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Two Middle East Outlooks
Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor and dimwit, had written a laudation of his own and his bosses foreign policy for the November print edition of Foreign Affairs. The piece was finalized before the war in Palestine had begun.
The Sources of American Power
A Foreign Policy for a Changed World
Excerpts:
Indeed, although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades.
The progress is fragile, to be sure. But it is also not an accident.
…
[The president's] approach returns discipline to U.S. policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors. And it is bearing fruit.
…
This disciplined approach frees up resources for other global priorities, reduces the risk of new Middle Eastern conflicts, and ensures that U.S. interests are protected on a far more sustainable basis. Challenges remain. The Israeli-Palestinian situation is tense, particularly in the West Bank, but in the face of serious frictions, we have de-escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years of its absence.
—
Alastair Crooke, who has personally negotiated prisoner exchanges between Hamas and Israel, has published a rather bleak outlook.
Escalations Cannot Be Stopped – The White House Is Rattled; Escalations Might All Fuse Into ‘One’
The reality of the necessity of war is permeating widely the consciousness of the Arabic and Islamic world.
…
It is no coincidence that Netanyahu flourished a map of Israel during his General Assembly address last month in which Israel dominated from the River to the Sea – and Palestine (indeed any Palestinian territory) was non-existent.
Tom Friedman in his NYT reflections may fear that just as NATO’s impaired performance in Ukraine has ruptured ‘the NATO myth’, so too the 7 October Israeli military and intelligence collapse and what happens in its wake in Gaza ‘might explode the entire pro-American alliance structure’ in the Middle East.
The confluence of two such humiliations might break the spine of western primacy. This seems to be the gist to Friedman’s analysis. (He likely is correct).
Hamas has succeeded in smashing the Israel deterrence paradigm: They were not afraid, the IDF proved far from invincible, and the Arab street mobilised as never before (confounding western cynics who laugh at the very notion of there being an ‘Arab Street’).
Well, that is where we are – and the White House is rattled.
…
This is what worries the White House Team. They are deeply unconfident that an Israeli invasion of Gaza will put ‘Humpty’ together again. Rather, they fear that events may go badly for the IDF, and further, that the images relayed across the Middle East of Israel using overwhelming force in a civilian urban setting will revolt the Islamic sphere.
In spite of western scepticism, there are signs that this insurrection in the Arab sphere is different, and resembles more the 1916 Arab Revolt that overthrew the Ottoman Empire. It is taking on a distinct ‘edge’ as both Shi’a and Sunni religious authorities state the duty of Muslims to stand with Palestinians. In other words, as the Israeli polity becomes plainly ‘Prophetical’, so the Islamic mood is turning eschatological, in its turn.
That the White House should be floating kites about ‘moderate’ Arab leaders pressing ‘moderate’ Palestinians to form an Israeli-friendly government in Gaza that would displace Hamas and impose security and order shows just how severed is the West from reality. Recall that Mahmoud Abbas, General Sisi and the King of Jordan (some of the region’s most pliable leaders) pointedly refused even to meet with Biden after the latter’s Israel trip.
The anger across the region is real and threatens ‘moderate’ Arab leaders, whose room for manoeuvre is now circumscribed.
So hotspots are proliferating, as are attacks on U.S. deployments around the region. Some in Washington claim to perceive an Iranian hand, and are hoping to expand a window for war with Iran.
…
Should Israel enter Gaza (and Israel may decide it has no choice but to launch a ground operation, given the domestic political dynamics and public sentiment), it is likely that Hizbullah will incrementally be drawn further in, leaving the U.S. with the binary option of seeing Israel defeated, or launching a major war in which all the hotspots become fused ‘as one’.
In a sense, the Israeli-Islamic conflict now may only be resolved in this kinetic way. All efforts since 1947 have seen the divide only deepen. The reality of the necessity of war is permeating widely the consciousness of the Arabic and Islamic world.
Aurlien discourses on the futility of US Carrier Deployments..
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/useless-in-gaza
So this use-of-force-for political-objectives thing looks a bit more complicated than we thought at first sight, doesn’t it? It also means that you might just get your fingers trapped in the wringer. For example, the US has deployed two carrier battle groups to the eastern Mediterranean. Now, this is a traditional action of governments that have no other options really open to them, and not, of itself, necessarily criticable. In the circumstances there is a political obligation to do something, whatever that something might be. And to be fair, carriers are very useful for evacuating foreign nationals, under military protection or otherwise, as the French showed in Beirut in 2006.
The problem is that it’s virtually certain that the carrier groups have been deployed according to this “do something” logic, which is to say that there is almost certainly no accompanying political strategy: as often, the US is making it up as it goes along. (Talking about “deterrence” or “stabilisation” is not a strategy, it’s an attempt at a justification.) The difficulty with all such deployments, though, is that they are much easier to start than stop. To withdraw the force is to send a political message that you think the crisis is over, or at least manageable, which may not be the message you want to send. So you keep the force in position, and eventually you replace it, because you don’t have any choice. The difficulty is that, apart from evacuations, there’s almost nothing for which the career group can be usefully employed. Intelligence gathering maybe, but there are far easier and more discreet ways of doing that. In the meantime, they are large targets, probably limited to flying patrols and not much else. (I’m assuming that the US would not be so insane as to join in the bombardment of Gaza itself.)
In turn, this reflects the effective impotence of the US in the present conflict. Its historical attempt to combine the positions of independent facilitator with doglike devotion to one side was always dubious, but was tolerated insofar as the country was actually able to have some influence. That’s clearly no longer true. Nobody in the Arab world is going to be influenced by the US now, and it has also ruled itself out of any influence over Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. Biden’s initial maximalist rhetoric has effectively given away most of the influence the US might have been able to assert over Israel as well. Which doesn’t leave a lot, and doesn’t leave a lot for US military power to actually do, either.
In any event, even if a decision were made to use military power, in a political vacuum, and just to look threatening, what could the US actually do? For the moment, nothing. Now if a major ground invasion were to start in Gaza, and if Hezbollah were to react militarily along the northern frontier, then theoretically the US could target them, but with massive attendant risks to the Lebanese population, and considerable risk of casualties to itself, in other places where there are US troops. Put simply, an attack agains Hezbollah which is large enough to make a difference could cause massive collateral damage to Lebanon, whereas anything smaller will not make a difference anyway. The US has invested massively in the stability of Lebanon in recent years, and is not to going to put that investment in jeopardy now.
There is certainly every chance that Iran would consider a large-scale attack on Hezbollah to be an unfriendly action, and then retaliate. The problem for the Americans is that the Iranians can inflict far more damage on them and their interests than they can inflict on the Iranians. This is nothing to do with the sophistication, or even numbers, of weapons: it’s a lot more mundane than that. Get out a map, and have a look at the region, and ask yourself, where could US carrier groups safely go? Which countries could be expected to provide airfields, ports and harbours and logistic depots? In the present political situation, the answer is probably “none.” No doubt an air- and sea-launched missile attack on Iran could do some damage, but what would be the point? What possible proportional political objective could be served thereby? No conceivable amount of damage caused to Iran could compel the government, for example, to cut off support for Hezbollah, or for the current government in Syria. By contrast, severe damage to a single carrier, even if it were not sunk, would be enough to drive the US out of the region.
Let’s divert to Ukraine, for a moment. It’s fairly clear that the Russians had a very long term objective (perhaps not even a strategy) of living in a Europe which was not a threat to them. It’s doubtful if their thinking had much more detail than that. As the situation began to deteriorate, and NATO became progressively more politically hostile, this strategy became more activist, trying to make it clear, among other things, that Ukraine in NATO, in theory or in practice, would never be acceptable. When this was rejected, and Ukraine became both heavily armed and politically unstable, the Russians went for military option (minimalist at first) in support of the same political objective. They are now conducting a maximalist military option designed to achieve forcibly what could not be achieved politically: a Europe which they do not find threatening. Whether they will succeed is too early to say, but, as good students of Clausewitz, they do at least know how the bits are supposed to go together.
The West has long had fantasies of overthrowing the current Russian political system and dismembering the country, taking it firmly into the “western orbit.” But nothing resembling a plan has ever existed (if you have any experience of NATO you will understand immediately why.) Isolated incidents, such as the entry of new countries, have been welcomed as contributing to this objective, but without anyone being able to explain exactly why and how. At the same time, NATO has adopted a policy of verbal and political hostility, while continually running down its conventional forces and its defence industry, so making itself increasingly less capable of confronting Russia if this hostility produced an equally hostile response, which it has. The only strategy that NATO has had since February 2022, if you can call it that, is to keep the war going in the hope that a miracle occurs, and that Putin is forced from power and replaced by a compliant NATO-friendly figure. That’s it. And by now you may see why it’s not working, and indeed why it never can. For example, NATO cannot fight Ukraine’s battles, and only exercise a loose control over its tactics. Its ability to influence political developments in Kiev is limited. Self-evidently it does not understand what Russian plans are, at any level, so it substitutes fantasies of the restoration of the Soviet Union. and the conquest of Europe. It has no strategy other than hope of forcing a change of government in Russia, and no idea what factors would bring such a change about. It has no understanding of the dynamics of Russian domestic politics, nor by which miracle the overthrow of a moderate President is expected to lead to the emergence of a NATO friendly government, nor the mechanics by which the nationalist parties could be pacified, nor what conceivable concessions a Russian parliament and government could be expected to make. Does that sound to you like a winning strategy? It’s like trying to make an IKEA chest of drawers with the assembly instructions and the list of parts missing.
But if you seek the creation of a national home for one people on a territory occupied by others, then your strategic objective is in practical terms impossible to achieve without violence. Moreover, if we glance back at the list of stages above, it’s clear that you need a clear idea of what that strategic objective amounts to in practice, the objective itself must be politically and practically feasible, there must be a military plan that achieves the necessary preconditions for that objective, you must have the resources to put that plan into effect, and some idea of what sequences of military stages you need to go through to achieve the military plan successfully. It’s not clear to me, as an outside observer, that any Israeli government has ever had a coherent plan along these lines, which is why it is now confronted with the consequences of this failure; (It’s not clear either that a coherent plan of this type, with all the stages I have set out was even possible in the first place.) And the failure to implement the plan has, of course, changed the nature of the problem itself, which is now far more difficult and complex than it was half a century or more ago.
On the subject of vague aspirations, this is the moment to look at the US experience, since they are the other major player staring into the abyss at the moment. It’s true that there has been a long tradition in Washington of wanting to control the oil-producing states of the Middle East (if only to deny control to others) and to support Israel as a forward western base, and an asset ready to carry out tasks the US could not publicly be associated with. Israel has also developed into a main source of intelligence on the Middle East for Washington which not everybody thinks is a good idea. And by the familiar tail-wags-dog process so often found in these relationships, successive Israeli governments have generally established themselves as the dominant partner where it matters
This is not, to put it mildly, a coherent strategy, and indeed the US does not have and never has-had a coherent strategy for the region at anything beyond a declaratory level. Which is why it is in such a mess over Gaza.
The problem is that the disjointed and often incoherent statements coming out of Washington seem to me to imply a government taken by surprise that has no idea what it wants, and so makes up policy from day to day. The risk, of course, is that it will simply be dragged along by Israel, since one of the constants of US non-policy is to avoid public differences with that country, and of course Israel itself will be dragged along by events. There is no knowing where the US will wind up, since, as indicated above, it now has very little influence on any of the principal actors.
He goes on with his analysis. I recommend those interested read it in it’s entirety.
INDY
Posted by: Dr. George W Oprisko | Oct 28 2023 13:33 utc | 859
Aurlien discourses on the futility of US Carrier Deployments..
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/useless-in-gaza
So this use-of-force-for political-objectives thing looks a bit more complicated than we thought at first sight, doesn’t it? It also means that you might just get your fingers trapped in the wringer. For example, the US has deployed two carrier battle groups to the eastern Mediterranean. Now, this is a traditional action of governments that have no other options really open to them, and not, of itself, necessarily criticable. In the circumstances there is a political obligation to do something, whatever that something might be. And to be fair, carriers are very useful for evacuating foreign nationals, under military protection or otherwise, as the French showed in Beirut in 2006.
The problem is that it’s virtually certain that the carrier groups have been deployed according to this “do something” logic, which is to say that there is almost certainly no accompanying political strategy: as often, the US is making it up as it goes along. (Talking about “deterrence” or “stabilisation” is not a strategy, it’s an attempt at a justification.) The difficulty with all such deployments, though, is that they are much easier to start than stop. To withdraw the force is to send a political message that you think the crisis is over, or at least manageable, which may not be the message you want to send. So you keep the force in position, and eventually you replace it, because you don’t have any choice. The difficulty is that, apart from evacuations, there’s almost nothing for which the career group can be usefully employed. Intelligence gathering maybe, but there are far easier and more discreet ways of doing that. In the meantime, they are large targets, probably limited to flying patrols and not much else. (I’m assuming that the US would not be so insane as to join in the bombardment of Gaza itself.)
In turn, this reflects the effective impotence of the US in the present conflict. Its historical attempt to combine the positions of independent facilitator with doglike devotion to one side was always dubious, but was tolerated insofar as the country was actually able to have some influence. That’s clearly no longer true. Nobody in the Arab world is going to be influenced by the US now, and it has also ruled itself out of any influence over Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. Biden’s initial maximalist rhetoric has effectively given away most of the influence the US might have been able to assert over Israel as well. Which doesn’t leave a lot, and doesn’t leave a lot for US military power to actually do, either.
In any event, even if a decision were made to use military power, in a political vacuum, and just to look threatening, what could the US actually do? For the moment, nothing. Now if a major ground invasion were to start in Gaza, and if Hezbollah were to react militarily along the northern frontier, then theoretically the US could target them, but with massive attendant risks to the Lebanese population, and considerable risk of casualties to itself, in other places where there are US troops. Put simply, an attack agains Hezbollah which is large enough to make a difference could cause massive collateral damage to Lebanon, whereas anything smaller will not make a difference anyway. The US has invested massively in the stability of Lebanon in recent years, and is not to going to put that investment in jeopardy now.
There is certainly every chance that Iran would consider a large-scale attack on Hezbollah to be an unfriendly action, and then retaliate. The problem for the Americans is that the Iranians can inflict far more damage on them and their interests than they can inflict on the Iranians. This is nothing to do with the sophistication, or even numbers, of weapons: it’s a lot more mundane than that. Get out a map, and have a look at the region, and ask yourself, where could US carrier groups safely go? Which countries could be expected to provide airfields, ports and harbours and logistic depots? In the present political situation, the answer is probably “none.” No doubt an air- and sea-launched missile attack on Iran could do some damage, but what would be the point? What possible proportional political objective could be served thereby? No conceivable amount of damage caused to Iran could compel the government, for example, to cut off support for Hezbollah, or for the current government in Syria. By contrast, severe damage to a single carrier, even if it were not sunk, would be enough to drive the US out of the region.
Let’s divert to Ukraine, for a moment. It’s fairly clear that the Russians had a very long term objective (perhaps not even a strategy) of living in a Europe which was not a threat to them. It’s doubtful if their thinking had much more detail than that. As the situation began to deteriorate, and NATO became progressively more politically hostile, this strategy became more activist, trying to make it clear, among other things, that Ukraine in NATO, in theory or in practice, would never be acceptable. When this was rejected, and Ukraine became both heavily armed and politically unstable, the Russians went for military option (minimalist at first) in support of the same political objective. They are now conducting a maximalist military option designed to achieve forcibly what could not be achieved politically: a Europe which they do not find threatening. Whether they will succeed is too early to say, but, as good students of Clausewitz, they do at least know how the bits are supposed to go together.
The West has long had fantasies of overthrowing the current Russian political system and dismembering the country, taking it firmly into the “western orbit.” But nothing resembling a plan has ever existed (if you have any experience of NATO you will understand immediately why.) Isolated incidents, such as the entry of new countries, have been welcomed as contributing to this objective, but without anyone being able to explain exactly why and how. At the same time, NATO has adopted a policy of verbal and political hostility, while continually running down its conventional forces and its defence industry, so making itself increasingly less capable of confronting Russia if this hostility produced an equally hostile response, which it has. The only strategy that NATO has had since February 2022, if you can call it that, is to keep the war going in the hope that a miracle occurs, and that Putin is forced from power and replaced by a compliant NATO-friendly figure. That’s it. And by now you may see why it’s not working, and indeed why it never can. For example, NATO cannot fight Ukraine’s battles, and only exercise a loose control over its tactics. Its ability to influence political developments in Kiev is limited. Self-evidently it does not understand what Russian plans are, at any level, so it substitutes fantasies of the restoration of the Soviet Union. and the conquest of Europe. It has no strategy other than hope of forcing a change of government in Russia, and no idea what factors would bring such a change about. It has no understanding of the dynamics of Russian domestic politics, nor by which miracle the overthrow of a moderate President is expected to lead to the emergence of a NATO friendly government, nor the mechanics by which the nationalist parties could be pacified, nor what conceivable concessions a Russian parliament and government could be expected to make. Does that sound to you like a winning strategy? It’s like trying to make an IKEA chest of drawers with the assembly instructions and the list of parts missing.
But if you seek the creation of a national home for one people on a territory occupied by others, then your strategic objective is in practical terms impossible to achieve without violence. Moreover, if we glance back at the list of stages above, it’s clear that you need a clear idea of what that strategic objective amounts to in practice, the objective itself must be politically and practically feasible, there must be a military plan that achieves the necessary preconditions for that objective, you must have the resources to put that plan into effect, and some idea of what sequences of military stages you need to go through to achieve the military plan successfully. It’s not clear to me, as an outside observer, that any Israeli government has ever had a coherent plan along these lines, which is why it is now confronted with the consequences of this failure; (It’s not clear either that a coherent plan of this type, with all the stages I have set out was even possible in the first place.) And the failure to implement the plan has, of course, changed the nature of the problem itself, which is now far more difficult and complex than it was half a century or more ago.
On the subject of vague aspirations, this is the moment to look at the US experience, since they are the other major player staring into the abyss at the moment. It’s true that there has been a long tradition in Washington of wanting to control the oil-producing states of the Middle East (if only to deny control to others) and to support Israel as a forward western base, and an asset ready to carry out tasks the US could not publicly be associated with. Israel has also developed into a main source of intelligence on the Middle East for Washington which not everybody thinks is a good idea. And by the familiar tail-wags-dog process so often found in these relationships, successive Israeli governments have generally established themselves as the dominant partner where it matters
This is not, to put it mildly, a coherent strategy, and indeed the US does not have and never has-had a coherent strategy for the region at anything beyond a declaratory level. Which is why it is in such a mess over Gaza.
The problem is that the disjointed and often incoherent statements coming out of Washington seem to me to imply a government taken by surprise that has no idea what it wants, and so makes up policy from day to day. The risk, of course, is that it will simply be dragged along by Israel, since one of the constants of US non-policy is to avoid public differences with that country, and of course Israel itself will be dragged along by events. There is no knowing where the US will wind up, since, as indicated above, it now has very little influence on any of the principal actors.
He goes on with his analysis. I recommend those interested read it in it’s entirety.
INDY
Posted by: Dr. George W Oprisko | Oct 28 2023 13:33 utc | 860
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