From the Arab Spring, to Syria, to Iran, to the peace process,
President Barack Obama's actions have yet to live up to his high-flying
rhetoric.
BY AARON DAVID MILLER
It is the cruelest of ironies that President
Barack Obama's legacy in the Middle East -- a signature issue for many U.S.
presidents -- now lies in the hands of two of his most intractable adversaries:
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. It
also probably doesn't make him sleep any easier that the third major player is
a man with whom he has a famously dysfunctional relationship: Israel's Benjamin
Netanyahu.
It's
cruel because saving Syria, resolving the Iranian nuclear issue, and achieving
Israeli-Palestinian peace seem well beyond the president's capacity -- even if
he boasted the support of willing and trusting partners. And it's ironic
because Obama set out not to preside over catastrophes in the Middle East but
to transform the region for the better. He now risks being the president on
whose watch it all became so much worse.
Is this unhappy
tale primarily Obama's fault? No. But on the four key issues that will likely
define the president's legacy in this region, his critics have already reached
a very different conclusion -- and history may too.
A regional order transformed
It was both Obama's
luck and misfortune to have been president during a historic, once-in-a-century
transformation of the Middle East. You don't get to be a doer of great deeds
unless you're confronted with great events and are then able to help shape them
(see: Lincoln, FDR).
Obama was lucky
enough to have the first, but he couldn't -- his critics allege -- produce the
second. Unlike the period from 1986 to 1992, when Ronald Reagan and George H.W.
Bush were perceived as proactive players in shaping events after the crumbling
of the Soviet Union, Obama may be seen as more the bystander.
The comparisons to
the end of the Cold War are perhaps a bit unfair. The president was indeed on
the right side of history in the early acts of the Arab Spring: He recognized
the inevitability of the end of America's authoritarian friends in Tunisia,
Egypt, and Yemen -- and to his credit, he was proactive in helping get rid of
Libyan autocrat Muammar al-Qaddafi.
But subsequent
inattention in Libya and the Benghazi debacle, Obama's vacillation about how to
deal with Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy and the Muslim Brotherhood, a
hesitancy to speak out more forcefully against the Brothers' exclusivist and
arbitrary policies in Egypt, and acquiescence to Saudi-backed repression in
Bahrain raised doubts about whether he had indeed moved to the right side of
history.
Yet the "who
lost the Middle East?" debate is really a silly one -- the region was
never Obama's to lose. America cannot dictate the course of events there, even
if it wanted to. It was, after all, Arabs' ownership of their own politics that
gave the Arab Spring its authenticity and legitimacy.
But the strange
marriage of neocons and liberal interventionists has hammered home the theme
that the president has lacked vision, leadership, and strength in responding to
these historic transformations. Where was the appointment of the "super
envoy" to oversee America's strategy toward the Arab Spring, the task
forces to monitor regional developments around the clock, and the strategic use
of incentives and disincentives to reinforce positive change and lay down
markers in the face of negative behavior? Or was it all just too much -- too
fast and furious to keep track of?
Had the Arab Spring
moved in the right direction, Obama would have been hailed as a strategic
genius for his smart, low-cost management from the sidelines. Sadly, it has
moved the other way -- toward instability, violence, and dashed hopes. As a
result, what people saw -- certainly those in the Middle East, where it's easy
to blame somebody else for your troubles -- is a president who became strangely
disconnected and who at best just seemed to have other things to do. At worst,
he seemed to have simply stopped caring.
Syria: Exhibits A to Z
Nowhere is the
charge of passivity and abandonment more likely to stick than in Syria.
I've supported the
president's risk-averse approach on Syria, largely because the endgame the
United States wants -- a liberal, secular, pro-Western Syria -- is beyond
America's capacity to achieve from the outside and not worth the risk of a more
muscular intervention that would require the United States to be on the inside.
Splitting the difference by thinking America can get what it wants by arming
this or that rebel group in a sea of competing rebel groups and external actors
for which Syria is truly vital is, well, laughable.
History may prove
much less sympathetic, however. Syria's isn't Obama's Rwanda. But the killing
-- and the passive reaction of the entire international community -- will raise
inevitable questions about what more could have been done.
It won't help the
president's case that key members of his national security team recommended
doing more and he overruled them. It may not be remembered that
"more" would barely have altered the military arc of the conflict.
It's lonely at the
top. And the president will be criticized on moral, humanitarian, and strategic
grounds for not doing more. Plenty of circumstances could still bring America
into Syria, particularly the use of chemical weapons on a large scale. But
barring some heroic, improbable intervention that brings down the Assads and
stabilizes the country, it's hard to see how Obama could create a
counternarrative to the judgment history is likely to bestow on him.
Iran
Obama
stands to be the U.S. president who either allows Iran to get a nuclear weapon,
is the first to bomb the country, or becomes the guy who cuts an interim deal
that keeps the mullahs a few years away from nuclear nirvana. That last
scenario, by the way, comes with ready-made tensions with Netanyahu, with whom
Obama just mended fences.
The Israeli prime minister will wonder how a limited tactical deal on
enrichment fixes Israel's strategic problem with prospective Iranian nukes. It
also offers no real guarantees that the Israelis -- unhappy with a diplomatic
outcome -- don't at some point resort to military action on their own. If he's
really lucky, he gets out of town before Iran gets the bomb, and then it's the
next president's headache.
Not a terribly
appetizing menu for the legacy buffet. A military strike could make Obama look
strong, but there are those pesky, unpredictable repercussions, including
plunging financial markets, skyrocketing oil prices, and escalating regional
tensions. A grand bargain in which the mullahs gave up their nuclear weapons
ambitions and began to work with the West toward a more stable Middle East
would make the president look like a genius. But it's an outcome he's unlikely
to see.
The reality is that
Iran -- followed by North Korea -- is probably the most difficult puzzle in the
international system today. There are no happy endings or comprehensive
solutions. And for this president, who has publicly vowed not to allow Iran to
develop a nuclear weapon, the ironies abound. Think about this: His predecessor
went to war against Iraq, a war Obama strongly opposed, because of imaginary
weapons of mass destruction, only to strengthen and embolden an Iran that could
cross some significant nuclear threshold on Obama's watch.
Obama's hopes for
burnishing his legacy don't improve when it comes to Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
Will he become the president on whose watch the two-state solution finally
expires?
Here, perhaps,
there's more time, leeway, and even some hope to improve the odds of leaving a
meaningful legacy behind. Sure, the possibility of a big, conflict-ending
accord seems pretty remote, but in between doing nothing and the full monty,
there's much to be tried. And Secretary of State John Kerry -- the new, very
smart and savvy Energizer Bunny of U.S. diplomacy -- is well suited to the
task, if the president gives him the latitude.
Kerry has a lot of
options as he attempts to kick-start the peace process. He can try to first
define the borders of a provisional Palestinian state. He might try to focus on
terms of reference to guide a negotiation. He could even sprinkle in some
resonant confidence-builders for both sides and a kind of code of conduct
during a negotiating period. And if he's really ambitious, he can see where the
gaps are on all the issues, including Jerusalem and refugees, and try for a
framework agreement that would garner support in the Arab world by tying it to
the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.
Given the
uncertainties in the region and the gaps between the new Israeli government and
the Palestinian Authority, I think Obama has no illusions about
Israeli-Palestinian peace. That's why he has a Plan B in mind: the legacy
initiative. And that's the Obama parameters -- laying out U.S. views on the big
issues to define the negotiations. It's not a perfect approach: Kerry, I'm
told, wants an actual agreement. If all else fails, however, you can lay out
these parameters, and who knows -- with enough effort, maybe you can get one
side to embrace them and then try to leverage the other.
But even if you
can't, Obama can use them to demonstrate his commitment to the desirability and
importance of a two-state solution. This kind of exercise is vintage Obama --
rhetorical, above the details, plenty of thematic altitude with no need for
real follow-up. It's not great for U.S. credibility if there are no takers and
the Obama initiative is left hanging, but it beats the alternative: a big, fat
goose egg from a president who initially set the bar so high.
Might Obama's zero
for three-and-a-half legacy be averted? Can't the next several years offer up a
different and happier set of endings? Isn't it still possible for Obama to be
the president he wanted to be: the transformer, the peacemaker, the visionary
leader?
It's hard to see how.
The issues in this region are so complex, the mistrust between the parties so
deep, the number of moving pieces so many, that it's tough to imagine grand
bargains and transformative change brokered by a risk-averse president.
The pull of doing
great things that initially inspired Obama will continue to tug. At least when
it comes to the Middle East, the president should do everything he can to
mightily resist it. Big transformations require that the locals -- in this
case, the Iranians, Israelis, and Palestinians -- share real urgency and
ownership. Only then can a willful and skillful president exploit that urgency
and ownership and turn crisis into opportunity.
Right now, the
first isn't evident and the second is a still a thought experiment. Obama ought
to think transactions, not transformations: Try a serious effort to broker a
deal with the mullahs before going to war, and do the same with Israelis and
Palestinians to preserve the possibility of peace. Such interim accords aren't
sexy or the stuff of which legacies are made. They won't get Obama into the
presidential hall of fame. But they are both desirable and possible.
And if Obama is
really lucky, he just might be able to do something that seems pretty
consequential right now: leaving this broken, angry, and dysfunctional region a
little better than he found it.
-This
article was published in Foreign Policy on 03/04/2013-Aaron David Miller is vice president for new initiatives and
a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars. His forthcoming book is titled Can America Have
Another Great President?.
