Then-U.S. President
Barack Obama walks alongside former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and
George W. Bush before speaking in the Rose Garden of the White House in
Washington, D.C., on Jan. 16, 2010.
Then-U.S. President Barack Obama walks alongside former U.S.
Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before speaking in the Rose
Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 16, 2010.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
October 18, 2023
As Israelis and Palestinians mourn the dead and fearfully
await news of those now missing, the tendency to look for someone to
blame is impossible for many to resist. Israelis and their supporters
want to pin all the blame on Hamas, whose direct responsibility for the
horrific attack on Israeli civilians is beyond question. Those more
sympathetic to the Palestinian cause see the tragedy as the inevitable
result of decades of occupation and Israel’s harsh and prolonged
treatment of its Palestinian subjects.
Others insist there is plenty of blame to go around, and that
anyone who sees one side as wholly innocent and the other as solely
responsible has lost any capacity for fair-minded judgment.
Inevitably, arguing over which of the immediate protagonists is most
at fault obscures other important causes that are only loosely related
to the long conflict
between Zionist Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. We should not lose
sight of these other factors even during the present crisis, however,
because their effects may continue to echo long after the current
fighting stops.
Where one begins to trace causes is inherently arbitrary (Theodor Herzl’s 1896 book, The Jewish State?
the 1917 Balfour Declaration? the Arab revolt of 1936? the 1947 U.N.
partition plan? the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, or the 1967 Six-Day War?),
but I’ll start in 1991, when the United States emerged as the
unchallenged external power in Middle East affairs and began trying to
construct a regional order that served its interests.
Within that broader context, there are at least five key episodes or
elements that helped bring us to the tragic events of the past two
weeks.
The
first moment was the 1991 Gulf War and its aftermath: the Madrid peace
conference. The Gulf War was a stunning display of U.S. military power
and diplomatic artistry that removed the threat that Saddam Hussein had
posed to the regional balance of power. With the Soviet Union nearing
collapse, the United States was now firmly in the driver’s seat. Then-
President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of State James Baker, and an
experienced Middle East team seized upon this opportunity to convene a
peace conference in October 1991, which included representatives from
Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, the European Economic Community, and a
joint Jordanian/Palestinian delegation.
Although the conference did not produce tangible results—let alone a
final peace agreement—it laid the groundwork for a serious effort to
construct a peaceful regional order. It is tantalizing to contemplate
what might have been achieved if Bush had been reelected in 1992 and his
team had been given the opportunity to continue their work.
Yet Madrid also contained a fateful flaw, one that sowed the seeds of
much future trouble. Iran was not invited to participate in the
conference, and it responded to being excluded by organizing a meeting
of “rejectionist” forces and reaching out to Palestinian
groups—including Hamas and Islamic Jihad—that it had previously ignored.
As Trita Parsi observes in his book Treacherous Alliance,
“Iran viewed itself as a major regional power and expected a seat at
the table,” because Madrid was “not seen as just a conference on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but as the defining moment in forming the
new Middle East order.” Tehran’s response to Madrid was primarily
strategic rather than ideological: It sought to demonstrate to the
United States and others that it could derail their efforts to create a
new regional order if its interests were not taken into account.
And that is precisely what happened, as suicide bombings and other
acts of extremist violence disrupted the Oslo Accords negotiation
process and undermined Israeli support for a negotiated settlement. Over
time, as peace remained elusive and relations between Iran and the West
deteriorated further, the ties between Hamas and Iran grew stronger.
The second critical event was the fateful combination of the Sept.
11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq in
2003. The decision to invade Iraq was only tangentially related to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even though Ba’athist Iraq had backed the
Palestinian cause in several ways. The George W. Bush administration
believed that toppling Saddam would eliminate the supposed threat of
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, remind adversaries of U.S. power,
strike a blow against terrorism more broadly, and pave the way for a
radical transformation of the entire Middle East along democratic lines.
What they got, alas, was a costly quagmire in Iraq and a dramatic
improvement in Iran’s strategic position. This shift in the balance of
power in the Gulf alarmed Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and
perceptions of a shared threat from Iran began to reshape regional
relationships in important ways, including by altering some Arab states’
relations with Israel. Fears of U.S.-led “regime change” also
encouraged Iran to pursue a latent nuclear weapons capability, leading
to a steady increase in its enrichment capacity and ever-tighter U.S.
and U.N. sanctions.
![U.N. General Assembly President Dennis Francis reads aloud from a laptop screen while sitting at a podium desk in the U.N. meeting chamber. Francis, a middle-aged man wearing a blue suit, is also visible on a video screen hung on the wall next to a large United Nations logo.]()
U.N. General Assembly
President Dennis Francis reads aloud from a laptop screen while sitting
at a podium desk in the U.N. meeting chamber. Francis, a middle-aged man
wearing a blue suit, is also visible on a video screen hung on the wall
next to a large United Nations logo.
The president of the General Assembly talks about the organization's possible next steps in the Israel-Hamas war.
With hindsight, a third key event was then-U.S. President Donald
Trump’s fateful abandonment of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA) with Iran and his adoption of a policy of “maximum
pressure” instead. This foolish decision had several unfortunate
effects: Leaving the JCPOA allowed Iran to restart its nuclear program
and move much closer to an actual weapons capability, and the maximum
pressure campaign led Iran to attack oil shipments and facilities in the
Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia, to show the United States that its
attempt to compel or overthrow them was not without costs and risks.
As one would expect, these developments heightened the concerns of
the Saudis and increased their interest in acquiring nuclear
infrastructure of their own. And as realist theory predicts,
perceptions of a growing threat from Iran encouraged quiet but
significant forms of security cooperation between Israel and several
Gulf states.
The
fourth development was the so-called Abraham Accords, in some ways a
logical extension of Trump’s decision to leave the JCPOA. The brainchild
of amateur strategist (and Trump’s son-in-law) Jared Kushner, the
accords were a series of bilateral agreements normalizing relations
between Israel and Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and
Sudan. Critics noted
that the accords did relatively little to advance the cause of peace
because none of the participating Arab governments were actively hostile
to Israel or capable of harming it. Others warned that regional peace
would remain elusive as long as the fate of the 7 million Palestinians
living under Israeli control was unresolved.
The Biden administration continued along much the same path. It took
no meaningful steps to stop Israel’s increasingly far-right government
from backing violent actions by extremist settlers, which led to a surge
in Palestinian deaths and displacements over the past two years. After
failing to fulfill a campaign promise to immediately rejoin the JCPOA,
Biden and Co. focused their main efforts on persuading Saudi Arabia to
normalize relations with Israel in exchange for some sort of U.S.
security guarantee and perhaps access to advanced nuclear technology.
The motivation for this effort had little to do with
Israel-Palestine, however, and was mostly intended to keep Saudi Arabia
from moving closer to China. Linking a security commitment to Saudi
Arabia with normalization was primarily a way to overcome U.S.
congressional reluctance to a sweetheart deal with Riyadh. Like Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, top U.S. officials
appear to have assumed that there was nothing that any Palestinian group
could do to derail or slow this process or draw attention back to their
plight.
Unfortunately, the rumored deal gave Hamas a powerful incentive to
show just how wrong this assumption was. Recognizing this fact in no way
justifies what Hamas did and especially the intentional brutality of
the attacks; it is simply to acknowledge that Hamas’s decision to do something—and especially its timing—was a response to regional developments that were driven to a considerable extent by other concerns.
As I noted in my last column,
the fifth factor is not a single event but rather the United States’
enduring failure to bring the so-called peace process to a successful
end. Washington had monopolized stewardship of the peace process ever
since the Oslo Accords (which, as the name implies, came about due to Norwegian
mediation), and its various efforts over the years ultimately led
nowhere. Former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack
Obama repeatedly declared that the United States—the world’s most
powerful country in the full flush of its so-called unipolar moment—was
committed to achieving a two-state solution, but that outcome is now
farther away than ever and probably impossible.
These background elements are important because the nature of the
future global order is up for grabs, and several influential states are
challenging the intermittently liberal and inconsistently followed
“rules-based order” that the United States has championed for decades.
China, Russia, India, South Africa, Brazil, Iran, and others openly call
for a more multipolar order, where power is more evenly shared. They
want to see a world where the United States no longer acts as the
so-called indispensable power, as one that expects others to follow its
rules while reserving the right to disregard them whenever they prove
inconvenient.
Unfortunately for the United States, the five events I just described
and their impact on the region provide potent ammunition for the
revisionist position (as Russian President Vladimir Putin was quick to point out
last week). “Just look at the Middle East,” they might say. “The United
States has been managing the region by itself for more than three
decades, and what has its ‘leadership’ produced? We see devastating wars
in Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. Lebanon is on life support, there is
anarchy in Libya, and Egypt is lurching toward collapse. Terrorist
groups have morphed and mutated and sown fear on several continents, and
Iran keeps edging closer to the bomb. There is no security for Israel
and neither security nor justice for the Palestinians. This is what you
get when you let Washington run everything, my friends. Whatever their
intentions may have been, U.S. leaders have repeatedly shown us that
they lack the wisdom and objectivity to deliver positive results, not
even for themselves.”
One can easily imagine a Chinese official adding: “May I point out
that we have good relations with everyone in the region, and our only
vital interest there is reliable access to energy. We are therefore
committed to keeping the region quiet and peaceful, which is why we
helped Iran and Saudi Arabia reestablish ties last year. Isn’t it
obvious that the world would benefit if the U.S. role there declined and
ours increased?”
If
you don’t think a message like this would resonate outside the
comfortable confines of the trans-Atlantic community, then you haven’t
been paying attention.
And if you are also someone who thinks that addressing the challenge of
a rising China is a top priority, you may want to reflect on how the
United States’ past actions contributed to the present crisis—and how
the shadow of the past will continue to undermine the U.S. standing in
the world in the future.
To their credit, over the past week Biden and his foreign-policy team
have been doing what they do best, namely, managing a crisis that was
at least partly of their own making. They are working overtime to limit
the damage, prevent the conflict from spreading, contain the domestic
political fallout, and (fingers crossed) bring the violence to an end.
We should all hope that their efforts succeed.
But as I noted more than a year ago, the administration’s foreign-policy team are best seen as skilled mechanics but not architects,
and in an era where the institutional architecture of world politics is
increasingly an issue and new blueprints are needed. They are adept at
using the tools of U.S. power and the machinery of government to address
short-term problems, but they are stuck in an outdated vision of
America’s global role, to include how its handling of its various Middle
East clients. It is obvious that they badly misread where the Middle
East was headed, and applying Band-Aids today—even if it is being done
with energy and skill—will still leave the underlying wounds untreated.
If the end result of Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s
current ministrations is merely a return to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo, I
fear that the rest of the world will look on, shake its head in dismay
and disapproval, and conclude that it’s time for a different approach.