Tag: Gulf states
A grand bargain, with the Gulf not Iran
Expectations for next week’s Wednesday/Thursday summit at the White House and Camp David with Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) heads of state (or their proxies) vary greatly. Simon Henderson, who follows the Gulf from the Washington Institute, says
the definition of success for this summit will more likely be a limited agreement than an historic pact.
Joyce Karam suggests something more substantial: the summit may allow a bargain in which the Gulf states drop their opposition to a nuclear deal with Iran in exchange for the US allowing the Gulf a freer hand in countering Iranian surrogates in Syria and possibly Yemen.
The Americans have not seemed inclined in this more grandiose direction. They remain worried about who might take over in Syria should Asad fall. They have also leaned in favor of a ceasefire or humanitarian pause in Yemen, where the Saudi-led intervention has not done much to roll back the Iranian-supported Houthis while rousing nationalist sentiment among Yemeni civilians, who are suffering mightily because of the fighting.
Those concerns are serious ones, but events on the ground in Syria may not permit the Americans to remain aloof much longer. Rebel forces there have gained ground both in the north, near Idlib, and in the south, between Damascus and the Jordanian border. Regime forces seem unable to respond effectively, though Lebanese Hizbollah and Iranian fighters continue to prevent outright disaster for Asad. The divisions among Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar (the three main financiers of the Syrian revolution) that in the past have hampered rebel effectiveness are diminishing. The Americans might prefer to await training of their vetted rebels to bring down Asad, but he is unlikely to last the years it will take to put a significant number of them back on the battlefield.
In Yemen, the Gulf protagonists have less reason for optimism. Intervention there against the Houthis has not done more than slow their advance south. In the meanwhile, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is gaining ground. The Houthis don’t like Al Qaeda any better than the Saudis do, but it is hard to picture a political solution at this point that allows them to combine to fight their common enemy. They are inclined to forget Ben Franklin’s admonition: either we all hang together, or we all hang separately.
A Gulf/American pact in favor of more concerted efforts to counter Iran’s regional trouble-making could be helpful to the Obama Administration at home, where it faces continued bipartisan opposition to the nuclear deal. Yesterday’s 98-1 Senate approval of legislation giving the Congress a 30-day opportunity to debate and vote on the nuclear deal sets up an important debate for early August, provided the nuclear deal is reached by the end of June. The strongest argument against the nuclear deal is likely to be the prospect of an emboldened Iran free of sanctions using its considerable wealth to subvert the Arab states of the Gulf and Levant. Freeing the Gulf to counter Iranian efforts in Syria and Yemen would be one way of responding to the Administration’s critics at home.
The problem is that it may not work. The Gulf states, which have armed themselves far beyond the Iranians’ wildest dreams, continue to bumble when it comes to military action and diplomatic weight. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has succeeded in building up effective surrogates in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. In Yemen and Bahrain, the Iranians have taken advantage of local grievances to make a lot of trouble. The Gulf states fear the lifting of sanctions for good reasons. Even under sanctions, Iran has done well diplomatically and militarily. What might Tehran be able to do once sanctions are lifted and hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenue return to its coffers?
The summit next week is an unusual one. Whether your expectations are great or not so great, there are real issues to discuss between Washington and its Gulf interlocutors. An agreement that combines a nuclear deal with more effective action to stem Iranian regional trouble-making would be a serious outcome. Rather than the grand bargain with Iran the Republicans and Israelis fear, we may be seeing the emergence of a grand bargain with the Gulf.
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Bridging the Gulf
Cinzia Bianco, an analyst for the “Mediterranean and Gulf” programme at NATO Defence College Foundation whom I met on a recent visit to Rome, offers this guest post, based her “The Changing US Posture in the Gulf as an Opportunity for Regional Cooperation. The role of the EU,” paper presented at the Fifth Gulf Research Meeting (GRM), University of Cambridge, 25-28 August 2014. Her full paper will be published with others from the GRM by the Gerlach Press.
The commitment of the United States in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) as well as Al Qa’eda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has silenced rumors about imminent American disengagement from the Gulf in order to pivot to the Asia Pacific. This commitment stems chiefly from the proliferation of terrorist groups in the Middle East and North Africa, which poses a threat to the US national security.
Nonetheless it has become clear that the US shows fatigue in managing unilaterally this ever-boiling, resource-consuming region. In favoring a “leading from behind” approach, the Obama administration has demonstrated a lack of coherent leadership in navigating the regional challenges, which include state failures in Syria, Yemen and Iraq as well as the consequences of a nuclear agreement with Iran. The US needs to find a way to prevent leaving a hazardous vacuum by relying on an ally to try and build a more stable, long-term strategic outlook in the Gulf. Despite all of its well-known weaknesses, that ally might be the European Union (EU).
The EU has the the potential and interests to step forward. Despite ups and downs, the EU has been involved for decades in direct dialogue with the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), made a big commitment in post-war Iraq and has almost uninterruptedly maintained communication open with Iran. Conflicts in the Gulf would directly affect Europe, whose geographic proximity raises the stakes. Europe is much more dependent than the US on the Gulf for oil and gas supplies. Its trade and investments volume could be hugely disrupted, as Gulf ports are Europe’s gateways to Asia. EU-GCC investments are far more significant than that involving the US.
These motives should be sufficiently compelling to encourage the EU to take on a more proactive role in the region, which would also consolidate its place as a global strategic player.
The presence of a heavy-weighted American military umbrella has not sufficed to protect the region from the emergence of the unconventional threats that are tearing it apart. The regional problems are, at their roots, not military but political and require courageous political responses. Since grievances and conflicts in the Gulf are mushrooming along sectarian fault lines – empowering Sunni and Shi’a extremism in a way that endangers internal as well as external stability of almost all regional countries–it is sectarianism that needs to be addressed head-on, by putting all Gulf countries around the same table. A truly effective dialogue on security in the Gulf needs active participation from Saudi Arabia, and cannot be built without or in spite of Iran and Iraq. Given the considerable distrust between the Sunni and Shi’a in the region, only the EU and the US together have enough political capital to entertain such a challenging enterprise.
The approach in the Gulf should start with limited cooperation on practical issues, in an incremental process of confidence-building focusing on many shared challenges and opportunities. All parties share critical resources, not only oil and gas fields but also water, whose management is strategic in such an arid region and needs to be coordinated. Joint patrolling of regional waters, under the umbrella of existing international initiatives, to fight the transnational criminal networks that engage in illicit trafficking and piracy, might be one step towards normalization.
Nothing can be done without a structured regional dialogue on the sociopolitical front, supporting existing fora of inter-sectarian dialogue and fighting extremist narratives. Tuning down the sectarian narrative at all levels, from leadership to population, might be the only way to prevent spillover from Syria, Iraq and Yemen into the broader region. The most concerned countries should in fact be Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Frameworks of this sort have failed to prosper in the past, but always in the presence of huge level of hostility between the US and Iran. The main GCC fear is that Iran always works to extend its influence in the Gulf, by playing the Shia communities against the Sunni rulers. Arguably, however, critical engagement rather than classic deterrence would the most effective approach to prevent this behavior.
As much as this idea may seem daunting, neglecting the challenge of sectarian-based extremism and allowing deep-seated conflicts to escalate would put national and international strategic interests at great risk. In order to return the Gulf to long-lost stability, bold steps are required, as well as the ability to adapt quickly to a changing strategic outlook, that might soon include the rehabilitation of Iran in the international arena. A visionary plan for a regional rapprochement based on shared challenges and shared opportunities might in the upcoming future become the best possible option.
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Tighten your seat belts
Yesterday’s unprecedented framework for a nuclear accord with Iran sets back the clock in two different ways: it would put Iran a year away from accumulating the fissionable material needed for a nuclear weapon (as opposed to the current two-three months) and it would maintain tight constraints for at least 10 years (and in some areas 15), in addition to permanent verification procedures. In return, Iran would get still unspecified sanctions relief, presumably timed to implementation of the nuclear parts of the agreement.
What does this mean for US/Iran relations, the region and the rest of the world?
It puts the US and Iran on course for intense interactions for a decade or more to come. This is a sharp break with the sporadic and often hostile relations they have endured for more than 30 years. Negotiation of the final details and implementation of the nuclear agreement will not necessarily be a friendly affair. There is lots of room for frictions and misunderstandings to develop over one or another aspect of Iran’s far-flung nuclear program. But we are going to need a dedicated group of nuclear and Iran savvy diplomats to ensure that all the t’s are crossed and the i’s dotted. It would clearly be best if these people were located in Iran or nearby, which raises the question of reopening an American diplomatic facility in Tehran. A bridge too far for the moment, but something to keep in mind.
Iran’s regional behavior will ensure that future relations with Washington are not entirely friendly. Tehran vaunt strong influence over four Arab capitals today: Damascus, Sanaa, Baghdad and Beirut, in addition to Gaza. This influence has been acquired by force of arms, mainly through aggressive action by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its proxies.
The IRGC and other Iranian security agencies do what they think they can get away with to subvert the Sunni Arab monarchies in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Iranian threats against Israel continue unabated. While claiming to be non-sectarian in outlook and providing support to Hamas (a Sunni Arab organization), Tehran has done a good deal to polarize the Middle East between Sunni and Shia, in particular by supporting Shia militias in Iraq, Hizbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the nominally Shia Alawite leadership in Syria.
At the same time, Iran is a serial human rights violator at home, where it keeps a tight lid on dissent. It is an autocracy, not a dictatorship, one that relies on elections in which candidates are screened and debate is circumscribed even if vigorous. The country’s biggest internal threat is ethnic strife, since barely more than 50% of the population identifies as Persian. Just yesterday there was trouble from Arab separatists in Khuzestan, a particularly sensitive area on the Gulf adjacent to Iraq. But Iran has also seen a broad-based, non-ethnic, pro-democracy movement that it crushed violently in 2010.
The US and Europe cannot ignore the misbehavior of Iran both at home and abroad. As sanctions are lifted, Tehran’s capacity for trouble making will increase with its oil exports, though perhaps not as much as expected because Iran’s renewed production may drive prices down further. Iran would be wise to spend any increased revenue on improving the lot of its own population, which has suffered big declines in standard of living.
But if Tehran chooses instead to unleash the IRGC even further to help Bashar al Asad, to counter the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen or to make trouble for Israel, the West needs to be prepared to respond. It may have been wise to isolate these issues from the nuclear talks until now, but it would be a mistake to allow Iran to use the resources it gets from the nuclear deal to further roil the region.
America’s friends and allies in the region, both Sunni Arab and Israeli, will rightly not let us forget that Iran continues to try to export its Islamic revolution. They regard the end of sanctions on Iran and its return to a more normal international status as strengthening the Islamic Republic. They at times seem more concerned with this return to normality than with the far greater strengthening that would result from Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. But there are real issues: Russia, for example, may transfer advanced air defenses to Tehran once sanctions are lifted. The conventional military balance in the Gulf favors the Sunni Arabs and Israel, but the end of sanctions may enable Iran to improve its standing.
No good deed goes unpunished. Iran and the US are at best at the beginning of a long road. It is not clear where the road leads. There will be many bumps along the way. Tighten your seat belts.
PS: Here is President Obama’s defense of the pending agreement.
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Unprecedented
Caveats and qualifications. This is only a “framework” agreement. A lot of details are still missing, and that’s where the devil lies. But I claim some qualifications for expressing an opinion on it: bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physical chemistry, plus seven years as a science counselor in American embassies abroad, where one of my primary responsibilities was preventing the transfer of technology that might enable one country or another to develop nuclear weapons. I’ve done my share of climbing around reactors, fuel fabrication facilities, enrichment laboratories, and reprocessing plants, not to mention talking with would-be bomb builders as well as their enablers.
The Parameters for a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Nuclear Program is remarkably detailed and exhaustive in specifying restraints on Tehran and their duration. I counted 32 specific Iranian commitments, including no enrichment above the level needed for power production for 15 years, a limited stockpile of that low enriched uranium for 15 years, a dramatic reduction in the number of centrifuges available for enrichment, verifiable conversion of Iran’s underground enrichment plant to other purposes for 15 years, permanent and intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections, restrictions on nuclear imports, and reconfiguration of Iran’s heavy water reactor to limit severely its production of plutonium as well as a ban on reprocessing.
Nothing like these restrictions has ever before been agreed to by a potential nuclear weapons state. They are truly unprecedented.
The one all-too-obvious gap is this sentence:
Iran will implement an agreed set of measures to address the IAEA’s concerns regarding the Possible Military Dimensions (PMD) of its program.
Iran has stiffed the IAEA on accounting for its suspected secret nuclear activities many times. This sentence offers nothing more than has been pledged many times in the past. That is too bad, as no state has ever developed nuclear weapons in an IAEA-monitored program. Accounting for past clandestine activities is important. But there are three months now to make good on the pledge–I trust Washington will insist.
On sanctions, the promise to Iran is vague: “relief, if it abides by its commitments.” Presumably Iran can expect China and Russia to press in particular for removal of UN Security Council sanctions at an early date, but that will require US, British and French concurrence. In addition:
U.S. and E.U. nuclear-related sanctions will be suspended after the IAEA has verified that Iran has taken all of its key nuclear-related steps. If at any time Iran fails to fulfill its commitments, these sanctions will snap back into place.
The US at least maintains human rights and other non-nuclear sanctions, so at least some will not be suspended. But this sentence appears to promise an “early harvest” of unspecified sanctions relief if everything is going smoothly.
As I read it, this is about as good an agreement as anyone had any hope of achieving. The question is whether it is better than no agreement, which would have left Iran free to generate enough highly enriched uranium to build at least one nuclear weapon within a few months. A 15-year delay in getting to that point seems a significant achievement to me. I see no sense in which this deal “paves the way” to the bomb, as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu claimed in his speech to the Congress.
Without this deal, we would have faced an Iran forging ahead unconstrained to make weapons grade uranium and possibly plutonium. Sanctions would be fraying. The only option left would be war, which might set Iran back a few years but cause Tehran to redouble its nuclear weapons efforts, as Saddam Hussein did after the Israelis* bombed the Osiraq reaction in 1981. That sounds much more like paving the way to nuclear weapons than this deal, even without the precious details on Iran’s past clandestine activities.
This is an unprecedented achievement, but I don’t expect the Congress, Israel or the Gulf Arab states to readily agree. President Obama has got his work cut out for him, both to fill in missing details and sell the package to domestic political adversaries and Middle Eastern friends.
*I originally wrote “French” here. Hazards of hasty drafting. The reactor was French. The bombs were Israeli. Apologies.
PPS: Jeb Bush’s statement on the Iran deal, with {my comments}:
Today, the Obama administration has agreed to remove U.S. and international sanctions {it agreed to still unspecified sanctions relief and suspension, not removal}, while permitting Iran to enrich uranium using most {less than one-third} of the centrifuges in use today, conduct research into faster, next generation centrifuges {but not deploy them for 10 years}, maintain an underground, hardened facility at Fordow {but not use it for enrichment}, and expand its ballistic missile capabilities {which are not included in the agenda of the talks}. It fails to obtain a guarantee of sufficient inspections {apparently Mr. Bush thinks insufficient the most intrusive inspection regime available to the IAEA, in addition to access to “suspicious sites” and uranium production facilities, monitoring of nuclear imports and early notification of newly constructed facilities}. Iran isn’t required to disclose its past weaponization activities and many of the deal’s provisions will expire in the near future {the failure to answer IAEA questions about weaponization is a serious issue that should be solved before the final agreement is concluded in June, but I can’t find any of the deal’s provisions that expire in anything I would call the near future, unless a decade is your idea of the near future}.
This statement is a sad commentary on Bush’s ability to respond quickly and accurately to an admittedly technical subject.
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The Islamic Republic and the Kingdom
This morning’s news confirms that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has jinned up a Sunni alliance (including Egypt, Turkey, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan as well as several other countries) to battle the (sort of Shia) Houthi rebellion in Yemen, which the Shia-majority Islamic Republic of Iran backs. No one likes to label wars sectarian, but avoiding it doesn’t make them less so.
Sectarian wars are identity conflicts, which makes them particularly difficult to resolve. No one likes to compromise their identity. During conflict, the multiple (and sometimes common) identities we all sport in more normal times are often shorn in favor of a single one. Middle East experts will all tell you that seeing what is going on exclusively through a sectarian lense is a mistake. But it is a mistake that in a first approximation comes all too close to reality during conflict.
It is increasingly clear that it won’t be possible to manage the conflicts in the Middle East country by country, which is the way diplomacy normally works. War does not. Syria and Iraq are one theater of operations for the Islamic State and for the Iranian-backed militias fighting it. Lebanon could be engulfed soon. Iran supports the Houthi rebellion in Yemen in part because of the Sunni rebellion in Syria.
The Sunni/Shia dimension of these conflicts puts the Americans in an awkward spot. They don’t want to take sides in sectarian war. Their major concerns are not sectarian but rather nuclear weapons, terrorism and oil. So they find themselves supporting Iranian militias in Iraq and as well as their (allegedly moderate) Sunni opponents in Syria and Yemen. The result is that Sunnis feel abandoned by their erstwhile ally even as Iranians accuse the Americans of originating Sunni sectarianism in the Middle East. We are in a lose-lose bind.
Getting out of it is going to require more skilled regional diplomacy than we have demonstrated so far. We need to be able to do two things at once:
- bring home a serious product from the nuclear talks with Iran early next week, and
- counter Iranian aggression and proxies in Yemen and Syria
If the nuclear talks fail, expect to see escalation on all sides: in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. But if the nuclear talks succeed, that will not mean peace in our time, as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) will seek a free hand in pursuing its activities abroad to compensate for limits on the nuclear program. Only preparedness to counter the IRGC will convince it otherwise.
The Administration has wisely kept the nuclear talks focused mainly on the Iranian nuclear program. But the time is coming for a wider discussion with Iran of its interests in neighboring countries and the counter-productive way in which it is projecting power through Shia proxies. We’ll also need to be talking with America’s Sunni friends, especially Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, about the opening they provide to Iran by discriminatory and exclusionary treatment of Shia in their own populations.
A classic security dilemma has emerged between Sunni and Shia in many parts of the Middle East. What one group does to make itself more secure the other group sees as threatening. Escalation is the consequence, but that won’t work. Neither Sunni nor Shia will win this war. Eventually the Islamic Republic and the Kingdom will need to reach an accommodation. How many will die before they do?
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The SuShi proxy war is likely to continue
This morning’s news that Saudi Arabia is bombing Houthi rebels in Yemen confirms what you already knew: the Middle East is engulfed in a proxy war between Iran–which supports the Houthis in Yemen, Bashar al Asad in Syria, Shiite militias in Iraq, and Lebanon’s Hizbollah–and Sunni states, including in the front lines the United Arab Emirates and Qatar as well as Saudi Arabia. Occasional Sunni-majority contributors include Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt. At the same time, Iran and its allies as well as Saudi Arabia and its allies are fighting against Sunni extremists associated with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
No wonder it is hard to keep score. This game is played in many dimensions. In the Sunni/Shia dimension, the United States has no dog in the fight, to use Secretary of State Baker’s unforgettable phrase. Our focus is on the fight against Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, wherever they rear their brutal methods, because we fear they will inevitably target the “far enemy” (us) in due course. You might think it would be possible for Iran and Saudi Arabia to cooperate in that dimension, but instead they compete. Neither wants a victory over extremism to be credited to the other or to allow the other (or its proxies) to inherit the territory extremists once controlled.
The Sunni/Shia dimension and the anti-extremist dimension are not really orthogonal. Victory in one will affect the outcome in the other. The protagonists know it, which is one reason they are engaging in both. Iran would gain a great deal in the fight against Sunni states if Shia-allied forces win in Iraq and Syria. Likewise, Saudi Arabia would gain a great deal in the fight against Iran if it is able to put a majority Sunni regime in place in Syria and chase the Islamic State from the Sunni provinces of Iraq.
Yemen is a bit of a side show to the main theater of operations in the Levant. But geography makes it important to Saudi Arabia, in whose back yard it lies. If the Iran-allied Houthis are able to take over there, the Kingdom will feel the loss. By the same token, the Kingdom wants to see Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula defeated. Ironically, the Houthis have been at least as willing to engage on that front as the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, but Riyadh won’t see that as a plus. It wants to defeat both the Houthis and Al Qaeda.
Washington is in a difficult spot. It doesn’t want to be a protagonist in the Sunni/Shia war, but is viewed as one with every move it makes. Yesterday’s American air attacks against the remaining Islamic State forces in Tikrit were apparently undertaken only when Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi agreed to limit the role of Shia militias in retaking the capital of Salahuddin province. David Petraeus and others are being quoted as claiming that Iran is a far greater threat to the US than the Islamic State.
Likewise the nuclear negotiations are being seen through the lens of the Sunni/Shia conflict. An agreement that blocks Iran’s paths to nuclear weapons and provides at least a year’s warning of breakout has come to be viewed as strengthening rather than weakening the Islamic Republic. Sunni states apparently prefer military action against Iran’s nuclear program, which would guarantee that the Iranians do their damndest to get the bomb. But their goading of the US to war might be quickly forgotten in the devastating aftermath, as Iran would no doubt target its Gulf neighbors in any response.
This layered set of interrelated issues (Sunni/Shia, Islamic extremists, nuclear capabilities) is a good deal to complex for even very skilled diplomats to imagine easy solutions. The Obama Administration has essentially decided to prioritize two issue: blocking Iran from nuclear weapons and fighting Islamic extremists. We’ll know by Monday, the deadline for some sort of product from the nuclear talks, if the first issue is likely to be resolved. The second is likely to be with us much longer, if only because the Sunni/Shia conflict we don’t want to be involved in will keep feeding the extremists of both varieties with recruits.
The SuShi proxy war (between Sunni and Shia) is likely to continue.
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