The Arab Spring And U.S. Interests

---

Ever since President Anwar Sadat of Egypt expelled his Soviet advisers in the early 1970s and aligned his country with Washington, the United States has been the dominant external power in the Middle East.

Before that decisive turn, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a Cold War competition in the region that Moscow - patron of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria - sometimes seemed to be winning. Earlier in the Twentieth Century, Britain and France dominated the region as inheritors of fragments of the Ottoman Empire. Today no country can match the United States' overwhelming military power or the wide and deep strategic and economic ties that it has forged through its petro-alliance with Saudi Arabia, its military partnerships in the Gulf, its willingness to deploy armed force, its global battle against al-Qaeda, its campaign against Iran, its protective relationship with Israel and its stewardship of what is known as the Arab-Israeli peace process.

With this power come responsibility and the worldwide expectation that the United States will somehow interject itself into or try to manage every crisis, and the belief that a failure by Washington to act represents a policy decision that will, in and of itself, influence the outcome. Yet the United States is not omnipotent, and the people who make its strategic decisions are not omniscient. One clear lesson of the events known as the Arab Spring is that there are times when Washington does not know what to do or even what it wants, and in a turbulent region whose populations are increasingly alienated from the United States its ability to bring about particular outcomes is quite limited.

As the Georgetown University scholar Daniel Bynam wrote recently, "Americans like to think that all problems can be solved and that, if they aren't, incompetence or malfeasance is to blame. Often, however, the challenge is overwhelming and U.S. influence is limited...few foreign policy problems can truly be solved. Most can at best be managed, and just getting by is often the best we can do." [1]

The Middle East, in the words of former U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller, is "a region we seem unable to fix and unable to leave." [2] Like everyone else, including many of the participants, the administration of President Barack Obama appears to have been taken completely by surprise by the wave of dissent that swept from Tunisia to Yemen in late 2010 and early 2011. No planning document listed options for responding to the downfall of regimes that had been in place for decades. That the administration did not see it coming or respond in a coherent fashion should not be grounds for criticism because events outran Washington's ability to analyze them and understand their implications.

This was hardly unique to Obama. Modern American history offers many examples of presidents whose foreign policy agendas were overtaken by sudden, unexpected international crises that required immediate responses in uncertain situations: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor, Harry Truman and the Korean war, Jimmy Carter and the Iranian revolution, John F. Kennedy and the Cuban missile crises, Richard Nixon and the 1973 Middle East war, George H.W. Bush and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, George W. Bush and the attacks of September 11, 2001. When Bill Clinton first ran for president in 1992, nobody could foretell that war in the Balkans would be the dominant international issue of his first term. Such events defy predictive policies. General principles may not change, but applying them, and deciding whether to use force, is much harder-a quandary that was exemplified by the seemingly endless "lift and strike" debate over Bosnia.

Small countries on the fringe of global events - Uruguay, for example, or Laos - may be able to sit out such events without involving themselves one way or another except perhaps by voting at the United Nations. The United States does not have that luxury, especially in the Middle East, where the speed, complexity and unpredictability of developments may outstrip the ability to forge a coherent response. This is a fact of life for Obama, and it would have been a fact of life for Obama's Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, if he had won the 2012 presidential election.

The strategic and economic importance of the Middle East is so great that the region will occupy much of the time and energy of any U.S. administration. But it is also possible to imagine events outside that region that would be of such overwhelming, immediate urgency during the next four years that the Middle East would be moved down on the agenda: Fidel Castro dies and civil war breaks out in Cuba, for example, or China invades Taiwan, or renewed civil war in Bosnia threatens the stability of all of Eastern Europe. No president will be able to predict or control such events.

To the extent that any president and his team are focusing on the Middle East, however, they will be operating in support of multiple, longstanding, strategic and economic interests that remain in place regardless of developments in individual countries and regardless of who is president. American leaders often disagree on the tactics by which these interests should be pursued - active intervention or quiet diplomacy? unilateral military action or coordination with allies? - but the larger objectives remain, and form the foundation of U.S. policy.

These interests include access to oil and freedom of navigation to transport it; the security of Israel; containment of Iran; limiting the spread of weapons of mass destruction; countering Islamic radicalism and the threat of terrorism; promoting trade, including the sale of arms; and the advancement of human rights and individual freedom.

In the administration of any president, each of these causes has advocates who would put them first in the shaping of policy while others would prefer to see them subordinated to some different priority. And each president chooses from this menu of objectives to emphasize some over others. President Jimmy Carter, for example, gave high importance to the promotion of human rights-although he put this issue aside when dealing with Saudi Arabia, in accordance with longstanding U.S. policy -- while President Obama has devoted more energy to curtailing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Relations with individual countries are also influenced by Congress: Israel always has strong bipartisan support, so decisions that could affect its security, such as arms sales, must always pass through that prism. More than a dozen countries have official "caucuses," or groups of supporters, in Congress; the list includes Bangladesh, Turkey, Morocco, Kenya and India. It does not include Saudi Arabia, which has no friends in Congress and yet has been a critical link in U.S. energy and security arrangements for seven decades.

Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, put the issue this way in a recent paper: "Prioritizing competing interests -- which in practice often means maintaining distasteful double standards -- is a fact of life for great powers, especially in times of war and conflict, as is the case in the Middle East today. While principle should define policy whenever possible, expediency is often deemed necessary. The key is not to let expediency become the 'new normal.'" [3]

That is why it has been so difficult for the United States to forge a coherent, consistent set of responses to the upheavals known as the Arab Spring, and why it will remain difficult, if not impossible, in Obama's second term. In the abstract the United States supports the replacement of dictators by popular representative governments, but on the ground in the Middle East other considerations often prevail; each country's situation has evoked a different U.S. policy response because some objective other than human rights emerged as more important. In addition, every decision regarding the Arab Spring has been influenced by the determination of Obama and his advisers to put an end to U.S. military adventures in Muslim countries. In their view, the American people had had enough after more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and would not support a full-fledged intervention in the Middle East for any reason other than an invasion of a friendly country by a hostile power, as happened in Kuwait in 1990.

And despite the substantial presence of U.S. military forces, whoever is president will be required to deal with the region from a position of strategic and political weakness caused by the grotesquely wrongheaded decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Saddam Hussein was Iran's most implacable and dangerous foe; his removal eliminated Iran's most troublesome security threat, delivered Iraq into Iran's sphere of influence, undermined American credibility, stoked sectarian conflict, and sabotaged American popularity all across the Muslim world. Recovering from the malign aftereffects of that invasion and helping Iraq maintain itself as a unitary state will be among the many difficult challenges of Obama's second term. The difficulty will be compounded if the conflict in Syria sparks an independence movement among the region's Kurds, who live in Turkey and Iran as well as in Iraq and Syria.

Throughout the U.S. presidential election year of 2012, as a candidate backed by the Muslim Brotherhood became president of Egypt, casualties mounted in Syria, and the U.S. ambassador to Libya was assassinated, Obama faced widespread criticism for what was perceived as his inconsistent and indecisive response to events.

In a sharply-worded paper published by the Brookings Institution during that summer, for example, Shadi Hamad, director of research at the Brookings branch in Qatar, wrote that the administration "has avoided articulating a broader vision or grand strategy and instead emphasized the need for a 'boutique strategy' that focuses on the specifics of each particular case. Considering the vastly different contexts of each country, this is unavoidable. Yet, a case-by-case approach, to be successful, needs to be guided by a coherent vision. Despite the historical import of the Arab Spring, there is nothing approaching the unified purpose of Truman's Marshall Plan or even the rhetorical sharpness of [George W.] Bush's short-lived 'freedom agenda.' The scale and scope of Obama's declared policies can at times seem tepid. The amount of U.S. economic assistance promised to transitional countries is minimal, dwarfed by the commitments made by the Gulf countries." [4]

At the height of his challenge to Obama in the 2012 campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney joined in this chorus, accusing the president of mishandling the Arab Spring uprisings. "The Arab Spring presented an opportunity to help move millions of people from oppression to freedom," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. "But it also presented grave risks. We needed a strategy for success, but the president offered none." [5]

It may be fair to say that Obama offered no overall "strategy for success" in responding to the bewildering events in the region, but neither did Romney, other than the meaningless assertion that the United States must deal from a position of strength. Nor could he have done so, because as he and his advisers surely knew, there is no single strategy. Each situation is different, as are the stakes for the United States. Events are moving rapidly. The countries involved are groping for their own futures. The rival currents within Islam are just beginning to sort themselves out. No one knows who will be running Libya or Egypt or Yemen five years from now. Indeed some American academic analysts have concluded that the "Arab Spring" is actually an inevitable process of sorting out the issues of state, nationality and border that were left unresolved after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire-a process that was held in check for decades by the colonial powers but has finally burst forth, with conclusions that cannot be foretold. And meanwhile, the possibility of war with Iran could make all other plans and considerations irrelevant.

If Romney had been president in 2011, his administration might have made different decisions in each situation from those that Obama made, but he would still have had to make those decisions case by case, because no comprehensive strategy was available.

In Libya, for example, NATO allies were willing to take the lead in helping the rebels oust Muammar Qaddafi; the United States had little to lose by participating in NATO's military action, and a quick resolution to the conflict was desirable in order to bring oil exports back on line and prevent further casualties. Moreover, the allies' airborne intervention was ratified by the U.N. Security Council, providing political cover for the participants. In Yemen, where oil is not an important factor and the primary U.S. interest is containing al-Qaeda, it was easy to leave the heavy lifting to Saudi Arabia and its partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council, who were directly threatened by the prospect of a spillover of Yemeni violence and who largely shared U.S. policy objectives. In Tunisia, there was no need for the United States to get involved at all.

The degree of difficulty in deciding how to respond in other countries caught up in the Arab Spring was considerably greater. In Syria, it was tempting for Obama to intervene on behalf of the rebels because they could bring down a ruler who was a crucial ally of Iran and a supporter of Hezbollah, a dangerous foe of Israel. But the regime in Damascus is much stronger than those of Libya or Yemen, and showed itself willing to spill as much blood as necessary to stay in power. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar provided limited amounts of weapons and humanitarian assistance to the rebels, but Washington resisted calls to arm the rebels or to use its air power to counter Syrian bombing raids because of fear that if the wrong faction emerges on top, the country's huge arsenal of chemical weapons will fall into hostile hands, Sunni extremists sympathetic to al-Qaeda will take over, and Syria will then present a much greater threat to Israel than it did under Bashar al-Assad. After initial hesitation, the United States in August 2011 issued a clear call for Assad to step down, but did little if anything to bring about his departure - in part, at least, because of difficulty in figuring out what kind of government would come to power in his absence.

Over the next four years, any president will face the grim reality laid out by Charles W. Freeman, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia: "Neither China nor Russia will allow the U.N. Security Council to repeat the Libyan precedent. In the absence of some new approach that obviates this political reality, all that can be said with assurance is that the fighting in Syria will continue to escalate until some development in Syria brings it to an end." [6]

Bahrain presented a different but equally difficult set of decision points. Bahrain is a major center of U.S. military operations and strategic commitment, headquarters of the Navy's Fifth Fleet and a prolific purchaser of American military equipment. According to a 2012 report to Congress by the Congressional Research Service, the United States has undertaken a $580 million expansion of naval and air base facilities there, including construction of a new facility for "special operations" forces. Since 2001 Bahrain has been officially designated a "major non-NATO ally" of the United States, putting it in an exclusive group that includes Israel, Japan and Australia, entitled to purchase the same weapons as NATO members. [7] Small as it is, Bahrain is nevertheless an important link in the security network that the United States for years has been trying to build in the Gulf - so much so that Bahrain's neighbors, U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, sent troops there when an uprising by the majority-Shia population threatened the al-Khalifa regime. The Khalifas, Sunni Muslims whose disenfranchisement of the Shia majority gave the rebels a portfolio of legitimate grievances, blamed Iran for fomenting the uprising. The Saudis believed them, or said they did. The evidence was thin, but the specter of an Iranian strategic gain alarmed Washington as it did Riyadh. Thus the Obama administration had to weigh its strategic concerns and military interests in Bahrain against its desire to promote human rights and political reform. It opted for the former, resuming arms sales to Bahrain once the police had clubbed and tear-gassed demonstrators off the streets and issuing only tepid criticism of the regime's actions.

The close U.S. defense ties to Bahrain were formalized in the aftermath of the Gulf War of 1991, in which Bahrain supported the United States. Washington and Bahrain signed a 10-year defense agreement after that war. The pact was renewed for another ten years in 2001, and then for five more years; it is not due to expire until 2016. The web site of the U.S. Central Command, CENTCOM, which covers the entire Gulf region, is replete with news items and statements about military cooperation with Bahrain and joint operations. [8] Small as it is, Bahrain is nevertheless an important link in the security network that the United States for years has been trying to build in the Gulf - so much so that Bahrain's neighbors, U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, sent troops there when an uprising by the majority-Shia population threatened the al-Khalifa regime. The Khalifas, Sunni Muslims whose disenfranchisement of the Shia majority gave the rebels a portfolio of legitimate grievances, blamed Iran for fomenting the uprising. The Saudis believed them, or said they did. The evidence was thin, but the specter of an Iranian strategic gain alarmed Washington as it did Riyadh. Thus the Obama administration had to weigh its strategic concerns and military interests in Bahrain against its desire to promote human rights and political reform. It opted for the former, resuming arms sales to Bahrain once the police had clubbed and tear-gassed demonstrators off the streets and issuing only tepid criticism of the regime's actions. In September 2012, for example, Bahrain was the host for an international minesweeping exercise organized by CENTCOM in which navies from 30 countries participated.

In the biggest and most important Arab country, Egypt, the United States navigated a treacherous path between competing interests. President Hosni Mubarak had been a staunch ally for three decades, cracked down on Islamic extremism, stood firm against Iran, maintained peace with Israel, and developed a broad and deep bilateral military relationship with the United States. The Egyptian armed forces, which a generation ago were trained and equipped by the Soviet Union, are now almost entirely within America's military orbit. Washington wished to preserve these ties, but at the same time recognized quickly that Mubarak's days were numbered. The Egyptian people wanted him gone; short of all-out invasion, the United States could no more have salvaged his regime than it could have maintained the Shah of Iran in 1979. In the face of that reality the United States called on Mubarak to resign and used its extensive influence with the Egyptian military to limit violence and civilian casualties. That policy may have benefited Egypt, but it infuriated another important ally, Saudi Arabia, which accused Washington of the unseemly abandonment of a longtime friend.

Now that Mubarak is gone, the United States is trying to sort out its relationship with the new leadership in Cairo under President Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is difficult and will remain difficult for many reasons. In the Arab world, the United States was mocked and reviled for insisting that the Palestinian Authority conduct elections and then refusing to accept the outcome when the Islamist group known as Hamas prevailed; had Washington similarly refused to come to terms with Morsi simply because he represented the Brotherhood, what remains of its credibility in the region would have been shattered. Within the United States, on the other hand, there is widespread suspicion that the Brotherhood condones jihadist extremism and therefore should be ostracized.

The early signs of flexibility in both Cairo and Washington have been encouraging, but the process of redefining the relationship will continue for some time, regardless of who is president of the United States. It is not just the United States that has to make difficult decisions. In Cairo, Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood sponsors, having taken full control of all instruments of the state except the judiciary, are now required to govern, which means they are required to deliver economic progress. If ideology trumps reality - that is, if a belligerent attitude toward Israel shuts down economic assistance and investment from the West and females are excluded from the productive work force - Egypt will not be able to improve the lives of its people. The United States can encourage Morsi to make the right choices, and it can offer incentives, but it cannot dictate his decisions.

This is the irony any U.S. president would face in the region: encouraging democracy and public participation in national decisions will not necessarily produce more desirable outcomes. Mubarak did whatever he wanted, often in harmony with U.S. policy. Morsi must answer to his constituents.

Egypt is a sufficiently strong and cohesive country to chart its own course, and despite its economic weakness less subject to guidance or meddling from outside than smaller, weaker states. It is far from certain that the course it eventually charts will be favorable to U.S. interests; at the very least the United States will need to establish a working relationship that is cooperative if not cordial. For years to come, the American president will confront a Middle East that is unpredictable, prone to violence, torn by regional and sectarian disputes, heavily armed, economically unbalanced, and managed by leaders of questionable legitimacy and dubious competence. A hostile Egypt would present an insuperable handicap to navigating those minefields.

In Syria, the issues include establishment of a post-revolutionary government, control and disposition of the chemical arsenal, policies on Hezbollah and the Golan Heights, the country's relationship with Iran, separatist sentiment among the Kurdish population that could bring new conflict with Turkey, and the threat of persecution of Alawites and other minorities. Now that Iran and Russia appear to have decided that the Assad regime must be preserved at all costs, the decisions facing Obama become even more difficult. After a year of assuming that Assad's fall was inevitable and therefore the United States did not need to do much to speed the process, Washington finds that Assad is still dug in, thousands are dying or fleeing each month, the tide of Syrian refugees threatens to overwhelm neighboring countries, and it is also necessary to plan how to deal with Assad if he does in fact survive. Shortly before the November election, the United States began an effort to organize the Syrian opposition into a unified front that would be more effective, but this initiative may be too little, too late.

In Bahrain, the United States will try to maintain the military relationship while knowing that if rebellion topples the al-Khalifa monarchy the country's new leaders may resent Washington's failure to support their cause and demand that the Fifth Fleet move elsewhere. So far the United States and American installations have not been targets of the angry Bahrainis in the streets, but that could change if the alZ-Khalifa are seen to be resisting reform because their alliance with Washington insulates them.

Nor are the pitfalls and problems confined to countries whose regimes were challenged or overthrown in the Arab Spring. Kuwait is facing a domestic political crisis. Iraq is increasingly divided along ethnic and sectarian lines. Iran is pursuing its nuclear program. The specter of civil war has reappeared in Lebanon. Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, asserted recently that Jordan is "the most threatened" of U.S. allies in the region. And peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel are moribund.

To confront all those challenges while maintaining a secure flow of oil to global markets and containing al-Qaeda-style extremism would be daunting for any American president, but it appears especially difficult in the current environment because the United States does not have a strong hand politically in the region.

In the words of Ambassador Freeman, a Kissingerian realist, "We are not in an encouraging position in the Middle East. We are less free of Iraq than we wish we were; groping for the exits without a plan in Afghanistan; uncertain how to deal with the Arab uprisings and their aftermath; dabbling from the sidelines in the Syrian civil war; stalemated with Iran and at odds with a belligerent Israel over it; snookered in the Holy Land; nowhere in the affections of the world's Muslims; and in sometimes deadly peril on the Arab street." That is a grim diagnosis, and Freeman did not prescribe a cure because there is no single cure. The United States' military and strategic superiority in the Middle East is unrivaled and unthreatened, but rebuilding its image among the region's people will take years of painstaking effort, whoever is president.

As Freeman and many others have noted, one result of the Iraq war and the Arab spring has been the liberation of Salafist Muslims to pursue and promote their objective of creating religious states based on their version of Sharia law. Obama will not be able to put that genie back in the bottle, nor could Romney have done so if he had been elected. Conversely, to the extent that the United States is perceived to be seeking an accommodation with Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood political leaders, it will cause alarm among its monarchical allies, who are all targets of the religious movement.

A month before the election, Romney issued a "White Paper" about his foreign policy views titled "An American Century-A Strategy to Secure America's Enduring Interests and Ideals." In the section dealing with the Middle East it said that "The Greater Middle East is experiencing the most dramatic change since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The protests that have broken out across the Arab world bespeak a generational yearning for a better life and for human dignity, and present an opportunity for profoundly positive change. History may show that the individual who moved the Arab world from autocracy to the path of freedom was not a head of state, but a humble Tunisian street vendor. But the ongoing revolution is double-edged. The region is riven by tensions, and Iran and Islamist extremists are seeking to influence events and expand their control. The future of democratic institutions in the region - and the security of the United States and its allies - hangs in the balance. Mitt Romney believes that the United States cannot be neutral about the outcome. To protect our enduring national interests and to promote our ideals, a Romney administration will pursue a strategy of supporting groups and governments across the Middle East to advance the values of representative government, economic opportunity, and human rights, and opposing any extension of Iranian or jihadist influence. The Romney administration will strive to ensure that the Arab Spring is not followed by an Arab Winter." [9]

It overstated the case to assert that "the security of the United States and its allies" is it stake. Otherwise, these are worthy objectives, but Romney did not say how he would go about achieving them. In the context of the Middle East, his lack of specificity is understandable; how he would respond in a given situation would depend on all the same factors that would be considered by Obama, or almost any other president.

Although foreign policy was the subject of one of the three televised debates between Obama and Romney during the campaign, it figured little in voters' decisions. The voters had other things on their minds, and the candidates did not offer enough differences in foreign policy to energize the electorate. In a perceptive essay assessing U.S. policy in the coming four years, David Milne argued that "Romney's working methods and operating principles closely resemble those of Obama. Both men are results-driven and leery of ideology. Both believe that the extent of America's decline has been overstated. Both nonetheless recognize that the nation's resources are finite. And both appreciate that few crises are as straightforward as idealistic observers on both sides of the political spectrum would have them appear...Romney and Obama are in fact both results-oriented pragmatists whose similarities outweigh their differences. Obama abhors absolutism and is comfortable with pursuing policies that test and probe, reaping incremental progress, rather than those that seek to unveil or validate universal truths. The world is uncertain and constantly evolving. Framing policies informed by modesty and provisionality is the best way to avoid dangerous conflict." [10] In other words, the differences between Romney and Obama are more stylistic than strategic. Romney would undoubtedly have embraced Israel more fervently and openly than Obama has done, but it is hard to see how doing that would enhance U.S. leverage among the Arabs.

In a paper distributed by Chatham House in England shortly before the election, the American analyst Steve Clemons wrote that "An Obama second term would be likely to lack the cohesive, strategic vision that the president spelled out when he first came to office, and might appear to be more a jumble of various policies put together as ad hoc reactions to problems... Obama's early strategic vision for the Middle East has been replaced by policies designed to engage the reform and democracy movements in the Arab region without generating large-scale responsibilities or exposure for the United States. Efforts to win hearts and minds in the region will be downsized until a new equilibrium is restored to these states - and until America sorts out what kind of vision it can offer to people in the region that will motivate them to defend the US relationship with their countries." [11]

Clemons is probably correct about the Arab countries that have transformed their political systems, but the greatest uncertainties and policy challenges confronting the United States in the Middle East in the next four years probably do not involve the Arab Spring countries at all, but Iran and Israel.

On the subject of Iran and its nuclear ambitions, the election offered American voters no clear choice. Both candidates pledged to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but both refrained from saying exactly how they would go about it.

Obama begins his second term in an uncomfortable and possibly untenable position on Iran. Having said repeatedly that he would not permit Iran to develop nuclear weapons and that all options for preventing it are "on the table," he has implied that he would use military force if it came to that. Wisely, he has refused to say what the trigger point would be; he rebuffed a demand from Israel's Benyamin Netanyhu that he declare a "red line" because doing so would limit his flexibility and would effectively transfer to Iran the power to decide when war would begin. Meanwhile, as Obama himself has said, the American people have had enough of war in the Middle East, and the U.S. intelligence community has not firmly concluded that Iran is even seeking to develop nuclear warheads.

According to Dennis Ross, a longtime Middle East negotiator for presidents of both parties, "In Iran the year 2013 will be decisive one way or another" for two reasons: harsh economic sanctions are devastating Iran's economy and the living standards of its people, and by the end of 2013 it will be too late to prevent Iran from reaching "breakout capacity," the ability to build weapons whenever it chooses to do so. [12] Ross formerly held the Iran portfolio in Obama's White House, but it is far from clear that the president and his current advisers share this analysis.

Around the time of the election, there were tantalizing hints of new flexibility in the leadership of the Islamic Republic. One was a statement posted on the web site of the Intelligence Ministry saying that Iran should not ignore the burdens sanctions place on its citizens or the potential consequences of a war. It would be much preferable to resolve the issue through negotiations, the statement said.

A week later, Iran's official news agency reported that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had told a news conference in Indonesia that the nuclear standoff should be separated from politics and addressed in direct bilateral negotiations between Iran and the United States. [13] Ahmadinejad, however, will no longer be president after elections scheduled for June. The most powerful man in Iran, Ali Khamenei, the "Supreme Leader," will still be in power after Ahmadinejad is out, and he has long opposed bilateral talks. Even if there were negotiations, success would hardly be guaranteed. In the second debate of the presidential campaign, Obama said that "We're not going to allow Iran to perpetually engage in negotiations that lead nowhere," reflecting the widespread suspicion in Washington that Iran would agree to negotiations only to buy time for its nuclear ambitions to be fulfilled.

In any case the nuclear program is not the only issue between the United States and Iran. Tehran is supporting Assad in Syria, running weapons and money to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and promoting sectarian conflict between Shia and Sunni Muslims in Iraq and the Gulf states. In addition, Iran is more forceful than any Arab state in opposing a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

On that front, both U.S. political parties and their candidates, during the presidential election campaign, reaffirmed their commitment to a "two-state solution," but neither offered any program for bringing it about-not surprising, since a successful formula for resolving this issue has eluded every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Obama has not made clear how he will address this issue in his second term, or even how high he places it on his "must do" list. Given the split among the Palestinians - in which the Hamas movement, rulers in Gaza, recently received an incalculable boost in status from a visit by the Emir of Qatar - and the uncertainty of Israel's relations with Egypt, Obama could decide to steer clear of this subject, or leave it to whoever succeeds Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

Netanyahu is facing his own election, in January. He seems assured of reelection. If he wins by a large margin, will he consider that a mandate for a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities? If he does, how will the United States respond? It would be politically risky for the Obama administration to make known that Israel was preparing for a strike and to proclaim its opposition publicly in an effort to head it off. But it would be even more difficult to refuse to support Israel if it did strike and Iran sought to retaliate. It is not known what form that retaliation would take, but it almost certainly would include a new round of attacks on Israel by Hezbollah, possibly drawing Lebanon into the conflict and spreading it to other countries in the region and aborting any possibility of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

In sum, these are uncertain and dangerous times in the Middle East, even more so than usual. The difficulty of formulating U.S. policy to deal with multiple, overlapping situations is compounded by the shifting political scenery in the region. No one can say for certain who will be running Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, Israel, Iraq, or the Palestinian Authority at the end of Obama's second term. Saudi Arabia is passing through a leadership transition. Kuwait is paralyzed by a political deadlock over elections and the role of parliament. The issues in Bahrain remain unresolved. The government of Iraq is weak, unstable, and threatened by Kurdish separatist sentiment.

This recent assessment by researchers at the Library of Congress seems beyond dispute: "The political change and unrest that have swept through the Middle East and North Africa since early 2011 are likely to have profound consequences for the pursuit of long-standing U.S. policy goals in the region with regard to regional security, global energy supplies, U.S. military access, bilateral trade and investment, counter-proliferation, counterterrorism, and the promotion of human rights. The profound changes in the region may alter the framework in which these goals are pursued and challenge the basic assumptions that have long guided U.S. policy." [14]

In that environment, the one certainty is that the U.S. military buildup in the Gulf will continue, despite the shift of some strategic forces to the Pacific. The growth of U.S. defense spending will decelerate, especially if the White House fails to reach a budget deal with Congress, but this is less constricting in the Gulf than elsewhere because the governments there pay for their own weapons, installation and training. The United States is helping the Arab Gulf countries install missile defense systems, build up their air and naval forces, and coordinate their training and operational readiness plans. That effort will continue so long as the current regimes of the Gulf Cooperation Council remain in power.

"President Obama is committed," his party said in the campaign platform document adopted as its national convention, "to maintaining robust security cooperation with Gulf Cooperation Council states and our other partners aimed at deterring aggression, checking Iran's destabilizing activities, ensuring the free flow of commerce essential to the global economy, and building a regional security architecture to counter terrorism, proliferation, ballistic missiles, piracy, and other common threats."

In practice, that means drone strikes against suspected al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen will continue, the Fifth Fleet will stay in Bahrain, the U.S. Air Force will stay in Qatar, the U.S. Navy will ensure that the Strait of Hormuz is not obstructed, and the flow of sophisticated military hardware to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf sheikhdoms will continue, in an effort to bolster their ability to defend themselves-against Iran, or any other aggressor. Now that U.S. troops are out of Iraq and withdrawing from Afghanistan, large-scale American ground combat in the Middle East is highly unlikely, but if an Israeli attack on Iran ignites a regional conflict that threatens U.S. allies, no U.S. response can be ruled out.

If Obama is lucky and diplomats are skillful, some agreement on the Iranian nuclear standoff will be worked out, the violence in Syria will subside, Bahrain will reach some accommodation with its dissenters, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt will subordinate ideology to pragmatism, Iraq's soaring oil revenue will lubricate national cohesion, oil transport through the Persian Gulf will be unimpeded, and al-Qaeda will fail to pull off a major attack on U.S. soil. But even in the unlikely event that everything breaks Obama's way on all those points, the Middle East always has the potential for trouble to break out for some new reason or, it seems, for no reason. There is no inherent reason why Obama should be spared.

---

   JIME Center.All rights reserved.