Tag: Arab Spring

Middle East scenarios (well, not really…)

On By Martin Kramer

On January 30, I made this presentation to a Herzliya Conference panel entitled “Short-Term Scenarios for the Middle East” (short-term being defined as the next three years). I didn’t actually present any scenarios, for the reason explained in my very first sentence. But I did ask what I think will be the most salient questions (except for Iran, which I’m not touching). Among the panelists was Ed Djerejian, former United States ambassador to Syria and Israel. I’ve always found him to be a feisty good sport, and he stood by the quote of him that I brought. But the session was run by Chatham House rules, so you only get my side of the story. (Other panelists: Sir Mark Allen, Riad al Khouri, and David F. Gordon. Moderator: Shmuel Bar.)

Short-term scenarios are obviously more dangerous than long-term ones—dangerous, that is, to whoever formulates them. Consider that a year ago at this conference, Husni Mubarak was under siege but clinging to power. Bashar Assad was claiming that he had nothing to worry about, and the London School of Economics was still proud to have Saif al-Islam Qadhafi as an alumnus.

It’s been a humbling year for prognosticators, and in this age of the internet, it’s easy to go back and retrieve embarrassing predictions. I allude to those that exaggerated the power of the Facebook youth, downplayed the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood, or described the Salafis in Egypt as a “tiny minority.” Some people have been so stung by their own predictions that they’ve vowed to abstain from making them again. Tom Friedman of the New York Times did that three weeks ago: “The Egyptian uprising is the equivalent of elephants flying…. If you didn’t see it coming, what makes you think you know where it’s going? That’s why the smartest thing now is to just shut up and take notes.” Whether Tom will keep his New Year’s resolution remains to be seen. But it’s now commonplace for chastened analysts just to admit that “no one knows” what will be in the Middle East.

That’s actually preferable to another approach: discounting the short-term altogether, especially as it looks so messy, and taking comfort in the long term. Ambassador Djerejian and I go back a long way, so he won’t mind if I quote something he said last September (at min. 4:30) to make my point. (You see, Ed, you’re not in office any more, but I’m still stalking you.)

I think in the long arc of history, what’s happening in the Arab world is akin to what we, the United States, stand for, both in terms of our values and our national security interests. But in the short term, there are going to be some detours, some bad actors are probably going to come to power in some of these countries, extremists will try to hijack this popular uprising. But I think in the long term, the fact that they are going to have broader political participation, more viable uncorrupt economies, is a good thing, and we have to support these movements.

Now I’m not going to pick on Ed. What he said reflects the Washington consensus: while the short-term is unpredictable and full of bumps, things will stabilize in the long term, and to our advantage. In this approach, short-term scenarios full of detours and bad actors can be disregarded, since long-term trends will correct for them—and these trends smile upon us. The most irresistable one is the spread of freedom, conceived in the American way.

I happen to believe that if things go awry in the short term, there will be hell to pay later, and I’m not alone. I respect the long-term scenario-building of the National Intelligence Council. But there’s a reason they redo their 15-year projections every five years. Still, I’m not going to burden you with short-term scenarios. That’s partly because, as long as I’ve been studying, following, and living in the Middle East, the crucial events have been flying elephants or, if you will, “black swans”—developments beyond all but the most far-fetched scenarios. Instead, I’ll pose a few questions about the future. Your answers are the scenarios.

  1. Is the “wave of revolutions” over? We’re now a year into events, and there seems to be a pattern. The wave hit the presidents-for-life in the so-called “republics” hardest. It swept some of them away. But the monarchies seem to have weathered the storm. When I was at The Washington Institute in November, I attended a session with the Tunisian Islamist guru Rashid Ghannouchi, and he said this: “Today, the Arab world is witnessing revolutions, some of which have succeeded and some of which are about to succeed. The republics have almost completed [this process], and next year it will be the turn of the monarchies…. The young people in Saudi Arabia do not feel they have fewer rights than those in Tunisia or Syria.” When the Institute published this, the Saudis went ballistic, and Ghannouchi claimed his remarks had been distorted. But he said it, and presumably people are thinking it. The answer to this question is especially important to everyone who depends on Persian Gulf oil.
  2. Is there an alternative to Islamism? Islamists are taking every ballot box by storm, usually by a margin twice that predicted by the “experts.” There are those who believe this advantage won’t last. Elliott Abrams last week wrote that “time is part of the antidote to extremism,” and anticipated that Islamists would mellow during that time and do worse in the second and third free elections. But if so, someone else will have to do better, so who might that someone else be? Who has the formula for beating the Islamists at what is becoming their game? The answer to this is especially important to Israel: Islamists may be prepared to play with the West, but to them Israel is forever unclean.
  3. Is the map of the Middle East going to change? We’ve already seen some map changes result from the ballot box: the split between the West Bank and Gaza was prompted by an election, and the split of Sudan into two, by a referendum. What about Libya and Syria? And Iraq? In 2016, the Sykes-Picot agreement, which drew the map of the Middle East according to British and French interests, will be a century old. It survived decolonization. Can it survive democratization? (For those who like the 1989 analogy to the “Arab Spring,” I remind them that 1989 changed the map of Europe.) The world wants to see democracy in the Middle East, but it doesn’t want the map to change. There may be a contradiction between these two desires.

So instead of the customary three scenarios, I’ve asked three questions. Your answers are your scenarios—short-term ones, because we’ll have answers to all three questions within the next three years.

And that brings me to my last point. President Obama has often mentioned the imperative of being on the “right side of history.” He’s said that on Egypt, “we were on the right side of history.” Qadhafi, he said, was on the “wrong side of history.” And the Middle East, he said, “will be watching carefully to make sure we’re on the right side of history.” The danger here is the assumption that events unfold in accordance with certain laws, and the most we need to do is position ourselves. This thinking provides an excuse for inaction—the belief that there is a predestined path to history, from which there are, at most, “detours.”

But there is no “long arc,” because people have choices they’ve yet to make, and those choices will affect outcomes. On the three questions I’ve asked, there may be policies that the United States, Europe, and even Israel can implement, to tilt the odds in favor of certain scenarios and against others. And since we too have to live with the consequences, why not? Let’s hope that, despite having plotted the ‘long arc” of the “right side” of history, we haven’t entirely given up on making it.

Yes, worry about the Islamists

On By Martin Kramer

A presentation made by Martin Kramer at the book launch of Reuel Marc Gerecht’s The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East, November 7, 2011. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

Reuel is an old friend, a fellow student of the same teachers, so I’m delighted that he’s added another contribution to the shelf. But I know I was invited to dissent, so let’s begin.

Reuel’s thesis is that we should be glad to see the old authoritarian order implode, because it could never evolve; and we shouldn’t fear the inevitable triumph of Islamism through the ballot box, because this new order can evolve—eventually in the right direction.

Now I agree that the old order couldn’t evolve—Reuel is quite right. The old regimes can only perpetuate themselves, for some amount of time, until they weaken and someone figures out how to topple them. Of course, this isn’t an entirely new revelation. You can find it in Ibn Khaldun.

I also agree that the Islamists are going to have their moment. If Palestine and Turkey and Tunisia put Islamists in power through the ballot, you can bet it will happen in Egypt and Libya and Syria, when that day comes. So we have to weather this change, and do what little we can to forestall a worst-case scenario. I suppose that in order to do that, we also have to be seen as embracing change. If I were writing speeches for Barack Obama, I too would compare the makers of the “Arab Spring” to Boston’s patriots and Rosa Parks. And I suppose we have to say, as a State Department official said the other day, that if Egyptian elections are free and fair, and the Muslim Brotherhood wins, the United States will be, quote, “satisfied.”

But this is where I part with Reuel. I wouldn’t really be “satisfied” at all, but Reuel would. In fact, his book might have been subtitled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Islamists.” What is it about former intel hands that they have this I-know-something-you-don’t approach to Islamists? I’m thinking about Graham Fuller, ex-CIA, Alastair Crooke, ex-MI6, Ephraim Halevy, ex-Mossad—each of them in his own quirky way tells us we can get what we want from Islamists, if we talk to them, stroke them, maybe even pay them off. Of course, this has a long history going back to the early Cold War. We used the Islamists against the Soviets, and many thought we should use them against Al Qaeda. Reuel is ex-CIA, and half the time, I thought he was winking at me, telling me: don’t worry, we’ve got their number. If Islamists win elections, it’ll be all right, because we’ve planted this democracy chip in their brains, they can’t get it out, and they’ll end up coming to Papa. (He even writes at one point that they have America in their bloodstream.)

Well, we shall see. Here’s a quote: “We are going to have a republic, a democracy. Every group is emphasizing the words ‘democratic’ and ‘republic’ as much as ‘Islamic.’”

That wasn’t said this year in Tunisia or Egypt. It was said in February 1979 by an Iranian revolutionary at a rally at Princeton University, where I heard it myself—I recently went back to the Daily Princetonian to see if I remembered it correctly. Reuel is wrong when he writes that “there was never any deception on the part of Khomeini.” There was a massive deception campaign, and it worked. I think we’re again witnessing campaigns of deception, and they’re working again.

Can movements that don’t practice democracy internally, that believe they answer to a power above the will of the people, that divide humanity between believers and unbelievers, build and sustain democracy? In saying yes, Reuel has written a very American book—a flattering paean to the power of an American idea. All I can say is, I hope he’s right. But let’s acknowledge that, however Americans try, they always seem to come up with some variation on modernization theory, which says the world wants what Americans want, in the way Americans want it. And let’s admit that this almost always sets up America for a fall.

Let me end, as I should, with a comment on the implications for Israel. Reuel has a passage that left me bewildered, coming as it does from an old intel hand: “Some Muslim autocracies have signed peace treaties with Israel. They may not guarantee all that much, but the signed paper does exist.”

Well, if that’s all you have to say about Israel’s relations with Egypt and Jordan, you aren’t an insider. The political, security, and intelligence relations with Egypt and Jordan have been intense and game-changing for Israel. There were no public expressions of warmth, but under Mubarak, no mobs stormed the Israeli embassy either. Israelis aren’t so daft as to think that some “evolution” of Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood is going to produce an improvement on what Israel had.

Reuel writes that “Israel’s security will be lasting only when Muslim peoples, not their ever-less popular governments, accept the Jewish homeland.” I don’t know what “lasting” means, but I do know that whether it’s governments or peoples, this acceptance is a function of Israeli power to defeat them. The governments appreciated that power. How does Reuel think Muslim peoples are going to reach the same understanding? Will Israel have to defeat them too? Will it have to do to Islamism what it did to Arab nationalism in 1967?

I’m also perplexed by his polisci Tom Friedman–style bromide, that “democracies eventually bring lasting peace, dictatorships don’t.” That was fine when the set of democracies included the United States and its dependencies. I believe the Middle East, with the Muslim Brotherhood setting the tone, is destined to disprove this slogan. That is, if Israel’s wars in 2006 and 2008—with those Arabs who’d cast the most ballots, Lebanese and Palestinians—didn’t disprove it already. Only Israel’s power, and fear of it, guarantees the peace. Whether Israel’s adversaries do or don’t drop ballots in boxes doesn’t make the slightest difference.

And the idea, in the afterword, that the Hashemite monarchy should turn over power to the Palestinians, is bizarre—because there’s no exploration whatsoever of its implications. We’re simply told that we must be consistent. As Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” We’re being pushed here to a foolish consistency. But if we’re going to be consistent, why not be so in the way Middle Easterners expect? That is, you reward your friends and punish your enemies. That’s how you win and keep friends. Given American values, standing by dictators might not always be advisable. But given American interests, neither is the overthrow of every single U.S. friend, ally, and proxy.

So we’re indebted to Reuel for a provocative book, which I enjoyed from beginning to end. I hope it sells well, gets him his fifteen minutes, and then disappears without a trace. No need to thank me, Reuel. What are friends for?

Israel’s national interests (not only for Chinese)

On By Martin Kramer

On September 7, I addressed a group of visiting Chinese international relations and Middle East experts, who had come to Israel under the auspices of SIGNAL (Sino-Israel Global Network and Academic Leadership). The topic: Israel’s national interests in the Middle East. It’s a challenge to explain the dilemmas of a small state to an audience accustomed to thinking big. Here is the text of my remarks.

Map of Israel in Chinese

I don’t intend to give you my own personal view of Israel’s national interests. My view is not especially important. I do want to suggest what I think most Israelis believe about Israel’s core national interests. These are basic things—I would call them the lowest common denominators. But they define the political center in Israel. Over time, Israeli policy doesn’t drift too far away from them.

In the Israeli national anthem, there is a phrase that expresses the purpose of Zionism and the Jewish state: our hope is “to be a free people in our land, the Land of Zion and Jerusalem.” “Free people” here isn’t a reference to democracy. It refers to the collective freedom of sovereignty. The Jews, through their state, and on their ancestral land, will gain the freedom to determine their own destiny, and not have it determined by others; to act in history, and not only be acted upon; to defend their lives, and not rely on the mercy of others.

The core national interest of the state of Israel is to preserve and enhance this freedom to act independently. How much freedom is enough? If Israel were a vast country with a large population like China, this freedom could be in rough proportion to Israel’s size. But because Israel is small in size and population, because its borders are very narrow and its population is that of one Chinese city, this is not enough. To be free, Israel must have capabilities that are disproportionate to its size and population. Otherwise it would be vulnerable to large neighbors, some of which have ten times its population and even more times its size.

A key national interest, then, is building Israel’s disproportionate power, so that Israel can remain the dominant actor in its own neighborhood—not the only actor, of course, but the dominant actor. This power is military, political, economic, and social. And Israel does have such power—partly due to the weaknesses of its neighbors, but mostly by virtue of its own ingenuity.

Another key Israeli national interest is an alliance with the most effective power of the day. Again, this is a function of Israel’s smallness in size and population. In the period before the creation of the state, this power was Great Britain, which provided the shelter in which the Jews built up their strength prior to 1948. Eventually, with Britain’s decline, Israel’s key ally became the United States. This was facilitated greatly by the fact that the United States is home to the largest number of Jews outside Israel, and the fact that Jews in America have flourished.

The U.S.-Israel relationship is complex, because no two states have identical interests. Neither is it exclusive, on either side. But Israel seeks, and will always seek, a primary relationship with the greatest power in a unipolar world, or one of the great powers in a multi-polar world. Since power ebbs and flows, even at the top level, and because great powers rise and decline, a key interest of Israel, like Zionism before it, is to anticipate such changes in advance.

Another key Israeli national interest is to prevent Israel’s enemies from forming effective coalitions against it. Israel is located in a fragmented part of the world. Although it is surrounding by hundreds of millions of people who speak Arabic and even more who profess Islam, they are divided into numerous states, sects, and tribes, many of them in conflict with one another. Israel is not the cause of these divisions—many of them are quite ancient—but it benefits from them, since these conflicts drain the power of Israel’s enemies.

The most dangerous threats lie in those ideologies that have united Israel’s enemies despite their differences. The two prime examples are Arab nationalism in its golden era of the 1950s and 1960s, and Islamism since the 1980s. The coalitions based on these ideas work to make war with Israel thinkable, despite Israel’s preponderance of power. Israel’s interest is to undermine them and highlight their internal contradictions. Israel can bring these contradictions to the surface by military operations, peace processes and treaties, and many other strategies. But the objective is the same: never to face a large number of adversaries at one time.

The same objective applies to the Palestinians, who constitute Israel’s nearest adversary. History has divided the Palestinians into many fragments—West Bank, Gaza, Israel, Jordan, refugee camps, diaspora. Were they unified, they could impinge on Israel’s own freedom to act. However, each fragment has its own interests, which prevents the Palestinians from forming a unified front. Historical circumstances have worked against Palestinian unity, as have certain weaknesses in Palestinian identity formation. Israel’s interest is to accommodate these divisions, by engaging separately with each Palestinian formation on the basis of its own distinct interests. In some instances, this engagement might be military, in others diplomatic.

Finally, a key national interest is the maintenance of a high degree of internal cohesion. Israel’s Jews constitute a very diverse population, with a large immigrant component, drawn from Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. There are other divisions as well, in approaches to modernity and religion.

It is remarkable how effective Jewish identity has been, in binding very different people to the new Israeli nation. Of course, there are many subcultures in Israel, from secular modernists to religious traditionalists, from Arabs to settlers, from the European-descended to the Ethiopian-born. It is one of the miracles of Israel—and a prime proof for the existence of the Jews as a people—that these subcultures not only coexist in peace, but cooperate at moments of war. The army itself is one of the chief mechanisms for building this solidarity, as is the democratic system.

So how has Israel performed of late in upholding its core national interests? As far as its dominance, Israel’s military and economic power has continued to grow relative to its neighbors, especially in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring. Arab peoples are largely turned inward, as struggles for power and resources unfold within each country. Since these revolutions are incomplete, these internal struggles will continue, with all their economic and political costs.

Iran seems to have suffered a setback in its nuclear program, which may be at least partly Israel-induced. Turkey has become more assertive, but it isn’t clear that there is an overriding Turkish national interest in playing that role. Israel, by building its strength, by its self-reliance, probably has as much freedom to act as ever.

As for Israel’s relationship with the United States, while there is no chemistry between Israel’s prime minister and America’s president, and there is some friction on strategy, the relationship remains solid, and has an expanding base in large sectors of American society. The question for Israel is whether the United States will remain the greatest power, both in absolute and relative terms. No one knows whether the present difficulties of the United States, exemplified by the debt crisis, are transitory or the beginning of a gradual decline. In any event, Israel continues to diversify its ties with rising powers (of which China is one).

The neighbors around Israel remain divided. The Arab Spring has particular potential for aggravating the Shiite-Sunni schism along an arc reaching from Lebanon through Syria and into the Persian and Arab Gulf. This would be to Israel’s advantage. But in the past, revolution has set the stage for the rise of charismatic leaders and unifying ideologies. Nasser in his day, and Khomeini in his, created ideological coalitions poised against Israel. The possibility of a populist leader emerging from the present turmoil to forge a coalition against Israel is not unthinkable. There are rising elements in each of the Arab Spring countries, including Egypt and Syria, which are hostile to Israel and linked to one another by transnational Islamism. (The Turkish leadership also has some links to them.) Israel will have to work especially hard to find the fissures in these still-weak formations and expand them.

As for the Palestinians, they remain thoroughly divided. The Palestinians have not joined the Arab Spring, and Israel has succeeded in preserving the status quo vis-à-vis each Palestinian formation Israel faces. So far, challenges to that status quo—most recently, the cross-border attacks from Egypt—have not undermined it. The statehood maneuver by the Palestinians at the UN will be another test. How that will end, one cannot predict, but so far Israel has been very agile in preventing Palestinians from coalescing in a way that would produce, for example, another intifada.

The internal cohesion of Israel has come under some stress, as a result of distortions that have accompanied Israel’s rapid economic growth. The protest movement under the slogan of “social justice” has had much momentum. But this hasn’t been as polarizing as past protest movements, because of its diffuse character. There have been much more polarized moments, from the Lebanon invasion to the Oslo Accords to the Gaza disengagement. Absent a serious peace process, it is unlikely that Israel’s internal cohesion will be tested anytime soon.

During your visit, you will hear many different views. You should understand that it is our habit to express strong opinions and debate loudly. But beneath this, there is a broad consensus on what Israel needs to survive and flourish, and a long-term record of success in creating the conditions that have made Israel the strong state you see today. I hope I have given you some understanding of those deeper considerations at play.