The United States and the Middle East, Essay Example

In this paper I will discuss what the main challenges are for the United States in the Middle East. I chose this question because it also necessarily touches upon the causes of the current uprisings and protests in the Middle East known as the “Arab Spring.” How the U.S. deals specifically with similar uprisings as they occur in the future (if they occur) will be the immediate core U.S. policy challenge in the Middle East. But it is not the only challenge. There are four others, of a more long-term nature: Israel, oil, nuclear power, and food.

The Arab Spring uprisings are highly problematical for the U.S. because they may compel NATO participation, as during Libya’s uprising against its dictator Muammar Gaddafi.¹ America is the leading member of NATO and its decision to participate or not participate in future uprisings could be decisive. The case of Libya was actually relatively simple, because Gaddafi had been an avowed enemy of the U.S. since the bombing of the Pan American flight over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. However, NATO participation may prove more difficult to manage in the case of nations that have been relatively friendly to the U.S., or have received substantial subsidies from the U.S, as in the case of Egypt. As it happened, that country’s former leader, Hosni Mubarak, and his government were overthrown without the need for outside (NATO) intervention. But should uprisings spread to nations like Saudi Arabia, the situation would be a very delicate one for the U.S. This is because the U.S. would, at some point, have to make the decision of which side of the rebellion to side with. This would be a critical foreign and domestic policy issue, as many around the world look to the U.S. as a beacon of freedom, as do America’s own citizens. This was the case during the Egyptian uprising, where the U.S. was accused of maintaining its support of the Mubarak regime for its own strategic purposes. That support, many alleged, was covert. When America joined the rebels, some saw it more as America adjusting to a new political reality than a statement of philosophical support.

Where the country undergoing rebellion is an oil producer, it may be difficult or impossible to get NATO unified behind intervention, either covert or overt. We saw this potential problem arise in the case of Italy during the Libyan uprising. Twenty percent of Italy’s oil imports come from Libya.² In the case of Saudi Arabia, this problem would be even worse. But that’s not the only problem involving NATO and the Middle East and oil. If rebel elements are radical enough, they could make as part of their official goals the seizure of foreign oil-producing assets in their country. This, of course, would tend to make any Western nations with private oil companies in the country prefer to side with the established government, no matter how brutal or corrupt it is. The decisive issue in such a case is what countries receive how much oil from the Middle Eastern country in question.

There is still another problem involving Middle East oil. According to the latest EU statistics, during the period January-September 2011, Iranian oil accounted for 34.2 percent of Greece’s total oil imports, 14.9 percent of Spain’s and 12.4 percent of Italy’s.³ Those three countries are also three of the most financially stressed members of the European Union. There has even been talk of Greece defaulting on its debts and leaving the Union altogether. Both Italy and Spain are considered to be next on the hotseat. Their economies are in trouble, and unlike Greece’s are far too large to be bolstered by European Union loans (a strategy that may yet even fail for Greece). To make things more difficult, last January, the European Union imposed a ban on the import of Iranian oil in order to force Iran to end its alleged covert development of nuclear weapons, a development being done under the guise of a uranium enrichment program for the production of civilian-purposed nuclear power. All this economic strain will necessarily result in political strains within NATO. If the stresses grow strong enough, it may increase the chances of the U.S. acting unilaterally in a crisis in the Middle East, at the risk of splitting NATO.

There are several scenarios which might compel U.S. unilateral action in the Middle East. The first is a longstanding one: the true safety of Israel, to which the U.S. has a special legal, financial, and moral commitment, as well as the perceived danger to Israel, to which the U.S. arguably has an even stronger legal, financial, and moral commitment . In a nutshell, the U.S. has committed itself to defending Israel as it would itself, making Israel, for the purposes of U.S. crisis-oriented Middle East policy (and regular annual budget appropriations), an American protectorate. As of today, (with ongoing U.S. help) Israel is capable of protecting itself against conventional attacks from its enemies, as well as against Palestinians guerrillas fighting their ongoing wars against Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and settlements. And the defeat of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has made Israel relatively safer (some argue that it was to protect Israel that U.S. President George Bush invaded Iraq). For the immediate moment, the spotlight has shifted now to Iran, and how far it is prepared to go to invite a preemptive strike, either from Israel or the U.S.

With that in mind, it is clear that Iran poses a special problem for Israel, and in so doing, poses a special problem for the U.S. First, Iran is openly hostile to the continued existence of Israel. (Iran’s leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has denied the existence of the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews during World War II.) Many policy analysts in the U.S. consider it a definite possibility that Israel will strike Iran preemptively to destroy its nuclear power facilities, facilities that, although claimed to be entirely for peaceful purposes, will generate plutonium as a byproduct. Plutonium of course is fissionable material that can be used in the construction of nuclear warheads, similar to the kind that the U.S. used to destroy Nagasaki in 1945. Those same analysts consider it also a possibility that the U.S. will do the same thing to Iran, either to forestall Israel doing so, or if it decides that Israel will not do so. This issue is very much up in the air, as some Israeli and American analysts deny that Iran’s possession of a functioning nuclear power industry will be a significant threat to either Israel or anyone else. However, the public perception of a threat may be sufficient to compel political leaders to act. I think this is particularly true in the U.S., which has a powerful Israel lobby that wields great influence in the media, in Congress, and in the White House, regardless of who happens to occupy it.⁴

Egypt has been a major player for the U.S. since 1979, when its then-leader Anwar Sadat signed the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty with Israel’s Menachem Begin, a treaty brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter.⁵ As a result of that treaty, not only did Israel and Egypt begin a 30-year peace, but Egypt began receiving billions of dollars in military and economic aid. The overthrow of Mubarak has thrown this relationship into doubt, as Ayman Nour, an influential Egyptian opposition figure and likely presidential candidate, has publically called for Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel to be reassessed, as have many members of the Muslim Brotherhood.⁶ Should that treaty be broken by Egypt, the future of U.S.-Egyptian relations could be in the hands of extremists.

This may be the major foreign policy predicament posed to the U.S. by the Arab Spring. Middle Easterners are tired of living in kleptocracies ruled by iron-fisted dictators and their families. But what happens when those same people are violently anti-Semitic in principle and anti-Israel as a matter of policy? Would the U.S. covertly support a military leader, say in Egypt, who could be trusted to put the brakes on an indigenous revolution to protect Israel from yet another well-armed enemy? The question remains unanswered because none of the principle actors know the answer themselves, or will know it, until they are forced to find out by facing a specific situation at a specific time and place.

It may be though that not even politics and oil are the fundamental driving forces behind all those riots, dictators, and kleptocracies that pose such an ongoing crisis for U.S. policy makers. It may be that food is the most important factor. The Fertile Crescent, that strip of arable land fed by the Nile River in North Africa and Egypt, and the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, used to feed all of the Arab world. But now that world imports 50 percent of its food.⁷ It has been pointed out that the revolutions in Tunisia and Syria began in their respective rural areas. According to the CIA Word Factbook, 32% of Egypt’s population works in agriculture. In nations with only a few major cities, the imbalance between the food-producing countryside and the cities they feed poses an intractable problem that tends only to get worse over time. The problem is a very old one, and one the U.S. increasingly faced itself after its own Civil War: technology in agriculture. ⁸

Whenever there is a new invention in the growing or collection of agricultural products, the resultant increase in productivity nearly always puts agricultural workers out of work. Poor countries like Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria face the same competitive pressure to mechanize their agriculture as other nations do. But there are not enough job-providing cities for their rural workers to emigrate to. Because Middle Eastern countries are primarily socialist in perspective, they cannot simply let market forces work the problem through as Europe and the U.S. more or less did.

The core problem is that nations like Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and Algeria are trapped by the inability of their cities to provide jobs to replace the jobs that are lost due to the mechanization of agriculture. Their response, of course, is to delay that mechanization, either through policy or through the simple inability of their economies to foster the infrastructure needed to keep a mechanized agriculture running — it’s inability to supply that last needed nail at a reasonable price. The result is that nations in this bind must import more and more of their food. Those same governments control both the price of food, and they control the export of their own crops. The result? Food riots in 2007 and 2008 followed by the Arab Spring. The world watched food riots break out throughout 2007 and 2008 after Vietnam, India, and Russia banned the export of their rice and grain after bad harvests and drought reduced supply. Vietnam, Indian, Russia have their own rural-city divide problems. They are not Middle Eastern nations, but they do business with Middle Eastern nations. So it is easy to understand why the U.S. looked upon the Libyan, Tunisian, and Egyptian uprisings with some ambivalence.

From keeping Israel safe to propping up or toppling dictators, American foreign policy in the Middle East has been and probably always will be under stress, and it has been and probably always will be based on subsidies, grants, loans, and food shipments to favored countries and the denial of such gifts to unfavored ones. Ultimately, the problem U.S. policy makers face is whether it is worthwhile to maintain a leading role in the Middle East. If so, then it will either have to base that role on supporting Israel right or wrong, or compelling Israel to change in accordance with American interests. It will mean maintaining an active military presence throughout the region. It will mean balancing the needs of avowed enemies. In short, it will mean more of the same from the U.S. government and its taxpayers.

Notes

1. Security Council SC/10200. Security Council Approves ‘No-Fly Zone’ Over Libya. (2011.)
2. Reuters, arabnews.com. Italy Oil Imports from Libya Drop. (2011.)
3. Daly, John. Greece: Between Iran and a Hard Place. Oilprice.com. (2012.)
4. Mearsheimer & Walt. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, p. 5. (2007.)
5. BBC: On This Date. 1979: Israel and Egypt shake hands on peace deal.
6. Oren Kessler. The Jerusalem Post. Egyptian opposition figure: Rethink Camp David Accords. (2011.)
7. PBS Newshour. Did Food Prices Spur the Arab Spring? (2011.)
8. Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations. p.83. (1984.)

Bibliography

BBC: On This Day. 1979: Israel and Egypt shake hands on peace deal. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/26/newsid_2806000/2806245.stmDaly, John. Greece: Between Iran and a Hard Place. Oilprice.com., 2012. Retrieved from http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Greece-Between-Iran-and-a-Hard-Place.html

Jacobs, Jane. Cities and the Wealth of Nations. New York, NY: Vintage, 1985.

Kessler, Oren. The Jerusalem Post. Egyptian opposition figure: Rethink Camp David Accords. 2011. Retrieved from http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=208085.

Mearsheimer, John., Walt, Stephen. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York, NY: Farr, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

PBS Newshour. Did Food Prices Spur the Arab Spring? 2011. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/world/july-dec11/food_09-07.html

Reuters, arabnews.com. Italy Oil Imports from Libya Drop. Retrieved from http://arabnews.com/economy/article398179.ece

Security Council SC/10200. Security Council Approves ‘No-Fly Zone’ Over Libya. 2011. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sc10200.doc.htm