The Obama Doctrine and a New Equilibrium
This article was originally published in Al-Akhbar English on Wednesday February 12th, 2014
In David Remnick’s recent interview [2] with President Obama in the New Yorker, Remnick quotes Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser for strategic communications, saying that Obama’s “long game” on foreign policy calls for traditional categories of American power and ideology to be reordered – insisting that Washington simply had become “trapped in very stale narratives.”
Rhodes is not specific about what those “narratives” are, nor does he analyze how they came about; but he adds this: “In the foreign-policy establishment, to be an idealist you have to be for military intervention.” He continues: “In the Democratic Party, these debates were defined in the nineties, and the idealists lined up for military intervention. For the president, Iraq was the defining issue, and now Syria is viewed through that lens, as was Libya—to be an idealist, you have to be a military interventionist. We spent a trillion dollars in Iraq and had troops there for a decade, and you can’t say it wielded positive influence. Just the opposite. We can’t seem to get out of these boxes.”
In short, Rhodes suggests that to be an idealist now has somehow become identified with having to support “humanitarian” military interventionism. This conflation, he suggests, lies at the core of President Obama’s foreign policy dilemma: Obama simply does not believe that military intervention is some sort of “joystick” that allows an American President to pull the lever in this direction, or in that, to achieve precisely the outcome which the US desires. Remnick quotes others who say that Obama sees change more as something organic – the result of invisible long-term dynamics, working to their own pattern and timetable, within society (which he calls “currents”) – rather than being something that can be sculpted into a desirable shape through a military hammer and chisel. The best that a (contemporary) president can do is to spot, and then work with any favorable current, hoping that it may take one in a good direction – but always unsure of the final destination. Rhodes identifies Obama’s “bind” as understanding this “limit to power”, whilst living in the American Beltway world where the imperative of humanitarian interventionism has come to define “foreign policy” idealism.
Obama’s second insight is fundamental. Carefully wrapped in guarded language, Obama suggests that the problem in the Middle East essentially derives from sectarian conflict: “It would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if Sunnis and Shias weren’t intent on killing each other,” he told Remnick. “And although it would not solve the entire problem … (with an Iranian solution) you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran, in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.” This is key: if the problem primarily is one of inflamed historic Islamic animosities, military intervention from the Christian West has no place in it; or, is likely only to polarize it further. The answer (to much of the tension in the Middle East) Obama clearly says, is that “If you can start unwinding some of that Sunni-Shia hostility, that creates a new equilibrium. And so I think each individual piece of the puzzle is meant to paint a picture in which conflicts and competition still exist in the region but that it is contained; it is expressed in ways that don’t exact such an enormous toll on the countries involved, and that allow us to work with functioning states to prevent extremists from emerging there.”
This is key: if the problem primarily is one of inflamed historic Islamic animosities, military intervention from the Christian West has no place in it; or, is likely only to polarize it further.
The “box” – mentioned by Rhodes, but left undefined – from which Obama seeks to escape however, is made explicit in a further Obama comment: “With respect to Israel, the interests of Israel…are actually very closely aligned with the interests of the Sunni states.” To this, we (CF) could add that both European, American and most think-tank elites, too, have very much aligned to the interests of Sunni states (and Israel) – and have unconsciously absorbed and uncritically adopted the narrative of Sunni “victimhood” in respect to the Shia “resurgence”. As a consequence, there is considerable anger directed at his Iran policy, which Obama implicitly acknowledges.
Of course, many (particularly humanitarian interventionists) will rush to deny Obama’s central observation. They will say that “sectarianism” is a bogus ploy designed to cover up, and divert from, the true roots of Middle East conflict, which lie with political failure, societal and economic failures. And there is some truth to this complaint. The Sunni “awakening” was essentially an anti-system eruption. It is also true that the “Arab system” and all alternative national “models” (Gulf, Turkish, Muslim Brotherhood, etc.) are widely and deeply deprecated in Middle East societies. It is also true that the power-plays by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the reactionary, counter-revolutionary interventions to unseat and destroy the MB, have used sectarianism for their own political purposes. But nonetheless, sectarianism has been inflamed, and the West has played its part in this – in Iraq, where it promoted firstly Shia miltias to fight Sunnis, and then launched “Awakening” Councils (Sunni militias) who in many cases attacked the Shia – as much as have the actors in the region been responsible for sectarian recrudescence.
The animosities kindled by sectarianism however are psychologically very real. Deep vulnerabilities, fears, and prejudice lie behind them. The balance between the Shia and Sunni has oscillated many times over the centuries. Once, much of Syria (then including Lebanon), Iraq and Palestine (and Egypt) were Shia. And people remember.
More recently the entire region from Pakistan to Lebanon has been affected by profound, seismic changes during the course of the last three decades. As Giandomenico Picco[3]has noted, these began in the late 1970s, in the Pakistan-Afghanistan-Iran triangle, when Saudi Arabia entered the war in Afghanistan, and a bitter Sunni-Shia struggle ensued (little noticed by the West) – as Iran backed the Northern Alliance against the Saudi supported Taliban.
It was the Khomeini revolution (February 1979) in Iran however, which convinced the Sunni “world” of an epochal change in the making. There followed the Iraq – Iran War, a conflict instigated in part to halt a Shia resurgence; and then came the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As Picco notes, “Iran welcomed the U.S. war against Saddam Hussein, seeing it as payback for 1534, an important, sad date in the Shia narrative. In that year, Suleiman the First (the Ottoman Sultan) conquered Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) and “the land of the two rivers” came under the control of the Sunni minority. Iran felt that the West had inadvertently given them a chance to reclaim Baghdad for the Shia in a contemporary Iraq where the Shia were a majority, “Again, the ancient Sunni-Shia conflict structured events but was little noticed by the West.” In the wake of the 2006 war, in which Hezbollah successfully halted Israel’s attempt to destroy the movement, Gulf anxieties soared as Hezbollah and Iran were lionized in the Arab street. And with these heightened anxieties, so too soared the Gulf anti-Shia rhetoric of sectarianism, which has so empowered, and on its own terms legitimized , the Sunni extremists.
President Obama surely is right in his insight that a lowering of sectarian tension – though not in itself a sufficient condition to solve all the region’s many problems – nonetheless may be the key to finding a new geopolitical equilibrium. But the consequences of “equilibrating” between Shia and Sunni power will be profound – if he manages to carry them through. It will resonate well beyond the Middle East; but for Saudi Arabia and Israel, it will require a fundamental “reset” of their policies, as their grip over American policy-making, becomes loosened.
The animosities kindled by sectarianism however are psychologically very real. Deep vulnerabilities, fears, and prejudice lie behind them.
For much of the 20th century, successive US Presidents have sought to prevent [4] any single country from dominating the centers of strategic power in Europe and Asia. The Carter doctrine simply refocused this basic principle of foreign policy specifically onto the Middle East, where no power that was not friendly to the US (or Israel) would be entertained, or permitted.
Events in Syria – particularly the Chemical Weapons Accord – have changed this paradigm: Russia, partly as a consequence of its Syrian and Iranian diplomacy has re-established itself as a Eurasian “power”. An accord with Iran will unleash another Eurasian economic and political power. Not only is the Carter doctrine being overturned, but the seminal underlying American thinking – “for the new (American) century” – is by implication being consigned to the category of “stale narrative”. Eurasia is rising, and it is rising on a tide of natural and energy resources.
Recall that it was Zbig Brzezinsky who earlier had written in his book The Grand Chessboard, “Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power.” Eurasia here means the Middle East and Central Asia, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America: “In that context, how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania (Australia) geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 percent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”
Well, this is what is happening now: the structures for containing Eurasia are eroding. Europeans should take good note too. They must consider their foreign policy. Do they remain with their relationship heavily weighted towards the US and become “peripheral” to the world’s central continent (in Brzezinski’s words), or should they re-orient towards the new center of power?
Naturally, Obama already is being accused of “losing” the Middle East to Tehran and Moscow. But the withdrawal of Britain from India and Pakistan was punctuated with similar cries of “sell-out”, and grave warnings of how much the Indians would regret the British passing. But how obvious Britain’s loss of will, and its need to exit, all seems now. Now it is the West as a whole, and not just Britain or America, that is undergoing a new period of introspection as categories of thought erode, and the world order shifts in new directions. The cold truth is that which Obama told Netanyahu and the Senators: the ideal – “the absolutist benchmark” is not available – “it is not achievable”.
The difficulty here is that the “narrative” of striving for the “ideal” has been so deeply rooted into the American psyche – and then grafted onto the European (and western think-tank) psyche too. More than two years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, some figures at the US Council for Foreign Relations launched a confidential project which came to be known as the War and Peace Studies, with financial support from State Department. They foresaw – even then – that the outcome of the expected war in Europe would leave America in a dominant position, economically and politically. They also warned against America repeating the mistake of the British, by pronouncing an American “empire” (though that is what effectively they were advocating). Instead of imperialism, America should espouse a narrative of “ideals”. Its “empire” should be founded not just in military might, but also in a “narrative” of progress, democracy and liberty. The task, these policy-formulators believed, was how to use America’s unrivaled military, economic, and political power to fashion an international environment conducive to its interests – wrapped in the narrative of progress, democracy and liberty: In short, a foreign policy pursued in the cause of utopia.
About 75 percent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil.
But as one philosopher noted more than two thousand years ago, the “hero” of virtue and the pursuer of a mission civilisatrice ultimately becomes mired in its own ambiguities. Why? Because, as the CFR researchers were advocating, America had set itself the aim of achieving “doing good” as an object. Once America came to see “the good” as some “thing” to be attained, it becomes involved in a division from which there is no escape: between the present in which America is not yet in possession of what it seeks; and the future, in which Americans believe they will get what they desire – a future made present by their efforts to eliminate evil.
From the moment that the “idealists” set their values as objects to be attained, these values lead to delusion and alienation: Since the more one concentrates on the means to attain ‘progress, democracy and liberty’, and the more it becomes an abstract, treated as something to be attained by special military techniques (special forces, drones, etc. — remember Samantha Power, the former self-proclaimed “genocide chick”, “promoting democracy whenever and wherever … at the point of a cruise missile if necessary”), the less ‘real’ it becomes. As it becomes less real, it recedes further into the distance of abstraction, futurity, unattainability. In short, the more one concentrates on the means to one’smission, the more the means become elaborate and complex, until finally the mere concentration on shaping the world becomes so demanding that all effort must be concentrated on this – and the end loses its true meaning. The conclusion of this early thinker was that “the good” which is preached and exacted by the moralist and idealist, finally – and paradoxically – may become an evil.
It seems from David Remnick’s account that President Obama intuitively grasps this, and is seeking to orient America away from this pursuit of a mission civilisatrice, in favour of a more limited goal of creating the “space” for positive currents to grow in their own way. The “idealists” – the humanitarian interventionists – (and of course the neo-conservatives) may never forgive him – they will conclude that he is giving way to the “evil” they believe stands in the way of having something (the mission achieved), which one does not have, and which one must constantly be pursuing until, in effect, it becomes unattainable.
Alastair Crooke is the director and founder of Conflicts Forum.
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