Well, President Obama’s much-anticipated Middle East speech has come and gone. Will anybody care what he said a year from now? Ask me in twelve months.
On balance, some sort of public presidential endorsement of the Arab Spring was probably necessary, if only to make the United States look a little less like a Johnny-Come-Lately. After all, we’ve spent the better part of 50 years supporting some of the most oppressive regimes in the region; we jettisoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak only when he was no longer useful to us. (President Obama, needless to say, avoided these unfortunate facts in his speech.) History is sweeping North Africa and the Middle East and Washington is scrambling to stay in its slipstream.
The speech was well written. It touched all the important subjects. It nicely combined rhetorical uplift and dispassionate analysis. And it was strongly delivered by President Obama, who ranks with John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton as one of the premier presidential orators since World War II.
When all is said and done, however, the speech was disappointing. Part of this was its predictability. The president praised democracy. He extolled the courage of activists from Tunisia to Yemen. He excoriated the government of Syria. He scolded the government of Bahrain. He managed not to mention Saudi Arabia at all. The president did make one strange assertion:
“Indeed, one of the broader lessons to be drawn from this period is that sectarian divides need not lead to conflict. In Iraq, we see the promise of a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian democracy. There, the Iraqi people have rejected the perils of political violence for a democratic process, even as they have taken full responsibility for their own security. Like all new democracies, they will face setbacks. But Iraq is poised to play a key role in the region if it continues its peaceful progress. As they do, we will be proud to stand with them as a steadfast partner.”
The idea that Iraq might be an example to other Arab states is, to put it mildly, dubious. Exactly what has it taken to bring Iraq to its current fragile position as a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian democracy? Invasion. Occupation. Social collapse. Governmental disintegration. Ethnic cleansing. Civil war. Death squads. Torture. Terrorism. Tens of thousands dead. Hundreds of thousands injured. A million dispossessed internally. An equal number refugees abroad.
This is supposed to be a model? Surely the president knows better. Arabs do.
The greatest weakness of the speech, though, was its lack of ambition. On inspection, our actual material support for democracy in North Africa and Middle East comes down to a billion or so dollars in debt relief for Egypt and maybe another billion in loans. If not exactly chump change, the amounts involved are frankly embarrassing, particularly when compared to the amounts we spend prosecuting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (a couple trillion between the two of them and counting.).
What about the Arab-Israeli dispute? But this has been the implicit assumption of peace negotiations for over a decade; indeed, U.S. Secretary of State Clinton said the very same thing in nearly identical words two years ago. The reaction from Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to what is, at most, merely the public acknowledgment of a well-known truth reveals exactly how little the Israeli government is committed to a two-state solution. Palestinians, for their part, are unlikely to give up their push for international recognition without confidence that the United States is willing to exert substantial pressure on Israel. The prospects for peace talks, in short, remain grim.
Remember: Mere words matter very little. Policies count. President Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech is a case in point. Lauded at the time as a turning point in U.S. policy towards North Africa and the Middle East, it is now remembered as a rhetorical exercise with few practical results. Will Thursday’s speech be different? Or will it disappear, like the Cairo speech, leaving behind it nothing but the stale, sour air of unfulfilled promise?
I’m hoping for the former. But, if I had to bet, I’d put my money on the latter.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.