The United States is in deep trouble in the Middle East. Despite Barack Obama’s promises to withdraw from Iraq, the debacle there shows no sign of ending soon. Hamas rules in Gaza; Iran is quickly moving to acquire a nuclear deterrent. We need a radically different strategy for the region.
Fortunately, there is a strategy that has proved effective in the past and could serve again today: “offshore balancing.” It’s less ambitious than President Bush’s grand plan to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, but it would be much better at protecting actual U.S. interests. The United States would station its military forces outside the region. And “balancing” would mean we’d rely on regional powers like Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia to check each other. Washington would remain diplomatically engaged, and when necessary would assist the weaker side in a conflict. It would also use its air and naval power to respond quickly to unexpected threats. But—and this is the key point—America would put boots on the ground only if the local balance of power seriously broke down and one country threatened to dominate the others.
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The strategy has three particular virtues. First, it would significantly reduce the chances that we would get involved in another bloody and costly war like Iraq. America doesn’t need to control the Middle East with its own forces; it merely needs to ensure that no other country does.
Second, offshore balancing would ameliorate America’s terrorism problem. Foreign occupiers generate fierce resentment. Keeping America’s military forces out of sight would minimize the anger created by having them stationed on Arab soil.
Third, offshore balancing would reduce fears in Iran and Syria that the United States aims to attack them and remove their regimes—a key reason these states are currently seeking weapons of mass destruction. Persuading Tehran to abandon its nuclear program will require Washington to address Iran’s legitimate security concerns and to refrain from overt threats.
A final, compelling reason to adopt this approach is that nothing else has worked. After the Gulf war, the Clinton administration pursued a “dual containment” strategy: instead of using Iraq and Iran to check each other, the United States began trying to contain both. As a result, both came to view the United States as a bitter enemy. The policy also required the United States to deploy large numbers of troops in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which helped persuade Osama bin Laden to declare war on America.
It’s realistic, cost-effective (don’t underestimate the role played by the Iraq war in the current economic crisis), and barebones enough to help concentrate on basic national interest essentials rather than a hodgepodge of a times contradictory aims. Importantly, one of its implicit recommendations is that when the balance shifts too much towards Israel (as in the peace-processing of the 1990s or the Bush administration) it needs to be corrected.
Let a natural balance of power emerge – a concert of nations for the Middle East, hopefully with a fair solution for the Palestinians. It would be tremendously less destructive to the region than constant war, sanctions and shock-and-awe displays of military might.
I don’t know whether a whole sentence can be an oxymoron, but “… a natural balance of power … with a fair solution for the Palestinians” is as good a candidate as I’ve seen in a while. Natural balances of power – as any third grader who had the crap beaten out of them by a fifth grader can attest – don’t tend to be fair, and in this specific context the solution that arises for the Palestinians out of a natural balance of power would probably be a final one.
Unless the Arabist has undergone a bit of a transformation, I don’t think that’s what it’s advocating.
I guess someone could argue that in the long term Palestinians have demographics on their side – that the day’s going to come when the “natural balance of power” is going to swing over to the folks who can afford to send out so many teenagers with slingshots that the teenagers with M40s on the other side run out of ammo or get buried under a landslide of corpses, but that’s hardly a neater and cleaner way to get to “fair solution.”
Is public diplomacy as such unworkable? Or is it that public diplomacy as practiced under the disinterested and cack-handed Bush administration didn’t work?
I see your point – but then again I do think Israel would not be in the same position of total dominance (i.e. political, diplomatic and military) without lopsided US support for it. Right now we have a first grader being beaten up by a third grader while a seventh grader helps him and at the same time keeps anyone else from interfering.
Nonetheless, even if it doesn’t help the Palestinians, this kind of policy seems better for average Americans than any pursued in the last 20 years.
As for public diplomacy, its entire basis is that you can convince people to like your policies no matter what their impact is. It’s a waste of time and essentially a propaganda effort. The problem right now is not that the US explains its aims badly. I am in favor of more cultural diplomacy, “high” culture especially, but that’s something entirely different.
(And by the way, I like you gravatar)
“Offshore balancing” sounds like a trendy rephrasing of good old regional balances of power, or regional security systems, a very old idea in international relations that has had little traction in the modern Middle East precisely because the US and to some extent GBR did not trust the so-called “natural” regional balance and, having thrown their lot in with Israel as their main enforcer/proxy in the region, were committed to continue to prop it up despite the imbalances and problems its creation led to.
If the US really wants to see a Middle East in which countries can take care of their regional security and sort out their problems without going to war (something that its Cold War-era efforts at regional balancing never did), it should try to learn the lessons of Latin America, where encouraging democratization and backing off from Cold War-driven interventions and politicking (and most importantly, letting go of “our bastards”) allowed stable regional powers to develop and produce a semblance of self-balancing regional order.