Middle East Policy Lacks Clarity, Conviction, and Courage

Yesterday, in an important but little noticed speech, White House National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan rolled out the Biden Administration's Middle East strategy. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal ignored the speech and Reuters gave only a spare summary. This was a striking omission by our papers of record, given the urgent need for sound and effective U.S. policymaking in the Middle East, to arrest the longstanding regional decline of American prestige and influence.??

Ordinarily, a speech review would assess both the style and substance to determine its merit. In this case, that is impossible. Sullivan's Great Plains bland manner of speech and unflinchingly technocratic speaking style left behind a rhetorical vacuum, without a single striking turn of phrase, metaphor, or flourish. Evidently, this was his purpose. The speech seemed written to begin fading from memory while it was still being heard. He appears to be a diplomat with the ambition to walk across Arabian sands without leaving a footprint.??

For want of memorable style, his speech instead substituted specificity when discussing the Administration's policy and inititiatives in the region. In an inordinately granular focus on process over tangible results, he touted: meetings, partnerships, dialogues, high-level visits, exchanges, consultations, engagements, as the bridge to better outcomes. These actions are, of course, the feedstock of diplomacy and would be utilized by any administration to varying degrees. However, they do not provide a compass and the lack of a clarifying true North behind the five elements of the Biden Middle East Framework (Partnerships, Deterence, Diplomacy and Descalation, Integration, and Values) ensured the confusion and contradictions that were a recurrent feature throughout the speech.?Although each pillar is essential to building lasting ties and influence across the region, they do not stand equally. One towers over the rest.?

For that reason, the speech is compromised rhetorically by the same factor that is weakening and constraining U.S. agency in the Middle East and steadily eroding its regional standing and influence: intellectual dishonesty about the primary ill plaguing the region. This deceptive shibboleth is uttered to prop up a destructive falsehood - an Iran Deal fixes everything.

Speeches are narratives and every story needs a villain - a condition, person, policy, or societal ill that is preventing the audience from realizing its goals or a better outcome. And the Middle East does have a proper villain, but Sullivan dare not name it. He made only passing reference to the Islamic Revolution of Iran's systematic brutality toward its own people and its decades-long pattern of fomenting terror within neigboring countries to subjugate their populations. The sad cases of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen show the wide reach of the IRI's ambition to dominate its region under the doctrine of Velayat-e faqih, a supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, exercising divine authority across the Muslim world.?

For more than a decade, members of the foreign policy establishment now in power have been consumed by an idee fixe: concluding a nuclear agreement with Iran would strengthen regional security and pave the way for a host of positive outcomes. Unfortunately, Ayatollah Khamanei shows little interest in signing such an agreement and no willingness to drop his clerical regime's aggressive subversion of the region and targeting of its own young people. Sullivan only begrudgingly addresses the crucial pillar, deterence. It is not, he says, "an end in itself." Maybe not, but it has always been the sine qua non, the essential element upon which progress heavily depends. It is the reason that thirty-nine years ago I was packing my gear for peacekeeping duty in Egypt's Sinai. It is necessary but not sufficient and in its absence the other goals will remain out of reach.

To put it into plain language, if Middle East policy was a car, deterence is the drive train, the other elements of Biden's Framework are like the functions and accessories, wipers, headlights, and air conditioningy needed to travel in safety and comfort. You absolutely need them, but without a powerful, credible deterent element, U.S. Middle East policy will remain where it is now, stalled at the side of the road.?

Sullivan cites modest progress in places like Yemen, extensions of the Abraham Accords, and, bizarrely, claims a consultative role in the Sino-brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochment. However, he refuses to grapple with the central catalyst fueling declining U.S. standing in the region. He does not explain the systematic failure and implications of the last seven U.S. presidents to confront and decisively deter Iran's malign activities across the region.?It is not as if wise and respected Americans had not thought long and hard about this problem. Regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran, as General Douglass MacArthur observed, "Now, [is] the time to recognize what the history of the world has taught from the beginning of time: that timidity breeds conflict, and courage often prevents it."??