While the Obama White House attempts to spin the president's recent
Middle East trip as a diplomatic success, in reality it provided more
evidence of how irrelevant the United States has become to the
byzantine politics of the region. The White House claims that President
Obama orchestrated a rapprochement between Turkey and Israel after a
period of tension. But the president's trip ignored three deeper and
more profound subterranean shifts in Middle East power alignments to
fill the void left by the American strategic departure from the region.
These three shifts include the realization of Kurdish ambitions
for more autonomy across the area, the new Greek-Israeli-Cypriot
relationship, and the commercial and diplomatic alliance of Saudi Arabia
and Turkey as a counter to rising Iranian influence.
The spin managers claim President Obama helped Turkey and Israel
repair broken diplomatic relations caused by Turkey's shipment of
humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza in 2010 and Israeli
military intervention to stop the aid during which several Turkish aid
workers were killed. Last week, Israeli President Netanyahu apologized
for the attack and agreed to make payments to the families of the aid
workers who were killed.
The two governments have agreed to restore full diplomatic
relations, but this does not restore the military alliance between
Israel and Turkey that had been a pillar of Israeli and Turkish
national security policy. In any case, the rapprochement began
unraveling even as it was being announced, as hardline Islamic elements
in Turkey reacted negatively to the policy and the Erdogan government
began backing away from it.
The president's trip missed the mark on what is actually going on in
the Middle East right now. First, long term Kurdish nationalist efforts
to achieve greater autonomy in the region are on the rise. While the
long term historical consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq will not
be clear for several decades (if that), one of the shorter-term
affects has been the creation of a virtually autonomous Kurdish
Republic in northern Iraq (the beginning of which predates the Iraq war
of ten years ago) whose economy is booming and influence rising—a
prosperous island of stability in a sea of regional chaos.
The precipitous American military and diplomatic withdrawal from
Iraq ordered by the Obama
Administration has limited what the United
States could do to prevent the breaking apart of the Iraqi state, of
which the Kurdish autonomous state is only one manifestation. The
refusal of the Obama administration until recently to intervene to
counter the dissolution of Syria as a state has allowed the
Kurdish-Syrian minority in the northeast to form its own Kurdish
semi-autonomous region, with the Iraqi-Kurdish state as a role model.
The Turkish government has brokered a peace agreement with the
militant Kurdish nationalist movement called the PKK, which brought to
an end decades of civil conflict. Part of that peace agreement allows
greater autonomy for the Kurdish minority within the Turkish state.
But it is in Iran that Kurdish ambitions are growing most militant.
Following the Iranian Islamist revolution and ouster of the Shah,
Iranian-Kurds began a separatist campaign from their redoubt in the
northern mountains. The Kurds remain a fiercely secular force against
the rising tide of Islamist sentiment in the Muslim world, and the
Iranian clerics responded to this secularism and separatist movement by
arresting and executing their leaders and fighters (many of whom are
women). The conflict reached a climax on September 17th, 1992, when
Iranian government agents arranged a meeting in Berlin with top
leaders of the Iran-Kurds, supposedly to begin negotiations to resolve
the conflict. The meeting turned out to be an ambush in which three
Iranian Revolutionary Guards broke into the meeting and murdered four
Kurds, three of whom were among the most powerful leaders of the
rebellion.
The Kurdish-Iran movement declined after this incident until
2004—led by its new party called the Party for Free Life (PJAK)—and
became active in pressing the Kurdish separatist agenda. The Iranian
government has been unable to stamp out the movement because of its
deep roots in the Kurdish community. The Iranians have accused the Turks
of supporting the PJAK, while the Turks have made the same accusation
of Iranian support for the PKK. While Ankara has made peace with its
Kurdish minority, Tehran has not with the Iranian Kurds and that may be
a source of instability in the region over the long term.
Second, in the absence of a stabilizing U.S. presence in the region,
the bitter rivalry between the Ottoman Turkish Empire and the Persian
Iranian Empire, which dates back centuries, is now reasserting
itself. Turkey fears that Iranian adventurism and its development of
nuclear weapons will destabilize the region, as do Qatar and Saudi
Arabia, which is particularly vulnerable to Iran's adventurism.
Between 10 and 15 percent of the population of the Saudi Kingdom is Shia
(Iran is the center of Shia Islam) and they live in the oil rich
northeast region closest to Iran.
The ease with which the Obama Administration dispensed with Hosni
Mubarak during the uprising in Egypt after Mubarak had supported
American policy for three decades shocked the Saudi royal family, which
now realizes the United States is no longer a reliable ally and is
making other arrangements to protect its interests. Saudi investments
are pouring into Turkey to cement a Sunni alliance of Turkey and Saudi
Arabia to counter growing Iranian influence.
The effective end of the Israeli-Turkish military alliance has set
in motion a third realignment of interests in the region. Greece has
had proper but cool relations with Israel since it's founding, and
only established full diplomatic relations in 1991. Greek interests
were aligned with Arab states, while Turkey saw its interests aligned
with Israel. Turkish relations with Arab states warmed as the
moderately Islamic government of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan overtly
supported the Palestinians and challenged Israeli policy in Gaza and
the West Bank.
As Israeli-Turkish relations soured, both Greece and Israel saw a
realignment of their interests, which encouraged a stronger
relationship. Greece and Turkey have had tense and, at times, hostile
relations for much of the twentieth century over many issues, but
mostly recently over control of Greek Islands in the Aegean, over
which Turkey has refused to acknowledge Greek sovereignty. In 1996,
Greece and Turkey nearly went to war in one of these disputes, which was
only stopped by last minute United States diplomatic intervention.
More recently, Turkey has disputed Greek claims over recent
discoveries of large oil and gas deposits in Greek territorial waters,
along with discoveries in Greek Cypriot and Israeli territorial
waters. Over the past year, there have been more Israeli business
delegations visiting Greece than during the previous five decades
combined. The Israeli Embassy in Washington recently hosted a
reception for Greek-American leaders, and the Greek-American community
has recently highlighted the efforts of the Greek Orthodox Church
during the Nazi occupation to protect Greek Jews.
The international system's equilibrium has grown increasingly
fragile as the western alliance—which acted as a stabilizing force
around the world—grows more inward-looking and less willing to take
the lead in crisis management. Other countries take messages from what
American political leaders say, how the U.S. government spends its
money (or doesn't) on its international obligations, and how it
responds to threats to its own interests. The message America's leaders
are sending around the world to friends and adversaries alike is that
by deliberate choice the United States has decided to withdraw from
its leadership position in the international system.
No policy pronouncement by President Obama has more strikingly
summarized America's new role than his promise to “lead from behind,”
an oxymoron if there ever was one. The accelerated U.S. withdrawal of
its military forces from the Middle East and Central Asia, drastic DOD
budget cuts—both those planned by the Obama Administration and
unplanned through the sequestration debacle—and the confused and
incoherent U.S. response to the Arab uprisings since 2010 have damaged
regional actors' views of America's reliability and predictability.
To make matters even worse, the Obama Administration policy of the
so-called Asia pivot made explicit to Middle East powers what had been
implied earlier: that the U.S. had chosen to make an exit from the
region.
The Europeans, preoccupied with their economic crisis and
governance problems, have continued to cut their defense and foreign
aid budgets and are increasingly irrelevant to what is happening in
the Middle East.
The international system abhors a vacuum and the vacuum the west has
created in the Middle East is being filled by regional powers without
the military, economic or diplomatic clout to drive the course of
events to stabilize the regional structure of power—the best example of
which is the debacle in Syria (which is now destabilizing Lebanon and
Jordan). The subterranean shifts of power now spreading across the
Middle East are increasing the risk of regional wars, which the United
States will be unable to stop. Since World War II, the peace and
stability of the world order has depended on a strong America in a
leadership position, which is now unraveling by the deliberate choice
of Washington policymakers. The price of these choices will be higher
than even America's past critics and current adversaries understand.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2013/03/28/the-united-states-has-become-irrelevant-in-the-middle-east
Thursday 28 March 2013
Obama Is Leaving A Vacuum in the Middle East
Posted @ 17:24
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