Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era by Michael Mandelbaum

Author:Michael Mandelbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

5

The Middle East

The basic problem is that the Arabs have not recognized the basic right of the Jewish people to a homeland.

— ARIEL SHARON1

. . . the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.

— GEORGE W. BUSH2

The Center of the World

In a 2008 survey that asked professors of international relations which area of the world they considered to be of greatest importance to the United States, 46 percent chose the Middle East, a higher total than for any other region.3 During the Cold War, the responses would have been different. In that era Europe, where the largest American army was deployed to deter a Soviet attack westward, and East Asia, where the United States fought two protracted and costly wars in Korea and Indochina, would have earned pride of place. With the conclusion of the conflict with global communism, however, the threats to American security in Europe and Asia disappeared—or at least seemed to do so. Those two regions still had major economic significance but had ceased to be the sites of major political or military challenges. The Middle East, by contrast, continued to present both. Europe and Asia were, or at least appeared to have become, peaceful. The Middle East had not, and so claimed a great deal of American diplomatic and military attention.

American policy in the region centered on Iraq but extended much farther. Senior officials of the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations devoted innumerable hours to trying to resolve the conflict, between Israel and the Arabs, which long predated the post-Cold War period. Faced with the political dysfunctions of the region, which were rampant in, but hardly confined to, Iraq, President Bush launched an ambitious project to cure them by bringing democracy to the Middle East. And in the second decade of the new millennium popular uprisings erupted against long-ruling authoritarian governments there, some of them long-time friends of the United States. The Obama administration had to devise a policy—or set of policies—toward what became known as the Arab Spring.

As with its initial approaches to China and Russia in the 1990s, its interventions during that decade in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, and its wars of the next decade in Afghanistan and Iraq, so in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with its democracy agenda, and through its responses to the Arab Spring, the United States sought to vindicate and to spread its own political values. In the broader Middle East, as elsewhere, America undertook the mission of fostering reconciliation, prosperity, and democracy. In the Middle East, as elsewhere, the mission failed.

It failed in a region that, before the twentieth century, had been dominated by three great empires one after the other: the Arab, the Persian, and that of the Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman Empire collapsed in defeat in World War I, and two of the victorious powers, Great Britain and France, became the arbiters of the Middle East. Together they drew the borders of the successor states to

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