US military presence in the Middle East: The less the better
By James M.
Dorsey
It may not
have been planned or coordinated but efforts by Middle Eastern states to dial
down tensions serve as an example of what happens when big power interests
coincide.
It also
provides evidence of the potentially positive fallout of a lower US profile in
the region.
Afghanistan,
the United States’ chaotic withdrawal notwithstanding, could emerge as another
example of the positive impact when global interests coincide. That is if the
Taliban prove willing and capable of policing militant groups to ensure that
they don’t strike beyond the Central Asian nation’s borders or at embassies and
other foreign targets in the country.
Analysts
credit the coming to office of US President Joe Biden with a focus on Asia
rather than the Middle East and growing uncertainty about his
commitment to the security of the Gulf for efforts to reduce tensions by Saudi Arabia, the United
Arab Emirate and Egypt on the one hand and on the other, Turkey, Iran, and
Qatar. Those efforts resulted in the lifting, early this year, of the
Saudi-UAE-Egyptian-led economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar.
Doubts about
the United States’ commitment also played an important role in efforts to shore
up or formalise alliances like the establishment of diplomatic relations with
Israel by the UAE and Bahrain.
For its
part, Saudi Arabia has de facto acknowledged its ties with the Jewish state
even if Riyadh is not about to formally establish relations. In a sign of the
times, that did not stop then Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu from last year visiting the
kingdom.
To be sure,
changes in Washington’s priorities impact regional defence strategies and
postures given that the United States has a significant military presence in
the Middle East and serves as its sole security guarantor.
Yet, what
rings alarm bells in Gulf capitals also sparks concerns in Beijing, which
depends to a significant degree on the flow of its trade and energy from and
through Middle Eastern waters, and Moscow with its own security concerns and
geopolitical aspirations.
Little
surprise that Russia and China, each in their own way and independent of the
United States, over the last year echoed the United States’ message that the
Middle East needs to get its act together.
Eager to
change rather than reform the world order, Russia proposed an all-new regional security
architecture
modelled on the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)
adding not only Russia but also China, India, and Europe to the mix.
China,
determined to secure its proper place in the new world order rather than
fundamentally altering it, sent smoke signals through its academics and
analysts that conveyed a double-barrelled message. On the one hand, China
suggested that the Middle East did not rank high on its agenda. In other words,
the Middle East would have to act to climb Beijing’s totem pole.
“For China, the Middle East is always
on the very distant back burner of China’s strategic global strategies,” Niu Xinchun,
director of Middle East Studies at China Institutes of Contemporary
International Relations (CICIR), China’s most prestigious think tank, told a
webinar last year.
Prominent
Chinese scholars Sun Degang and Wu Sike provided months later a
carrot to accompany Mr. Niu’s stick. Taking the opposite tack, they argued that
the Middle East was a “key region in big power diplomacy
with Chinese characteristics in a new era.”
Chinese
characteristics, they said, would involve “seeking common ground while
reserving differences,” a formula that implies conflict management rather than
conflict resolution.
On that
basis, the two scholars suggest, Chinese engagement in Middle Eastern security
would seek to build an inclusive and shared regional collective security
mechanism based on fairness, justice, multilateralism, comprehensive
governance, and the containment of differences.
In the final
analysis, Chinese and Russian signalling that there was an unspoken big power
consensus likely reinforced American messaging and gave Middle Eastern states a
further nudge to change course and demonstrate a willingness to control
tensions and differences.
Implicit in
the unspoken big power consensus was not only the need to dial down tensions
but also the projection of a reduced, not an eliminated, US presence in the
Middle East.
While there
has been little real on-the-ground reduction of US forces, just talking about
it seemingly opened pathways. It altered the US’ weighting in the equation.
“The U.S.
has a habit of seeing itself as indispensable to regional stability around the
world, when in fact its intervention can be very
destabilizing
because it becomes part of the local equation rather than sitting above it,”
noted Raad Alkadiri, an international risk consultant.
While
important, the United States’ willingness to get out of the way is no guarantee
that talks will do anything more than at best avert conflicts spinning out of
control.
Saudi and
Iranian leaders and officials have sought to put a positive spin on several
rounds of direct and indirect talks between the two rivals.
Yet, more
important than the talk of progress, expressions of willingness to bury
hatchets, and toning down of rhetoric is Saudi King Salman’s insistence in
remarks last month to the United Nations General Assembly on the need to build
trust.
The monarch
suggested that could be achieved by Iran ceasing "all types of
support" for armed groups in the region, including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in
Lebanon, and pro-Iranian militias in Iraq.
The
potential monkey wrench is not just the improbability of Iran making meaningful
concessions to improve relations but also the fact that the chances are fading
for a revival of the 2015 international agreement that curbed Iran’s nuclear
program.
“We have to prepare for a world where Iran
doesn’t have constraints on its nuclear program and we have to consider options for dealing with
that. This is what we are doing while we hope they do go back to the deal,” said
US negotiator Rob Malley.
Already,
Israeli politicians, unhappy with the original nuclear deal and the Biden
administration's effort to revive it, are taking a more alarmist view than may
be prevalent in their intelligence services.
In
Washington this week, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid told US National Security
Advisor Jake Sullivan that Iran was “becoming a nuclear
threshold state.”
Back home Yossi Cohen, a close confidante of Mr. Netanyahu, who stepped down in
June as head of the Mossad, asserted at the same time that Iran was “no closer than before” to obtaining a nuclear weapon.
There is no
doubt, however that both men agree that Israel retains the option of a military
strike against Iran. "Israel reserves the right to act
at any moment in any way," Mr. Lapid told his American interlocutors as they sought to
resolve differences of how to deal with Iran if a revival of the agreement
proves elusive.
Meanwhile, a foreplay of the fallout of a potential failure
to put a nuclear deal in place is playing out on multiple fronts. Tension have
been rising along the border between Iran
and Azerbaijan.
Iran sees closer Azerbaijani-Israeli relations as part of an
effort to encircle it and fears that the Caucasian state would be a staging
ground for Israeli operations against the Islamic republic. Iran and Azerbaijan
agreed this week to hold talks to reduce the friction.
At the same time, Iran, Turkey and Israel have been engaged
in a shadow boxing match in predominantly Kurdish northern Iraq while a poll showed half of Israeli
Jews believe that attacking Iran early on rather than negotiating a deal would
have been a better approach.
Taken
together, these factors cast a shadow over optimism that the Middle East is
pulling back from the brink. They suggest that coordinated big power leadership
is what could make the difference as the Middle East balances between forging a
path towards stability and waging a continuous covert war and potentially an
overt one.
A Johns
Hopkins University Iran research program suggested that a US return to the
nuclear deal may be the catalyst for cooperation with Europe, China, and
Russia.
“Should the
United States refuse to re-join the agreement following sufficient attempts by
Iran to demonstrate flexibility in their negotiating posture, Russia and China
will ramp up their economic and security
cooperation with Iran in a manner fundamentally opposed to US interests,” the program warned.
Iranian
Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh announced this week that Russia
and Iran were finalizing a ‘Global Agreement for Cooperation
between Iran and Russia’ along the lines of a similar 25-year agreement between China and
the Islamic republic
last year that has yet to get legs.
Even so,
Iran scored an important victory when the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO) in which China and Russia loom large last month agreed to process Iran’s application
for membership.
A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr,
Podbean, Audecibel, Patreon
and Castbox.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning
journalist and scholar and a Senior Fellow at the National University of
Singapore’s Middle East Institute.
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