Good grief: problems with friends and adversaries

Anyone who thinks there is no risk of US military action in the Middle East before January 20 hasn’t been paying attention to

1. President Trump’s efforts to block reversal of his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement and to reassert his declining political relevance at home;
2. The refusal of the Defense Department to brief fully the incoming Biden transition team and the reversal of its decision to withdraw an aircraft carrier from the Gulf;
3. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s interest in continuing Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, Tehran’s decision to enrich uranium to 20%, and Iran’s desire to avenge the assassinations of Generals Qassem Soleimani and (nuclear physicist) Mohsen Fakhrizadeh;
4. The Tonkin Gulf and Iraq war precedents, the former an intentionally manufactured excuse for escalation and the latter a fabulous miscalculation, at best.

Flying B52s around the Gulf is not in itself particularly dangerous. Nor is the passage of an Israeli submarine through the Suez Canal or patrolling by the USS Nimitz. But their maneuvers were deliberately publicized, supposedly as deterrence against Iranian attacks. That may be their intention–hard to tell. But even minor or incidental responses by Iran or its surrogates could drive an erratic president to take retaliatory action aimed at shoring up his own image and political relevance as well as hampering re-entry into the nuclear deal.

Fortunately, Tehran seems determined not to give Trump an excuse for military action. They seem anxious to deal with Biden. His National Security Adviser is signaling willingness to return to the status quo ante, but he wants Iran to be willing to engage on missile issues in a regional context. That means America and its allies in the region would also need to be willing to discuss missiles. That isn’t going to be an easy sell.

After January 20, Biden is going to face a cool reception in the Middle East from America’s friends. Trump’s strongest supporters–Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia–will not welcome Biden, as he will be critical of their human rights abuses. Turkey is also on the outs with the US, mainly right now over its purchase of the S400 air defenses from Russia. Iranian proxy forces imperil US troops in otherwise friendly Iraq. The war in Yemen has tilted heavily in the direction of Iran’s favorites, the Houthis, while the US Congress wants the US to stop supporting the Saudi and Emirati intervention there. The war in Libya has tilted towards the Turkish-supported government in Tripoli, leaving the Emiratis on the losing side and the Egyptians scurrying to reach a modus vivendi with the UN-supported government in Tripoli.

Just about the only unalloyed welcome for Biden will be from Jordan and the Palestinians, two of the weakest reeds in the Middle East, as well as Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman. There will be early decisions required on the Palestinians, in particular whether to re-initiate aid to them through the UN Refugees Works Agency. Biden will happily inherit the “Abrahamic accords,” which exchanged American goodies for Emirati and Bahraini normalization of relations with Israel. But the supposed normalization with Morocco entails American acceptance of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, which Biden may well want to reconsider and possibly reverse.

Biden will have as many problems with America’s friends as with its adversaries. He will want to be critical of Saudi imprisonment of women activists as well as the Kingdom-ordered murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Israeli settlements and annexation of the Golan Heights, Iraq’s failure to rein in paramilitary forces that threaten US troops, Turkish attacks on US-allied Kurdish forces in Syria, and Emirati as well as Turkish violations of the UN arms embargo on Libya. But each of those moves will risk undermining US influence in a region where it is already waning. As the US seeks to withdraw from Middle East commitments, Russia, China, autocrats, extremists, and other undesirables will move to fill the vacuum.

These challenges above all require skilled diplomacy. But the State Department is a shambles and the Defense Department is close behind. The Biden appointments so far in both places are superb people with deep experience. They’ll need it. They won’t want to spend time and energy on the Middle East, which is a region of declining US interest. But it is a region where a lot can be lost, even if little can be gained.