Matt Yglesias

Going Offshore

John Mearsheimer has an article in Newsweek outlining his proposed strategy for US policy toward the Middle East “offshore balancing” as a military posture plus indifference to what goes on inside these states. I’m not so sure about the indifference, but I think it’s worth observing that Mearsheimer’s points about military posture hold up independently from the deep theoretical roots that he uses to ground them.

The question Mearsheimer is raising is whether it really makes sense for us to maintain extensive military facilities in and around the Persian Gulf. These bases are costly for the United States, both in terms of their direct financial cost and also in terms of the fact that unlike our European bases they’re extremely unwelcome. And the benefits are pretty obscure. Until the Gulf War, we got along without this massive apparatus and in fact we were able to prosecute the war successfully without it. And for better or for worse, the Iraqi threat that the apparatus was supposed to contain is gone.

Meanwhile, I think a lot of people have the sense that these bases are giving us “influence” in a key region of the world. But the influence is actually hard to see. The Saudis aren’t selling us discount oil. And our bases don’t give us any magical abilities to spread democracy.

Israel’s Test

It’s good news that Israel is evacuating an illegal (under Israeli law) settlement in Hebron, but as Moran Banai points out commitment to the rule of law requires Israel to act swiftly to dismantle all illegal settlements.

A big part of the issue here, of course, is that many if not all of the “legal” settlements are going to need to go at some point. And nobody on the Palestinian side is going to have any confidence that Israel will ever do that as long as the government continues to not enforce even its own laws against settlement expansion and outpost building.

“Addressing the Arab-Israeli Conflict”

In contrast to the disappointing essay referenced below, the new Brookings-CFR bundle ‘o reports on US policy toward the Middle East contains a pretty great chapter by Steven Cook and Shibley Telhami. It’s what a think tank policy report should be — bold, independent, and unconstrained by political fashion. Some excerpts below the fold:

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Post-Cedar Lebanon

Thanassis Cambanis, who’s covered the Middle East for The Boston Globe and The New York Times, has an original commentary out for Middle East Progress on how to deal with the new Lebanese realities rather than the fantasies of the Cedar Revolution:

In short, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran are stronger in Lebanon that any point in the last decade. In order to foster better ties with a Lebanese government that includes Hezbollah as well as the pro-Western coalition, U.S. policy makers should consider building stronger relations with ambiguous Lebanese politicians who must deal with Hezbollah as a practical matter. And Washington might have to make a thorny choice: find a way to deal with a government dominated by Hezbollah, or else cut off all ties and relations with one of the few states in the Middle East where a real battle of ideas has been joined. The dialogue in Lebanon is no less critical because of the struggle between Hezbollah, which maintains its own independent military, and those who want the state at last to exercise a real monopoly on security.

It will no doubt be awkward to find a way to forge relations with a state that has at its center a group defined as terrorist by Washington and several European countries including Britain, and which remains in a state of war with Israel, America’s closest Middle East ally. But more complex political quandaries have been resolved, and in this case the formula will probably involve Americans talking directly to independents that have close ties to Hezbollah, rather than party officials themselves.

To add an obvious addendum to this, clearly policy toward Lebanon will be impacted by whether or not the United States chooses to aggressively pursue the seemingly promising possibility of Israel-Syria peace talks. But it seems to me that this kind of approach to Lebanon would be a useful complement to an approach to Syria.

Necessary Risks

Shadi Hamid writes that the United States needs to rethink its approach to the Middle East in a more fundamental way than perhaps many progressive leaders are thus far prepared to do:

While there is a well-deserved consensus that the Bush administration has caused untold damage to our relationship with the Arab
and Muslim world, it would be a mistake to think that eight years of Republican rule are an anomaly in an otherwise proud history of
successful engagement. The reality is more troubling: American policy has been consistently self-defeating under administrations of both parties for more than five decades.

I think that’s right. As Hamid says, America’s cozy relationship with unpopular Arab despots is, in many ways, at the root of our larger problem vis-a-vis the Muslim world. Simply stepping back from Bush-style unilateralism is a good idea, but it won’t actually resolve that problem. And I think most of his policy recommendations are good. I’m a bit wary, however, of the idea that we should “elevate democracy promotion through aid conditionality.” This is a popular suggestion, but I think it has a lot of problems. One way you could implement it would be to say to the King of Jordan “either write and adopt a democratic constitution and hold free and fair elections to fill the office by 2010 after which you step aside or we’re cutting you off.” That would presumably result in the King telling us to get lost, and us cutting off aid. But that’s typically not what democracy promoters have in mind. Instead, they want us to make more moderate demands (”a set of benchmarks, including respect of opposition rights, freedom of expression, and progress toward holding free elections, even if only on the municipal level at first”) that, presumably, the incumbent authorities are more likely to accept.

But this sets up an odd dynamic. In effect, clever State Department bureaucrats are trying to trick the Mubaraks and Husseins of the world into accepting deals that lead to them losing their grip on power. But common sense indicates that this is closer to the core area of competence of the dictators than of the State Department. Most likely, they’ll trick us, proposing cosmetic reforms that fundamentally change nothing. Meanwhile, we’re now officially certifying shame reform processes. Beyond that, in a larger sense the nexus of terrorism, US policy, and Arab autocracy isn’t just about electoral systems, it’s about control and autonomy and specifically the sense that the United States is trying to push Arabs around, tell them what to do, and control their lives and their countries. Attempting to micromanage political reform in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere is likely to compound that problem rather than ameliorate it. This is especially true in light of the fact that, as Hamid says, American motives are viewed with enormous suspicion in the region.

Better would be to embrace Hamid’s other ideas and then, I think, just distance ourselves from some of these autocratic regimes. The next president should decline to invite Saudi princes to his vacation house. Instead of selling these regimes advanced weaponry and then offsetting that with special extra goodies for Israel, we could just not sell the advanced weaponry and eschew the extra goodies for Israel. And the president can say that while he won’t dictate internal policy to Arab governments, America’s view is that democracy is good, and we would be happy to deal with democratically elected governments no matter who won which elections.