On October 15, the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings hosted a conversation with Suzanne Maloney, deputy director of Brookings Foreign Policy program and author of the recently released book, Iran’s Political Economy since the Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Maloney was joined by Javier Solana, a Brookings distinguished fellow and former EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy; and Vali Nasr, Dean of Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings. The three experts discussed Iran today, the implications of the nuclear agreement, and more. Bruce Jones, Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy at Brookings, gave introductory remarks.

      

 

 

Yes, America may have to resort to surgical airstrikes to help Iraq check the advance of this extremist group, known as ISIS. But in the end, Iraq can be pulled back fully from the brink only if its quarreling sects agree to share power under a new constitution. And that will not happen unless American diplomats re-engage as mediators among the sectarian leaders.

The Shiite-Sunni divide has grown too wide for Iraqis to reconcile their differences by themselves, and Iraq’s neighboring powers are in no position to be honest brokers. Iran stands firmly behind Iraq’s Shiites, while Saudi Arabia and Turkey sympathize with its Sunnis.

So Americans alone have the ability to bring together all the stakeholders to end the fighting. Once we take on that role, the cooperation of the three regional powers would be not only useful, but essential.

And it would be in all of our interests. ISIS has carved out a vast Sunni region, from Aleppo on Syria’s border with Turkey to Samarra deep in central Iraq, that threatens to redraw the maps of both countries by creating a landlocked and impoverished Sunni realm that would covet its neighbors’ riches and be a breeding ground for extremism. That realm could expand further to include parts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and then project influence across the Sunni world, from Africa to Southeast Asia.

In Syria and Iraq, the rebellion began with protests against anti-Sunni harshness by sectarian governments. Now it may be peaking; ISIS is unlikely to seize Damascus or Baghdad, and its extreme sectarian tone and record of heinous violence are provoking a reaction in kind among Alawites, Christians, Shiites and even among Sunnis, who once admired its fight against the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Still, there is no predicting the ultimate reach of ISIS. That is why it is critical for Iraq and Syria to remain intact and keep hold of their Sunni regions.

Consider the intersecting challenges: two failed states, populated by warring sects and ethnic groups, and ruled by ineffective and predatory governments; they are now besieged by brutal extremists backed by menacing neighbors with regional allies. That is a problem far too large and deeply rooted for a military solution alone.

In the long run, the key to stability and peace is rule from Damascus and Baghdad that is less centralized and that provides more justice and equality for Sunnis than in the past. And that, in turn, is achievable only if Iraqis and Syrians agree to power-sharing deals.

However estranged the quarreling parties are right now, they might respond to our diplomacy, with the buy-in of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

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The effort should steer clear of war-making, nation-building and goals as quixotic as ending the Middle East’s sectarian and ethnic divisions.

Rather, its guideposts should be three achievable goals: don’t let the extremists control territory; protect the territorial integrity of the region’s states; and promote governance by bargaining, to allow each sectarian community a fair chance to live in peace.

The task for American mediators would be formidable. While many Iraqis cling tenaciously to the idea of a unified country, the dysfunctional wrangling among Baghdad’s politicians pales when compared with the deep sectarian distrust left in the population by a decade of violence and displacement. In addition, the Kurdish region in the north has already left Iraq for all intents and purposes. And America has far less leverage than in 2006, when it had troops in Iraq to quell sectarian violence, and more financial and political levers with which to influence Iraqi politics.

Iraq’s Shiites, an overwhelming majority of its Arabs, will resist talk of sharing power with rebellious Sunni extremists. Most Shiites want instead to vanquish ISIS, then embrace Sunnis only as junior partners in a Shiite-dominated state. Many Sunnis, by contrast, feel the wind in their sails and think they can again rule Iraq; they are unlikely to settle for less than an equal partnership.

Breaking those attitudes may require a new government in Baghdad. But even with one, keeping Iraq intact will also require a new constitution to define how power is shared. A workable formula would have Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds governing their own domains, while sharing national power in a weaker center. A similar formula ended the ethnic war in Bosnia in the 1990s.

One factor in favor of this plan is the fear already sown by ISIS. Even leading Sunni Arabs who criticize Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and who have supported ISIS in Syria, worry that an ISIS triumph in Iraq would threaten their own interests; in particular, an emergent “Sunnistan” could strengthen other Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood, which they have opposed in Egypt as too populist. As angry as these Arabs are with Mr. Maliki, they have little appetite for breaking up Iraq.

As for Iran, its ties are with the current rulers in Baghdad and Damascus, so it wants them to keep their borders. And with a Sunni minority of its own, Iran fears that even it may not be immune from efforts to redraw the map of the Middle East.

America can build a diplomatic plan on the common interest in keeping Iraq intact. It can rally the region and nations around it. It needs to start the effort now.

This piece originally appeared in
The New York Times
.

      

 

 

A bribery and corruption scandal has plunged Turkey into crisis, seriously undermining Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authority. Mr. Erdogan now faces serious challenges from both secularists suspicious of his Islamist agenda and his erstwhile ally turned rival, the cleric Fethullah Gulen, who leads a powerful Islamic movement from his perch in Pennsylvania. Sluggish economic growth and setbacks in foreign policy have only spurred the critics.

The political bickering is unlikely to let up before next year’s crucial presidential election, in which Mr. Erdogan is expected to run. He will have a difficult time repairing the tarnished image of his Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P. The economy will not give him a boost, but foreign policy might — if he can show that Turkey will once again play a central role in the Middle East.

For over a decade, Turkey cultivated ties with its Arab neighbors. Turkish diplomats and businessmen were ubiquitous across the region, opening borders and trade routes, promoting business and brokering political deals. Turkey’s spectacular economic success and its stable Muslim democracy were hailed as a model for the whole region.

Read the full article »

      

 

 

On May 14, Foreign Policy at Brookings hosted Vali Nasr for a discussion on the state of U.S. power globally and whether American foreign policy under the Obama administration is in retreat. Brookings Senior Fellow Robert Kagan joined the discussion, which was moderated by Vice President Martin Indyk, director of Foreign Policy.

      

 

 

President Obama has doggedly resisted American involvement in Syria. The killing of over 70,000 people and the plight of over a million refugees have elicited sympathy from the White House but not much more. That is because Syria challenges a central aim of Obama’s foreign policy: shrinking the U.S. footprint in the Middle East and downplaying the region’s importance to global politics. Doing more on Syria would reverse the U.S. retreat from the region.

Since the beginning of Obama’s first term, the administration’s stance as events unfolded in the Middle East has been wholly reactive. This “lean back and wait” approach has squandered precious opportunity to influence the course of events in the Middle East. There has been no strategy for capitalizing on the opportunity that the Arab Spring presented, or for containing its fallout — the Syrian crisis being the worst case to date. The president rewarded Burmese generals with a six-hour visit for their willingness to embrace reform, but he has not visited a single Arab country that went through the Arab Spring.

Obama sees Syria as a tragic humanitarian crisis without obvious strategic implications for the United States. “How do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?” he asked in a New Republic interview in January. When the president visited the region last month he chose to focus on the Arab-Israeli peace process rather than Syria. The peace process is now at the top of Secretary of State John Kerry’s agenda.

The plight of Palestinians is a perennial concern, but it is in Syria that the future of the region hangs in the balance. Choosing the peace process over Syria underscores not the administration’s interest in the Middle East but its determination to look past it.

Washington has wasted precious time in using diplomatic, economic and military levers to influence the course of events in Syria. That neglect has allowed the conflagration to rage at great human cost, radicalizing the opposition and putting at risk U.S. allies across the region.

America cannot and should not decide the fate of the Middle East, but it should be clear about its stakes there, and not shy away from efforts to at least nudge events in more favorable directions as this critical region faces momentous choices. A “lean back and wait” posture toward unfolding events is dangerous.

The paroxysm of violence in Syria is expected to kill tens of thousands more and produce as many as three million refugees by the year’s end. That is a humanitarian tragedy to be sure, but one with immediate strategic consequences. American insouciance in the face of that devastation is fomenting anti-Americanism. The waves of refugees will constitute an unstable population that will be a breeding ground for extremism and in turn destabilize the countries where they take refuge. Syria’s neighbors are not equipped to deal with a humanitarian disaster on this scale.

The longer the devastation goes on the more difficult it will be to put Syria back together, and failing to do so will leave a dangerous morass in the heart of the Middle East, a failed state at war with itself where extremism and instability will fester and all manner of terrorists and Al Qaeda affiliates will find ample space, resources and recruits to menace the region and world.

Worse yet, the conflict in Syria could spill over its borders. Syria has become ground zero in a broader conflict that pits Shiites against Sunnis and shapes the larger regional competition for power between Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Syria’s paroxysms if allowed to drag on could potentially spread far and wide and even change the map of the region. America may think it does not have any interests in Syria, but it has interests everywhere the Syrian conflict touched.

Lebanon and Iraq are each deeply divided along sectarian lines, and both countries teeter on a knife’s edge as tensions rise between their ascendant Shiite populations who fear a setback if Bashar al-Assad falls, and the minority Sunnis in their own countries who support Syria’s Sunni-led opposition. Sectarian tensions stretch from Lebanon and Iraq through the Gulf countries of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain and on to Pakistan where sectarian violence has exploded into the open.

It is time America takes the lead in organizing international assistance to refugees. America should not hide behind the Russian veto. It should pursue a concerted diplomatic strategy in support of arming the rebels and imposing a no-flight zone over Syria. That would not only hamper Assad’s ability to fight, it would allow refugees to remain within Syria’s borders, thus reducing pressure on neighboring countries.

It is time the U.S. took over from Qatar and Saudi Arabia in organizing the Syrian opposition into a credible political force — failure to do that accounts for the chaos that has paralyzed the group. There are powerful economic sanctions that the U.S. could use to cripple the Assad regime.

Finally, America should build ties with the Free Syrian Army with the goal of denying extremist groups the ability to dominate the armed resistance and gaining influence with groups that will dominate Syria’s future. It was failing to build those ties in Afghanistan that allowed the resistance groups who opposed the Soviet Union to disintegrate into the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The Syrian crisis has become a Gordian knot that cannot be easily disentangled. As daunting as the crisis looks, there is a cost to inaction — in human suffering, regional instability and damage to America’s global standing. And as the Syrian crisis escalates, America and the world will only rediscover their stakes in the Middle East. If Obama truly wants to pivot away from the Middle East then he has to help end the bloodletting in Syria.

      

 

 

If we put a map of the world on the wall and put red pins on the conflict zones that most threaten American security and tax its resources, and green pins where economic growth is fastest and the promise of wealth greatest, we would see a lot of red pins clustered in the Middle East and a lot of green pins dotting Asia. So it should not come as a surprise that President Obama made “pivoting” away from the Middle East and toward Asia the cornerstone of his foreign policy. He saw the writing on the map, so to speak, and decided that the future of America should be entwined with the prosperity of the Asia-Pacific region and China and not with the troubles of the Middle East.

The pivot’s aim, on the face of it, is economic: boosting the amount of business that America does with Asia’s booming economies, both investment and trade. Those plans, however, collide head-on with China’s regional ambitions. The pivot, to succeed, must block China’s hegemonic impulse and contain its rise in its own backyard. Containing China, therefore, thinks Washington, is the real strategic challenge facing America in the coming decades.

But this sort of thinking poses a false choice between the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. America is right to think that its rivalry with China will play out in Asia — but Beijing and Washington have very different conceptions of what Asia is. America thinks of Asia as the arc from the Straits of Malacca to the Sea of Japan: the area from Myanmar to the east, or, in other words, the region we call Southeast Asia (Myanmar,Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc.) plus Northeast Asia (Japan, North Korea, South Korea). China, however, thinks of Asia as the entire vast landmass — the world’s largest both in area and population — that stretches from the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea.

On this larger playing field, China is expanding its reach, across the continent and toward Europe, pivoting west just as America is pivoting east. In China’s view, the Middle East is integral to Asia’s power politics, while America, with its shrunken conception of Asia, thinks of the Middle East as excess baggage in a Pacific-focused foreign policy.

America, which is reducing its dependence on Middle Eastern oil, believes it can afford to think this way. China, by contrast, must look to the rich oil and gas fields of Central Asia and the Middle East to keep its surging economy humming. As James Fallows puts it, “As fast as [China’s] economy grows, its energy consumption grows faster still. Each percentage point increase in economic output leads to a more than proportional increase in demand for energy.” China is the world’s second-largest oil importer, behind only the United States. Its demand for oil will double again in the coming 15 years or so. Well before then, in 2020, China is projected to be importing 7.3 million barrels of crude a day — half of Saudi Arabia’s planned output. By that time, China will be the world’s number one oil consumer, and its manic rate of urbanization is likely to keep it that way. In the next decade alone, the rise of new Chinese cities, according to a McKinsey report, “will account for around 20 percent of global energy consumption and up to one-quarter of growth in [global] oil demand.” Two decades ago, China’s large industrial and population centers lay almost exclusively along its east coast. That region remains a dynamo, but people and production — and the hunger and thirst for energy — are moving west. China now needs more and more energy for its middle and western regions.

China’s fevered investing in west Asia is designed to create a sophisticated network of roads, railways and pipelines stretching home from the oil and gas fields of northern Iraq and Central Asia. Those land routes will complement the tanker fleets carrying oil and liquid natural gas across the Indian Ocean. There are plans for railway lines connecting Turkey to Pakistan and Iran, and pipelines running west over high mountain ranges into western China or to the port of Gwador, Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea coast.

To facilitate all this, China is forging close economic ties with Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. Its trade with Persian Gulf monarchies, too, is on the rise. Persian Gulf sovereign funds are pouring investments into China while a growing number of Chinese businesses ply their trade in Cairo and Baghdad. So many Chinese businessmen now visit Irbil in Northern Iraq that local law firms are looking for Mandarin speakers. China is investing billions to buy access to markets and resources, but also to increase its political influence. China’s scramble for Africa is being repeated in the Middle East.

China is naturally concerned about the security of its supply routes. Beijing sees American strategic relations with countries from the Pacific to the Persian Gulf as a noose that could choke China’s access to energy. Indeed, in the run-up to World War Two, America, Britain, and the Netherlands did deny energy- and resource-poor Japan access to oil, rubber, and iron shipments from Southeast Asia and the Dutch East Indies. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union cast hungry eyes on the Persian Gulf with the idea of doing something similar to the West. These lessons are not lost on China’s strategic decision-makers. They believe access to energy will be at the heart of the next global rivalry — the one between China and America –too.

Confrontation between the two powers, whether over energy or markets, is no longer a far-fetched idea but entirely within the realm of possibility — that is what the American military build-up in Asia is signaling. In a military competition, America has the clear advantage. China knows the U.S. can use its superior sea power to squeeze China’s oil supplies; the American armada dominates the Pacific and Indian Oceans and every body of water in between. Two strategic choke points in particular matter to China. The first is the Straits of Malacca — the narrow, 500-mile long straits separating Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. The Straits of Malacca is a shallow, heavily traveled, easily blocked stretch of water — in the Phillips Channel, just south of Singapore, it is less than two miles wide. It is the eastern doorway to the Indian Ocean and one of the world’s critical maritime choke points. More than 85 percent of the oil and oil products bound for China pass through the Straits from west to east. For Chinese strategists, resolving what they call “the Malacca dilemma” is a major preoccupation. The second choke point is the Persian Gulf.

In order to escape the Malacca dilemma, China has turned to a series of overland pipelines linking the eastern industrial centers of Shanghai and Guangzhou with western China and Turkmenistan, respectively. China has also looked to Myanmar as an alternate route that avoids the Straits. There, Beijing has had to compete for influence with Delhi. India, too, is growing rapidly, and is looking to the same Middle Eastern and Central Asian sources to sustain its economy.

Even as it develops overland alternatives, China is building a blue-water navy and has invested in the so-called “string of pearls” strategy of building bases in the Indian Ocean (in places such as Sri Lanka) to protect its sea routes to Africa and the Middle East. There is already a brisk competition between China and India over which country will dominate the Indian Ocean. The two Asian powers eye one another with suspicion even as they cooperate to address the menace of piracy. But China is also worried about U.S. control of the high seas. The Scarborough Shoal row, in which China asserted primacy over the South China Sea and met resistance from several Southeast Asian nations backed by the U.S., brought the problem into sharp relief. At that point, America had already announced that it would deploy 2,500 U.S. Marines to Australia and help the Philippines to upgrade its navy.

But of equal importance is American naval domination of the Persian Gulf, the source of much of China’s future energy supply. It is a critical strategic advantage in managing China’s rise, a fact that Beijing is acutely aware of. The U.S., however, does not seem to be. America is focusing on the Straits of Malacca but proclaiming its goal of leaving the Persian Gulf. We will not need Persian Gulf oil and gas, American officials visiting the Gulf states tell their hosts, so we will be shrinking our footprint here. We may not need Persian Gulf oil, but China will, and so will the countries we depend on to balance China in its backyard: Japan and South Korea. The administration has made it clear that we are now in the business of containing China. So should we not be doubling down on the Persian Gulf, a region we have already secured for 60 years, rather than abandoning it at the precise moment that it has achieved new strategic value?

American retreat from the Middle East will be welcomed in China as a strategic boon: it will give China a free hand to shape its energy security in west Asia, which in turn will give Beijing greater leverage in resisting American pressure in the Asia-Pacific. This region is not only a source of valuable energy to China, but is also a cultural and ethnic bridge to the Turkic Muslim minority living in China’s western-most provinces, which gives China a security interest there as well. Until the pivot, China may have worried that American presence could encourage Central Asian states closest to China’s western borders to resist Beijing’s influence, as is happening in Southeast Asia. Beijing has sought to bolster that influence, integrating parts of the Middle East and Central Asia closest to its borders into its economic orbit, and founding the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a rival to American power styled as a counterweight to NATO or the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). With Iran and Russia’s backing, SCO is working to limit American diplomatic presence in the region.

America has got its Asia strategy wrong. It should start with a broader view of Asia, one that reflects the strategic interests that bind the eastern and western parts of that continent and drive China’s role there. In that larger context American presence in the Middle East is an enormous asset that will become more valuable as America’s rivalry with China intensifies in the years to come.

      

 

 

That’s a debate over whether the U.S. has the right counterterrorism strategy to start with. The administration claims its elimination of al-Qaeda leaders using drones and special operations forces has crippled the organization. Has it, really?

The Benghazi attack occurred a day after al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri urged Libyans to avenge the death of his top lieutenant, Libyan Yahya al-Libi, in a drone strike in June in Pakistan. If Zawahiri’s call prompted the attack on the Benghazi mission, al-Qaeda, far from being a spent force, retains sufficient capability to threaten U.S. security.

Even if the Benghazi attack had nothing to do with al- Qaeda, there’s no doubt the organization, and like-minded groups, is enjoying a comeback in other places, notably Mali and Yemen. How did this happen?

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. saw the war on terrorism as a battle of ideas: Violent extremism had to be defeated by moderate Islam and the spread of liberal Western values. The Iraq War was largely an effort to install a democracy in the heart of the Arab world. Because war proved the wrong way to build democracy, however, American policy makers became convinced that the whole idea of addressing terrorism through reform was unfounded.

Hounding Al-Qaeda

Accordingly, the Obama administration took a far narrower approach. Its counterterrorism policy has been focused on relentlessly hounding al-Qaeda leaders, relying on drones in the skies and special forces on the ground to eradicate them. The campaign has had successes, driving al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, loosening the group’s hold over the insurgency in Iraq, and disrupting operations by removing effective leaders such as Anwar al-Awlaki and Osama bin Laden.

It has been a seductive policy. Drones are a low-cost, low- risk way to wage war. They give the impression a country can defeat terrorism without engaging in costly military campaigns, economic development or nation-building. The administration insisted the policy was working, and the country bought it. This might have dulled the instinct to better protect facilities such as the U.S. mission in Benghazi. Taking seriously the threat of violent extremism in newly democratic Libya would have challenged the administration’s claim that it was defeating the jihadists.

Yet history tells us that assassination alone isn’t an effective strategy. During the Vietnam War, the CIA killed thousands of Vietcong leaders in Operation Phoenix. The campaign set the Vietcong back, but the organization survived it.

The effort to decapitate al-Qaeda looks to be similarly futile. Drones have killed al-Qaeda leaders with devastating precision but with the unintended consequence of pushing the organization out of its lair in northwest Pakistan and into every other broken part of the Muslim world. The options for asylum, meanwhile, have spread beyond Africa’s Sahel region because of the effects of the Arab Spring. Syria’s civil war has pulled in global jihadists. Extremists are exploiting a breakdown of order in parts of Egypt, Libya and Yemen caused by the dissolution of authoritarian regimes.

As Americans learned after Sept. 11, terrorists thrive in failed or failing states. They need space to recruit, train, organize and launch operations.

Terrorist Redoubts

Given the growing number of terrorist redoubts, the limited U.S. counterterrorism strategy is at the end of its effectiveness. Going forward, the U.S. can no longer rely principally on drone strikes. The policy in Obama’s second term should focus more on shoring up failing states and denying al- Qaeda new havens. Only then would counterterrorism efforts actually diminish the organization.

Hiding behind Russia’s opposition to a United Nations resolution on Syria, the U.S. has done almost nothing to stop the country’s disintegration. The Obama administration needs to assert leadership in organizing the opposition, forging a cease- fire and facilitating the exit of President Bashar al-Assad. This would not only stop the violence in Syria but also reduce the chances of the country becoming the next field of jihad.

The U.S. must also help Libya build effective state institutions and assist Egypt and Yemen in addressing the decline of social order and state authority. That requires greater diplomatic engagement, economic aid and support for civil society.

This is an ambitious agenda, but the U.S. can no longer afford a minimalist approach. In the campaign, President Obama identified terrorist networks as the most serious threat to U.S. national security. His response should be as serious as that threat.