Brookings: Experts - Shadi Hamid

Why the Current Syria Policy Doesn't Make Sense

Shadi Hamid — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0400

President Obama's decision to arm Syrian rebels -- after resisting such a course for nearly two years -- has come under some withering criticism. Marc Lynch, who has long opposed military intervention in Syria, calls it "probably his worst foreign policy decision since taking office," while Daniel Larison casts it as "certainly one of the two or three worst [decisions]." Despite being on the opposite side of the debate -- I began writing in favor of military intervention nearly a year and a half ago -- it is hard to disagree with their assessment that providing "small arms" to the rebels is unlikely to make much difference.

What makes Obama's decision so unsatisfying -- and even infuriating -- to both sides is that even he seems to acknowledge this. As the New York Times reports, "Mr. Obama expressed no confidence it would change the outcome, but privately expressed hope it might buy time to bring about a negotiated settlement."

To some extent like the 2010 Afghanistan "surge," this is a tactical move that seems almost entirely detached from any clear, long-term strategy. A source of constant and sometimes Kafkaesque debate among interpreters of Obama's Syria policy is figuring out what exactly the policy is in the first place. Secretary of State John Kerry has been promoting the Geneva II peace conference, but his explanations of U.S. goals have tended to confuse. For example, there is this: "The goal of Geneva II is to implement Geneva I." But no one is quite sure what the goals of Geneva I were, except perhaps to "lay the groundwork" for Geneva II.

If the goal is to help rebels regain the military advantage and, second, to diminish the regime's ability to kill, then the proposed means fall well short (for a detailed discussion of why small arms are likely to be ineffective, see C.J. Chivers' explanation here). The fact that nearly everyone seems to agree on the ineffectiveness of such a course -- including even Obama himself -- suggests the president did this because he needed to "do something." It was, after all, getting embarrassing, with open mockery of Obama's fecklessness, in general, and a rather squiggly "red line" that insisted on shifting in odd directions, in particular. But that Obama has done something he clearly didn't want to do for precisely the wrong reasons does not inspire confidence. Rarely has a major policy change been announced so circumspectly with so little conviction.

The fact of the matter, and one the administration seems intent on eliding, is that the only way to help the rebels regain the advantage and force the Assad regime to make real concessions is with a credible threat of military intervention through airstrikes against regime assets and the establishment of no-fly and no-drive zones. This will mean taking additional steps and slowly deepening our involvement, a result which some now fear is inevitable. Of course, the other argument -- eloquently advanced by Larison over the past year -- is that no vital interests are at stake and that the United States would be better staying out altogether. This latter argument, despite defining U.S. "interests" in extremely narrow terms, at least has the virtue of some internal consistency.

For those who supported the NATO operation in Libya -- perhaps the epitome of a non-interests-based intervention -- and past interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, the continued reluctance to entertain direct military action is more difficult to explain, although it no doubt has to do with the legacy of Iraq. Iraq is often mentioned by the administration as offering lessons for the present, although why Syria should be so analogous to Iraq, rather than say Libya or Bosnia, is rarely specified in any detail (Syria shares some of Iraq's sectarian features, but, to my knowledge, this was not the reason that so many felt the war was illegal, unnecessary, and based on false pretenses). Misplaced support for the Iraq war has led to an overcorrection in the opposite direction.

"To my mind," Andrew Sullivan writes for instance, "the key components of a successful Obama presidency -- an actual change we can believe in -- is the ability to resist war in Syria or with Iran under almost any circumstance." Why intervene again in a messy, uncertain region when previous interventions have turned out so bad? Sullivan's position has little to do with understanding Syria and how the situation on the ground has changed, but is based, rather, on an ideological aversion to intervention under, as he puts it, "almost any circumstance." The problem with the Iraq war wasn't that it was an intervention, but that it was a bad intervention. It was the result of conscious policy decisions -- guided by a neo-conservative worldview - just as non-intervention in Syria has been a very conscious and deliberate choice on the part of an Obama administration guided by a philosophical and even ideological aversion to intervention or even pro-active involvement in the Middle East.

The question for Syria anti-interventionists builds on Sullivan's perhaps inadvertent admission: under what circumstances, if any, do they believe military intervention would be warranted, a question which has broad relevance for the future of the "Responsibility to Protect"? In Syria, at least 93,000 have been killed, one of the highest totals of any recent world conflict. Beyond unspeakable mass slaughter, rape, and torture, two other key conditions have been met. First, there have been consistent requests from the Syrian political and military opposition, as well as the broader protest movement, for foreign direct intervention, particularly the imposition of a no-fly zone. Second, there is broad regional and international legitimacy, with Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and France backing various degrees of military action.

In an ideal world, these considerations would have been enough to intervene long ago -- the point of the Responsibility to Protect, after all, is to intervene on behalf of the living, rather than the dead -- but that is not the world we live in. I have always hesitated to emphasize the strategic rationale for military action, due to my concern that what should be about protecting the Syrian people and supporting their struggle against a brutal regime becomes much more a matter of setting scores with Iran, Hezbollah, or other unsavory actors. That caveat aside, the strategic arguments are compelling in a way they never were in Libya (or for that matter Kosovo). Unlike most Arab autocratic regimes, Syria has long been an enemy of the United States. The Syrian regime is such a vital lifeline and point of entry for Iran and Hezbollah that both parties are doing everything in their power to keep Assad in power. And so on. It is difficult to think of a comparable case where the moral and strategic rationales for military intervention were this strong.

If, despite all of these reasons, liberal internationalists are still loathe to consider intervention, then this calls into question the broader applicability and relevance of the very concept of "humanitarian intervention" and the Responsibility to Protect. If the exceptionally dire circumstances of Syria -- of mass slaughter and the resulting destabilization of an entire region (including Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq) -- are not enough to trigger intervention, then what would?

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Publication: The Atlantic

Image Source: © Stringer . / Reuters

Syria, the U.S., and Arming the Rebels: Assad’s Use of Chemical Weapons and Obama’s Red Line

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 18:30:00 -0400

Following confirmation that the Assad regime used chemical weapons in Syria, the Obama administration may send small arms, ammunition and potentially anti-tank weapons to the Syrian rebels. As the United States weighs its options, Foreign Policy at Brookings experts assess the situation in Syria and the Obama administration’s options going forward.

Tamara Wittes
Senior Fellow and Director, Saban Center for Middle East Policy

“Having apparently made the decision to provide lethal support to the Syrian opposition, the Obama administration must still make clear its ultimate interests and objectives. If the goal is limited to addressing the military imbalance to make way for a negotiated settlement, I fear they may be disappointed. For Assad, this is an existential struggle and the fighting will likely intensify. In addition, the more the sectarian aspect of the conflict deepens, the more existential the fight will be for Syrians on all sides of the conflict. The likely and unintended result? Making a negotiated peace very hard to achieve and creating a situation where the post-conflict phase will demand an intensive international presence.”

Michael Doran
Senior Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy

“President Obama has been extremely reluctant to get involved in Syria. But the combination of chemical weapons, pressure from allies, including the British and French, and the recent victories on the battlefield by Hezbollah have forced the president’s hand. In addition, there was a growing awareness in Washington that the Geneva II conference, the flagship of America’s Syria policy, would never take place without a greater commitment by the United States to strengthening the rebels.

“It remains to be seen, however, exactly what the United States has in mind when it says it will increase “the scope and scale” of aid. Leaks to the media suggest that this aid includes weapons, but as of yet we have no clear idea of exactly what the president has in mind. The provision of weapons alone is unlikely to drastically change the balance of power on the ground. What is needed, at a bare minimum, is a robust program of training and equipping the opposition, coupled with significant support in the areas of strategic planning, intelligence, and logistics. It is doubtful if at this stage the administration is considering such a broad package.”

Daniel Byman
Senior Fellow and Director of Research, Saban Center for Middle East Policy

“Regime change is the only way to end this conflict. And to go further, the United States wants this regime to fall. By comparison, regime change in Egypt was the right thing to support diplomatically and in terms of U.S. values, even though we were betraying an ally nonetheless. It was also a big strategic risk, but an important one to take. In the case of Syria, however, the U.S. would be undermining an enemy. The Obama administration has been slow to recognize that difference and has shown a preference for pursuing stability instead of making a full commitment to regime change.

“In addition, I increasingly worry that the opposition will turn on itself, should it ever start to truly triumph. Its inability to unify after over two years is staggering. At the height of the Libyan revolution, many in the U.S. administration complained about how poorly united the Libyan opposition was. Now Obama officials are saying, ‘if only the Syrians could be like the Libyans,’ reflecting how low the expectations have become for the opposition forces. If nothings else at this point, the U.S. needs to arm and train the Syrian rebels in order to create a stable post-Assad Syria. After Assad falls, there may be a fight among the opposition forces, and I would think the Obama administration would want someone who is not Jabhat al-Nusra to take power.

“It may be too little, too late in terms of really affecting the military balance or, for that matter, scoring points with the Syrian people who will wonder why it took 90,000 dead for the United States to become more involved in the conflict. And as in Libya, the administration seemed to have waited until the forces it is backing are losing before becoming directly involved. But only by becoming involved can the U.S. help manage spillover of the conflict in the wider region and enable the U.S. to deal with a post-Assad Syria.”

Shadi Hamid
Fellow and Director of Research, Brookings Doha Center

“By itself, arming the Syrian rebels is unlikely to tip the balance in their favor. It might have made a difference a year ago, but, today, the Assad regime - particularly after re-taking Qusayr - has the advantage. With that, it is no surprise that Assad seems as confident as ever and, put another way, that the rebels are losing. At this point, a much more concerted effort is required for the Syrian rebels to regain momentum. That effort likely now would have to include the use of surgical airstrikes and the establishment of no-fly and no-drive zones.

“It is worth putting the Obama administration's decision into perspective. The U.S. will provide small arms and ammunition but not the more advanced weaponry that the rebels have been practically begging for. So not only is this a half-measure, it's a particularly weak half-measure. I worry that the Obama administration is doing this largely because of domestic and international pressure, and not because there's any real strategic vision or a re-think of what its wants to accomplish in Syria.”

Bruce Riedel
Senior Fellow and Director, Brookings Intelligence Project
Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence

“The United States is about to start arming and training the Syrian rebels fighting to overthrow the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. If done well, this move can end a bloody civil war. If done poorly, it could lead to disaster. Will Obama and his team do the right thing?”

“It turns out Afghanistan of the 1980s is a terrific test case for how to handle the Syrian rebels. The Afghan mujahedin then and the Syrian rebels now both seem incapable of forming a broad national consensus or an effective united political and military organization. Both have a significant component of hard-core Islamist extremists in their midst who are fundamentally opposed to American interests. But both also have a legitimate cause that deserves our support. The issue is how to help wisely.”

Read Bruce Riedel's full op-ed on The Daily Beast website »

Authors

Image Source: © Goran Tomasevic / Reuters

The Folly of Waiting for a More Perfect Syrian Opposition

Shadi Hamid — Tue, 28 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Today, the debate over Syria focuses once again on the composition of the Syrian National Coalition. And while the United States, Europe, and Saudi Arabia push the opposition to expand its ranks to include more liberals, the Assad regime continues to make significant gains against rebel forces, who report a loss of morale and -- remarkably after two years of asking -- lack even the most basic equipment. "If we had more ammunition," says a rebel from Aleppo's Tawhid brigade, "we could take Aleppo in 20 days."

With military intervention effectively ruled out from the beginning, the United States has instead worked to build a more "unified" and "representative" political opposition, despite the fact that liberation movements, historically, are rarely unified or particularly representative. A more unified opposition would, of course, be better, but the persistent hopes for a more perfect opposition have become both a crutch and a distraction from what really matters -- fighting Assad's forces and shifting the military balance on the ground. Progress on the military front is a prerequisite for political progress, rather than the other way around.

From the beginning, there has been a seemingly obsessive concern with creating a more palatable and sufficiently "liberal" opposition. It may have made sense to try in the early months of the uprising, but much less so today, with the armed opposition inside Syria effectively dominated by Salafis and Islamists. A truly "representative" opposition coalition, in actuality, would require adding a significant number of Salafis (there is no Salafi bloc in the National Coalition), but, presumably, this is not the sort of representation that the United States, Britain, and France have in mind.

In the early months of the uprising, the international community worked to build up the Syrian National Council (SNC), after a number of false starts and dueling opposition conferences. Soon enough, the SNC came to be seen as a Muslim Brotherhood proxy and was deemed insufficiently representative of Syria's ethnic and religious diversity (not without reason), so efforts were made to piece together a broader coalition, culminating in the formation of the National Coalition. This new 60-person strong coalition, in which the SNC was allotted a third of the seats, also came to be seen as dominated by the Brotherhood (despite Brotherhood members only officially having six seats). To be sure, the group is able to extend its influence beyond its numbers through a network of allies, including former Brotherhood members from Ahmed Ramadan's National Action Group. It seems self-defeating, though, to fault the Brotherhood for being better organized and more effective than the rest of the notoriously fractious Syrian opposition.

In recent weeks, there was yet another effort to "broaden" the coalition to include 20 to 25 additional seats for a liberal bloc led by veteran secular opposition leader Michel Kilo. Western nations, along with Saudi Arabia, effectively tried to strong-arm the National Coalition into accepting Kilo and his allies. When it went to a vote, Coalition members approved only six new seats (according to coalition bylaws, adding new seats requires a 42-vote supermajority). The French were reportedly furious, saying "unless you expand you will get no support from any of us." Such a reaction, through unsurprising, was a bit odd. In any organization, it is standard practice for existing members to approve expansion of membership.

For their part, American officials - far from being the hapless observers that they are sometimes portrayed as - have put considerable energy, resources, and money into a quixotic attempt to mold the Syrian opposition. Would it be nice if more people like Kilo were in the opposition? Yes. But it's unclear how much of a difference this would make, considering that most fighters on the ground don't answer to or particularly care about the National Coalition, whose members are primarily based abroad.

Efforts to expand the Coalition come ahead of the "Geneva II" peace conference, touted by some as a final (or first) opportunity for a real political breakthrough. The idea, here, is that the opposition needs to get its act together so it can speak with one voice to the Russians and regime. There is the small matter that practically no one in the Coalition believes anything will come out of the talks. They are going largely for show, to placate an international community which they still hope will do more on their behalf, including providing advanced weaponry.

Most in the political opposition say they won't accept anything less than Assad's ouster, yet Russia appears to see Geneva as an opportunity not to negotiate in good faith but, rather, to rehabilitate Assad. Assad himself is as strong as ever, both on and off the battlefield. The head of German foreign intelligence believes the regime could retake the entire southern half of Syria by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the international community has increasingly bought into the regime narrative of a rebellion dominated by extremist elements (the distinction between Salafi and Salafi-Jihadist fighters is rarely made). Prominent American voices, including former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill, have come awfully close to drawing moral equivalence between the rebels and the regime. It is an strange time to hope for a diplomatic "breakthrough," when the rebels are arguably at their weakest and the regime at its strongest.

From the beginning, there has been a fundamental problem of sequencing. The original sin of U.S. policy was taking military intervention off the table and focusing instead on a "political settlement," as if the two were mutually exclusive. Instead, intervention and diplomacy should have proceeded in parallel. It was only a credible threat of military action that would have brought the regime, or at least elements of it, to the negotiating table. In Bosnia and Kosovo, the Serbian government gave up its ethnic cleansing campaign and agreed to Western terms only after NATO military intervention, not before. In Libya, NATO intervention pushed a once confident regime to desperation, with Qaddafi envoys engaging in cease-fire talks and eagerly offering to negotiate with the rebels.

It is a testament to the faith that the Syrian opposition still place in the United States that they are even willing to go to Geneva. They, and we, have been through this before, the cycle of hope, followed by disappointment and even betrayal. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they still hope that American policy might change and adapt, after yet another round of diplomacy fails, as it almost certainly will.

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Publication: The Atlantic

Morsi and the Muslims

Shadi Hamid — Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Many Americans -- and many Egyptians -- are souring on the Muslim Brotherhood. Some are rather smugly saying, "I told you so." From the American and Arab liberal perspectives, the Brotherhood seems run by hyper-charged Islamists bent on imposing their will on the Egyptian people. Like most things in politics, though, it depends on what exactly you're comparing them to. More than two years into the Arab revolts, Islamists are weighing the virtues of moving more aggressively to implement their agenda versus the benefits of proceeding cautiously in an attempt to placate their critics and opponents.

There is little doubt that the Brotherhood has veered to the right. The real debate within the group is whether they've veered far enough. With Egypt as polarized as ever, the Brotherhood has effectively given up on reaching out to liberals and leftists, focusing instead on closing ranks and rallying its base. During the presidential race, Khairat al-Shater, the Brotherhood's original candidate, chose a Salafi-leaning council of scholars for his first campaign event, where he affirmed that the application of sharia law was his ultimate goal and that he would form a committee of scholars to help parliament achieve that goal. After Shater's disqualification, Mohammed Morsi -- a weaker, less convincing candidate -- doubled down on Shater's back-to-basics message. "Needless to say," Morsi said, "[I am] currently the only contender who offers a clearly Islamic project."

After winning the presidency, Morsi took a brief stab at rising above his partisan origins. But the tragic events of Dec. 4, when anti-Brotherhood protesters and government supporters clashed outside the presidential palace, rendered such efforts moot. The violence of that night -- provoked by the Brotherhood when it called on supporters to confront protesters -- claimed "martyrs" on both sides. For many in the opposition, this was the point of no return -- blood had been spilled.

Read the full article on Foreign Policy »

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Publication: Foreign Policy

Image Source: © Handout . / Reuters

Syria, Chemical Weapons, And The Intervention Question

Shadi Hamid — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

In an interview with NPR’s On Point program, Shadi Hamid calls for American intervention in Syria on the basis of humanitarian grounds, as well as rising levels of anti-American sentiment and radicalization on the ground. Hamid says a lot of damage has already been done with regard to radicalization in Syria and that the country’s future is bleak. Despite this reality, Hamid concludes it remains important for the United States to intervene.

The Assad regime will fall regardless of American intervention, Hamid says. The questions, then, are how long the United States waits to intervene and how many people die in the process. On this basis, Hamid supports a military intervention which doesn’t involve putting boots on the ground, but rather uses surgical air strikes and safe zones to diminish the regime’s ability to kill its own people. Hamid says to alternately depend on channels such as the United Nations or wait for a verification process regarding the regime’s use of chemical weapons will take time and delay action, thereby exacerbating existing problems, whether inside Syria or involving anti-American sentiment in the region.

Hamid says the idea that the international community can nurture a perfect Syrian opposition before committing to military action is misguided. He says the fighting forces in Syria are not primarily secularist, and more accurately reflect varying shades of Islamism. Hamid points out extremists tend to gain prominence during situations of war because they generally have better access to weapons and support, and that in Syria these extremists have already come to the fore.

Considering radicalization and rising levels of anti-American sentiment inside Syria, Hamid notes there is an issue of American credibility at stake not just in Syria but in the broader region. Hamid says American intervention in Syria will show the United States sides with the Syrian people and will make a difference in the longer-term of American-Middle Eastern relations. Hamid suggests the world, including Syrians, still look to the United States for moral and political leadership.

Hamid says the American public is historically receptive to foreign policy action in light of humanitarian crises. If the Obama administration wanted to explain the Syrian case clearly, Hamid suggests there would likely be public willingness for American engagement. However, Hamid also says the Obama administration has demonstrated it does not want to get involved in Syria and has a lot of wiggle room to avoid following up on prior-delineated “red lines” on the use of chemical weapons.

Listen to the full On Point program »

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Publication: NPR

Obama's Strategy in the Middle East: The Blurry Red Line

Shadi Hamid — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:23:00 -0400

As evidence of the Syrian regime's use of chemical weapons mounts, the Obama administration has further confused matters regarding its own stated "red lines." The evidence appears to be strong but not necessarily "conclusive." As the April 25th White House letter states, "the chain of custody is not clear, so we cannot confirm how the exposure occurred and under what conditions." This sort of rhetoric points to an administration that finds itself cornered but, at the same time, seems intent on postponing any decisive action for as long humanly possible. The debate over whether, how, when, and to what extent lines were crossed not only seems petty (and undermines the very notion of a red line); it is also a distraction.

Presumably, the Obama administration's red-lining of chemical weapons isn't just about the risk of mass civilian casualties. After all, mass slaughter -- with over 70,000 killed -- has already happened and hasn't apparently shaken the U.S. commitment to studied inaction. The real concern is over the security implications of chemical weapon use or transport. First, the weapons could fall into the hands of non-state actors, metastasizing the terror threat. Second (and related to the first), the spread of chemical weapons would lead to unprecedented regional destabilization in the form of a sharp increase in refugee flows, which, in turn, could threaten the stability of friendly autocrats like the Jordanian monarchy.

These concerns are of course justified, but the focus on security implications -- rather than focusing on the 70,000 already killed by good old-fashioned artillery and aircraft -- suggests an outdated (and morally problematic) calculus for action. In saying that chemical weapons are a red line, the Obama administration is also saying that the killing of 70,000 Syrians is not a red line, which, when you think about it, is a remarkable thing to say.

Read the full article »

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Publication: The Atlantic

Image Source: © George Ourfalian / Reuters

Political Islam in Tunisia: A Discussion with Shadi Hamid

Shadi Hamid — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

In an interview with Tunisia Live, Shadi Hamid talks about the rise of Tunisia's ruling Islamist Ennahdha party since the ouster of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Hamid's analysis addresses challenges facing Ennahdha two years after the revolution, tensions within the ruling party, and more generally the socio-political landscape of Tunisia.

Hamid says the role of Ennahdha in Tunisia is unique to the role of equivalent Islamist parties in the transitioning Middle East for multiple reasons. First, the changing role of Ennahdha in Tunisia over the last two years is much more striking than the changing role of Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which already had a significant foothold in Egyptian society. Second, Ennahdha’s movement and political party are one in the same. Hamid says a lack of distinction between the two renders Ennahdha’s experience more problematic than if Ennahdha's movement and party were separated. If Ennahdha fails politically, Hamid suggests the failure could potentially undermine the entire Islamic movement of Tunisia. Third, Hamid says Ennahdha is unique in that the gap between the movement’s liberal, centrist, and conservative wings is quite large.

Outside of the Ennahdha movement, Hamid said Tunisia as a country is also unique from other transitioning countries, due to a relatively homogeneous population and clear secular influence. Hamid says this secular influence puts a limit on how far Ennahdha can take its policies, given the fact that the government’s opposition is vibrant and organized. Hamid concludes that stark differences between positions held by the opposition, Ennahdha, and the Salafis about the role of religion in public life assured political polarization in Tunisia was inevitable.

Watch the interview by Tunisia Live »

On February 19, Tunisia Live published a previously unreleased portion of its interview with Shadi Hamid. In contrast to the first video, this clip focuses on the differences between Islamism in Egypt and Tunisia. As Hamid notes in the interview, this topic is the focus of his ongoing book project on the evolution of Islamist parties before and after the Arab Uprising.

Watch the second video released by Tunisia Live »

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Publication: Tunisia Live

Syria Is Not Iraq

Shadi Hamid — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

More than a year ago, a real debate began over whether to intervene militarily in Syria. Here in The Atlantic, Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations was one of the first to propose taking military action - or at least thinking seriously about it. When Cook wrote his article (which, in its prescience, is well worth re-reading today), around 5,000 Syrians had been killed. Today, the number is more than 10 times that, and is now over 60,000 according to some estimates. I remember, early on, wondering whether 15,000 would be a "trigger."

But, apparently, there is no "trigger." Military intervention in Syria cannot not happen without American support and there is nothing to suggest the United States has any interest in intervening, no matter the number of dead. The Obama administration has cited the use of chemical weapons as a "red line," but even that red line has managed to shift back and forth several times.

Opponents of intervention have, understandably, tended to focus on the risky - and potentially prohibitively difficult - nature of military action. Yet, the very fact that some "red lines" do exist suggests that the U.S. would be willing to intervene at some point, in spite of those difficulties. The question, then, isn't so much the difficulty of the operation as much as what is an appropriate red line.

If Bashar al-Assad proceeded to destroy an entire city, killing 100,000 people in the matter of weeks, presumably many of those opposing intervention would decide to support it. But why then and not now? Why exactly is 60,000 people not enough? Sure, the use of chemical weapons should be a red line for national security reasons, but why should strictly national security considerations be a red line, when the killing of tens of thousands isn't? It is this latter point which sends precisely the wrong message to Arab audiences and the broader international community. Nothing fundamental has changed in U.S. policy since the Arab Spring, even though many of us said, and hoped, that new realities required a new way of doing business. As I wrote nearly a year ago,

What made Libya a "pure" intervention was that we acted not because our vital interests were threatened but in spite of the fact that they were not. For me, this was yet one more reason to laud it.

The memory of the Iraq War obviously looms large. The war, itself, was one of the greatest strategic blunders in the recent history of American foreign policy. But its legacy is proving just as damaging, leading to a series of mistakes that we are likely to regret in due time. There would have been much more willingness to intervene in Syria if we hadn't intervened in Iraq. But the Bush Administraton's misguided adventurism abroad has made open displays of ideology, or even simple morality, in foreign policy seem suspect. Today, it is fashionable to play technocrat and ask "what works?" Asking this question, as opposed to others, is a marker of pragmatism and prudence. As difficult as it may be, the thinking goes, we must do away with moral sentiments and attachments, which tend to distort more than clarify.

As Cook pointed out in another piece, fundamental questions of morality and philosophy are what, in part, separate proponents and opponents of intervention. "Is it a morally superior position," Cook asks, "to sit by as people are being killed rather than take action that will kill people, but nevertheless may end up saving lives as well?" The question here, then, isn't whether it will work, but will it be worth it?

Such questions are worth considering, and thinking seriously about, but they're unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. In returning to narrower questions of what, if anything, can stop the killing, a few considerations are in order. First, Bashar al-Assad might have a particularly high tolerance for brutality, but there is little to suggest he has ceased being a rational actor. And the unfortunate reality is that he has no real incentive stop the slaughter of Syrians unless there is a credible threat of military action. It is clear that this is a relevant calculation for Assad and the people around him. The regime has spent the last year testing its limits, seeing how far it can go. Accordingly, the rate of killing has never dramatically shot up. Rather, it has increased slowly and gradually, as Assad gauges the international community reactions and its willingness to intervene more aggressively. He apparently has gotten his answer.

Even if the Obama administration has little interest in intervening, it seems odd, even remarkable, that it would choose to telegraph that lack of interest to the Syrian regime in such a flagrant manner. It would have made much more sense for the Obama administration and leading European powers, along with NATO, to publicly discuss military options and make a good-faith effort to consider them.

So much of the aversion to intervention, as mentioned earlier, has been predicated on Syria's supposed similarity to Iraq and the fear of entering into another quagmire. But no one, to my knowledge, was proposing a full-on ground invasion of Iraq. Instead, what was being suggested was an escalatory ladder of varying military options. An escalation would be contingent on how the Syrian regime (and the rebels) responded. Mission creep is always a risk, but if there was ever an administration resistant to mission creep, it is the Obama administration, as became evident during the Libya operation, when the U.S. went out of its way to limit its involvement, even at the cost of prolonging it.

Another unfortunate feature of the ongoing debate was the tendency to treat the military option and the diplomatic "alternative," as mutually exclusive. They never were. On the contrary, they could have been pursued in parallel. In Bosnia, NATO power forced the Serbs to the negotiating table, leading to the Dayton Accords and the introduction of multinational peacekeeping forces. In Libya, the Qaddafi regime showed more interest in negotiating with the opposition after military intervention, rather than before (Within a few weeks of the NATO operation, Qaddafi envoys were engaging in ceasefire talks).

Lastly, it is worth thinking about what this means for future instances of mass slaughter. With the Libya intervention, there was hope that a post-Arab Spring precedent would be set - that whenever pro-democracy protesters were threatened with massacre, the U.S. and its allies would take the "responsibility to protect" seriously and consider intervention as a legitimate option. But, nearly two years later, what we didn't do in Syria is more relevant than what we did do in Libya.

If I sound defeatist, then it is likely because I am. It is worth speaking frankly, and, unfortunately, this probably requires speaking in the past tense. For Syria, it is likely too late. Notwithstanding something sudden and entirely unexpected, the international community will not intervene. That does not mean that the Syrian people are doomed. They will likely "win" in the end, but their victory, if we can even call it that, will have come at a much greater cost - in the sheer number killed - than was likely necessary. It will have come at the cost of a country destroyed, of sects polarized beyond any hope of reconciliation, of Salafis and Jihadists ascendant, of a state too torn and divided for real governance. As has been reported elsewhere, the Syrian opposition feels that it has been not just forgotten, but, worse, betrayed. They are unlikely to forget this anytime soon. Anti-Americanism, a given among regime supporters, has slowly taken root among the opposition as well. The Syrian protest movement's Friday theme for October 19, 2012 was "America, has your spite not been sated by our blood?" In due time, the Obama administration's inability or unwillingness to act may be remembered as one of the great strategic and moral blunders of recent decades. Hoping to atone for our sins in Iraq, we have overlearned the lessons of the last war. I only wish it wasn't too late.

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Publication: The Atlantic

Image Source: © Goran Tomasevic / Reuters

How Should President Obama Change U.S. Policy in the Middle East?

Shadi Hamid — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's note: This article was published as part of a report by the Project on Middle East Democracy. Read the full report »

As Arab attitudes toward the United States are “inelastic,” anything short of a major policy overhaul—such as the tinkering on the margins that has so far defined the Obama administration—will not make much of a difference.

The issue of leverage and aid conditionality has become more relevant than ever in the post-Arab Spring era. The Obama administration’s proposed MENA Incentive Fund and the European Union’s Support for Partnership, Reform, and Inclusive Growth (SPRING) programs are both gentle nods in the direction of conditionality. The problem with both programs is how small in scope they are, totaling less than $1 billion annually across the region—simply not large enough to influence the political calculations of Arab governments.

With this in mind, there is a need to coordinate the funding of a “multilateral reform endowment” that would provide clear incentives to Arab countries to implement necessary reforms. The endowment would include a minimum of $5 billion, with the goal of increasing total available funding to $20 billion by 2022. Receiving aid would be conditional upon meeting a series of explicit, measurable benchmarks on democratization, which would be the product of extensive negotiations with interested countries. The endowment would be funded with contributions from the United States, the EU, allies like Japan, Qatar, and Norway, rising democracies such as Turkey and Brazil, as well as international financial institutions.

For transitional states like Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, benchmarks would include security sector reform, military noninterference in civilian affairs, judicial independence, and ensuring press freedoms. For liberalizing monarchies like Jordan, Morocco, and Kuwait, benchmarks would focus on expanding political space for opposition groups and the gradual devolution of power to elected institutions accountable to the people. Even if certain countries rejected endowment funds, an important message would still be sent to both Arab leaders and publics that democracy assistance is no longer half-hearted and ad-hoc, but part of an institutionalized, multilateral, and long-term effort to hold Arab governments accountable to a set of explicit standards.

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Publication: Project on Middle East Democracy

Image Source: © Jason Reed / Reuters

The President's Fantasy Cabinet

Shadi Hamid — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

As President Obama's second term gets underway, The American Prospect asked experts and activists look back and weigh in on who Obama should have chosen to serve, if partisan politics (and reality) were no object. Please find below Shadi Hamid's contribution, which discusses Obama's optimal choice for Secretary of State.

Secretary of State

John Kerry would be a safe bet and a solid Secretary of State. But I’m not sure if a safe, solid Secretary of State—or a solid Secretary of Defense—is precisely what America needs now. That Kerry turned against the Iraq war and revised his views on the use of force is a credit to him. President Obama has clearly decided that he wishes to pursue a prudent, status quo-oriented foreign policy. But as the Middle East threatens to implode and with America’s moral leadership increasingly in doubt, a better choice would be someone at least slightly outside the Washington consensus—someone who saw foreign policy as a way to fashion new opportunities rather than manage the same set of threats. Though the Obama administration may not agree, the Arab Spring is on par with the transformative world events of 1848, 1945, and 1989. In an ideal world, Obama would appoint someone who gets the Arab revolutions and understands the opportunities they provide for bold, creative U.S. policymaking.

To be sure, there are few candidates of stature who fit that bill. Two exceptions are Samantha Power and Michael McFaul. Power came from a human rights background and, as Director for Multilateral Affairs on Obama’s National Security Council, has been a key administration voice for a more ideals-based foreign policy (especially during the debate over intervention in Libya). McFaul was also a senior NSC director and is now U.S. Ambassador to Russia (full disclosure: I briefly worked with McFaul when I was a fellow at the center he directed at Stanford University). Before joining the administration, he established himself as one of the leading American scholars not only on Russian politics but also on democratic transitions, an issue that is front and center not only in the Arab world, but also in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Eastern Europe. There is also something to be said for having an academic in the position, which can mean (but certainly doesn’t always) that the person in question has a broader, longer-term view of economic and political dynamics and the role they play in international politics.

Read the full list of recommendations by a range experts and activists on The American Prospect »

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Publication: The American Prospect

Image Source: © Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Camp David Peace Treaty Collapse

Tamara Cofman Wittes and Shadi Hamid — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

The United States has been resolutely focused on maintaining the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. While Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi has signaled he is willing to set aside the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideological opposition and most Egyptians’ hostility to Israel, several factors could destabilize the situation. Shadi Hamid and Tamara Cofman Wittes drafted this memorandum to President Obama as part of Big Bets and Black Swans: A Presidential Briefing Book.

How should the U.S. engage with President Morsi to preserve peace between Egypt and Israel?
What can the U.S. do to improve communications between Egypt and Israel?
How should the U.S. prepare for a scenario in which the treaty breaks down and there is a direct confrontation?

Download Memorandum (pdf) | Download the Presidential Briefing Book (pdf)

TO: President Obama

FROM: Tamara Cofman Wittes and Shadi Hamid

Since the fall of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, the United States has been resolutely focused on maintaining the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty as a cornerstone of regional stability and as an essential platform for broader efforts at Arab-Israeli coexistence. The loss of this 33-year-old treaty would represent a profound strategic defeat for the United States in the Middle East.

Recommendation:

To mitigate such a possibility you should take immediate steps to deepen U.S. engagement with the Morsi government, the Egyptian military and opposition forces; consider negotiating new Israeli-Egyptian agreements to address each side’s grievances about Sinai security; promote better communication and confidence building measures between the Egyptian and Israeli militaries; and be ready to intervene immediately should a crisis erupt.

Background:

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s decision to mediate a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in November 2012 signaled that he was willing to set aside the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideological opposition and most Egyptians’ hostility to Israel in favor of a pragmatic raison d’etat. Nevertheless, there are several possible ways by which the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty might be ruptured.

Third-party terrorist attacks in Sinai or emanating from Gaza could draw in Israeli and Egyptian troops and rupture relations. In August 2011, for example, a terrorist attack led Israeli forces on a hot pursuit into Sinai, during which they killed five Egyptian soldiers. This generated heated demonstrations outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo. That incident took place under the military council’s rule; a future incident would take place under a democratically-elected government that would face strong popular pressure to respond, provoking a further crisis and threatening the treaty itself. While Israel has been careful since then to avoid any provocation in Sinai, it has also watched continued terrorist activity there, and Egypt’s inability or unwillingness to tackle it, with growing alarm. At the end of the day, Israel will insist on its right to self-defense. Terrorists and others with an interest in creating a crisis could easily provoke an incident in a location that would heighten the chances for a direct Israeli-Egyptian military confrontation.

Even without a border incident, an elected, Muslim-Brotherhood-led government might resort to populist nationalism to sustain support for its rule. While the international community saw Morsi’s diplomacy in Gaza as a signal that an Islamist-led Egypt would act responsibly to reinforce regional stability, his opponents in leftist and revolutionary circles attacked him for working within the Mubarak framework of relations with Israel. Even Morsi’s own Brotherhood has taken a harder line than he, as for example in August 2012 when it claimed that a recent terrorist attack on Egyptian soldiers in Sinai was a “Zionist” plot. In the coming years, Morsi’s opponents are likely to make greater use of anti-Americanism and anti-Israel sentiment to attack the Brotherhood in the court of public opinion (just as the Brotherhood did to Mubarak).

Moreover, the touch policy measures required to stabilize the Egyptian economy will worsen the pain of average Egyptians, making populist policies, and particularly adventurism abroad, a tempting distraction for an increasingly unpopular government. A continued failure to address deteriorating Israeli-Palestinian relations could also spark further violence between Hamas and Israel or a collapse of the Palestinian Authority, exacerbating anti-Israeli sentiment in Egypt. Meanwhile, the Egyptian government security-focused approach to Sinai’s problems relies on ham-handed repression while failing to invest the necessary resources to promote local development and reduce local grievances. This increases the incentives for locals to participate in violence. Morsi and the Brotherhood cannot be expected to continue to confront increasing public pressure over these issues without any impact on cooperation with Israel. At some point, the temptation to make a symbolic move against the treaty could become too strong to ignore. Morsi might then demand amendments to the treaty or put it to a popular referendum. He might also seek to address both security threats in Sinai, and perceived slights on Egyptian sovereignty there, by moving additional forces into zones where the Treaty restricts forces without Israeli consent.

Should Morsi be tempted to use hostility toward Israel to bolster his domestic standing, this will only persuade Israeli officials that their worst fears about the Arab Spring are being realized. Any Egyptian move to undermine the Treaty would be seen as implying a sharp decrease in Israel’s deterrent capabilities, and would likely produce a sharp response.

Israel is already nervous. Since Egypt’s revolution, Israel has acquiesced in Egypt’s remilitarization of eastern Sinai, accepting a semi-permanent Egyptian presence close to its border. At the same time, Israel has doubled the number of battalions it has deployed along the border, built a border fence, and established a new “Southern Brigade” to defend Eilat. In the context of anti-Israeli populism, any Egyptian military move that Israel does not know about or approve could easily provoke suspicion and a matching Israeli military mobilization intended to send a signal about the costs of abandoning the treaty. But given the already-increased troop presence and the limited communication between the two sides, such a scenario heightens the chances for unintended escalation.

Preventing a Peace Treaty Rupture:

There are steps you should take now to reduce the chances that terrorist provocations or populist moves by Egypt’s leadership might end in the rupture of the Treaty:

• Deepen U.S. security cooperation and coordination with the Morsi government so that, even in the event of growing anti-Israel agitation inside Egypt or a terrorist provocation in the Sinai, Morsi and the Brotherhood feel they have a vital stake in not upsetting the bilateral relationship.

• Sustain and expand U.S. engagement with the Egyptian military and with political actors across the Egyptian spectrum, in the course of which administration officials should extol the benefits of peace with Israel for Egypt’s stability and economic recovery. In order to avoid the perception of a Mubarak-style authoritarian bargain, your embassy in Cairo should balance its cooperation with Morsi with broader political outreach and sustained pressure on the Brotherhoodled government to promote inclusive democracy.

• Consider developing a new Egypt-Israel modus vivendi that would enhance the sustainability of the peace treaty. Israel is not happy with the very limited bilateral communications over Sinai and Gaza, which occur through a high-level intelligence channel; Egypt is unhappy with the Treaty’s limitations on forces in Sinai. These limitations may also no longer meet the needs of the two parties when the primary security threat is non-state terrorism and illicit activity. A revised agreement that codifies the alreadyaltered realities on the ground, and that adds more robust bilateral information sharing and coordination mechanisms, could potentially relieve pressures on the Treaty within Egyptian politics, while better serving both sides’ security interests.

• Press now for increased communication between Egyptian and Israeli militaries. Those operating along their shared border must have some direct means to share information in the event of a crisis. You can also work to enhance the role of the Multinational Force Observers in Sinai (MFO). Currently, limited numbers and capabilities as well as security concerns restrict MFO movements. A larger, more mobile and capable force could improve information sharing and verify that new Egyptian deployments in Sinai are sized, equipped, and operating according to agreements. This would also lessen Morsi’s ability to “surprise” Israel with any new military deployments, reducing his incentive to do so.

Minimizing Fallout in the Event of Further Deterioration:

In extremis, if the treaty is broken, or if tensions flare to the point that cross-border fighting is conceivable, you should be ready to act quickly to:

• Deter both sides from a direct confrontation, or bring one to a swift end. Since the Egyptian military is unlikely to seek allout war with the far-superior Israeli Defense Forces, it may welcome U.S. intervention. This could involve seeking an immediate separation of forces monitored by MFO, and, if necessary, putting nearby U.S. forces on alert to deter aggressive movements by either side in advance of such a separation taking hold. The temptation in Washington might be to declare swift and clear support for Israel’s defense. But in a case where extreme nationalism is driving Egyptian actions this would not itself act as a deterrent to further escalation.

• Prevent terrorist elements in Sinai or Gaza from taking advantage of the crisis to fire rockets or breach Israel’s borders. Success in this objective will require getting both Egypt and Israel focused on the primacy of the terrorist threat: pressing Egypt to back down swiftly, urging Israeli restraint in response to provocations, and mobilizing third-party channels to Hamas in Gaza warning against such moves.

• Prevent an Egyptian-Israeli rupture from having ripple effects in the region. The United States should engage swiftly and firmly with Arab capitals, especially in the Gulf, to head off any statements of support for Egyptian actions against the treaty and to elicit public and private messages expressing a desire to maintain regional peace. Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel would become an immediate target should this effort fail, and the United States as well as our Gulf allies should seek to demonstrate their support for the maintenance of Jordan’s peace with Israel in the face of what could be a fierce nationalist onslaught.

Download Media

The Black Swan: Camp David Collapse

Downloads

Video

The Black Swan: Camp David Collapse

Authors

Image Source: © Amr Dalsh / Reuters

Old Friends, New Neighborhood: The United States, the GCC, and their Responses to the Arab Spring

Shadi Hamid — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Shadi Hamid's article says the widening policy gap between America and its GCC allies in response to Arab Spring uprisings is the result of differing threat perceptions. Hamid says that “stability” from a U.S. perspective does not mean what it used to, or what Saudi Arabia still thinks it means. For stability to be maintained, U.S. officials believe, governments must respond to the substantive demands of their people and provide them with a real stake in the political process. So while U.S. and Saudi interests do align on a number of issues, they do not align on the broader, philosophical question of how to manage political change.

However, Hamid says there are no ready replacements for the United States in its critical role as the Gulf’s security guarantor. On this basis, Hamid argues the United States and the GCC, despite apparent public tensions, will continue to find ways to work with each other. Neither, for now at least, is in a position to do otherwise.

Hamid concludes that the current nature of American-GCC relations will ultimately dampen any bold U.S. initiative to support greater democratization in the region, particularly in the conservative monarchies of Bahrain, Morocco, and Jordan.

Read the article, which is part of the German Marshall Fund's paper series on "The GCC in the Mediterranean in Light of the Arab Spring" »

Downloads

English PDF

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Publication: The German Marshall Fund of the United States

Image Source: © Fahad Shadeed / Reuters

Egypt’s Constitutional Referendum: What Comes Next?

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 10:30:00 -0500

Event Information

December 17, 2012
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM EST

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

Register for the Event
This event was broadcast live on C-SPAN2. The full video is available on cspan.org.

On December 15, Egyptians voted on a new constitution. The vote was intended to be the culmination of Egypt’s journey from authoritarianism to democracy, but it occurred amid a political crisis and, regardless of outcome, will not resolve tensions. What can the United States do to help ensure Egypt moves toward stable democracy? How will the U.S. relationship with Egypt emerge from this crisis?

On December 17, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings hosted a discussion to explore these and other questions about Egypt’s constitutional referendum and its effect on U.S.-Egyptian relations. Panelists included Brookings Fellow Khaled Elgindy and Fellow Shadi Hamid, director of research for the Brookings Doha Center, who appeared via video conference from Doha. Senior Fellow Tamara Cofman Wittes, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, moderated the discussion.

After the program, panelists took audience questions.

Is There an Egyptian Nation?

Shadi Hamid — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

In the latest round of Egypt's current crisis -- once again pitting Islamists against non-Islamists -- demonstrators gathered at the presidential palace in Cairo to protest President Mohamed Morsi's stunning decision to claim authoritarian, albeit temporary powers and his subsequent moves to rush through a controversial constitution. In a grim reminder of the country's precarious state, police clashed with protesters and fired tear gas -- only this time, it was to protect a legitimately elected president, not a dictator of 30 years.

But this isn't really about Morsi and his surprise decree -- though to be sure, parts of the decree employ language straight out of Orwell and seem almost designed to provoke and polarize. But neither the decree nor the draft constitution is quite as bad as Morsi's opponents insisted. The opposition's sometimes bizarre comparisons to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, the 1933 Enabling Act, and the French Revolution suggest a legitimate fury (and an intriguing fascination with fascism), but make little sense as historic analogies.

Morsi could have read his Friday shopping list on national television, and it might have made little difference. The decree, after all, was only the latest in what Morsi's opponents see as a long list of abuses. Egypt's "original" revolutionaries are one such group that blast the Brotherhood's compromises small and large with the old state bureaucracy, lamenting how their revolution was sacrificed on the altar of expediency and gradualism. And it is true that the Brotherhood-appointed leaders of the Ministry of the Interior, the military, and the intelligence apparatus include men who were complicit in some of the worst human rights abuses of the Hosni Mubarak era -- and have gone unpunished to this day.

But these mostly younger revolutionaries, whose critiques have been admirably consistent, are a small minority. The rest of the opposition is an odd assortment of liberals, socialists, old regime nostalgists, and ordinary, angry Egyptians, each whom have their own disparate grievances and objectives. The liberals and leftists in the equation, led by figures such as Mohamed ElBaradei, Hamdeen Sabbahi, and Amr Moussa, have little in common with each other -- besides a fear that their country is being taken over, and taken away, by Islamists. While they may be "liberal," in the sense of opposing state interference in private morality, their attachment to democracy is mercurial at best. Many of them welcomed the dissolution of Egypt's first democratically elected parliament, called on the military to intervene and "safeguard" the civil state, and even cast their presidential ballot for Ahmed Shafiq, Morsi's opponent and Mubarak's last prime minister.

Liberals' problem with Morsi's decree is not so much its authoritarian overtones, but that its authoritarianism is (or could be) in the service of an ideology -- Islamism -- that they view as an existential threat to Egypt. While Morsi has been extremely polarizing in power, the Muslim Brotherhood insists, so far correctly, that it has not actually overseen the imposition of any "Islamic" laws on the population.

But the Brotherhood too is missing the point here. Liberals, and so many others, fear Morsi and the Brotherhood not for what it has done, but for what it might do. Such fears, based on worst-case projections well into the future, are difficult to engage and impossible to disprove. To assuage them, trust is required -- and the heart of the problem is that there is little to go around Egypt these days.

Islamist distrust of the other side, justified or not, is what led Morsi to issue his Nov. 22 decree, people close to him insist. The Brotherhood saw an existential threat on the horizon: Looming in the near future were court rulings that would dissolve both the Constituent Assembly and the upper house of parliament. Brotherhood and FJP officials told me that they knew from sympathetic judges that rulings revoking Morsi's Aug. 12 decree, which established civilian control of the military, and even possibly annulling the presidential election law, were in the cards. Another prominent Brotherhood member, who has privately been critical of Morsi's presidency, went so far as to suggest to me that, if the president didn't act preemptively now, the closing of Brotherhood offices could be next in a new campaign of repression, followed by the dissolution of the group itself.

At the same time, the Brotherhood was well aware just how bad Morsi's decree looked. As one senior FJP official admitted: "Yes, the decree isn't democratic and it's not what you would expect after a revolution," but he claimed there was simply no other choice. The message was clear: The Brotherhood is in an existential fight and, as a result, the normal rules of politics would be suspended. One Brotherhood member I spoke to likened it to "shock therapy that runs the risk of leaving the patient dead."

In short, the Brotherhood sees its opponents -- whether liberals, the judiciary, elements of the military and state bureaucracy -- as fundamentally anti-democratic. Among other things, it points to the failure of someone as prominent as Mohamed ElBaradei -- a "liberal dictator" in the words of one Brotherhood official -- to stand up against the judiciary's dissolution of parliament, and blasts his recent warnings that the military may need to intervene "to restore law and order."

The irony of non-Islamists' antipathy toward the Muslim Brotherhood is that the current version of the organization happens to be the moderate, reconstructed version. For all its considerable faults, the Brotherhood of today is not the Brotherhood of the early 1980s, when calls for tatbiq al-sharia ("application of Islamic law") were its core demand. This was not just rhetorical: As the Islamic revival intensified, the formal effort to synchronize Egyptian law with sharia won the support of Egypt's most powerful men, such as Sufi Abu Talib, the speaker of parliament and a close associate of President Anwar Sadat. By 1982, Abu Talib's committees had painstakingly produced hundreds of pages of draft legislation (which were for the most part never implemented), including 513 articles on tort reform, 443 on the maritime code, and 635 articles on criminal punishments.

Back then, the Muslim Brotherhood was more a sharia lobby than a political party, with a seemingly obsessive focus on Islamic law. The 1987 electoral program of the "Islamic alliance" -- a coalition of the Brotherhood and two smaller parties -- allowed little room for dissent on such a fundamental matter: "Implementation of sharia is a religious obligation and a necessity for the nation. This is not something that is up for discussion; it is incumbent upon every Muslim to fulfill God's commandments by governing by his law." The push for sharia would be, the program says, "a massive national undertaking that will require experts to devise how to apply Islamic law in a variety of realms."

The Brotherhood took steps to smooth over the hard edges of its political program during the next two decades, culminating in its 2005 electoral platform -- the centerpiece of the group's effort to rebrand itself and offer a vision for political and institutional reform. Democracy, rather than sharia, was the new call-to-arms. Much of the program focused on how to establish a workable system of check and balances and ensure the independence of local government from the central executive. Interestingly, one of the program's longest sections is on "financial and administrative decentralization," where the Brotherhood calls for "transferring powers and the authorities of the ministries to the governorates," including the ability to impose and collect taxes. Indeed, if there is a dominant theme that runs throughout the 2005 platform, it is the notion that the executive branch has too much power, which it abuses at will. (It makes for dispiriting reading in light of today's top-heavy constitution, which enshrines a too powerful presidency.)

After the revolution, the Brotherhood and its political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), made a major flip-flop -- they are now apparently believers in a strong president, at the expense of parliament and local government. But they still seem to genuinely think that they are democrats, and their rhetoric, perhaps today more than ever, is replete with references to electoral legitimacy and the will of popular majorities. As for the constitution, they insist it is a moderate, consensus-driven document. From the Brotherhood's perspective, the constitution's Islamic content is minimal: In a stark contrast to the 1980s, the Brotherhood actually pushed back against Salafi demands that the "rulings" rather than the "principles" of Islamic law be the primary source of legislation.

Liberals would tell an almost completely different story, and their disagreements are based on process as much as substance. Recently, at the Brookings Doha Center, we held our third "Transitions Dialogue," where we brought together Islamists and liberal representatives along with U.S. officials to seek out areas of consensus. Depending how you looked at it, the participants were either very far apart or surprisingly close together. It was hard to tell, since they seemed to have different interpretations of reality and often couldn't even agree on what they disagreed on. Some of the differences were on procedure -- including the decision to appoint 50 Islamists and 50 non-Islamists to the Constituent Assembly, which one human rights activist called the "birth defect" of the process.

From the very beginning, liberals have complained of an assembly "dominated" by Islamists, where each camp became entrenched in its position and voted as a bloc. And they were right: Islamists set the assembly's agenda and led and oversaw the constitution-drafting process. Brotherhood and Salafi representatives, however, felt that the 50/50 agreement was, in fact, a major concession on their part. If the assembly was elected, rather than appointed, Islamists pointed out that they would likely have taken at least 70 percent of the seats. As for content, they were only calling for the "principles" of sharia, rather than its "rulings," as the Salafis had wanted, to be the main source of legislation. The constitution has a few Islamically flavored articles, but for the most part it is a mediocre -- and somewhat boring -- document, based as it was on the similarly mediocre 1971 constitution. This, too, Islamists treat as a concession to their opponents, arguing they could have had stronger Islamic clauses but instead compromised with liberals -- angering many Salafis in the process.

Indeed, it sometimes seems that Brotherhood and Salafi representatives viewed the very presence of "liberals" on the assembly as a gesture of goodwill and magnanimity. The Brotherhood's disdain for liberals is nothing new and is, at least in part, a product of the Mubarak years, when many liberals tolerated the Mubarak regime as the lesser of two evils. But it runs deeper than that: Islamists generally don't see liberals as having any natural constituency in Egypt. Moreover, they represent an ideology that is foreign to Egypt and, worse, morally subversive. To the extent that Egyptians ever support "liberals," it's only because they don't want to vote for the Brotherhood, not because they're liberal or even know what "liberalism" means. In my interviews with Brotherhood leaders both before and after the revolution, I usually got the sense that, despite occasionally trying, they simply couldn't bring themselves to take liberals seriously. They were almost always more concerned about those on their right flank, the Salafis.

Lack of respect aside, when you look at what each side says they believe, there seems to be room for consensus. After all, the major liberal parties say they support a role for sharia in public life (Egypt's most "liberal" party has been known to campaign with banners saying "The Quran is Our Constitution"), while the Muslim Brotherhood says all the right things, calling for a "civil state." Even the Nour Party, the political arm of the largest Salafi organization, says that "the state should be far from the theocratic model."

But these groups are acting more moderate than they actually are. Liberals are trying to be more responsive to the popular mood, which is both conservative and religious. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood and Salafis are eager to portray themselves as "responsible" actors, particularly in the eyes of Western governments, whose support is necessary for Egypt's economic recovery. But such ostensibly conciliatory gestures have also led each group to believe that the others are acting insincerely. It is understandable that liberals, being the weaker party, fear that the Brotherhood will use its increasing powers to undermine and exclude them. But the Brotherhood, too, fears its opponents are out to destroy it, using any tools at their disposal to reverse the group's electoral victories.

As Brookings Institution scholar Khaled Elgindy astutely observed, "a persecution complex is the backbone of authoritarianism." He may be right, but that doesn't make the Brotherhood's persecution complex any less real. The memory of 1954 looms large, when President Gamal Abdel Nasser banned the Brotherhood, rounded up its members en masse, and executed many of its leaders. More recently, the Algerian tragedy of 1991 -- where the staunchly secular military aborted an election Islamists were poised to win, plunging the country into civil war -- remains a defining moment in the Islamist narrative.

For the Muslim Brotherhood, another Algeria is always around the corner. Winning one election after another is no guarantee of political survival, just like it wasn't in 1991. For the Brotherhood, the dissolution of parliament last June offered yet more evidence that the liberal opposition and international community would not stand up for democracy when it was Islamists who suffered.

These betrayals -- and each side has their own long list -- are now etched in memory, making reasoned dialogue a challenging task. To be sure, the mistrust is amplified by a terribly mismanaged transition, but it also draws from something real and deep, if often unstated. Behind all the accusations and the seemingly minor procedural objections lies something more basic: Egyptians simply may not agree on the fundamental attributes of the modern nation state. Should the state be ideologically neutral, or should it be an enforcer of morality, intent on creating virtuous families and virtuous individuals? Egyptians, and most of the Arab world for that matter, haven't really had this conversation until now.

In the short term, there can and will be at least some consensus. The Brotherhood is constrained not only by an increasingly vocal opposition, but also by external actors. The economy is teetering on the brink and stabilization will only come through the economic support of the United States and Europe. There is only so far Morsi and the Brotherhood can go -- for now. Their focus is on stability, security, and the economy, not on applying Islamic law or creating the mythical Islamic state.

That said, Islamists are Islamists for a reason. They have a distinct ideological project, even if they themselves struggle to articulate what it actually entails. The Brotherhood has already been developing something called the "Nahda Project," a sort of dream for Islamist would-be technocrats. While some of the project's ideas on institutional reform, economic development, and urban renewal are impressive, they shouldn't be taken as the end point of what Islamists are trying to do.

Islamists have a core constituency that, naturally, wants to see sharia implemented. Democracy does not necessarily moderate such ambitions: According to most polls, the Egyptian public wants to see more Islam and Islamic law in their politics, not less. And then there are the Salafis, the second-largest electoral bloc in the country, who are likely to do whatever they can to drag the Brotherhood -- and everyone else, if possible -- further to the right.

A manufactured consensus may, in fact, be easier to forge now, in this early stage of Egypt's democratic transition. "Islamists" and "non-Islamists" may hate each other, but, on substance, the gap isn't currently as large as it might be. In the longer run, however, the consensus that so many seem to be searching and hoping for may not actually exist.

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Publication: Foreign Policy

Image Source: © Mohamed Abd El Ghany / Reuters

Between Interference and Assistance: The Politics of International Support in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya

Shadi Hamid and Salman Shaikh — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Summary:

Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya have all held relatively successful elections, ushering in parliaments and governments with popular mandates. Tunisia and Egypt also saw landslide Islamist victories, provoking fear among both Arab liberals and the international community, particularly in the West. Libya, which saw a surprising showing for a more liberal grouping, presents a critical case of a political community being created almost literally from scratch.

With three ongoing transitions, the Brookings Doha Center’s second “Transitions Dialogue”—which took place on May 29-31, 2012—provided a venue for addressing the tensions that threaten prospects for successful transitions. Seeking out shared lessons from each country case, the working group brought together a diverse group of mainstream Islamists, Salafis, liberals, and leftists, along with U.S. and European officials, to discuss issues of economic recovery, civil society development, regional security, and the role of the United States and other international actors.

Download » (English PDF)
Download » (Arabic PDF)

Read other publications from the 2012 U.S.-Islamic World Forum »

Downloads

Authors

Middle East Lost

Shadi Hamid — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500

One of the great mysteries of the past four years is how Barack Obama -- who rose to the presidency, in part, on his promises to fundamentally re-think and re-orient U.S. policy in the Middle East -- has instead spent his term running away from the region.

It is difficult to remember it now, but the prospect of an Obama presidency was initially greeted in the Arab world with a mixture of relief and guarded optimism. His name and Muslim origins certainly helped. But there was something else: For the first time, here was an American president who seemed to have an intuitive grasp of Arab grievances. This grasp extended, perhaps most importantly, to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israelis may have been victims, but so too were the Palestinians. In short, Obama seemed to "get" the Middle East. This didn't sound like someone who wanted to spend three years "pivoting" to China.

Read the full article at foreignpolicy.com »

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Publication: Foreign Policy

The Candidates Debate Foreign Policy – The Takeaways

Shadi Hamid, Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Ted Piccone, and Marvin Kalb — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 15:00:00 -0400

On October 22, President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney met in the last presidential debate of 2012, this time focusing on foreign policy. In this second part of a two part compilation, read the reactions to the debate by Brookings Foreign Policy experts: Shadi Hamid analyzes statements both candidates made on U.S. Middle East policy; Kenneth Lieberthal examines three themes on China both Romney and Obama focused on during the debate; Ted Piccone explores why Latin America was left out of the debate; Bruce Riedel comments on Romney's defense of Obama's Afghanistan-Pakistan policy; Marvin Kalb reflects on lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis and how they apply to U.S. foreign policy today.

Discussion of Middle East Would Leave Arabs Confused
Shadi Hamid, Director of Research, Brookings Doha Center and Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy
CNN

This debate, if nothing else, showed us that U.S. discourse on the Middle East bears little resemblance to how Arabs see their own region. I joked on twitter that if you had a split-screen of randomly selected Arabs watching, they’d probably be beyond confusion. To begin with, Romney’s foreign policy message crumbled under the weight of its own contradictions. In his October 8speech on the Middle East, he echoed the Bush “freedom agenda” in calling for a more pro-active approach to democracy promotion. But his first response on the Arab Spring suggested an exclusively security-oriented approach, with a region reduced to violence, terrorism, and “tumult.” He cited the free election of an Islamist president in Egypt as an example of the “dramatic reversal in the kind of hopes we had.”

Republicans and neoconservatives, to their credit, once prioritized democracy promotion. But the fact that Islamist parties tend win free elections has rendered “neoconservatism” incoherent. It is simply impossible to support democracy, on one hand, and oppose the rise of Islamists, on the other.

Authors

Publication: The Brookings Institution, CNN, Foreign Policy

Mitt Romney's Foreign Policy Agenda

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:30:00 -0400

Follow @BrookingsFP

Editor's Note: This blog post was updated on October 9, 2012.

On October 8, 2012, presidential candidate Mitt Romney delivered a speech on U.S. foreign policy at the Virginia Military Institute. Brookings experts examine the foreign policy platform laid out by Governor Romney in the VMI speech. Suzanne Maloney assesses Romney's remarks on Iran and advises how the Obama administration should respond to his speech. Shadi Hamid takes a closer look at a common narrative that emerged during the remarks claiming that the Obama administration has abdicated America's leadership role in the Middle East. Justin Vaïsse examines the assertive stance Romney took during his speech. Bruce Riedel focuses on Romney's statements regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict, al Qaeda, and Afghanistan. Michael O'Hanlon lays out his views on the most compelling elements of the speech and how it might help bring the foreign policy debate to the forefront in the closing weeks of the presidential election. Clara O'Donnell explores what a Republican win in November would mean for Europe.

Mitt Romney's Unsettling Track Record on Iran
Suzanne Maloney, Senior Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy

Predictably, Iran figured prominently in Mitt Romney’s address on Monday detailing his foreign policy positions. The issue of how to handle the threats posed by Iran has proven a reliable feature of American campaign debates for more than three decades. This reflects Washington’s deeply-held concerns about Iran’s nuclear program and support for terrorism, as well as the sense that Iran’s cartoonish clerics and messianic bombast provide a convenient foil for American politicians from both parties to exude a brawny patriotism and appeal to pro-Israeli audiences.

Gratuitous swagger on Iran has long been a part of the Romney repertoire. He has likened the Islamic Republic with the Soviet Union’s “evil empire,” tossing in an analogy to Nazi Germany for good measure. Romney has suggested that his own election is the only means of preventing Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and has disparaged the Obama Administration’s diplomatic efforts on Iran as “a symbol of weakness and impotence.” None of this provides serious policy alternatives, nor does it truly reveal how a Romney administration might actually approach the intractable issue of Iran.

After all, despite all the tough talk, the track record of both U.S. political parties on Iran is far more complicated. A quick review of the historical record would show that Democratic administrations have been responsible for each of the most significant intensifications of sanctions on Iran. Meanwhile, Republican administrations have tried to ply cooperation from Tehran with weapons sales – Ronald Reagan – and have not only sought talks with Iran but actually engaged in them – George W. Bush, whose administration's dialogue with Iranian diplomats in 2001-2003 stands as the single most successful use of diplomatic engagement with Iran since the end of the hostage crisis.

But while his posturing on Iran was not in and of itself new, Romney's speech at the Virginia Military Institute on Monday appeared to tweak his standard message on Iran, which until now has focused on the Iranian nuclear standoff. In Monday's speech, however, he opened up a new line of critique of the Obama administration, focused on the President's hands-off approach to the brief but intense protest movement that emerged after the dubious 2009 reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "And yet when millions of Iranians took to the streets in June of 2009; when they demanded freedom from a cruel regime that threatens the world; when they cried out, are you with us or are you with them, the American president was silent," Romney asserted.

The argument that Obama betrayed Iran's struggling democracy movement was a throwaway line, apparently intended to link Romney's argument on Iran to his broader critique of the current administration's handling of the Arab spring. But it raises an important issue, one that Romney will surely revisit in future foreign policy speeches and in the upcoming debate. The accusation that Obama mishandled the 2009 protests is particularly problematic for the President, whose partisans and advisers often seem discomforted by the administration's restraint back in 2009. Especially in the light of the subsequent revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria, many Iranians and even some Obama backers question whether Washington was on the right side of history in keeping its distance from the first salvos of Iran's "Green Movement."

But the administration's self-recriminations and Romney's casual critiques are both wrong. There is simply no evidence that more forceful American advocacy could have tipped the balance in favor of Iranian protestors in 2009. The Iranian Green Movement did not falter because of Obama's actions or lack thereof, but rather because of the divisions within its leadership, the lack of a coherent strategy, and the Iranian regime's willingness to use force, as well as the Iranian public's corresponding unwillingness to continue coming to the streets in the face of that force. All these factors distinguish what happened in Iran in 2009 from the subsequent triumphs in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in the Arab world.

More to the point, Romney's grandstanding on Iran's long-held democratic aspirations does not offer a credible answer to the basic question that will face the next administration in dealing with Iran: is it possible to change not simply the most dangerous policies of the current Iranian government, but the nature and character of that government itself? After all, it is hard to imagine that a durable resolution to the nuclear crisis can be achieved without constructing a viable modus vivendi with Tehran, something that would appear to be unlikely given the paranoia and resentment of the current Iranian leadership. Given the long memories of the American role in the 1953 coup that unseated Iran’s elected prime minister, and the fresher memories of the disastrous U.S. experience in picking winners in Iraq, regime change is an appropriately dirty word for American policymakers in contemplating options toward Tehran. And yet there ought to be a serious conversation about how Washington and the world can cultivate a better future for Iran and encourage the emergence of responsible, representative leaders in that country.

Here, Mitt Romney’s track record is particularly unsettling. His advisors include advocates for the Mojahideen-e Khalq, a discredited, cult-like exile group that has been reluctantly removed from the U.S. government’s list of foreign terrorist organizations after a well-greased lobbying campaign. Other advisors distinguished themselves as proponents of Ahmad Chalabi and the prospect of an American ‘cakewalk’ in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion. Romney himself boasts about his decision while governor to deny state police protection to former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami during a 2006 speech at Harvard University, apparently failing to appreciate that Khatami was responsible for efforts to strengthen Iran’s electoral institutions and curtail its worst abuses, as well as for a two-year suspension of its uranium enrichment program.

Given the ambivalence among his own team about the approach to Iran’s 2009 protest movement, Obama may be tempted to duck any challenge from Romney on this issue. He should not – rather, the President should use any Romney moralizing to challenge the governor for specific policy proposals that would advance a democratic future in Iran. It would be a welcome relief to hear both candidates offer serious ideas rather than more empty slogans on Iran.

Romney Asked the Right Questions About U.S. Policy in the Middle East
Shadi Hamid, Director of Research, Brookings Doha Center, and Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy

With his Middle East speech on Monday, Mitt Romney – after much fumbling – seems to have finally found a distinct and somewhat coherent foreign policy message. Many of Romney’s critics quickly dismissed the speech. “There’s absolutely nothing in this speech,” said James Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations, while former secretary of state Madeleine Albright called Romney “very shallow.” Romney may not have provided the right answers, but he asked many of the right questions. In his remarks, a common narrative emerged – that the Obama administration, in its desire to reduce its footprint in the Middle East, has abdicated America’s leadership role in the region. Oddly enough, this perception is not a Republican fiction but is increasingly widespread within the Middle East itself. Obama, the argument goes, is a weak president who can be pushed around, with little consequence.

To what extent, though, is perceived American “decline” a function of specific policies choices or is it a more general issue of the projection of U.S. power, and how that power is perceived by our friends and enemies in the region? Romney seems to be arguing that the latter, however hard to measure, counts for a lot. Indeed, the debate over “leading” versus “leading from behind,” as tired as it might sound, reflects real differences in philosophy between the candidates.

In Syria, such differences have obvious and practical implications on the ground. Romney argued, with good reason, that “the President has failed to lead in Syria.” He pledged to prioritize the coordination and arming of rebel forces (although he did not specify how directly the U.S. would be involved). In contrast, the Obama administration has actively discouraged Saudi Arabia and Qatar from arming the rebels, as Robert Worth recently reported in the New York Times. Khalid al-Attiyah, Qatar’s state minister for foreign affairs, stressed the importance of getting more advanced weapons to the opposition. “But first we need the backing of the United States,” he said, in a rare, public criticism of the Obama administration. In Turkey, the feeling is closer to one of betrayal, as Turkish officials find themselves alone, on the brink of war with their Syrian neighbors, and an international community that seems uninterested in doing much about it. That is to say nothing of Syrian rebels themselves who have been calling for either arms or outright military intervention since last year. A year is a long time to wait, and they may be turning against the United States. As a member of Kafr Takharim’s revolutionary council said: “We read in the media that we are receiving things. But we haven’t seen it. We only received speeches from the West.” When Romney quoted a Syrian woman saying “we will not forget that that you forgot about us,” he was conveying a real, palpable sense that, in the eyes of a growing number of Arabs and Turks, the United States and Europe have abandoned the Syrian people. The memory of that betrayal, if it continues, is likely to have real consequences for the United States and its allies.

A second notable contrast was on aid conditionality. Romney said he would “make further reforms to our foreign assistance to create incentives for good governance, free enterprise, and greater trade, in the Middle East.” Regarding Egypt in particular, he spoke of including “clear conditions on our aid.” Nearly two years into the Arab uprisings, the Obama administration has failed to tie any existing or new aid to explicit benchmarks on political reform and democratization. U.S. military aid to Egypt continued to flow despite egregious anti-democratic behavior on the part of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, including waging war on civil society, dissolving a democratically elected parliament, reinstating martial law, and unilaterally stripping the presidency of many of its powers. Meanwhile, the political situation in Jordan – the second-largest per capita recipient of U.S. aid – continues to deteriorate. But a discussion of reformulating U.S. assistance there has not even begun.

What would Romney actually do about Jordan, though? Here, the tensions in Romney’s foreign policy approach become all too obvious. In his speech, Romney spoke of standing by our “friends,” but what about our friends – the leaders of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait – who have actually become more repressive in the wake of the same Arab Spring that Romney claims to support? Instead of urging Gulf countries to take reform seriously, Romney pledged to “deepen our cooperation with our partners in the Gulf.”

It is also remarkable that Romney managed to run through an entire speech on the Middle East without mentioning the word “Islamist” even once. Neoconservatives within the Republican Party prioritize democracy promotion but, like the Tea Party faction of the party, they also fear the effect Islamists will have on U.S. interests, including Israel’s security (I discuss intra-Republican differences in this recent Brookings paper). The problem is that democratic openings inevitably benefit Islamist parties. Again, the tensions here seem irreconcilable, which is probably why Romney avoided addressing them.

It was President George W. Bush who once said that “America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” Unfortunately, they are not, and won’t be anytime soon. Sometimes, difficult choices have to be made, but Romney does not appear willing to make them. But, then again, neither does Obama. The Arab revolts have, in some ways, closed the gap between interests and ideals (as in Libya and Syria), yet, at the same time, they have made the policy contradictions all the more obvious (as in Bahrain). Whatever else might be said about it, Romney’s speech did us the service of highlighting those contradictions. Instead of doubling down on President Obama’s flawed Middle East record, Obama’s supporters (and, if he wins, Obama himself) should engage with the substance of Republican critiques and outline a vision for re-thinking and re-orienting U.S. policy in the region. Otherwise, the contradictions – which have damaged U.S. credibility in the region for decades – will persist. And so too will the consequences.

Romney Offers Clear Choices. But Are They Sustainable?
Justin Vaïsse, Director of Research, Center on the United States and Europe, and Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy

Contrary to the strategy he followed in the first presidential debate last Thursday, Mitt Romney did not try to strike a more moderate tone in his foreign policy speech on Monday. Instead, he maintained a hawkish, neoconservative line. He thus confirmed the two campaign choices he made in the summer of 2011 – but opened himself to questions about the economics of his assertiveness.

The first choice is to ignore the growing number of Republicans and Independents who are tired of foreign interventions (see here and here) and are not convinced that defense spending should be increased. This was not always the case. In June 2011 for example, Romney said it was time to "bring our troops home" from Afghanistan "as soon as we possibly can." This rhetoric was replaced by a much more hawkish stance, especially in his speech at The Citadel a year ago, where he started talking about "a new American century," insisting soon afterwards that it was "not time for America to cut and run" from Afghanistan.

In his speech of Monday, Romney acknowledged the existence of this anti-interventionist strain ("I know many Americans are asking whether our country today—with our ailing economy, and our massive debt, and after 11 years at war—is still capable of leading"), but only to unambiguously reassert his preference for an internationalist and hawkish posture. In purely electoral terms, it means that he expects more votes from his attacks on President Obama's perceived weakness and lack of leadership than he fears losing them from anti-interventionist Republicans and Independents, or from his association with the neoconservatives.

That is the second choice Mitt Romney made in the summer of 2011. He adopted a foreign policy line which checks all the boxes of neoconservatism, the school of thought associated with the administration of George W. Bush and the 2003 Iraq war. That foreign policy tradition, which dates back to the 1970s, is based on five pillars (internationalism, primacy, unilateralism, militarism and democracy), which were all present in one form or another in Romney's speech on Monday, most notably in sentences like "if America does not lead, others will—others who do not share our interests and our values—and the world will grow darker" or "our friends and allies across the globe do not want less American leadership. They want more."

Romney's positioning is thus very clear, but he opens himself to criticism on various counts. First, given Obama's image on national security, which is unusually strong for a Democratic candidate thanks to the Bin Laden raid and his decisive use of drones, it might not be the best electoral strategy to use the traditional line of attack of Democrats as weak and insufficiently patriotic. Second, it is hard for Romney to present himself as more assertive than Obama without crossing the fine line between hawkishness and adventurism. Whether on Syria, Iran, Afghanistan or China, Romney outlines policies that are actually not very different from the President's; you have to believe the rhetoric in order to detect the existence of a real gap.

Lastly, there might be cause for skepticism about the fiscal and diplomatic sustainability of his foreign policy. Even without buying into the current wave of declinism, it is hard to deny that America's power relative to that of other countries has indeed decreased, and a posture of uncompromising hawkishness (Iran), toughness (Russia, China), or conditionality (Egypt; foreign aid) vis-à-vis the rest of the world –what James Traub dubbed the "more enemies, fewer friends doctrine" – might not be the most effective way to fulfill America's objectives. This is all the more true that America's resources will necessarily be strained in the next four years, and that the issue of the debt will loom large.

This leads to the most serious questions about Romney's speech. Although he has found it difficult, because the Middle East has a way to always force itself back to the agenda, President Obama has tried to redistribute American diplomatic and military assets away from that region and towards emerging powers, especially in the Asia-Pacific, where the stakes are highest in the long term. More generally, he has tried to rebalance U.S. foreign policy towards global and economic issues and away from land wars and counter-terrorism. In his speech of Monday, the Romney outlined a world which closely resembled the one George W. Bush inhabited, as if frozen in time circa 2005. He didn't really talk about China and the Asia-Pacific region, and mentioned economics only when talking about free trade. One only needs to read Robert Zoellick's excellent analysis "The Currency of Power" to be convinced of the imperious necessity to integrate economics into any foreign policy strategy. Such integration was thoroughly lacking in Romney's speech. But since he picked Zoellick to head his national security transition team, perhaps that dimension will eventually be added, if he reaches the White House?

Governor Romney's Approach to the Middle East
Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy

Governor Romney's foreign policy speech at VMI is a timely and constructive contribution to the presidential campaign. He has delivered a thoughtful critique of the Obama record in the Middle East and provided some specific policy proposals. Importantly, Gov. Romney stated his commitment to a two state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, an issue his previous statements had left confused at best. Romney gave no road map for how to secure a peace agreement but he acknowledged the need to do so.

Romney also rightly assessed the threat still posed by al Qaeda. It has been bloodied in Pakistan by the 300 drone strikes since Obama's inauguration and the death of Osama bin Laden but it is not defeated. The chaos across the Arab world has opened the door for al Qaeda's comeback from Yemen to Mali. It is indeed clear now it had a role in the Benghazi attack on the 11th anniversary of 911. Aside from calls to leadership, however, we don't have much answer to how a Romney administration will fight al Qaeda differently. Standing by Israel, stopping Iran's nuclear ambitions and keeping close ties to Saudi Arabia may be good policies in their own right but don't really address the al Qaeda challenge. Drones indeed are not a strategy, as the VMI speech notes, but what is the strategy to fight al Qaeda?

The governor was helpfully a little more clear on Afghanistan but here he also left room for more to come. He appears to accept the 2014 date for transition to Afghan leadership but seems to open the door to a reappraisal if battlefield conditions warrant. That is smart, we need flexibility. Does he mean he will keep more troops longer if his generals say they are needed? The even harder problem is how to deal with Pakistan which backs the Taliban and harbors its leaders but which has gotten $25 billion in aid from two administrations since 911, one Republican and one Democrat. How can we defeat the Taliban if Pakistan insists on backing them? Is Romney still opposed to talks with the Taliban as he stated last spring?

The VMI speech is a good start to what needs to be a far more vigorous and detailed debate in the next month. Both candidates need to be much sharper on the challenges ahead. The war in Afghanistan is eleven years old today but a successful outcome is still elusive. The Arab awakening is changing the politics of an entire region more decisively than any event in its recent history. The debate is critical. The time for vague soundbites is over.

A Good Speech for America, Regardless Who Wins
Michael E. O'Hanlon, Director of Research, Foreign Policy at Brookings, The Sydney Stein, Jr. Chair, and Senior Fellow, 21st Century Defense Initiative, Foreign Policy at Brookings

While I did not agree with everything Governor Romney said in his foreign policy speech at VMI today, and while I have particular differences of opinion with the Governor over the necessity of his proposed defense spending levels, he delivered a good speech on balance. However, the Governor’s critiques of President Obama’s handling of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya and the Iranian elections of 2009, as well as the Administration’s “pivot” towards Asia in recent years, were not compelling. Romney’s promise not to show flexibility towards Russia on missile defense was too categorical as well, but one must expect differences of opinion during a presidential campaign.

That said, the speech was still effective in many ways, because Romney conveyed a sense of sustained American engagement with the world that is welcome at a time when our domestic economic situation could easily produce a “Come home, America” mentality among the voting public. Instead, Romney talked about being patient in Afghanistan, and doing more to help the Libyan revolution in language that echoed that of nation-building advocates of the past. Romney also spoke of helping the Syrian opposition a bit more - without dragging the United States into war - and consolidating aid programs under a single leader in the U.S. government, which would make these programs more effective and would support certain Middle East countries in their efforts to make their revolutions succeed on terms that overlap with American interests.

These ideas generally make sense to me individually, and taken together they suggest ongoing American leadership in the world, regardless of who wins the election. I don’t know which party the speech will help most on November 6, but on balance I think it is a speech—and a type of foreign policy debate—that is good for the country either way.

What Romney Would Mean for Europe
Centre for European Reform, October/November 2012
Clara M. O'Donnell, Nonresident Fellow, Center on the United States and Europe, Foreign Policy

As the U.S. elections approach, Mitt Romney’s sometimes bellicose rhetoric on national security is raising European eyebrows. But many in Washington believe that if the Republican contender were to become president, U.S. policies might not differ much from the last four years. Despite Romney’s strong criticism of Barack Obama, some of the challenger’s views on foreign policy issues are similar to the president’s. And the points on which they disagree may matter little: U.S. presidents rarely implement their more outlandish campaign pledges. In any case, Congress will continue to set limits on U.S. policy on issues such as the Arab-Israeli conflict and nuclear arms control, whoever the president. But, if Mitt Romney genuinely believes much of his foreign policy rhetoric, a Republican victory in November could mean difficult times for transatlantic relations.

The former governor has, for example, identified Russia as America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” He considers Obama’s ‘reset’ with Moscow to have been a failure. He opposed ratification of the New START treaty on strategic weapons reductions because it supposedly allows Russia to expand its nuclear arsenal – Romney has notably warned that the treaty, unprecedentedly, allows Russia to mount intercontinental ballistic missiles on bombers. The Republican candidate has also strongly criticised Obama’s missile defence plan as less technologically reliable and ambitious than that of George W. Bush, and for downgrading the involvement of U.S. allies Poland and the Czech Republic.

Europeans, however, welcomed the U.S.-Russia reset. Many of them worry about Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism and non-co-operation on Syria. But most Europeans think the reset has made Russia more helpful on Afghanistan and Iran. They like New START, and many EU governments will have been confused by Romney’s concerns about bombers equipped with intercontinental ballistic missiles. Indeed it would be impossible for a bomber to take off with such a heavy load. Even EU countries that are more hawkish on Russia are likely to see Romney’s views as unnecessarily antagonistic. Initial concerns in Poland and the Czech Republic about the Obama administration’s commitment to their security have been largely addressed, after the US placed fighter jets in central Europe and started holding regular military exercises there. And Poland has been working on its own reset with Russia in recent years.

Read the full article »

Authors

Anti-American Sentiment in Egypt and the New Post-Arab Spring Reality

Shadi Hamid — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Egypt and the U.S. have had a decades-long alliance, but Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi says America now needs to change its approach to Egypt and the Arab world. Amid rising anti-American sentiment in the Middle East and the continued stalemate between the Palestinians and Israel, the U.S.-Egypt relationship is critical for American foreign policy in the region, notes Fellow Shadi Hamid.

Video

Anti-American Sentiment in Egypt and the New Post-Arab Spring Reality

Authors

Shadi Hamid

Campaign 2012: Arab Awakening

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

September 25, 2012
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

Following the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the death of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, the United States is weighing its position and policies in the post-Arab Spring Middle East. More than a year after the initial Arab uprisings, the United States is questioning the state of its relations with the nascent Arab democracies and the emerging Islamist regimes. As the second anniversary of the Arab revolutions approaches, political and economic instability persists alongside growing anti-American sentiment, forcing the United States to adapt its policies to the evolving landscape in the Middle East. With the U.S. election just over six weeks away, many American voters are questioning the presidential candidates’ foreign policy strategies toward the region and wondering how the volatility in the Middle East and North Africa will affect the United States in the months and years ahead.

On September 25, the Campaign 2012 project at Brookings held a discussion on the Arab Awakening, the tenth in a series of forums that identify and address the 12 most critical issues facing the next president. POLITICO Pro defense reporter Stephanie Gaskell moderated a panel discussion where Brookings experts Tamara Cofman Wittes, Shadi Hamid and Raj Desai presented recommendations to the next president.

Participants can follow the conversation on Twitter using hashtag #BIArabAwakening.

Download papers from the event:

Prioritizing Democracy: How the Next President Should Re-Orient U.S. Policy in the Middle East, by Shadi Hamid
Three Key Challenges in Confronting the Arab Awakening, by Tamara Cofman Wittes
The Challenge of a Reform Endowment, by Raj M. Desai

Campaign 2012: Twelve Independent Ideas for Improving American Public Policy is an indispensable guide to the key questions facing White House hopefuls in 2012.

Brookings: Experts - Shadi Hamid

Why the Current Syria Policy Doesn't Make Sense

Authors

Syria, the U.S., and Arming the Rebels: Assad’s Use of Chemical Weapons and Obama’s Red Line

Authors

The Folly of Waiting for a More Perfect Syrian Opposition

Authors

Morsi and the Muslims

Authors

Syria, Chemical Weapons, And The Intervention Question

Authors

Obama's Strategy in the Middle East: The Blurry Red Line

Authors

Political Islam in Tunisia: A Discussion with Shadi Hamid

Authors

Syria Is Not Iraq

Authors

How Should President Obama Change U.S. Policy in the Middle East?

Authors

The President's Fantasy Cabinet

Authors

Camp David Peace Treaty Collapse

Downloads

Video

Authors

Old Friends, New Neighborhood: The United States, the GCC, and their Responses to the Arab Spring

Downloads

Authors

Egypt’s Constitutional Referendum: What Comes Next?

Event Information

Audio

Transcript

Event Materials

Is There an Egyptian Nation?

Authors

Between Interference and Assistance: The Politics of International Support in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya

Downloads

Authors

Middle East Lost

Authors

The Candidates Debate Foreign Policy – The Takeaways

Authors

Mitt Romney's Foreign Policy Agenda

Authors

Anti-American Sentiment in Egypt and the New Post-Arab Spring Reality

Video

Authors

Campaign 2012: Arab Awakening

Event Information

Video

Audio

Transcript

Event Materials