Tag: Gulf states
The troubles we see
This year’s Council on Foreign Relations Preventive Priorities Survey was published this morning. It annually surveys the globe for a total of 30 Tier 1, 2 and 3 priorities for the United States. Tier 1s have a high or moderate impact on US interests or a high or moderate likelihood (above 50-50). Tier 2s can have low likelihood but high impact on US interests, moderate (50-50) likelihood and moderate impact on US interests, or high likelihood and low impact on US interests. Tier 3s are all the rest. Data is crowdsourced from a gaggle of experts, including me.
We aren’t going to be telling you anything you don’t know this year, but the exercise is still instructive. The two new Tier 1 contingencies are Russian intervention in Ukraine and heightened tensions in Israel/Palestine. A new Tier 2 priority is Kurdish violence within Turkey. I don’t believe I voted for that one. Ebola made it only to Tier 3, as did political unrest in China and possible succession problems in Thailand. I had Ebola higher than that.
Not surprisingly, the top slot (high likelihood and high impact) goes to ISIS. Military confrontation in the South China Sea moved up to Tier 1. Internal instability in Pakistan moved down, as did political instability in Jordan. Six issues fell off the list: conflict in Somalia, a China/India clash, Mali, Democratic Republic of the Congo Bangladesh and conflict between Sudan and South Sudan.
Remaining in Tier 1 are a mass casualty attack on the US homeland (hard to remove that one), a serious cyberattack (that’s likely to be perennial too), a North Korea crisis, and an Israeli attack on Iran. Syria and Afghanistan remain in Tier 2 (I think I had Syria higher than that).
The Greater Middle East looms large in this list. Tier 2 is all Greater Middle East, including Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Turkey and Yemen (in addition to Tier 1 priorities Israel/Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Palestine). That makes 11 out of 30, all in the top two tiers. Saudi monarchy succession is not even mentioned. Nor is Bahrain.
Sub-Saharan Africa makes it only into Tier 3. Latin America and much of Southeast Asia escape mention.
There is a question in my mind whether the exclusively country-by-country approach of this survey makes sense. It is true of course that problems in the Middle East vary from country to country, but there are also some common threads: Islamic extremism, weak and fragile states, exclusionary governance, demographic challenges and economic failure. From a policy response perspective, it may make more sense to focus on those than to try to define “contingencies” country by country. If you really wanted to prevent some of these things from happening, you would surely have to broaden the focus beyond national borders. Russian expansionism into Russian-speaking territories on its periphery might be another more thematic way of defining contingencies.
One of the key factors in foreign policy is entirely missing from this list: domestic American politics and the difficulties it creates for a concerted posture in international affairs. Just to offer a couple of examples: failure to continue to pay Afghanistan’s security sector bills, Congressional passage of new Iran sanctions before the P5+1 negotiations are completed, or a decision by President Obama to abandon entirely support for the Syrian opposition. The survey ignores American “agency” in determining whether contingencies happen, or not. That isn’t the world I live in.
For my Balkans readers: no, you are not on the list, and you haven’t been for a long time so far as I can tell. In fact, it is hard to picture how any contingency today in the Balkans could make it even to Tier 3. That’s the good news. But it also means you should not be looking to Washington for solutions to your problems. Brussels and your own capitals are the places to start.
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Geopolitics of lower energy prices
Oil prices are down by about 20% from their recent peak (or 15% from their three-year plateau around $100 per barrel) and likely to stay low for months if not years. Downward pressure will continue unless the Saudis are prepared to rein in their production (no sign of that yet) or prices decline enough (to $70 or less) to turn off the flow of tight oil and gas in the US, which has become a major factor on world markets.
There is a lot of benefit to be seen from lower oil prices. From the US perspective, cutting revenue flow to the governments of Russia, Iran and Venezuela is a big plus. Putin, who is already feeling substantial pressure from European Union and US sanctions, faces serious financial difficulties. Iran, likewise hurt by sanctions, will find it difficult to generate anything like the revenue it needs to fund economic recovery, even if sanctions are lifted. Venezuela was already headed towards a financial crisis. Its budget is almost entirely dependent on oil revenue.
Major oil and gas producers in the Gulf will be hit as well. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates , Kuwait and Qatar as well as Iraq will feel the pinch. They are far more likely to cut their spending on various international causes than risk austerity at home. That could mean scarcer resources for the restored military autocracy in Egypt, Yemen’s besieged government and Syria’s opposition. It could also mean less revenue for Islamist extremists of various stripes, including the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, for which oil sales are a significant portion of revenue.
Lower oil prices will also give a boost to global economic growth, particularly in the US and Europe but also in China and India. The Economist worries that the lower prices may be due to slack economic growth and that lower prices will do little for consumers, but then it gives ample evidence that the lower prices are in fact due to higher production. If past patterns hold, global economic growth could gain by a significant 1% over current 3.3% predictions for 2015.
What has happened in the past couple of weeks is part of a broader secular trend that will have profound impacts on geopolitics and economics for a long time to come. Production of oil and gas is rising sharply in the Western Hemisphere, especially in the US, Canada and Brazil. Demand is rising principally in the East, where economic growth is strong, the economies are still heavily dependent on energy, and energy resources are scarce. This trend has implications for future security risks and burden sharing: it will not make much sense for the US to carry most of the burden of ensuring the security of the strait of Hormuz when 90% or more of the oil shipped through this classic “choke point” is going to India, China and other Asian consumers.
Asian consumers should be stocking 90 days of imports, as members of the International Energy Agency are required to do. They should also be providing some of the naval assets to protect the strait of Hormuz. That will require a major rethink on the part of the US, as well as creation of a multinational force that the Asians can feel comfortable joining.
There are calls in Congress to curtail the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is slated for use in an oil supply disruption. That would be an unwise move, as a major disruption of oil markets anywhere means a hike in prices everywhere. The US may be much less dependent on the Middle East in the future, but it will still be vulnerable to the economic damage of an oil supply interruption.
We have tended to view the rise of Asia as a challenge. But of course it is also an opportunity. The US will soon be the world’s largest oil and gas producer. If the Washington can continue to moderate American demand and in addition decides to allow oil and gas exports, the assumption of its declining influence could soon be proven, once again, a mirage.
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The next big thing in Syria
It’s been a few days since I’ve written about the importance of state-building in Syria, so maybe I can return to the theme. I’ve just come from a Brookings event at which Ken Pollack made an eloquent and well-argued plea in favor of what he termed nation-building, while Salman Shaikh underlined the importance of promoting a national dialogue in Syria, which is increasingly seen as important preparation for writing a new constitution, which of course is one of the vital tasks in state-building.
This took me a bit by surprise, as I thought the event was to focus on Ken’s most recent report Building a Better Syrian Opposition Army: How and Why. That proposes building over the next year or so a new, apolitical but opposition (to Bashar al Assad) army outside Syria. I’m on board that far. The report doesn’t say much about the state-building process. Some of what it says I can’t agree with:
Once the forces of a new Syrian army had secured a chunk of Syrian territory, they could declare themselves to be a new, provisional Syrian government.
Regular readers will understand that hell will freeze over before I advocate that an army declare itself a government. That is not a formula for good, or democratic, governance. Nor will it bring stability.
What Salman had to say made more sense to me. Syrians of all stripes need to talk with each other in an open and transparent national dialogue. Up to a point, that process worked well in Yemen, where the US and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) insisted on it and the UN made it happen. It was failure to implement its conclusions adequately that led to the current Houthi rebellion, not failure of the national dialogue itself.
Talking is not enough. What Syrians need to do is to define their goals. Salman, who is in active communication with many stripes of Syrians, gave some hints where they are coming out: they want security, rule of law, economic prosperity and better governance. None of that is surprising. Those are in fact four of the five end states in Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction, the book of civilian doctrine for state-building whose preparation I supervised at USIP. The Syrians will discover the fifth end state–social well-being–soon enough. Or they will include it in one of the other categories.
There is nothing at all wrong with reinventing this wheel. People have to discover what they want for themselves, and it won’t always come out so neatly congruent with Guiding Principles. But it is vital that goals be defined. Otherwise, the state-building process has no direction and no way of measuring progress.
The question is whether this state-building process needs to wait until Bashar al Assad is gone. I think not. It needs to begin from the grass roots in liberated areas as soon as possible. The United States has been providing support to local councils and surrogate police forces in some liberated areas. That is all to the good.
But there are two problems. The Assad regime often bombs these areas to disrupt the process of creating alternatives to its own oppressive governing structures. That has to be stopped. It could be done by establishing a no-fly zone over the whole country or safe areas along the Turkish border and perhaps in other opposition-controlled areas. But let there be no doubt: such safe areas will come under attack, likely from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant as well as from the regime. We will have to be prepared to defend them, at least from air attacks (but likely also from artillery bombardment).
The second problem is preventing liberated areas from leading to de facto and eventually de jure partition. That will require they operate under the umbrella of something like Etilaf, the Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC). So far, that has not generally been the case. Somehow or other, the breach has to be corrected. Ken proposes that the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General “hold sovereignty until a properly constituted new Syrian government is ready.” More or les that was done in Kosovo, but I can’t picture the Syrians putting up with it. Nor is it possible before Assad is deprived of Syria’s seat at the UN.
The international community I fear is as much part of the problem as it is part of the solution. Humanitarian assistance is usually subjected to serious coordination efforts. I trust that is the case in Syria. But reconstruction assistance rarely is. Donors like doing their own thing, often without regard to governing structures and international community coordination efforts that they in principle support. That has to be somehow avoided in Syria, which will be subjected to strong centrifugal forces of other sorts. The last thing we need in Syria is partition.
Despite President Obama’s reluctance, state-building in Syria is the next big thing. Stay tuned.
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Bombing is not sufficient
To bomb or not to bomb was yesterday’s question. Now most of Washington is agreeing that to stop the Islamic State bombing is necessary. The questions currently asked concern how much, whether to do it in Syria as well as Iraq, the intelligence requirements and how many American boots needed on the ground, even if not in combat.
Bombing may well be necessary to stop extremist advances, but it is certainly not sufficient to roll back or defeat the Islamic State. If you think the United States is at risk from the IS, you will want to do more than bomb. Quite a few people are proposing just that, though the numbers of troops they are suggesting necessary (10-15,000) seems extraordinarily low given our past experience in Iraq. Presumably they are counting on the Kurdish peshmerga and the 300,000 or so Iraqi troops the Americans think are still reasonably well organized and motivated. How could that go wrong?
But the military manpower question is not the only one. The first question that will arise in any areas liberated from the IS is who will govern? Who will have power? What will their relationship be to Damascus or Baghdad? How will they obtain resources, how will they provide services, how will they administer justice? The Sunni populations of Iraq (where they are a majority in the areas now held by IS) and of Syria (where they are the majority in the country as a whole) will not want to accept prime minister-designate Haider al Abadi (much less Nouri al Maliki, who is still a caretaker PM) or President Asad, respectively.
Bombing may solve one problem, but it opens a host of others. This is, of course, why President Obama has tried to avoid it. He heeds Colin Powell’s warning: you break it, you own it. The governance question should not be regarded as mission creep, or leap. It is an essential part of any mission that rolls back or defeats the IS. Without a clear plan for how it is to be accomplished, bombing risks making things worse–perhaps much worse–rather than better.
Sadly, the United States is not much better equipped or trained to handle the governance question–and the associated economic and social questions–than it was on the even of the Afghanistan war, 12 years ago. Yes, there is today an office of civilian stability operations in the State Department, but it can quickly deploy only dozens of people. Its budget has been cut and its bureaucratic rank demoted since its establishment during George W. Bush’s first term. Its financial and staff resources are nowhere near what will be required in Syria and Iraq if bombing of the IS leads to its withdrawal or defeat.
The international community–UN, European Union, NATO, Arab League, Organization of the Islamic Conference, World Bank, International Monetary Fund–are likewise a bit better at post-war transition than they were, but their successes lie in the Balkans in the 1990s, not in the Middle East in the 2010s. They have gained little traction in Libya, which needs them, and only marginally more in Yemen, where failure could still be imminent. Syria and Iraq are several times larger and more complex than any international statebuilding effort in recent times, except for Afghanistan, which is not looking good.
Even just the immediate humanitarian issues associated with the wars in Syria and Iraq are proving too complex and too big for the highly capable and practiced international mechanisms that deal with them. They are stretched to their limits. We don’t have the capacity to deal with millions of refugees and displaced Iraqis and Syrians for years on end, on top of major crises in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and ebola in West Africa.
President Obama has tried hard to avoid the statebuilding challenges that inevitably follow successful military operations. He wanted to do his nationbuilding at home. We need it, and not just in Ferguson, Missouri, where citizens clearly don’t think the local police exercise their authority legitimately. But international challenges are also real. Failing to meet them could give the Islamic State openings that we will come to regret.
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Proxy war
Ben Rhodes said interesting things to Kelly McEvers on NPR this morning:
This clarifies a bit the President’s objectives and strategy for dealing with what the Administration wants to call ISIL (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant).
The objective he states is to squeeze ISIL and reduce the space in which it can operate. The White House is not aiming to defeat or destroy it, though it would be delighted if that is the outcome. But the Administration clearly agrees with its critics, who have been saying that defeat of ISIL requires deployment of 10-15,000 US troops. It doesn’t want to do that, so it has lowered its sights.
The principal means will be an international coalition, including moderates in Syria as well as Iraqi security forces (the Kurdish peshmerga as well as Baghdad’s massive but still underperforming army). The US role will include air strikes, supplying weapons, organizing logistics and providing intelligence. Washington and others will need to provide massive humanitarian assistance, mainly to displaced people and refugees. Bashar al Asad is explicitly not part of the political/military coalition. Iran implicitly is, at least inside Iraq and perhaps even inside Syria, where it is thought to have urged Asad to take more vigorous action against ISIL.
What this amounts to is a formula for proxy war against ISIL, with extensive US backing. No one should expect a short struggle, or an easy one. ISIL has demonstrated several capacities that will make it difficult to counter:
- it recruits easily.
- it fights well.
- it adapts to local circumstances.
- it has had at least some success in providing services to the civilian population.
- it kills and expels non-Muslims, creating massive population movements and enormous humanitarian aid requirements that burden its enemies.
- it appears to have ample funding from captured resources (banks and oil wells principally), extortion, kidnapping and Gulf donations.
The weakest link on the international coalition side of this war will be Baghdad, where sectarian politics undermined the effectiveness of the Iraqi security forces in the first place. There is no significant sign yet that Haider al Abadi, the newly designated (but not yet in office) prime minister, has found a way to fix what his predecessor Nouri al Maliki broke.
Abadi needs somehow bring a significant portion of the Sunni population to his side by meeting some of their demands for increased resources and power. ISIL may help him, if it tries to enforce its draconian lifestyle preferences (no smoking, no women in the street, murder of dissenters). But he will need to show in the formation of his new government (due in early September) significant Sunni participation in key roles in order to convince Sunnis of his sincerity in overcoming Maliki’s legacy.
Abadi also needs to resolve the problems Maliki created with Iraqi Kurdistan by refusing to transfer the money it is owed and trying to block its exports of oil. The Kurds will fight to protect themselves and may even go a bit farther than that in order to please the Americans and increase their own leverage, as they did in helping to retake the Mosul Dam. But if Abadi wants their help in retaking places like Tikrit, where few Kurds live, he’ll need to give them good reasons.
Proxy war is never easy. It may reduce the number of Americans at risk, but it will require deep American involvement in the politics of Syria and Iraq as well as a lengthy commitment of American resources. We are in for a long war with ISIL, an enemy who will reach past the proxies and attack Americans wherever it can find them. Jim Foley was a beginning, not the end.
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The anti-ISIS fire brigade
I’m an Obamista–I campaigned for him and continue to support him. I even sympathize with his much-criticized reluctance to engage abroad. The United States needs a respite. We are a weary world policeman. Our most recent interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated our limitations more than our capacities.
But even while taking a break from our law and order role, we need to be prepared to lead the fire brigade. Uncontained fires that break out abroad can cause us serious damage here at home. The war in Syria, which the President initially viewed as one not directly affecting American national security, always had the potential to do so, by creating a safe haven for terrorists and by spilling over to neighboring countries.
Now both threats have become real. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has carved out a substantial area of control in both countries. While the challenges of governing may prevent ISIS from threatening the United States in the near future, the supposed caliphate it has established clearly intends to do so. Its threat to fly its black flag over the White House is bombast, but if it gains and consolidates a safe haven in Iraq and Syria ISIS will want to strike the United States. It would be delusional to think otherwise.
The President has chosen to act against ISIS, but in strictly limited ways. He is using American air power to provide humanitarian assistance and protection to threatened civilians as well as to prevent an advance on Iraqi Kurdistan, whose vaunted peshmerga have found it difficult to defend their long confrontation line with ISIS. The US is also providing advice and intelligence to both Kurdistan and Iraqi security forces, which performed miserably when ISIS advanced against Mosul and moved towards Baghdad.
The United States needs to do more. It needs to lead a fire brigade committed to containing and eventually defeating ISIS.
This should not be a US-only effort. ISIS threatens Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia more immediately than it threatens the US. But these are not countries that are used to cooperating with each other. Only Turkey has a habit of projecting military force into neighboring countries. But Turkey and Saudi Arabia are at odds over the role of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Middle East, Lebanon is preoccupied with its internal difficulties, and Jordan is overwhelmed with Syrian refugees.
The main ground forces available to meet the ISIS threat are Iraqis and Syrians.
The Iraqi Kurds need help: air power, logistics and intelligence. For the moment, the Americans are providing all three. But there is no reason why Turkey can’t provide at least some of the air power and logistics to help Kurdistan. Turkey’s long border with Kurdish-controlled territory and the immediacy of the ISIS threat would enable it to intervene from the air and supply the Kurds with whatever materiel they may need. Perhaps Qatar might help from the air as well. It participated in the NATO-led operation against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and it shares Turkey’s affection for the Muslim Brotherhood, making it a natural ally.
The Iraqi security forces also need help. They are getting intelligence and some supplies. But President Obama wants Baghdad to form an inclusive government before he commits fully. Nouri al Maliki is still refusing to step down, despite strong hints from Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the Iranians that he should do so. He is an extraordinarily stubborn man, and he has the largest block in parliament as well as a lot of personal preference votes in the April election to back his claim to the prime ministry. There are rumors that he is negotiating for a large security detail and immunity. It would be foolish not to give him both under current circumstances, if doing so will accelerate the process of forming a more inclusive government.
Simply changing the prime minister may not solve the problem. Iraq needs a new political compact that will give
- the Kurds money they are owed as well as some capacity to export their own oil and receive the proceeds from its sale;
- the Sunnis more power in Baghdad as well as control over their own destiny in the Sunni-dominated provinces and the money to realize their ambitions.
In exchange, the Kurds should be expected to commit to staying in Iraq and fighting ISIS while the Sunnis and their foreign supporters Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) should be expected to turn against ISIS and help defeat it.
Nailing together a pact of this sort in peacetime would be difficult. It may be easier in wartime, as the consequences of failure are all too clear.
ISIS will be easier to defeat in Iraq if it is also attacked in Syria. Bashar al Asad cannot be expected to do that in any but a perfunctory way. It serves his purposes well to have an extremist threat that he can blame for the uprising against his rule. It also conveniently fights against more moderate opposition forces. The Syrian opposition needs more and better weapons and training in order to attack ISIS. It also needs help from the Syrian Kurds, who can attack from ISIS’ rear and have proven effective against ISIS at times in the past.
So the anti-ISIS fire brigade looks something like this:
- Kurds in the north and east supported by Turkey and Qatar in addition to the US,
- Iraqi army in the south and Syrian opposition (including Kurds) in the west supported by the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Putting that 360° coalition together is today’s challenge for American diplomacy.
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