Middle East expert Aaron Miller has a recent and thought-provoking piece up at the Foreign Policy magazine website called “The Politically Incorrect Guide to U.S. Interests in the Middle East.” (Full disclosure: I worked with Miller — in a capacity far junior to his — on the State Department policy planning staff in the early 1990s.) I am not sure that I buy the entirety of Miller’s argument. I think that he overplays the success of U.S. foreign policy in the region, giving short shrift, for instance, to the terrible costs — human, financial, and strategic — of our misadventure in Iraq. But Miller does bring a bracing dose of honesty to a subject — Washington’s policy towards the Middle East – that has been the source of hypocrisy under Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
The source of that hypocrisy is not hard to locate. It lies in the conflict between our interests and our values in the region. Do we care about human rights and democratic government? Of course. We just don’t care about them all that much. We were for elections in the West Bank and Gaza, for instance, until Palestinians actually exercised their right to vote and chose a Hamas government; then we did everything we could to undermine it. We supported Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak until he outlived his usefulness to us. We have maintained our naval base in Bahrain despite the Bahraini regime’s crackdown on the local freedom movement; we are clearly fearful of Iranian influence should free elections yield — as they almost certainly would — a government dominated by the country’s Shia majority. And we continue to consider Saudi Arabia an important ally, despite its unabashedly autocratic character.
There may be very good reasons for each of these policies; indeed, I support or have supported most of them. But they are hard, if not impossible, to square with official U.S. rhetoric about our commitment to human rights and democracy. As Miller stresses in his article, we simply give a higher priority to such things as maintaining the flow of Middle Eastern oil to international markets, isolating Iran and bolstering Israeli security.
Let me stipulate that the United States is hardly unique in the hypocrisy of our foreign policy; even a cursory reading of history, beginning with Thucydides, demonstrates its enduring presence in interstate relations. But, given our influence in the Middle East, hypocrisy can bear heavy costs. Miller is eloquent on the risk of raising expectations. In retrospect, President Obama’s much-touted Cairo speech was probably an error, particularly its description of Palestinian statelessness as “intolerable.” Rightly or wrongly, his administration would later decide that it did not want to risk a major confrontation with the Israeli government in order to advance the peace process. It turned out that an “intolerable” situation was tolerable, after all, at least for four years. Tens of millions of Arabs drew their own conclusions, contributing even further to an abiding mistrust of U.S. motives in the region.
Does this mean that we should simply jettison our ideals? No. But we would be wise to more clearly acknowledge — perhaps most of all, to ourselves — the often difficult, sometimes tragic, trade-offs we face between the world as it is and what we would like it to be. In particular, the president — whoever he is next January — should be wary of promising what we have no intention of delivering. Flights of Oval Office rhetoric can both educate and inspire; but they should always keep the ground firmly in sight.
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.