ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT
This article explores the impact of the US foreign policy’s predictability, or lack thereof, vis-à-vis the Middle Easter regional order. It lays out two main arguments. Firstly, since 2003, the US has undertaken some concrete actions which have undermined former expectations of its behaviour among regional actors. By that, Washington distanced itself from open and predictable foreign policy that played a key role in maintaining the regional order, most concretely as an external security provider. US actions fostered a double-level uncertainty: amid a broader process of strategic disengagement from the region, the US’s level of intervention was not really predictable as in some occasions it adhered to its former responsibilities and opted either for direct intervention or offshore engagement, while in others it advanced in its disengagement by not intervening or doing less than expected by regional actors; additionally, in terms of the direction of its interventions, its policies fostered uncertainty as they fluctuated from some reinforcing the status to those disrupting it. Secondly, this uncertainty prompted regional actors to assume further security-oriented responsibilities, as shown by the renewed centrality of the Gulf Cooperation Council or the innovative Saudi foreign policy in Bahrain, Yemen or Qatar since 2011.
On 8 May 2018, US President, Donald Trump, announced Washington’s unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The agreement was adopted by his predecessor, Barack Obama, together with the rest of the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, just 3 years earlier, in October 2015. The US action caught many by surprise. Despite electoral promises, the logic behind the pacta sunt servanda principle, by which states tend to respect their given-word under International Law, was expected to constrain temptations for escapism by the new administration. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani accused the US of ‘fail[ing] to live up to its international commitments’.1 Declarations by several other world leaders—including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and Canada—noted that such action was dangerous for international peace and security but also, as indicated by the Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, that it ‘critically decreased the trust in international peace and security deals’.2
Only a few weeks earlier, on 13 April, President Trump authorized airstrikes against Syrian regime positions over an alleged chemical weapons attack against civilians in the Ghouta area around Damascus. This was the first time such (re)action was taken by the US government over the course of the 8-year-long Syrian war despite being just the latest episode in a long list of chemical weapons use—US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, confirmed estimates of at least 50 previous espisodes.3 While President Obama had labelled the use of chemical weapons a ‘red line’ which would prompt direct US intervention in 2012,4 on several previous occasions Washington did not enforce this threat only to deliver this time. As happened in the case of the Iranian nuclear deal, this course of action hampered any sense of predictability in US foreign policy as, over the course of a few months, the US reacted differently to similar events. President Trump himself underlined the novel character of the US’s reaction, claiming ‘the US no longer makes empty threats. When I make promises, I keep them’.5 A clear parallelism can be drawn with the US’s withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change (COP21) or Trump’s decision to forgo the already-advanced negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Taken together, these developments have placed the issue of foreign policy predictability, international actors’ credibility and global expectations at centre stage in global debates.
IR theory has comprehensively examined how expectations are central to the construction of a stable international order. Following Hedley Bull’s original English School conceptualization of the notion,6 different authors have articulated proposals of the definition of international order where behavioural expectations are essential.7 Many among them seem to accept that ‘stable and regular patterns of human behavior’—defined as order- contrast with ‘chaos, instability, or lack of predictability’.8 The stability associated with order only comes after international actors respond in certain recurrent ways to certain events or situations. This raises expectations among the rest of the actors within any given system, anticipating individual or collective outcomes by assuming behavioural continuity, and ultimately ordering the relations among them. Predictability, therefore, becomes a centripetal element in the establishment and survival of political orders among global actors.
This article explores the impact of US foreign policy’s predictability, or lack thereof, vis-à-vis the regional order in place in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It lays out two main arguments. First, since 2003, the US has undertaken some concrete actions and foreign policy decisions that have undermined former expectations of its behaviour among MENA regional actors. By that, Washington distanced itself from open, predictable and institutionalized foreign policy that played a key role in maintaining MENA’s regional order in the last seven decades, most concretely reflected in Washington’s traditional responsibilities as an external security provider.
The paper argues that US actions fostered a double-level uncertainty among regional actors. On the one hand, amid a broader process of strategic disengagement from the region, the US’s level of intervention was not really predictable as in some occasions it adhered to its former responsibilities (through direct intervention or Libya’s 2011-like offshore engagement) while in others it opted to advance in its disengagement by not intervening at all or doing less than what regional actors would have expected (like its silence amid revolutionary uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt or Yemen). On the other, in terms of the direction of its interventions, its policies increased uncertainty as they fluctuated from those reinforcing the status quo (inaction in Bahrain in 2011 or in Syria since 2011, for example) to those disrupting it (the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the intervention in Libya being the most illustrative cases). If regional actors might have easily adapted to progressive strategic disengagement, the uncertain direction of US foreign policy, caught between interventionism and retrenchment, engagement and disengagement, fostered unseen levels of uncertainty. The most notable exception to these dynamics has been Israel, which, even if it suffered some setbacks during the Obama administration—especially in light of the US negotiations with Iran on the nuclear issue and tensions over Israel’s incessant settlement expansion—US policy towards Tel Aviv has remained highly stable and consequently mostly predictable to the rest of the actors.
Second, the uncertainty surrounding the direction of US foreign policy has prompted regional actors to assume further security-oriented responsibilities. Combined with the renewed assertiveness of Iranian foreign policy since 2003—fathomed as a consequence of the disappearance of Iraq as an effective counterbalance—uncertainty over what to expect from Washington amid multiple security challenges has led some regional actors to reconsider their roles and responsibilities. Thus, we are witnessing a shift in the normative environment of the regional system, moving away from the traditional institution of extra-regional superpower management due to the uncertainty raised by a volatile external security provider amid increasing volatility in the wake of the Iraq war and the 2011 uprisings. The renewed centrality of the Gulf Cooperation Council and the innovative Saudi foreign policy as seen in the cases of the intervention in Bahrain in 2011, in the war in Yemen and in the ongoing diplomatic crisis with Qatar, as well as recent Saudi actions in Lebanon, may be examples of these phenomena.
US and the MENA regional order since 2003: the double-level uncertainty
The MENA region has been systematically described by IR scholars not only as a regional subordinated system—as ‘changes in the major system will have a greater effect on [this] minor system than the reverse’9 —but also as a ‘penetrated’ system. That term stressed the idea that the region could not be ‘adequately explained—even at the local level—without reference to the influence of the intrusive outside system’, as extra-regional actors severely impacted the regional order.10 Yet, what this penetration means to the region or how it shapes the norms, institutions and values comprising the regional order in place is a far more complex question. Among the many impacts it may have, in terms of security, the penetration has traditionally translated into the inception and survival of a primary institution of the regional order by which security-oriented responsibilities are chiefly assumed by extra-regional actors.11 This has been carried out in a combination of ‘outside supply push’ (global superpowers meddling with regional politics to advance their own interests) or ‘local demand pull’ (regional actors playing out global superpowers and requesting their involvement in advancing their own agendas).12
This situation has been encapsulated in notions of imperial or hegemonic peace in the region like the Pax Britannica or the Pax Americana. Since 1956’s Suez Canal war, the United States assumed security-oriented responsibilities formerly carried out by London. From the first instance when the Eisenhower Doctrine was put into practice during the Lebanon crisis in 1958 until the expulsion of the Iraqi army from Kuwait in 1991, the US intervened in the region aiming to providing security, and generally defending status quo forces. US policymakers embraced interventionism as a necessary acceptance of Washington’s responsibility as a global power.13
After the 1979 Revolution in Iran, and the disappearance of the Shah who had assumed along with Riyadh part of the Gulf security burden in the US’s so-called ‘twin pillars’ policy,14 this commitment started changing and a pattern of more arbitrary US military interventions has taken shape since. During the 1980s, this started with the Reagan administration’s deployment of boots on the ground in Lebanon in 1982 and Washington’s confrontations with Gaddafi in 1981 and 1986 while largely staying away from the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988) even as it provided logistical support to both sides in conflict.15 But it was in the 1990s that a progressive, non-dramatic disengagement began and the US was transformed from a security provider into a security enhancer.16 Right after its intervention peak to defend the status quo amid the Gulf War, the Clinton Administrations took some steps towards lowering its level of intervention. In the Persian Gulf, for instance, it did so by shifting its policy from direct ‘containment’ to the ‘dual containment logic’.17 As Iraq, together with Iran, started to be considered threats to global peace and security, Clinton opted for letting Teheran and Baghdad balancing each other, while assuming the limited costs of keeping a reduced contingent of ground and air forces in Saudi Arabia.18
Beyond the Gulf, the uncontested global hegemonic position of the US permitted to shift into offshore balancing and selective engagement strategies with the rest of the region. The implementation of the no-fly zone over Iraqi Kurdistan, the decade-long sanctions on Baghdad or the 1998 bombing campaign against Iraq are the best examples of these trends. Relying on its unrivalled economic and military superiority, Washington’s soft power and deterrence was quasi sufficient to maintain the regional status quo without substantial direct interventions.
Increasing uncertainty under Bush and Obama
Over the last 18 years, a fundamental change has taken place. This paper claims that the strategy of War on Terror and the subsequent invasion of Iraq in 2003 introduced a second dimension of uncertainty that has survived throughout the Obama Administration. Aside from the trends described earlier stemming from an uncertainty on whether or not the US might intervene and with what level of commitment, starting in the George W. Bush Administration the US has furthered this uncertainty in light of a general unpredictability on the direction of any potential intervention. Since 2000, Washington’s foreign policy has swung back and forth between actions aiming to maintain the status quo in the region to others highly disruptive against that status quo. Since the regime change operation in Iraq and in the wake of the 2011 Arab uprisings US foreign policy has participated—by action or omission—in certain transformative agendas against some of its traditional allies, thereby appearing to contradict Washington’s long-standing defence of the regional status quo. This has nurtured unparalleled levels of uncertainty on what to expect from the US among different regional actors.
This double-level uncertainty can be represented in a Cartesian axis showing on the y-axis the level of intervention and on the x-axis the direction of the intervention (see Figure 1). While since the early 1980s, in broader terms the US seems to have moved in the y-axis from higher levels of intervention to progressive lower levels of intervention, it has broadened the scope of the direction of its interventions from mainly sticking with status quo reinforcing actions to encompass multiple different examples across the x-axis as well (see Figure 2). There are several examples of US foreign policy decisions under George W. Bush and Obama that justify this claim.
Published online:
17 February 2019![]({"type":"image","src":"/na101/home/literatum/publisher/tandf/journals/content/cbjm20/2021/cbjm20.v048.i02/13530194.2019.1580185/20210706/images/medium/cbjm_a_1580185_f0001_oc.jpg"})
Figure 1. The double-level uncertainty matrix
Published online:
17 February 2019![]({"type":"image","src":"/na101/home/literatum/publisher/tandf/journals/content/cbjm20/2021/cbjm20.v048.i02/13530194.2019.1580185/20210706/images/medium/cbjm_a_1580185_f0002_oc.jpg"})
Figure 2. US foreign policy in the Middle East uncertainty matrix
Following 9/11, Bush inaugurated a pro-active policy shift in US Middle East policy that highly contrasted with his predecessor’s progressive disengagement efforts. After the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush Administration contended that Saddam Hussein was dangerous enough to US and Israeli interests that containment was insufficient.19 Instead, it was necessary to directly intervene and support regime change in Baghdad. Bush’s new liberal interventionism advocated for democracy promotion by military means if necessary. Afghanistan and Iraq were the materialization of Bush’s Doctrine, or the acceptance of an ‘explicit causal relationship between the absence of democracy and the rise of extremism’ in the Middle East and elsewhere. The causal relation permitted the US to present the lack of democracy in the MENA as a national threat20 and, making use of ‘preemptive self-defense’ justifications, to intervene militarily.21 The causal nexus was at the basis of the ‘rogue states’ doctrine, targeting North Korea or Cuba as well, as expressed in the 2002 and 2006 National Security Strategies.22 According to Hudson, this meant ‘the US had moved away from its traditional stance of upholding the regional status quo towards proactive, interventionist policy’.23 Furthermore, Bush’s transformative agenda for the region was not only expressed by military means in Iraq as it also encompassed different political projects aiming at re-formulating the regional order, such as the 2002 Middle East Partnership Initiative or the 2003 Greater Middle East Initiative.
Contradictions were not absent during George W. Bush’s presidency though. In Egypt’s parliamentary elections held in late 2005, Mubarak made use of security forces to manipulate the results fearing a victory for the Muslim Brotherhood.24 In 2006, the Islamist party Hamas defeated Fatah in the Palestinian parliamentary elections.25 In both cases the US did not commit with the results of free-elections. These two cases contradicted the Bush Doctrine and represented a momentary return to a status quo enforcement policy that protected two strongholds of the US leverage in the region, Egypt and Israel.
Obama’s foreign policy towards the MENA, in turn, was a story marked by discontinuity, not only with his predecessor but also over its own lifespan. The new expectations raised after his 2009 Cairo speech, progressively transmuted into pessimism and less ambitious objectives.26 This was described by some as a return to old-fashioned realpolitik towards the region, a progressive disenchantment from idealism to realism.27 Yet, besides discussions on the issue of labelling, even if in broader terms the US continued in a larger process of disengagement from the region—with some notable exceptions discussed below—Obama contributed more decisively to raising uncertainty among regional actors as his foreign policy keep oscillating between reinforcing and disrupting the status quo. At its core, Obama’s policy enclosed an opposition towards the high level and direction of Bush’s interventionism, clearly marked by Operation Iraqi Freedom and its effects. Obama sought not only to get the US out of Afghanistan and Iraq but also to distance his administration from the policies of democratic proselytizing and the idea that liberal hegemony can enhance global stability, even by unilateral means.28 From his perspective, the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq was a ‘war of choice’, not a ‘war of necessity’.29 The President believed that direct intervention should be restricted to only those cases where a direct security threat was posed to US, and the case of Iraq did not fulfil those conditions—unlike Al-Qaeda’s threat, challenges to Israel’s existence or a nuclear Iran.30
Additionally, other reasons justified Obama’s willingness not to intervene alike his predecessor. The Iraq war not only heightened debates on how best to identify core threats to national interests, and the difficulties and costs associated with contemporary interventions and nation building efforts, it also (re)awakened US domestic opposition to military interventionism. In this vain, Iraq demonstrated the US inability to meaningfully and positively shape the region’s future in light of the high costs and limited results achieved by the time Obama reached office.31 It also nurtured a fatigue towards the whole MENA region and its political dynamics. His own words in that respect are revealing:
Any president who was thoughtful, I believe, would recognize that after over a decade of war, with obligations that are still to this day requiring great amounts of resources and attention in Afghanistan, with the experience of Iraq, with the strains that it’s placed on our military—any thoughtful president would hesitate about making renewed commitment in the exact same region of the world with some of the exact dynamics and the same probability of an unsatisfactory outcome.32
Structural changes also contributed to reconsiderations of US engagement in the region. Firstly, it is worth noting the discussion on the limits of US power. Not only is the US embedded in a process where its relative power is diminished but also its ability to translate it into the consecution of its political and economic objectives seems at stake. The fiascos of Afghanistan and Iraq, together with the difficulties associated with the resilience of global terrorism, have questioned the effectiveness of US military and economic power to achieve international peace and security. In a situation where one is not capable of doing everything, everywhere, disengaging from less important scenarios and instead directing efforts to key priorities seems compulsory. Such logic can be clearly observed in Obama Administration’s strategic documents like the 2010 National Security Strategy, the 2012 Strategic Defense Guidance or the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, articulated around the ‘pivoting to Asia’ approach. Secondly, the changes in the global energy market were also important. If we accept that one of the most pressing priorities of the US in the focus region is guaranteeing access to natural resources, some recent technological changes have raised doubts on the indispensable nature of MENA energy. The ‘shale gas revolution’ seemed to consolidate alternative sources of energy, with the US itself becoming a major producer, thus reducing its energy dependency. These technological changes have nurtured the idea that the MENA region is in a path of reducing its strategic importance for oil-consuming economies, especially if regional volatility and insecurity makes safeguarding access costlier.
Obama’s innovative strategic thinking prescribing disengagement was put to test amid the social unrest framed as the Arab uprisings. Three countries—Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen—were considered key US allies in the Middle East. Especially important were Mubarak’s Egypt as pillar of Israel’s security matrix since the 1979 Camp David Agreements and Saleh’s Yemen in its role in the fight against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The uprisings tested US’s willingness to support former autocratic allies if by doing that it had to compromise core liberal and democratic values. Caught in this trap, contradictory messages for instance in the case of Egypt emerged. Here, ‘the administration came under domestic criticism for sending mixed messages to Mubarak and the protesters, tentatively backing Mubarak before deciding to throw its full support behind the protesters demanding his removal’ only 10 days before the Egyptian president was forced to resign.33 In general, President Obama opted for not committing with the continuity of those regimes nor opening the door for fully collaborating with revolutionary forces. His administration condemned the use of violence in all three cases and decided to stick with a wait-and-see approach. Only once the uprisings seemed close to succeed the US embraced change and praised democratic transitions.
The key question at stake had to do with what regional actors expected from the United States and whether being the absolute security provider meant providing security to the regimes in power or only safeguarding territorial integrity. The absence of support was interpreted as a policy-decision by the US that harmed the continuity of the regional status quo. Putting it differently, while the US understood that the Pax Americana in place in the region did not mean preventing domestic uprisings to succeed, autocratic leaders from the region believed that Washington would assist them in a more decisive manner. They contended that regime change could mean giving room for anti-status quo, anti-Pax Americana and revolutionary forces of all types to gain ground in strategic strongholds in the region, the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliated political movements being placed on the top of the list. Saudi Arabia and Israel, among pro-status quo traditional allies, manifested their rejection to let those autocratic regimes to fall but most importantly such a long-standing US allies as Mubarak.34 In terms of level of commitment, if Mubarak was not considered important enough to mobilize a decisive support, the US’s overall role as a security provider was no longer credible to most regional actors.35
The civil war and subsequent NATO-led intervention in Libya in 2011 is a case in point for understanding uncertainty dynamics. On May 2011, Obama condemned Gadhafi for indiscriminate use of force against civilians, clearly differentiating Libyan regime’s reaction in front of massive mobilizations from Tunisia’s or Egypt’s.36 A sense of urgency took shape within the Administration and, while in the latter cases Washington was not willing to intervene neither to back social mobilizations, in the case of Libya it opted to actively promote a regime change. The shape of the intervention was the implementation of a no-fly zone, sanctioned by a UNSC resolution under Chapter VII and the R2P doctrine, which prompted the ousting of Gaddafi.
Importantly, the US’s role in the NATO intervention was framed within a strategic approximation encapsulating the logics of US disengagement described above: ‘leading from behind’. This term appeals to the idea that it is not necessary for the US to assume the chief responsibility in organizing, coordinating, executing and managing every direct intervention it is willing to support.37 Krieg talks about the externalization of the burden of war or about ‘war by surrogate’.38 This ‘anti-doctrinal doctrine’, as labelled by Gerges, is born out of opposition to George W. Bush’s model of leading alone which is confronted by Obama’s retrenchment and selective commitments approach.39 It is based on the appreciation that the US has assumed an unjust proportion of the financial and human burden associated with maintaining global peace and security, especially compared with its European and some Arab allies.40 Under this doctrine, any intervention in Libya would be necessarily short, reducing the overall burden, and forcing the Europeans to assume further security-oriented responsibilities. Even if the intervention succeeded in ending Gaddafi’s regime, from Washington’s perspective the mission in Libya (and the unenthusiastic role of its European allies) proved to be a failure, not least in light of the catastrophic stalemate of the country since 2011. Libya represented a novelty not only in terms of the level of intervention but also in its direction as it actively promoted a disruptive change of the former domestic political status quo.
The decision to intervene in Libya must also be weighed in light of the US’s reaction in Bahrain in early 2011. The violent suppression of protesters in Manama only saw a timid urge for restraint to the Al-Khalifa family.41 The subsequent intervention of the Gulf Cooperation Council’s Peninsula Shield Force, orchestrated from Riyadh, only resulted in a pro forma protest by the US.42 The reaction contrasted with the logics expressed by Obama on 19 May where he prioritized human rights and democracy in front of an ‘unsustainable’ status quo in the region.43 Saudi Arabia’s pressure (presenting the situation in Bahrain as an Iranian-led campaign and fearful of the US replicating the abandonment of Mubarak, Ben Ali and Saleh), oil and the strategic interests associated with the US Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain might be highlighted as the main underlying reasons justifying such policy incongruity between the cases of Bahrain and Libya.
The war in Syria is also illustrative. At the beginning of the first protests in early 2011, US statements were limited and highly cautious only to increasingly toughen later that year. In early April, the US President requested Bashir Al-Assad to cease the ‘abhorrent violence committed against peaceful protesters’; and later that month he condemned the use of indiscriminate force against civilians, passing the first limited package of sanctions against Syria’s intelligence agencies.44 Highly influenced by what had happened in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, Obama advocated for limited involvement as he thought that Al-Assad’s fall was inevitable, against calls for additional involvement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and National Security Council Advisor Samantha Power.45 Acknowledging the US’s limited means to develop alternative political institutions in Syria, the deep divisions among the Syrian opposition and the US’s military overstretch in the region were also important elements in the decision-making process at that time.46 Only later that year, in August, did the President move a step further, formally requesting Al-Assad to step aside, imposing a comprehensive package of sanctions against Damascus while starting to consider the possibility of arming and funding the Syrian opposition.47 Still, as symbolic as it might be, the US Embassy remained opened until February 2012.
In August 2012, the policy dramatically changed: President Obama surprised many by setting a so-called ‘red-line’ against the use of chemical weapons, noting that any use of these unconventional weapons would change the US’s calculus, presumably triggering a direct US intervention.48 This new step signalled novel US willingness to do more than before if a specific set of circumstances were met. It also confirmed that, short of chemical weapons, Washington’s direct intervention was not in the cards. Ultimately this deterrence strategy also meant that the set of circumstance that triggered a US intervention in Libya (i.e. massive attacks against civilians) would not be enough for a parallel reaction in Syria. The standards were higher, underlining inconsistency in US foreign.
The most inconsistent reaction, though, came in August 2013 when allegations of Assad’s use of chemical weapons tested the US’s ‘red line’ commitment. The Administration was divided again between those presenting direct intervention as mandatory for the sake of US credibility and those who feared getting trapped in the Syrian mayhem. Secretary of State John Kerry stated that ‘[the situation] is directly related to our credibility and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something. They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they too can put the world at great risk’.49 CIA Director, Leon Panetta, and former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton embraced similar views. Alternatively, President Obama and his Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough, opinioned that a ‘fetish of credibility’ and playing by ‘the Washington playbook’ could led to the repetition of errors that led to the US intervention in Vietnam and not to ‘America’s friends feeling secure and [keeping] the international order stable’.50
Countries like the United Kingdom, France or Saudi Arabia were sure that the US would enforce the red line and were getting ready for collaboration.51 After initially announcing the attack, the President decided to back down, eventually sending the issue to Congress—where he anticipated a negative response on intervention. Concomitantly, the unexpected decision of the British Parliament not to authorize London’s support to an intervention contributed to raising concerns about the cost to be paid by the US if moving ahead. The solution to this impasse came from Moscow as Presidents Obama and Putin reached an agreement at the G20 Summit in Saint Petersburg in early September that saw the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons implement and supervise the dismantling of Al-Assad’s chemical weapons programme.52 From that point onwards, the United States remained with a secondary role in the Syrian conflict, loosing much credibility among its regional allies and particularly the fractured Syrian opposition. All in all, Obama’s policy towards Syria was at least intermittent and fostered uncertainty due to a failure to uphold a stated ‘red line’ and the different levels of engagement if compared to events in Libya.
Finally, the last case in point is Iran and the negotiations towards the 2015 JCPOA. Initially, Obama assumed Bush’s dual-track policy towards Iran which included, for instance, passing new sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran in December 2011.53 Yet, by 2014, Obama’s take moved into a new aspiration of engaging Teheran in negotiations. The shift resulted from the acknowledgement that ‘US policy can have only limited influence, and at that more negative than positive, in terms of confrontational rhetoric and policies reinforcing the internal political strength of the ideological, revolutionary side’.54 The P5 + 1 negotiations ultimately lead to the conclusion of the JCPOA on 14 July 2015, introducing a historical turning point in Washington’s Iranian policy. The negotiations and the JCPOA represented an unexpected novelty in US foreign policy as it demonstrated Washington distancing from its traditional Sunni allies. Since 1979, after the revolution and the hostage crisis, the US’s antagonism towards Iran and collaboration with Arab-Sunni states, particularly the Gulf monarchies, in isolating Teheran was a solid precept of the regional order with only minor periods of digression. Obama’s decision to engage in direct negotiations, on an issue as sensitive as nuclear capabilities, was understood by many Sunni leaders as a weakening, even an abandonment of the US’s traditional commitment and a step towards normalizing bilateral relations with Tehran.55 Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, called Obama an ‘untrustworthy’ president as already seen in his ‘abandonment’ of Mubarak in 2011. Similar ideas were expressed by the King of Jordan, Abdullah II, and different Saudi leaders.56 The frustration was better expressed in the May 2015 Gulf Summit at Camp David, not attended by Saudi Arabia, where the rest of the Gulf monarchies expressed their disavowal on the JCPOA and the new turn of US foreign policy.57 All in all, regional actors believed this policy shift was rather the result of a long-range change in US perceptions: from the ‘support our friends’ mantra, better exemplified in the 2010 National Security Stragey,58 to a broader questioning of the value of the US’s alliance with Sunni states, prompting Obama’s ideas on how ‘the Saudis need to “share” the Middle East with their Iranian foes’.59
The Israeli exception?
In the midst of these growing trends of unpredictability in US Middle East policy since 2003, one irrefutable constant is present: Israel. Support for Israeli security has represented a key, unwavering constant in US Middle East policy since the end of World War II. Key examples include negotiating stances and diplomatic approaches to the conflict and the preferred means of engaging with Israel’s leadership, with US policy prioritizing inducements and soft persuasion (‘carrots’) over conditionality or coercive diplomacy (‘sticks’). Continued opposition to linking US aid to tangible Israeli concessions and growing trends of prior-consultation and coordination with Israel on diplomatic approaches and regional developments are also important, demonstrating continuity independently from personnel changes or indeed of regional developments and disruptions. Further dimensions of continuity are identifiable in the US’s (and Israel’s) traditional opposition to comprehensive approaches to peacemaking and related prioritization of bilateral agreements, the continued sidelining of the United Nations and international law and the US’s sustained efforts to maintain a monopoly over the diplomatic process.
While the broad contours governing US policy towards Israel and the Arab–Israeli–Palestinian conflict retained a large degree of continuity between 2003 and 2016, each successive administration has sought to trace a different approach or sequencing of policies. A degree of ‘trial and error’60 has long been a reoccurring trend in US policy towards Israel and the conflict, yet political and institutional constraints governing US aid and support for Israel have consistently led administrations to resolve these (political) tensions through a familiar embrace of (policy) continuity. Such continuity has been highlighted above, and rests on increased aid and political-military support for Israel in the form of inducements and soft persuasion, either as a means to resolve a current political crisis with Israel or to compensate Tel Aviv for growing support to Washington’s Arab allies.
Thus, when a degree of unpredictability or change was present in US policy towards Israel and the conflict between 2003 and 2016, this mainly related to the extent to which a sitting administration would be willing to engage in diplomacy in the Arab–Israeli theatre (and at what point during his time in office), the freedom of action bestowed on Israel to carry forth its preferred policies and the extent to which the US would overtly marry Israeli viewpoints and concerns, adopting them as if they were the US’s own. Overall, and dating back well before 2003, distinct trends of circularity are present in US policy towards Israel and the conflict, as each administration will either engage or disengage from diplomacy depending on the immediate experiences of his predecessor. Meanwhile, and independently from progress on the diplomatic track, each US administration since Harry S. Truman has consistently outdone its predecessor with increases in US aid and political-military support for Israel.
Tangible expressions of US support for Israel’s security are provided by the long-standing US pledge to preserve Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge (QME) against any combination of threats in the region. Multi-year aid packages date back to the early 1970s, but the first 10-year military supply arrangement was approved by the Clinton administration in 1999, bringing US military and economic aid to $26.7 billion over a decade (FY1999–2008). The subsequent 10-year agreement, signed by President George W. Bush in 2007, increased US aid to $30 billion between FY2008–2018.61 Finally, the most recent MoU, negotiated by Barack Obama during 2016, and in the midst of unprecedented political disagreements with the right-wing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, increased US aid to $38 billion between FY2019–FY2028, the ‘single largest pledge of military assistance in US history’.62
This aid has long been framed by US policymakers as an ‘investment in peace’, a means to reassure Israel of the US’s reliability as a security provider, which in turn would ostensibly increase Israel’s propensity to agree to territorial concessions needed for a peace agreement. Meanwhile, increased US military aid for Israel is also considered a means to ‘freeze’ developments in the Arab–Israeli theatre, diminishing the risk of conflict while consolidating the US’s monopoly over the diplomatic process by virtue of its professed ability to ‘deliver’ Israeli concessions. Such approaches mirrored those developed by US planners during the Cold War in the 1970s, again pointing to strong degrees of continuity in US policy. While successful in reaching a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1979, and, following the Oslo Accords, with Jordan in 1994, the implicit limits of such a strategy have been clear with regards to the Palestinians, but also Lebanon and Syria.
In the wake of George W. Bush’s election, and with the second Palestinian intifada raging in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), US policy sought to step back from the Middle East. The 9/11 attacks would change this dramatically. When it came to the strategic zone of the Arab–Israeli conflict, US policymakers were content on granting Israel a free hand to militarily redeploy across the West Bank, placing Yasser Arafat under siege in Ramallah while elevating Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) to a new leadership position in the Palestinian National Authority. Clinton’s failure at Camp David in 2000, coupled with the legacy of his father’s difficult relationship with Israel and its network of supporters in the United States, lead George W. Bush to avoid serious crisis with Israel’s leadership, particularly on this issue of Palestine.
In accordance with the Bush administration’s broader emphasis on democratization, the US subsequently pushed hard for the holding of Palestinian legislative elections in 2006. Hamas’s victory led the US, together with Europe and Russia, members of the Middle East Quartet, to boycott and sanction the Hamas government, insisting that it recognize Israel, abandon violence and accept past diplomatic agreements as preconditions for engagement in accordance with the ‘Quartet Principles’. Meanwhile, the US redoubled its efforts to train and equip a Palestinian police force that was loyal to Abbas and his movement, Fatah, leading to the outbreak of the intra-Palestinian violence and Hamas’s ultimate takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007. The deepening intra-Palestinian divide would bury efforts to resume negotiations, while Israel continued its settlement enterprise in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In turn, the Obama administration entered office in 2009 with the objective of putting some ‘daylight’ between the US and Israel, seeking to restore US credibility with the Arab-Muslim world. At the basis of these efforts was an understanding that the increasingly exclusivist relationship with Israel in the Middle East and the absence of progress on the diplomatic track in the Middle East was harming US credibility and strategic interests in the region. While displaying an outward image of change and discontinuity from the past, the fundamentals of the Obama approach towards Israel and the MENA contained significant elements of continuity. Much of this is explained by the institutionalized precedents governing US policy towards Israel and the Arab–Israeli conflict and the continued significance of the key conventional wisdom that prioritizes Israeli security and military margin as a precondition for any policy approach to the conflict.
Indeed, even in the midst humiliating Israeli actions against the US—such as the 2010 announcement of settlement construction in coincidence with the arrival of US Vice President Joe Biden in Israel, repeated criticism of Secretary of State Kerry’s efforts to broker peace talks or Netanyahu’s unprecedented interferences in US domestic politics and opposition to the JCPOA—President Obama never ‘got tough’ with Israel. Instead, his administration struggled to separate the political relationship, where disagreements were profuse, from the deeper levels of institutionalized military and security cooperation.63 Such efforts reflect the continued relevance of a ‘policy straitjacket’ that constrains US administrations from employing US aid and assistance as a form of leverage or conditionality over Israeli policy.
The most the US could muster in terms of accountability or demonstrations of disapproval vis-à-vis Israeli actions were a number of public criticisms of Israeli settlement activity and eventually, an abstention at the UN Security Council on Resolution 2334 approved on 23 December 2016, in the final days of the Obama Administration. The resolution essentially reiterated long-standing international policy on the conflict and the illegality of Israel’s settlement enterprise in the OPT. Significantly, the Obama White House had previously vetoed a similar UNSC resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction in 2011, the only time the US President employed his veto power in eight-years of office.64
While the Obama Administration maintained a difficult political relationship with Israel, concrete elements of long-standing US policy towards Israel remained unchanged. Military aid increased to unprecedented levels, and while John Kerry publicly blamed Israel for the failure of peace efforts in 2014, to Israel’s relief Washington consistently refrained from publicly presenting proposals on outstanding final status issues. Most importantly, the US maintained its traditional policy of pressuring the Palestinian’s to refrain from seeking membership in UN bodies, particularly the International Criminal Court, which Palestine formally joined in 2015, after having been granted non-member observer status at the UN in 2012.
Indeed, such is the predictability of US policy towards Israel that other key MENA actors have increasingly moved to align their policies and expectations to those of the United States out of a need for protection, military aid and international legitimacy. The Arab uprisings raised concern in Israel because many feared that Arab leaders would become more accountable to their populace and therefore less subservient to US (and Israeli) demands. While Arab regimes and elites have long exploited the Palestinian cause to serve their own interests, growing concern among key US allies in the region—chief among which stand Israel and Saudi Arabia—regarding Obama’s efforts to engage with Iran have driven covert Israeli–Saudi cooperation into the open, further isolating the Palestinians. While decades in the making, this cooperation between Israel and a number of Arab Sunni states reached unprecedented extents in the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016.
The impact of uncertainty: reaction by regional actors
The double-level uncertainty cultivated a shared impression of US neglect in different countries of the region, especially the status quo champions in the Gulf and Israel.65 Feelings of abandonment and heightened threats to regime survival triggered new assertive foreign policies by and new joint commitments among some states to assume regional security responsibilities in a way they never assumed before.66 Additionally, this also meant that traditional American allies feel progressively less answerable to the US especially as their interests keep diverging over time.67 It also creates incentive for exploring new venues of collaboration and potentially building new alliances with other extra-regional powers as well as with other regional actors. As suggested by Jentleson, these ‘triangulation’ efforts make regional actors less reliant on the US for security or other political gains.68 The most notable examples of this process were the new Saudi foreign policy since 201169 and the momentary revival of some regional organizations like the Gulf Cooperation Council or the Arab League. Assertiveness and new regional autonomy in the security field can be primarily observed in four different occasions in the period studied: the intervention in Bahrain in 2011, the war in Yemen since 2011, the Qatar crisis in 2017 and the Lebanon political crisis in the summer of 2017.
Before moving into the concrete cases, it is worth noting that uncertainty regarding US policies cannot alone explain these dynamics, yet Washington’s discontinuous policies were largely blamed. Firstly, the new Iranian foreign policy cycle inaugurated in 2003. One of the unintended consequences of the invasion and occupation of Iraq was the disappearance of this country as balancer against Teheran. Since 1979, the Ba’thist government in Baghdad represented the spearhead of the Gulf regime’s opposition to attempts by Iran to export its revolution to neighbouring countries. The Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s, and the subsequent burden assumed by Baghdad in facing Teheran, was the clearest example of this newly assumed responsibility. All in all, even after the war ended, Iraq acted as a counterbalancing force that thwarted Iranian’s regional projection. With Iraq nearly turning into a failed state in the mid-to-late 2000s—as a consequence of US’s decision against the status quo—Iran was enabled to ‘return’ to regional politics and reclaim its position as a regional power. The articulation of the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’, together with Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, consolidated a faultline pitting Iran against the pro-Western status-quo-enforcers in the Gulf and beyond, leading some to talk of a ‘New Arab Cold War’.70 The confrontation also sparked more active foreign policies.
Secondly, the articulation of a pro-Muslim Brotherhood informal alliance between 2011 and 2013 also contributed to this process. In the period between 2011 and 2013, Egypt, Qatar and Turkey fostered an informal alliance supporting the Muslim Brotherhood-model of moderate Islamism.71 The coalition represented a threat to the conservative forces in the region, and particularly the Gulf monarchies, as it offered an ‘inspirational model’ combining ‘financial, military and demographic power with the Islamist ideology, transnational permeability and organisational skills of the Muslim Brotherhood’.72
In reaction to this, an incremental process towards more assertiveness can be observed in Saudi foreign policy from 2003 onwards. Since 2005, after the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, Riyadh has extensively funded the March 14th Alliance and Saa’ad Hariri’s Future Movement as a countering measure against Syrian and Iranian power projection in the Levant.73 In 2006 and 2007, it acted as mediator between Hamas and Fatah brokering the Mecca Agreement of February 2007 while continuing to financially support Fatah and the Palestinian National Authority as a means to oppose Iran.74 In Iraq, amid suspicions of Al-Jaafari and Al-Maliki’s rapprochement with Teheran, Riyadh decided to provide logistical support to almost every opposition party in the country.75 But it was following the Arab Spring that Saudi Arabia would go a step further, abandoning Riyadh’s traditional covert and financial diplomacy for a more proactive foreign policy.76 Since late 2010, Riyadh has conceptualized many of the unfolding events in the region as an existential threat to the House of Saud. Some of this is in response to Iranian meddling and a more general rise in Iranian influence across the region since the 2003 Iraq war. Further concern in Saudi Arabia came with the outbreak of the Arab Spring in late 2010, and the subsequent rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood represented an existential threat to the survival and legitimacy of the Saudi monarchy, as a marriage between political Islam and electoral democracy could well have undermined Saudi Arabia’s social contract and governance model. These threats, combined with the rise of a younger leadership in Riyadh, gave birth to a more adventurist and proactive foreign policy by Saudi Arabia, one that no longer felt reassured by US security guarantees.
There are several examples of these developments. In Libya, Riyadh, together with other Gulf states’—most decisively, the United Arab Emirates77 —decided to give support to the NATO military intervention sanctioned by the UN Security Council.78 In the case of Syria, Saudi Arabia has actively participated in the proxy conflict by backing the opposition Free Syrian Army, as well as an array of other Salafi-linked groups tied to the opposition, since the beginning of the civil war. The outcome of the war was important to Riyadh—in its effort to weaken Iranian influence in the Levant- to the point that it unleashed one of the first internal crises among the GCC states when Qatar backed alternative opposition forces against Saudi’s will.79
However, the most significant cases are those of Bahrain’s uprising in 2011 and the war in Yemen that began in the same year but which has since witnessed a major Saudi-led military intervention since 2015. Amid the 2011 revolutionary wave in the region, Manama saw the unfolding of social protests against the Al-Khalifa ruling family as a direct threat to regime survival. Neighbouring Gulf states, fearing spillovers, deployed troops to Bahrain on May 15th, 2011, by means of the Gulf Cooperation Council’s Peninsula Shield Force—after an official request by King Al-Khalifa. This new level of involvement in internal affairs marked a turning point in the GCC’s traditional embrace of the principle of non-interference with other members’ internal affairs. The justification of this detour, besides the actual petition by the government in Manama, was that protests were undercover actions carried out by Iran through Bahrain’s Shia population. Additionally, the operation helped Saudi Arabia send a strong message, both to Washington and its neighbours, reasserting Riyadh’s leverage and independent action also in front of internal dissenting voices (i.e. Qatar, as we saw few years later with the diplomatic crisis within the GCC with Doha). Riyadh demonstrated it was able and willing to fill the vacuum of US disengagement.
The war in Yemen proved to be a perfect spot for projection-of-power exercises by Iran as well as Saudi Arabia and many other GCC members. At the beginning of the uprisings, the Al-Saud family sought to contribute to a smooth transition of power between Abdullah Saleh and Mansour Hadi. In this context, Saudi Arabia assumed the responsibility through the GCC to launch the 2013–2014 National Dialogue Conference as stated in the November 2011 deal among the parties. Yet, with the failure of peace attempts, the Houthi offensive over Sanaa in September 2014 and Salman bin Abdulaziz becoming the new king in January 2015, Saudi Arabia reformulated its policies towards the conflict. In March 2015 Saudi Arabia initiated a military offensive (Operation ‘Decisive Storm’) with the participation of the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and Sudan, aiming at backing Hadi’s offensive against the Houthis, still ongoing today. This level of military interventionism, unseen up to that point, was based on the conviction that Saudi Arabia needed to assume further security responsibilities in the Gulf as no external security provider would shoulder that burden.
Other less significant examples were the Qatar crisis in 2017 and the Lebanon political crisis in the summer of 2017. Since the beginning of the century, Qatari foreign policy saw an evolution towards more active global and regional engagement, particularly in the realm of soft power through its Al-Jazeera network, to the point that many talked about Doha ‘playing a regional role far beyond its means’80 or ‘punching above its weight’.81 Amid the 2011 uprisings, Qatar began being perceived by the Al-Saud family, together with other Gulf leaders, as a multidimensional threat. On the one hand, Qatar’s support to Islamists groups related in different ways with the Muslim Brotherhood (not only in Morsi’s Egypt but most significantly in the Syrian war) was understood as a dangerous move in Riyadh.82 On the other, Qatar’s efforts to articulate an independent foreign policy from that of Saudi Arabia or other GCC states was perceived by Riyadh as a challenge to its sub-regional leadership in the Gulf. The result was the 2017 Qatar crisis: an act of Saudi reaffirmation vis-à-vis the rest its partners in the Gulf and a demonstration of a newly inaugurated assertive foreign policy targeting, if necessary, even its neighbouring allies. In the case of Lebanon, re-assertive policies were expressed by forcing Prime Minister Saad Hariri to resign during an official trip to Saudi Arabia. Beyond the reasons put forward by the parties (an initial accusation to Hezbollah and Iran to represent an imminent threat to Hariri’s life if he returned to Lebanon, the subsequent accusation by Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun of Hariri being actually kidnapped by the Saudis, etc.83 ) the most important element for the sake of our argument is that the episode revealed Saudi Arabia’s ability to impose its will over other regional allies. It is difficult to find similar examples of such levels of assertiveness in Saudi foreign policy in the recent history of the region.
The re-activation of some regional multilateral organizations, however temporary, and their use for advancing some security-related purposes might be understood as an alternative example of this new assertiveness. As stated by Fawcett, the 2011 uprisings seriously harmed a ‘regional environment more conducive to regional cooperation’84 as the unfolding of issues to give response to, many security-related ones, mushroomed. The Gulf Cooperation Council was in several occasions the mechanism used by Saudi Arabia to socialize its re-assertive policies with the rest of the Gulf states. As seen above, the GCC was the multilateral platform channelling their intervention in the cases of Bahrain in 2011 (through its Peninsula Shield Force, used only once before, in 2003 in Kuwait) and Yemen since 2015 (Operation ‘Decisive Storm’). In this period the organization even saw proposals to modify its sub-regional scope to transform it into some of sort of broader collective-security mechanism among monarchical conservative regimes by suggesting the admission of Jordan and Morocco.85
In turn, the League of Arab States’ (LAS), flourished momentarily amid the uprisings but soon deflated in the wake of renewed intra-regional tensions and animosities, themselves the result of more proactive engagements by regional actors and an increasingly retrenching US. In the context of the Libyan crisis in 2011, the LAS requested the UN Security Council to establish a no-fly zone which ultimately translated into UNSC Resolution 1973 and the NATO-led intervention. Most significantly, the LAS decided embraced the unprecedented action of suspending Syria’s membership while passing different packages of sanctions targeting Bashir al-Assad. It also assumed some other security-oriented responsibilities as potential peace broker and mediator (for instance, with the Annan Six-Point Peace Plan and with the different monitor missions). It is true, though, that this might have been a mirage in time: many states’ assertive foreign policies have absconded multilateral mechanism as the regional situation changed. The counter-coup in Egypt ousting Mohammed Morsi, the creation and expansion of the Islamic State into Syria and Iraq, and the progressive breakdown of the relations between Saudi Arabia and Teheran, significantly raised the stakes for the actors involved while, in many occasions, narrowing potential points of agreement. In this context, many actors opted for a return to channelling their foreign policies either in pure bilateral terms or through none institutionalized channels in the case of multilateralism.86
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 ‘Iran’s President Says US Failed to Live Up to its Commitments’, CNN, May 9, 2018. [All online sources cited in this article were last visited on 25/05/2018].
2 ‘World Reacts to US Withdrawal from Iran Nuclear Deal’, Anadolu Agency, May 9, 2018, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/politics/world-reacts-to-us-withdrawal-from-iran-nuclear-deal/1140043.
3 ‘U.S. envoy to U.N. says Syria used chemical weapons 50 times’, Reuters, April 13, 2018.
4 President Obama stated that any such use ‘would change my calculus, (…) that would change my equation’. See ‘Obama issues Syria a “red line” warning on chemical weapons’, The Washington Post, August 12, 2012.
5 D. Trump, ‘Remarks by President Trump on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’, Remarks, The White House, May 8, 2018.
6 Bull famously defined international order as ‘a pattern of activity that sustains the elementary or primary goals of the society of states, or international society’, in Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society. A study of Order in World Politics, 3rd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 1977), 8. The idea of repetition in Bull, as the basis for generating expectations, is the most important element of Bull’s definition for the sake of this paper and no so much the existence of primary goals within the international society. As stated by Cox, by including the notion of elementary objectives Bull introduced too much normative specificity in his definition; R. W. Cox, ‘Towards a Posthegemonic Conceptualization of World Order: Reflections on the Relevancy of Ibn Khaldun’, in Approaches to World Order, eds. Robert W. Cox & Timothy J. Sinclair (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 144–173, 148.
7 I. Clark, The Hierarchy of States: Reforms and Resistance in the International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 13; J. N. Rosenau, ‘Governance, Order, and Change in World Politics’, in Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, eds. J. N. Rosenau & E. O. Czempiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5.
8 A. Hurrell, On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2.
9 L. Binder, ‘The Middle East as a Subordinate International System’, World Politics, 10, no. 3 (1958): 408–429.
10 C. L. Brown, International Politics and the Middle East: Old Rules, Dangerous Games (London: I.B. Tauris, 1984), 5.
11 F. Halliday, ‘The Middle East and Conceptions of “International Society”’, in International Society and the Middle East. English School Theory at the Regional Level, eds. Barry Buzan & Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1–23.
12 A. Gonzalez-Pelaez, ‘Primary Institutions of Regional Interstate Society’, in International Society and the Middle East. English School Theory at the Regional Level, eds. Barry Buzan & Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 92–116, 100–3.
13 M. C. Hudson, ‘The United States in the Middle East’, in Fawcett, L., International Relations of the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 319–43, 321–22.
14 F. G. Gause III, The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 31–2.
15 In 1987, the US did intervene militarily in the Persian Gulf during the Iran–Iraq war, through the oil tanker reflagging operation (Operation Earnest Will). This represented the ‘the deployment of the largest contingent of American forces in a crisis situation since the Vietnam war’ to secure access agreements and basing rights in close vicinity to the Persian Gulf. See, George Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East (New York: Duke University Press, 1990), 254.
16 Jentleson defines it as a process in which the key is ‘bolstering allies’ national security and strengthening overall regional security in ways for which it has unique capacities, but with regional partners taking on more responsibility for their own and regional security’; B. W. Jentleson, ‘Strategic Recalibration. A Palmerstonian US Middle East Regional Strategy’, Order from Ashes: New Foundations for Security in the Middle East, The Century Foundation’s Report, January 24, 2018. The creation of the CENTCOM in 1983 could be pointed as the beginning of that policy change.
17 A. Al Shayeji, ‘Dangerous Perceptions: Gulf Views of the US Role in the Region’, Middle East Policy, 5, no. 3 (1997): 1–13.
18 J. J. Mearsheimer & S. M. Walt, ‘The Case for Offshore Balancing: A Superior US Grand Strategy’, Foreign Affairs, (2016): 70–83, 76.
19 M. C. Hudson, ‘The Case for Offshore Balancing: A Superior US Grand Strategy’, Foreign Affairs, (2013): 334.
20 F. Cavatorta, ‘International Politics of the Middle East’, in The Middle East, ed. Ellen Lust (London: SAGE, 2014), 396–428, 414.
21 Some authors have studied different concrete cases in which this link between absence of democracy and proliferation of terrorism does not hold. See for instance K. Dalacoura, Islamist Terrorism and Democracy in the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
22 White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: White House, September 2002); White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, (Washington, DC: White House, March 2006).
23 Hudson, ‘The Case for Offshore Balancing’, 336.
24 ‘Egypt’s Ugly Elections’, The Washington Post, December 10, 2005.
25 ‘Hamas Sweeps Palestinian Elections, Complicating Peace Efforts in Mideast’, The Washington Post, Scoot Wilson, January 27, 2006.
26 B. Obama, The President’s Speech in Cairo: A New Beginning (Washington: The White House, 2009).
27 F. Gerges, ‘The Obama approach to the Middle East: The End of America’s moment?’ International Affairs, 89, no. 2 (2013): 299–323, 303.
28 J. Tovar, ‘The Foreign Policy of the United States following the Arab Spring’, in Political Change in the Middle East and North Africa After the Arab Spring, ed. Inmaculada Szmolka (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 326–46, 327; Mearsheimer & Walt, ‘The Case for Offshore Balancing’, 73.
29 Hudson, ‘The Case for Offshore Balancing’, 338. On the conceptualization of the two notions, see R. N. Hass, War of Necessity, War of Choice. A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster).
30 As Obama stated, ‘there are going to be times where either because it is not a direct threat to us or because we just do not have the tools in our toolkit to have a huge impact that, tragically, we have to refrain from jumping in with both feet’; in G. Golberg, ‘The Obama Doctrine’, The Atlantic, April 2016.
31 Hudson, ‘The Case for Offshore Balancing’, 341.
32 Golberg, ‘The Obama Doctrine’.
33 Gerges, ‘The Obama approach to the Middle East’, 306–7.
34 Tovar, ‘The Foreign Policy of the United States following the Arab Spring’, 330.
35 Initial US hesitance seemed coherent with George W. Bush’s reaction in front of Hamas’ victory in the Palestinian elections in 2006 or the raising concerns on Hizbollah’s electoral victories in Lebanon. It was also echoed within Obama’s Administration as some of its members, namely Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and Joe Biden, manifested their reluctance to supporting revolutionary forces and advocated for a more restrained policy towards traditional allied regimes.
36 Tovar, ‘The Foreign Policy of the United States following the Arab Spring’, 328.
37 R. Lizza, ‘The Consequentalist: How the Arab Spring Remade Obama’s Foreign Policy’, The New Yorker, May 2, 2011.
38 A. Krieg, ‘Externalizing the Burden of War: The Obama Doctrine and US Foreign Policy in the Middle East’, International Affairs, 92, no. 1 (2016): 97–113.
39 Gerges, ‘The Obama approach to the Middle East’, 308, 322.
40 G. Goldberg, ‘The Obama approach to the Middle East: The End of America’s moment?’ International Affairs, (2016).
41 ‘Obama Speaks to Bahrain’s King, Urges Restraint’, Reuters, February 19, 2011.
42 Hudson, ‘The Case for Offshore Balancing’, 340.
43 Tovar, ‘The Foreign Policy of the United States following the Arab Spring’, 328.
44 ‘Timeline: US policy shifts on Syria in Obama administration’, Reuters, July 27, 2012.
45 Golberg, ‘The Obama Doctrine’.
46 Gerges, ‘The Obama Approach to the Middle East’, 309–310.
47 ‘President Obama’s Statement on Syria’, The New York Times, August 18, 2011.
48 ‘Obama issues Syria a “red line” warning on chemical weapons’, The Washington Post, James Ball, August 20, 2012.
49 ‘Secretary of State John Kerry’s Remarks on Syria on August 30‘, The Washington Post, August 30, 2013.
50 Tovar, ‘The Foreign Policy of the United States following the Arab Spring’, 334.
51 Golberg, ‘The Obama Doctrine’.
52 A. Lund, ‘Red Line Redux: How Putin Tore Up Obama’s 2013 Syria Deal’, Report, The Century Foundation, 2017.
53 Gerges, ‘The Obama approach to the Middle East’, 319.
54 B. W. Jentleseon, ‘The Obama Approach to the Middle East: The End of America’s Moment?’ International Affairs, (2018).
55 The invitation issued to Iran to participate in the Vienna peace talks on Syria in October and November 2015 was understood as an example towards normalization of their relations after the JCPOA; see Tovar, J. (2017), Op. Cit., p. 338. Many, including Susan Rice, argue that this was at no point an attempt to ‘pursuing broader transformation of the Iranian-American relationship’, Jentleseon, ‘The Obama approach to the Middle East’; Golberg, ‘The Obama Doctrine’.
56 Golberg, ‘The Obama Doctrine’.
57 Tovar, ‘The Foreign Policy of the United States following the Arab Spring’, 337.
58 Jentleseon, ‘The Obama approach to the Middle East’.
59 Golberg, ‘The Obama Doctrine’.
60 W. Quandt, Peace Process. American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967 (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), 2–21.
61 J. M. Sharp, ‘U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel,’ Congressional Research Service, April 10, 2018, 4–5.
62 ‘Fact Sheet: Memorandum of Understanding Reached with Israel’, The Obama White House, Office of the Press Secretary, September 14, 2016.
63 ‘Exclusive Interview: Obama on the World,’ The New York Times Opinion, Thomas L. Friedman, August 8, 2014.
64 ‘Donald Trump’s New World Order,’ The New Yorker, Adam Entous, June 18, 2018; ‘US Veto on UN Settlement Resolution Shows Obama is Not Ready for Change,’ HeptagonPost, Andrea Dessì, February 26, 2011.
65 F. Wehrey, ‘A new US approach to Gulf security’, Carnegie Policy Outlook, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 10, 2014.
66 Gerges, ‘The Obama approach to the Middle East’, 300.
67 S. Simon & J. Stevenson, ‘The End of Pax Americana. Why Washington’s Middle East Pullback Makes Sense’, Foreign Affairs, (November/December 2015): 2–10, 3.
68 Jentleson, ‘Strategic Recalibration’.
69 This phenomena not only affected Saudi Arabia, but some other examples of new assertive foreign policy can be observed in the cases of the United Arab Emirates (most notably in the context of the war in Libya), Qatar (in the war in Syria mainly) or Egypt; see J. Quero & E. Soler, ‘Regional order and regional powers in the Middle East and North Africa’, in Political Change in the Middle East and North Africa after the Arab Spring, ed I. Szmolka (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 257–280.
70 C. R. Ryan, ‘The new Arab Cold War and the struggle for Syria’, Middle East Report, 42, no. 262 (2012); F. G. Gause III, ‘Beyond sectarianism: The new Middle East Cold War’, Brookings Doha Center Analysis Papers, 11, (Doha: Brookings Institute, 2014).
71 C. R. Ryan, ‘Regime Security and Shifting Alliances in the Middle East’, in International Relations Theory and a Changing Middle East (POMEPS Studies 16) (Washington DC: Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS), 2015), 42–46, 44.
72 B. F. Salloukh, ‘The Arab Uprisings and the Geopolitical of the Middle East’, The International Spectator, 48, no. 2 (2013): 44.
73 F. G. Gause III, ‘Ideologies, Alliances and Underbalancing in the New Middle East Cold War’, International Relations Theory and a Changing Middle East (POMEPS Studies 16) (Washington D. C.: Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS), 2015), 16−20, 16.
74 Salloukh, ‘The Arab Uprisings and the Geopolitical of the Middle East’, 37−38.
75 Idem, p. 35.
76 K. Kausch, ‘Competitive multipolarity in the Middle East’, IAI Working Papers, 10 (Rome: Istituto Affari Internazionali, 2014).
77 The NATO military intervention in Libya and the subsequent situation in the country was a perfect ground for other states of the region as well to put into practice more assertive foreign policies, being the United Arab Emirates but also Egypt in this concrete case a critical example of that unfolding reality. See, for instance, Ulrichsen, K. C. (2017), ‘Transformations in UAE’s foreign policy’, Report, Al Jazeera Centre for Studies.
78 Comparing Saudi Arabia’s reaction in the uprisings in Libya, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen, Khoury underlines the ambivalence of this new assertive foreign policy that ‘fend[s] off the turmoil form their own shores while jumping into the fray where their interests are clearly implicated in favor of one side or the other and with overall goal of containing the situation’; N. A. Khoury, ‘The Arab Cold War revisited: The regional impact of the Arab uprising’, Middle East Policy, 20, no. 2 (2013): 73–87, 77.
79 ‘Gulf states at odds over Syria war’, BBC News, James Longman, July 1, 2013.
80 C. R. Ryan, ‘Inter-Arab politics and international relations in the Middle East’, in Reflections on the Arab uprisings, POMEPS Studies, no. 10, (2014): 27–30, 28.
81 J. Hiltermann, ‘Qatar punched above its weight. Now it’s paying the price’, The New York Times, Op-ed, June 18, 2017.
82 B. F. Salloukh, ‘The Arab uprisings and the geopolitical of the Middle East’, The International Spectator, 48, no. 2 (2013): 32–46.
83 ‘Aoun estime que la liberté de M. Hariri a été “restreinte”’, L’Orient le Jour, November 12, 2017.
84 L. Fawcett, ‘Alliances and regionalism in the Middle East’, in International relations of the Middle East, ed. L. Fawcett (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013), 185–204, 201.
85 M. Lynch, ‘The what Cooperation Council?’ Foreign Policy, May 11, 2011.
86 R. Del Sarto & E. Soler, ‘A flash in the pan? Regional cooperation platforms in the MENA region since 2011‘, MENARA Working Paper, 2018.