The masochism tango

President Barack Obama would like to avoid entanglement in the Middle East. He will not get his wish

WHEN Barack Obama became America’s president four years ago, he had two main aims in the Middle East: to make America more popular around the region; and to get out of it, starting with Iraq and ending with Afghanistan. Such was the faith in his powers that some thought Mr Obama might even find the solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict that had eluded previous presidents. He would persuade Iran to forgo a nuclear weapon, preventing further war in the region. The shale-gas bonanza would make America less dependent on Middle Eastern oil and, in turn, bound less tightly to its oil-rich allies in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Gulf. With all this done, America could edge towards an exit from this troublesome place and pivot towards the Pacific.

Alas for Mr Obama, it hasn’t happened like that. Within a fortnight of his re-election, as he was basking in the warmth of a first visit to South-East Asia since his childhood spell in Indonesia, his administration found itself scrambling to prevent Israel from launching a ground war in Gaza to smash Hamas, the Palestinians’ dogged Islamist movement. Hillary Clinton, his secretary of state, left the Asian tour and flew to Israel and then to Egypt. That elegant pivot became an ungainly lurch back to America’s position of old, as reluctant and unloved mediator

Bibi and Barry

America’s most direct influence in the Middle East runs through Israel. Mr Obama was burned by his first-term experience of trying to deal with Israel and Palestine. In his first year-and-a-half he won plaudits—and a premature Nobel peace prize—for telling Arabs and Muslims that America was their friend. He either forgot or chose not to whisper soothing words to Israel, and failed to visit Jerusalem and present a peace plan of his own. The result is that he is disliked more by Israelis than any other American president in living memory. The warmth that Palestinians and other Arabs felt for him at first has faded, too.

For the past two years the peace process has been dead. Although Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, formally espoused the notion of the two-state solution for the first time in mid-2009, Mr Obama failed to prod him into actually working for it. Now Mr Netanyahu seems to have lost interest, if he ever had any to start with. Moreover, the two leaders cordially detest each other. Israel’s electoral system of proportional representation can throw up strange coalitions. But after Israelis vote on January 22nd Mr Netanyahu is still likely to head a hawkish new coalition that favours a “fortress Israel” policy, rather than making territorial and other concessions to the Palestinians.

Would Mr Obama consider squeezing Israel towards negotiations, for instance by penalising it for settlement-building policies that contravene international law? Some say he could get tough, seeing that he no longer needs to fear the powerful Israeli lobby back home. But his heart isn’t in it. That leaves the Palestinian side, where the balance of power has shifted. Hamas and the Islamists are rising, as the more secular moderates of Fatah, led by Mahmoud Abbas, the putative leader of a fledgling Palestinian state, are in decline. Will Mr Obama reach out to Hamas, hoping to persuade it to adjust its policies, as it periodically hints that it will, so that it can become an accepted interlocutor? “He’s an enigma,” says a senior American diplomat who worked on the issue in Mr Obama’s first term. “No one knows what he thinks. This is a man whose inner circle is very small.”

The lack of bipartisanship in American foreign policy is a further impediment. Few Republicans will support any policy that seeks to force Israel to give much ground, diplomatic or literal. Among Democrats there is some sympathy for Mr Obama’s impatience with Mr Netanyahu. J Street, a doveish Jewish-American lobby that takes issue with the influential and relentlessly hawkish American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is gaining a bit of traction. But not enough to give a Democratic president much extra room for manoeuvre. Mr Obama’s advisers are not keen for him to get entangled in the thickets of Israel-Palestine again. But events on the ground may force him to turn peacemaker. “The longer it goes on, the worse it gets for Israel,” says a senior Republican to whom the president listens.

Dealing with Israel has become more complicated since the Arab spring toppled neighbouring governments. Mr Obama’s instinct has been to put out an exploratory hand of friendship to the more moderate Islamists of the region, in particular the Muslim Brotherhood, which runs Egypt and whose counterparts in various guises share power in Tunisia, Morocco, Yemen and Gaza. When Muhammad Morsi, Egypt’s president, helped arrange a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, Mr Obama applauded him. But when, barely a week later, Mr Morsi issued a decree that gave him near-dictatorial powers, Mr Obama recoiled. The Republicans are calling Mr Obama naïve to embrace assorted Islamists who are no friends of America and mortal enemies of Israel. Mr Obama’s optimism has certainly had a cost: relations with Saudi Arabia, which was furious with the American president for cheering the fall of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak early last year, remain tense.

The rights and wrongs of spring

To the north, in Syria, America’s calculation is even more delicate. Both the National Security Council in the White House and the State Department, often at odds in past years, agree for now that direct military involvement is too risky. That leaves two options: either give arms directly to the rebels trying to overthrow Mr Assad, or enforce a no-fly zone, at least over the north-west part of Syria where the rebels have more or less won control of large swathes of territory.

Although Mr Obama this week followed European leaders by announcing that America would recognise the Syrian opposition as the sole legitimate representative of the people, he is against both options. Fears are growing that jihadists may emerge as the strongest among the rebel factions. A no-fly zone would probably require NATO, with America to the fore, to bomb Syrian air defences, many of them in densely populated areas. Mr Obama has done the next-best thing, meeting Turkey’s requests to position PAC-3 Patriot missiles near its border with Syria. This would deter Mr Assad’s fighter jets from flying close to the liberated zone, creating a thin no-fly zone. Yet the longer the civil war goes on, the more likely it is that Islamist extremists end up on top, and the harder it will be to rebuild Syrian society after Mr Assad’s fall, which looks increasingly likely.

Mr Obama is already being excoriated for his apparent timidity over Syria by those such as Senator John McCain who advocate intervention. Some of the neoconservatives who led America into the failed war in Iraq are among the keenest to get involved in Syria. More cautious types from the old school of realpolitik say Mr Obama should talk to Russia and look for a way, even at this late stage, of ending the strife by negotiation. Once more, his preferred policy is to watch and wait.

Meanwhile, in Tehran

Mr Obama cannot, however, do nothing about Iran. “He can afford to be the sixth president in a row who fails to make peace between Israel and Palestine,” says an expert on the region. “But he can’t be the first president to let Iran get a nuclear bomb.” A strong view is emerging that Mr Obama will have to talk directly to the Iranians, outside the framework of long-running negotiations led by Britain, France and Germany. But he faces a dilemma. Since the summer, Mr Obama has agreed that even an Iranian capacity for making a bomb, short of actual possession of one, would not be acceptable. “Containment is now off the table,” says a senior diplomat.

Those who follow the tortuous negotiations about negotiations think a deal is possible. At a minimum, the Iranians would have to stop enriching uranium beyond 5%; send their stockpile of material already enriched to 20% (from which it is easy to get to a bomb-making level) to a third country (apart from small amounts used for medical isotopes); limit their centrifuge-spinning activity to only one site; and sign an additional protocol providing for intrusive and frequent inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s watchdog.

George Perkovich, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, thinks Mr Obama will bid for this sort of compromise. “He is prepared to take a beating to get a comprehensive nuclear arrangement, if the Iranians agree to it.” But, he adds, you cannot realistically expect Iran to accept a deal that prevents it from having a capacity for building a bomb, rather than a bomb itself. A leading neoconservative who was deputy national security adviser to George W. Bush says Mr Obama is “caught between pledges on Iran and his desire to avoid a war”. Anyway, he adds, “the Republicans will oppose almost any deal he agrees to.”

Is Iran, under the lash of economic sanctions, now minded to cut a deal? Its intentions may become clearer after its presidential election next June, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is not thought to have much of a say in nuclear matters despite his occasional blood-curdling language, will have bowed out. At least until then, Mr Obama may keep his diplomatic and military powder dry.

His advisers insist that Mr Obama is prepared to take military action if Iran fails to co-operate. But others, while acknowledging that the president is bound to talk of keeping “all options on the table,” say he is unlikely ever to go to war with Iran. Memories of the invasion of Iraq, which has taken on the patina of a ghastly episode from a former marriage, explain that. Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the elder President George Bush, sums up America’s current position in Iraq thus: “We have pretty close to zero influence there.”

In his first term Mr Obama tried staying out of the region and then involved himself. Neither approach worked. This time round he is still pondering his choice. “There is no such thing as benign neglect when it comes to the Middle East,” says Robert Danin, formerly of the State Department. If Israel-Palestine stays stuck, if Syria descends into prolonged sectarian hell and if Iran gets the bomb or gets bombed, the outlook for both the Middle East and for the United States (for the two remain yoked together) will be bleak. Mr Obama is sure to take a pile of the blame. He cannot afford to look the other way.

http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21568391-president-barack-obama-would-avoid-entanglement-middle-east-he