America's Priorities in the Middle East
Over at the Council on Foreign Relations, Aaron David Miller offers some sage advice to the next president on U.S. policy in the Middle East:
We also need to be clear about our priorities. Governing is about choosing. And we need to identify those priorities and then try to own the issues we want to try to affect. This means working with our friends, the Arabs and the Israelis, and others but not allowing their priorities to dominate ours, or to let others shape our tactics and strategies when it’s not in our interests. In short we need an American narrative about what constitutes our interests and how important the Middle East really is to the next administration and to the American people. The next president must begin to articulate that narrative and sell it early and often to build the base of support for whatever he wants to do. None of this guarantees success. But without these adjustments, particularly a policy that is tough, smart and fair, and which keeps our national interests paramount; we will certainly guarantee another string of failures. [Emphasis mine.]
That's exactly right. But I think such an argument only works in the context of an administration that wants to disengage from the region (i.e. it is not applicable to either Senator McCain or Senator Obama). It would work for an administration that wanted to argue that America's over-riding interest was not oil or the security of Israel but winning the war on terrorism.
Today, I think there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that you can't have all three. Securing Israel and policing the Gulf on behalf of incumbent oil producers increases America's vulnerability to Islamic terrorism by dealing a lethal blow to the U.S. in the arena that counts: the war of ideas. Because the Middle East has its own narrative - about the impact outside powers have played in shaping events. It is a narrative that is being exploited by our enemies. The only way the U.S. is going to emerge victorious in its conflict with radical Islam is if it fundamentally reshapes Muslim perceptions of American foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond. And those perceptions won't change unless the U.S. recasts its interests in the region and disavows the Cold War-era power balancing that has, at least in part, led us to our present impasse.
The next administration could change course and worry less about oil (which has to be sold on world markets to be worth anything to its producers) and Israel (whose precise borders with the Palestinians will only impact U.S. security to the extent we have an active hand in drawing them) and more about winning the war on terrorism. I just don't think such an about-face is very likely.
