Gulf following a potential Iran nuclear deal, the United States should focus instead on cooperating more closely on intelligence and threat assessments with its Gulf partners, and specifically help build their capacities to train and equip their law enforcement agencies and directorates of analysis so they can better assess, detect, and counter Iranian interference. Border security is a vulnerability for the Arab Gulf states. Therefore, greater investment in persistent, long-range, and high-altitude intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities is a must for ensuring customs border protection, and the United States can help both train local forces and, if necessary, deploy jointly. Partner-capacity-building priorities also should include cyber security—a domain in which Iran has considerably enhanced its capabilities over the years.
In the end, “whatever the course, however long the process took, and whatever its outcome,” President George H. W. Bush said on Soviet reforms under Mikhail Gorbachev, “I wanted to see stable, and above all peaceful, change.” The Middle East is currently going through its own revolutionary changes, and it is critically important, as Bush National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft cautioned at a time when the Soviet empire was collapsing, to “mold and guide [these changes] into channels that would produce the right outcome.”
Bilal Y. Saab is Senior Fellow for Middle East Security at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council.
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