Reagan and the Middle East: Learning the Art of the Possible

REAGAN AND THE MIDDLE EAST: LEARNING THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE Martin Indyk X/ROM THE TIME OF THE CRUSADERS TO THE PRESENT, Western powers have discovered that engagement in Middle East affairs is a difficult and dangerous enterprise. For the most part, the region is unstable, ridden with conflict, and prone to crisis. Its inhabitants, moreover, tend to be schizophrenic toward outside intervention, on the one hand looking to the West for salvation, on the other hand quick to blame the West for all their ills. The United States' experience in the Middle East, since it assumed the mantle of leadership of the Western world after World War II, has differed little from that of its predecessors. Drawn into the region by its importance to the superpower rivalry and alliance relations, the United States has found the ability to influence events a tall order at best and fraught with peril at worst. Almost every president since the war has faced at least one Middle East crisis, most of them threatening a superpower confrontation. All postwar presidents have had to cope with the same basic set of problems: how to protect and promote U.S. interests 6,000 miles from the continental United States but in the "backyard" of the Soviet Union; how to come to terms with the complexities of political interaction in a Hobbesian environment; how to live with intractable conflicts ; and how to deal with mass-based, anti-American ideological movements, from the radical nationalism of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s to the fundamentalism of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. Martin Indyk is executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of many articles on U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, including To The Ends ofthe Earth: Sadat'sJerusalem Initiative, Harvard Middle East Papers, 1984. Ill 112 SAIS REVIEW Yet every U.S. president has also found himself drawn into diplomatic activity to deal with the challenges of the Middle East. None could afford to leave well enough alone. This is partly because of the importance of the region, given its vast oil reserves and its geostrategic location on NATO's southern flank. But it is also because of the opportunities for U.S. intervention that present themselves. Not only do the local elites tend to look to the West, and the United States in particular, to help them, but some of the most important states are resource-poor (Egypt, Syria, Israel, andJordan), others are strategically vulnerable (Iran vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan), and most are engaged in conflicts that they cannot afford. The apparently unalterable dependence on outside powers that these factors generate — for example, Egypt and Israel alone consume more than half of the total U.S. foreign assistance budget — also provides the United States with leverage, the very stuff of diplomacy. A new administration, confronted by such threats to, and opportunities for, the defense of U.S. national interests, therefore finds it extremely difficult to be inactive in the Middle East. Even if it does not choose to, sooner or later it will be forced to develop a diplomatic response to events in the region. In doing so, it will invariably discover that one of its priorities — usually the top priority— will be an effort to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict. This long-standing dispute engages U.S. interests in a way unlike all the other conflicts in this volatile region. U.S. interests in the Middle East have come to be fairly well defined over the years: (1) denying and containing the regional influence of the Soviet Union (2) securing Western access to Middle Eastern oil at reasonable prices (3) supporting the security of Israel and (4) promoting the stability of friendly Arab regimes. Each of these interests is affected by developments in the Arab-Israeli conflict. First, the continuation of the conflict provides the Soviet Union with great opportunities for spreading its influence in the region. And the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union support opposite sides of the conflict means that — as in 1967, 1970, and 1973 — armed clashes between the two sides...