The politically unthinkable, given the extraordinary level of support always granted to Israel by Washington under any Administration, is now emerging as the increasingly possible, that the U.S. is losing sway in the Middle East. With Oriental subtlety, in March 2023 a terse announcement from Beijing informed that China had “succeeded in brokering renewed diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran”.
The United States, in what may be described as “the extended Middle East, was left floundering out of the diplomacy loop. With Iran its attempts to revive the nuclear pact were getting nowhere. With Saudi Arabia, an ally that Biden while campaigning casted as a “pariah”, because of Crown Prince Salman’s alleged role in the murder of the regime critic Khashoggi, the U.S. president suffered the humiliation of having his request to raise oil production during the Ukrainian war curtly denied.
Permanence in politics does not exist. While the Middle East was rapidly changing, and Russia was invading Ukraine, in the winter of 2022 an important essay by Marc Lynch, a professor of political science at George Washington University and the author of the recent book “The New Arab Wars”, appeared in the pages of Foreign Affairs – and predictably given the circumstances was totally ignored.
The Middle East policy of the United States, he argued, as well as the equally ineffective policies of Europe, were obscured by a strange form of dyslexia. They both persisted in looking at the Middle East through an outdated map of the old Cold War times, while the situation kept changing.
American policy in the region, the author explained, is flawed. It is too focused on Palestine, and Israel’s relations with its Islamic neighbors, and rivals or enemies.
Right now, the crisis is getting more complicated. It includes no fewer than four Middle Eastern countries – Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Turkey and Iran – all directly involved in what appears to be an African conflict with ramification extending as far as Ethiopia and Libya.
Such “out of area” developments are in fact hardly unusual in what was described above, for lack of a better definition, as “the Extended New Middle East”. In recent years Turkey has established over 40 new consulates in Africa and a major military base in Somalia. Israel meanwhile has announced a “return to Africa”, partly to seek new alliances facing growing international pressure over its occupation of West Bank. Egypt is also involved in the conflict with Ethiopia, over its plan to build a dam at the head of the Nile. So are also the Saudi who had bought land in Ethiopia and Sudan, in pursuit of food security. And the Emirates has built naval bases across the Horn of Africa.
Nor are such new involvements limited to the African continent. Turkey has increasingly intervened in Central Asia including military action in Azerbaijan. Saudi Arabia keeps meddling deeply in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Oman, an Indian Ocean nation, keeps strong economic ties with India, Pakistan and Iraq. Moreover, almost every Gulf state has recently upgraded its partnership with China, the Asian emerging superpower now competing with America in pursuit of a global role.
How does America’s foreign policy fit in such a changing environment? The answer is: Not very well. The U.S. foreign policy remains wedded to an outdated mental vision, that broadly equates the Middle East to the Arab world plus Iran, Israel, and Turkey, and a few outliers such as Somalia.
Insofar as the Middle East is concerned, the two keywords at Washington’s Foggy Bottom, where State Department is located, seem to be “pivoting” and “outstretch”. They clearly do not include “overhaul” of an outdated definition of the Middle East. That, warns professor Lynch, “threatens to blind U.S. strategy to the actual dynamics shaping the region. Worse still, it makes Washington all too likely to continue making disastrous blunders there”.
It is a safe bet, now, that the Washington academic will be respectfully listened to by the political establishment – and then politely forgotten. In the White House, with president Biden concerned with the war in Ukraine and with China, and inevitably with home politics in preparation for the long campaign that will precede the November 2024 presidential election, the overhauling of a legacy East policy that does not work is not going to be a priority.
