Obama's Mideast policies are working
To listen to the president’s critics, Secretary of State John Kerry is heading off this weekend to a Middle East where U.S. policy is failing – galactically.
Last week in the Washington Post, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and again in Foreign Policy, blasted the Obama administration for creating a vacuum in the Middle and betraying American successes in Iraq. A host of others have maintained that the president’s policies are leaderless, lacking strategy and marked by gross inconsistency, if not incompetence.
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But beneath the politics, propaganda, and punditry lies a much different reality.
Trapped in a Middle East region it can neither fix nor leave, the United States has settled on a realistic, disciplined and selective form of engagement. When it comes to what really matters, the Obama administration is advancing America’s core interests; and in doing so, it has separated out what can realistically be accomplished from what cannot.
There’s little doubt that the administration’s reaction to the dizzying array of political changes and turbulence sweeping the Arab world has been far from skillful and rarely sure-footed.
For several years now, and certainly since the beginning of the Arab Spring in 2011, administration critics have hammered the president for what they charge is an absence of U.S. leadership.
And America’s actions can be baffling: The United States intervenes reluctantly in Libya but not in Syria, where an endless civil war has killed 100,000 and hemorrhages refugees and radicalism. It has made a mess of its relationship with Egypt, refusing to act boldly in defense of its principles against either the Islamists or the military – thus alienating Egyptians from one end of political spectrum to the other. Traditional American allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia question U.S. resolve on Syria and Iran, too.
Critics see all this as an abdication of responsibility. But in the wake of the two longest, and among the most profitless, wars in U.S. history, it’s more an acceptance of reality and the limits of influence. There is little public support and not much logic for a major effort to bring democracy to societies that cannot provide basic security, governance and prosperity to their people.
Think of it this way: If, with hundreds of thousands of U.S. forces and billions of dollars expended in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has failed to deliver good and effective governance, how can it possibly do so in war-wracked Syria? Given the serious disrepair in America’s own broken house, there’s zero public support for expending resources to fix someone else’s. And rightly so, because let’s face it: Helping to bring the democracy to the Arab world is a discretionary interest. That’s not because politics in the Arab world are unimportant; it’s because they’re largely beyond America’s capacity to control, let alone repair.
When it comes to America’s core interests — where the United States puts its time, money and resources — the administration is not only on the right track, but faring reasonably well. Several of these interests are doubly important because they also carry great consequence for America’s domestic well being, too.
First, the administration has been effective in advancing the most vital interest of all — and the organizing principle of any nation’s foreign policy — protecting the homeland. America may not be safe; but it’s certainly safer as a result of counterterrorism policies that have tracked and killed Osama bin Laden, dismantled much of al Qaeda’s core and prevented another spectacular attack against the continental United States.
Second, the administration is well on its way toward extricating itself from both Afghanistan and Iraq — conflicts that have resulted in thousands of Americans killed, scores of thousands with life-crippling injuries and a massive expenditure of resources and credibility that by any standard was hardly worth the price the country paid. And the administration has been smart about that disengagement, neither delaying it unnecessarily nor obsessing and handwringing over the prospects of unhappy post-withdrawal scenarios. That we will leave a sizeable residual force to train and assist Afghan security makes sense. But clearly the future of Afghanistan, like Iraq, will be determined less by what we do while we’re there and more what they do when we leave.
Third, the United States is weaning itself off Arab hydrocarbons. In 2011, the U.S. imported 45 percent of the liquid fuels it used, down from 60 percent just six years earlier. A new Western Hemispheric oil order is emerging, at the expense of the Middle East. Between new oil in Brazil, oil-sands production in Canada and shale-gas technology here at home, by 2020 we could cut our dependence on non-Western Hemisphere oil by half, according to oil guru Daniel Yergin. Combine that with the rise in national oil production and greater focus on fuel efficiency and conservation, and the trend lines are at least running in the direction of less reliance of Middle East oil, and perhaps less obsessing over its politics, too.
Fourth, the U.S. is more seriously engaged now than ever in a determined effort to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capacity. Whether this effort will succeed is impossible to say, but the U.S. has mixed a potentially effective cocktail of biting sanctions, diplomacy and the possibility of the use of military force to create circumstances for a negotiated deal that won’t transform U.S.-Iranian relations; but might start with a smaller transaction for future progress.
Fifth, for the first time in almost four years, serious Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are on again thanks largely to Secretary of State John Kerry. How consequential the effort turns out to be will depend on what happens when the talks move from the negotiator to the leaders level, and on what role Washington will play. But if the Obama administration is realistic, it may well produce some kind of agreement on some of the core issues.
Barack Obama can’t fix the Middle East, end Syria’s civil war, and create democratic polities there. But that doesn’t mean he’s failing. Instead, after a decade in which American leaders seemed to believe we had no limits on our power, we’re much more honest with ourselves now about what we can and cannot do.
Transforming this broken, angry region may not be possible. But we can and are doing smart transactions. The growing realization that we can’t fix everything and the world shouldn’t expect us to is a good thing. And it couldn’t have come at a better time, particularly for a nation whose own house in so badly in need of repair.
Aaron David Miller is vice president for new initiatives and a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His forthcoming book is titled Can America Have Another Great President?
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/obamas-mideast-policies-are-working-99262.html#ixzz2jdEO8qEe
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