As Barack Obama surveys a region where his administration’s failures have so far outweighed its successes, his most obvious challenges are to revive a non-existent Middle East peace process, maintain international pressure on Iran, help Iraq stand on its own feet, and find an exit strategy in Afghanistan. Other issues – such as the growing impatience of the young with the failings of the region’s autocratic rulers – may force themselves upon the president’s attention, distracting him from his own, already difficult agenda. Does he possess the leadership qualities necessary to meet these challenges? Could he, for example, seize the initiative on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, as some are urging, by coming up with a peace plan of his own – or will his advisers warn him that a bruising confrontation with the pro-Israel lobby could jeopardise his chances of re-election in 2012?
The president has shown that, when he chooses, he can hold fast to his convictions, regardless of setbacks and pressures to change course. Notably, having promised to withdraw combat troops from Iraq by August 2010, he kept his word – despite legitimate fears (expressed, for example, by a veteran US diplomat and former ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker) that the country was not strong enough to stand alone. Iraq is and will remain a far from happy place, but the evidence so far is that the president’s decision was the right one. The likelihood is that the country will limp forward, its progress hampered by political feuding and intermittent violence, but without becoming so acutely unstable as to require renewed American intervention. Will US forces leave Iraq altogether by the president’s stated deadline of the end of 2011? That will depend on whether the new government in Baghdad – finally cobbled together after a painfully long period of intrigue and paralysis – wants a smaller force to remain. If it does, the issue could conceivably be fudged so that President Obama and Prime Minister Maliki can save face in the eyes of their respective people, neither of whom are enamoured of a prolonged embrace.
There can be little doubt that this is an administration that, given the prevailing concern over ‘imperial overstretch’, prefers to avoid direct military intervention wherever possible. It would prefer, in military terms, to make as clean a break with Iraq as possible; to move towards an eventual withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan (starting in 2014: the deadline of July 2011 has been quietly buried); and to avoid getting sucked into future quagmires in Yemen or elsewhere. At the same time, it is anxious to avoid military confrontation with Iran, despite the assertive behaviour of that country’s president both at home and abroad. Though the word ‘containment’ smacks of weakness in some Washington circles, the administration believes there are some grounds for thinking Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been contained, at least for the time being, through a mixture of sanctions and subversion.
Meanwhile an issue the Obama administration might wish to avoid, but will be obliged to confront, is how far it is willing to press the case for better governance in the region. Its critics, on both left and right, feel it has been too timid in this regard. Many argue it is not enough to speak out against the failings of America’s enemies (such as Iran), at a time when so many of its allies are facing a crisis of legitimacy. The signs of this crisis are visible everywhere: the recent unrest in Tunisia and Algeria; the worries about who will succeed President Mubarak in Egypt and King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia; the pervasive sense that, across the region, there are large and growing numbers of young people – many of them graduates without jobs – who blame their corrupt and autocratic leaders for the glaring lack of hope and dignity in their lives. Even if the region escapes major conflict in 2011 – for example, through a flare-up of violence between Israel and Hamas, or between Israel and Hizbullah – this deep-rooted malaise is likely to produce consequences that neither local leaders nor the outside world will be able to ignore.
In 2011, containment of the Greater Middle East’s most pressing problems may be the best we can hope for, rather than eye-catching breakthroughs. But what lies beyond? Although the region remains a pressure-cooker of tensions, a different scenario can be imagined – admittedly, with some effort – if one looks beyond the immediate prospects to the medium term. Seasoned observers in Washington expect that, despite his current difficulties, Barack Obama will win a second term in 2012. If he can recover from the mistakes and miscalculations of his first two years in office – if he can begin to make progress on the all–important Israeli-Palestinian issue – and if the condition of Iraq and Afghanistan, however dismal, is no worse than it is today – then the chances of fulfilling at least some of the promise of his Cairo speech will look less bleak than they do today. Back then in June 2009 a young, articulate president offered the Muslim world a new and more hopeful relationship with the United States. That task, as he must now realise all too clearly, is fraught with difficulties of every kind. But it is not inconceivable that, if he wins a second term, that new relationship might gradually begin to materialise.
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