[Salon] America will never be free of the Middle East

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

America will never be free of the Middle East

Edward Luce, US National Editor and Columnist November 19, 2021

The Middle East has long been the world’s equivalent of the Hotel California. America can check out, or think it’s checking out, but it can never really leave. I say this after having spent a few days at the annual Abu Dhabi Strategic Debate in Abu Dhabi, the beating heart of the modern Middle East — a region where the centre of gravity has long since shifted from the old hubs of Arab culture, such as Alexandria, to the Hong Kong-esque skylines of the United Arab Emirates (which turns 50 this year).

I did eventually manage to leave. But my main takeaway from the conference, which gathered thinkers and policymakers from many regions, is that the US has yet to figure out that the whole world is now the Middle East. Joe Biden, and Donald Trump before him, may think that the best way of prioritising the China challenge is to pare down American activity elsewhere, such as in the Middle East or Afghanistan.

But China, which is stepping up its commercial and diplomatic presence everywhere, including in America’s hemisphere, has very different ideas. Whether you call it a new cold war, or the modern great game, the whole planet is relevant to US-China rivalry, including the Middle East.

This brings me to Biden’s immediate challenges in that region. In the coming days, the “six plus one” Iran nuclear talks will resume — the fifth attempt to rekindle the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action since Biden was inaugurated. Since then, Iran has elected a new hardline president and China has stepped up its purchases of Iranian oil, albeit for pennies on the dollar. It seems increasingly unlikely the US will be able to persuade Iran to roll back its nuclear enrichment advances, which, at 60 per cent, are a multiple of the original negotiated thresholds. That means it is inching ever closer to nuclear breakout capacity.

Biden is loath to threaten military consequences — a stance with which I strongly sympathise. But that leaves him with scant leverage to compel Iran to roll back its programme. Tehran insists that it was the US that unilaterally left the deal under Trump, and that Biden has no means of guaranteeing that won’t happen again. They have a point.

Which leaves Biden little choice but to fall back on another round of US financial sanctions on Iran’s main oil purchasers, notably China. Scholars call this “weaponised interdependence”. Israel will probably have more kinetic ideas of how to deal with an increasingly ebullient Iran. At the same time, the Iranian-backed Houthis are poised to take full control of Yemen, which will cause conniptions in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and elsewhere.

What can Biden do about that? Not much, it seems. A Houthi takeover will be seen as the regional version of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.

The reality is that America’s partners in the region, including the UAE, are now hedging their geopolitical bets by striking up ever closer relationships with China while trying not to alienate the US. The French have dubbed this “strategic autonomy”. It is happening far more noticeably in the Middle East than in Europe. Countries such as the UAE no longer see the US as a strategic diplomatic player.

Abu Dhabi is the new beating heart of the modern Middle East © Getty Images

One moment, under Barack Obama, America was calling on the region to invest in Iran as a reward for signing the deal. Then Washington did a U-turn under Trump and applied a flurry of sanctions on multiple entities. Now America’s stance is something in between. Who is to say what America’s position will be in 2025? Meanwhile, on next-generation 5G mobile technology, the US is insisting that its partners jettison Huawei and ZTE in favour of western providers — posing the “my way or the Huawei” dilemma. Yet the US is offering no equivalent provider to replace Huawei.

The essence of good diplomacy is to see the world from the other guy’s point of view. America, at least temporarily, appears to have lost the appetite to do that. The last thing countries such as the UAE want is to see things degenerate into an “either/or” proposition from the “both/and” world that enabled them to thrive. The more America restricts their choices, the greater their temptation to cosy up to China. There was repeated reference in Abu Dhabi to the “one world, two systems” era that seems to be on the horizon.

America is pulling back from its so-called forever wars because of very understandable fatigue and disillusion back home. But that calls for greater US diplomatic and commercial engagement with the world, not less. If Washington is serious about winning friends and influence in its contest with China, it needs a strategy for the whole world, not just for the Indo-Pacific.

Rana, I know you are no stranger to the Middle East. Would you even try to check out of the Hotel California?

•  Rana Foroohar responds

Ed, I love your first line and the whole Eagles conceit here. But yes, I am all for the US checking out of the Hotel Mena (that’s Middle East and north Africa, for those of you who don’t read World Bank reports), which I believe has always been inevitable, as was our exit from Afghanistan (which was necessary and never going to be anything other than messy).

Given the fact that Chinese energy demands are more pressing than America’s, the Middle Kingdom was always going to come closer to the Middle East, while the US pulled away. Over the past few years, the US shale oil and gas revolution and the Obama pivot to Asia was already pushing things in that direction. Now, the clean energy transition and geopolitical conflict between the US and China will do the same. The shift will be bumpy, to be sure.

But how much do our supposed “allies” in the Mena region really do for the US? And how much of a hassle will they be over the long haul for China? Let the Middle Kingdom try doing diplomacy in the Gulf, Iran or Afghanistan, or for that matter the Congo or any number of other difficult parts of the world in which they are encroaching for their own mercantilist reasons. Good luck to them!

As for America not providing an alternative to Huawei, I don’t believe that’s correct. There are alternatives to Chinese 5G systems, with technologies made by Qualcomm, Intel, Nokia, Cisco, Ericsson and others (see a complete outline of the 5G ecosystem in this White House supply chain report from July. But they are more expensive. That’s the cost of doing business with companies that aren’t state subsidised.

As I noted in a piece about Xi’s techno-authoritarianism in 2019, most autocratic countries, including those in the Middle East, will follow China and buy Huawei. The US and Europe can go in a different direction, and there are signs that they are doing so with a new tech and trade alliance. This alone doesn’t give me a peaceful easy feeling (I just had to get another Eagles reference in). But it’s a better place to put American effort than in trying to change politics in the Middle East.