Two high-profile events have set the stage for President Bush’s final year in the White House. The Annapolis peace conference in November signified a new commitment by his administration to press for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. And by visiting the Middle East himself in January the US president has, for the first time since coming to office, put himself centre-stage in the region’s affairs.
Most observers have confined themselves to asking whether the ambitious target of a “signed peace treaty” (Mr Bush’s words) can be met by the end of 2008 – and have answered the question in the negative. Scepticism is indeed in order, but it may be more helpful to view the president’s aims in a broader regional context. He wants not only to promote Arab-Israeli peace but to sound a warning about Iran’s new power and ambition, to get the help of allies in stabilising Iraq and in return reassure them that America will support them diplomatically, economically and militarily. In a sense these different aims can be summed up under a single heading: President Bush wants to leave office with the Middle East in better shape.
What does that mean? Listen to Mr Bush’s rhetoric, and you hear the persistence of two big themes dear to his heart: the conflicts in the Middle East are part of a much bigger global struggle between good and evil, and the overarching aim of Western policy must be to transform dictatorships into democracies. But the rhetoric disguises a significant shift: US diplomacy is actually geared to more modest ends. It is no longer transformative but incremental – an old-fashioned effort to nudge the different parties in the right direction rather than try to achieve grandiose and unattainable goals.
There are still contradictions, as the administration’s different preferences pull it in different directions. Iran is an obvious example, where the signals from Washington veer from the conciliatory to the confrontational. But on the whole George Bush now heads an administration whose instincts are more pragmatic than his own, and whose priority is damage limitation rather than fresh adventures.
There will undoubtedly be testing times in the region during the next twelve months. The real test of the “surge” in Iraq will come in the summer, when US troop numbers are due to return to their pre-surge levels – and when, if all goes to plan, sensitive provinces such as Anbar will be under Iraqi rather than American control.
The chances that a variety of pressures on Iran will begin to defuse the nuclear issue are slim; so too are the prospects for successful power-sharing arrangements between either the Lebanese or the Palestinians. Failure to reunite Gaza and the West Bank under a single authority – and internal threats to the fragile governing coalition in Israel – will jeopardise the chances of an Israeli-Palestinian deal. This does not mean that nothing whatever can be achieved. In this most recalcitrant of regions, damage limitation is a more realistic goal than transformation. Accordingly a new American pragmatism, if it persists, will be widely welcomed. Given the choice, the world would prefer this administration to end with a whimper than with a bang.
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