Career diplomat James F. Jeffrey explains in this op-ed at Al Monitor why the Biden Administration needs a new Middle East policy and what its policy should look like. Here’s a snippet:
Beyond that, Washington should accept that long-term improvements flow not from its policies, but from the region’s peoples and leaders, be it Arab rapprochement with Israel, or economic dynamism in countries from Turkey to recently Egypt. The US can best encourage such home-grown developments by assisting on the margins, while maintaining, with its collective security order backed by free trade and access to investments and funding, a stable environment within which regional states and populations can develop.
There are just a few factors I think he’s missing. The first is that, as is true in most of the world, we have no friends in the Middle East. We have clients; we have vendors; there are also hostile non-belligerents but no friends. No only aren’t they our friends but they can’t be our friends. Our interests are just too divergent.
The second is that far too many people in Washington, not must people in the Defense or State Departments but people in Congress and in think tanks continue to adhere to the Wolfowitz Doctrine. That “doctrine” which aims to prevent the emergence of rivals, is not only authoritarian and imperialist but, worse, it is obsolete by about 20 years. As the old Yiddish prayer put it, Lord send us a cure—the disease is already here. We already have rivals. It’s too late to prevent their emergence and we don’t have the resources to accomplish it.
The third is that the gimlet-eyed objective of U. S. foreign policy has to be securing U. S. interests. Presently, that is not the case or, more precisely, we’re pursuing much broader objectives and taking it on faith that they will be good for us. So far that hasn’t worked out well.
I think the regional specific issues in the Middle East are nuclear proliferation, energy and terrorism. There are general issues that the U.S. has everywhere, such as freedom of the seas and stability, that are probably more pronounced because of the regional specific issues. The energy issues is the most interesting because the U.S. has recently shifted its dependence on middle east oil, making cooperation as major competitor more challenging. Also some of the M.E. countries do not appear to be hitting their OPEC+ allotment, suggesting a deterioration in their oil production capacity. Meanwhile, oil from the Persian Gulf is more important for China, which the U.S. is treating as the number one rival (or two?). A lot of threads of engagement seem to be coming loose. I don’t know what to expect ten years from now.
I would add Israeli aggression and militarism. There are reports that the US will participate in Israeli preparations for air attacks on Iran. The American contribution would be refueling tankers and bunker busting, deep penetration bombs.
The one country that has a deep commitment to freedom of navigation of the seas is China. It is the US that constantly babbles about closing choke points and blockading China, Iran, and Russia.