The Back Channel

by William J Burns

  While he was intrigued by Obama initially, it remained for Putin a matter of both conviction and convenience to paint the United States as a hostile force, maneuvering to undermine Russia’s influence in its neighborhood and his own grip at home. Putin had created a trap for himself and for Russia; willful failure to diversify the economy and adopt the rule of law led to slow stagnation, from which foreign adventure offered only a temporary diversion. Like the experience of George W. Bush, early potential in U.S.-Russian relations was eclipsed by a relapse, and a new post–Cold War low. It was a pattern that hinted sometimes at historical immutability. It was also, however, the product of the personalities, preconceptions, disconnects, and choices of leaders on both sides. Like the rest of post–Cold War relations between Russia and the United States, it was a fascinating—and often depressing—story.

  Obama’s effort to keep pace with a changing international landscape and invest energy and political capital in shaping relations with that landscape’s most significant players was admirable. Unlike George H. W. Bush, he was not moving from a world of bipolarity to rising unipolarity, but from a world of diminishing unipolarity to something far messier. It was a time for big bets, like the rebalance to Asia and the strategic partnership with India, both wise and well executed, if less ambitious and complete than initially hoped. It was a time for steadiness in dealing with China, and patient effort to avoid unnecessary collisions. It was also a time to test the proposition of more stable relations with Russia and hard-nosed cooperation on issues of shared interest.

  For all the agility and imagination of the time, we didn’t have the freedom to play our diplomatic cards like Bush 41. Diplomacy could open doors, or prevent them from slamming shut, but ultimately others had to decide whether to walk through them. Obama hoped that this new era of U.S. leadership would unleash faster and more dramatic adjustments. History had other ideas.

  8

  The Arab Spring: When the Short Game Intercedes

  ON THE AFTERNOON of February 1, 2011, President Obama joined his senior advisors in the Situation Room to review the unfolding drama of Egypt’s revolution. He was pensive and steady, seized by the sense of possibility for Egypt and the region but sober about all the ways in which things could go wrong—for them and for us. “I’m worried that Mubarak is falling farther and farther behind events,” he said. “I don’t want us to.”

  A week into the revolution, the crowd in Tahrir Square had swelled to nearly one hundred thousand defiant and determined people. Now in his early eighties, President Mubarak was weary after three decades in power but stubbornly convinced that he knew what was best for Egypt. A lot was at stake. Since the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, Egypt had been a centerpiece of American strategy in the Middle East. It was a reliable security partner in the region, despite continuing political and economic corrosion at home. The compact between rulers and ruled had become more brittle, with the benefits of economic growth limited to a privileged few, a leadership growing more remote, and a young population increasingly consumed by a sense of indignity—fueled by their mounting awareness in a digital world of what others had that they did not.

  Over the previous few days, Obama and Hillary Clinton had pressed Mubarak to address the legitimate demands of the protestors, indicate that he would step down soon, disavow any inclination to install his son as successor, and begin a shift to a new, democratically elected government. His fate was sealed. The scale and persistence of the protests made that clear. The hope was that Mubarak would come to grips with reality and set in motion an orderly transition. But he was not ready to go nearly that far. Hoping to stunt the momentum of the protests, he took the modest step of filling the long-vacant vice presidency with his intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman. Mubarak was reluctant to concede more, even as the ground continued to shift rapidly beneath him.

  The Situation Room meeting began with an update from our embassy in Cairo, an intelligence assessment, and a review of the diplomatic state of play. An hour in, word was passed to the president that Mubarak was about to make a hastily arranged televised address. Hopeful that the Egyptian leader was finally ready to move, Obama interrupted the meeting to turn on CNN’s live coverage, and we all sat there, watching expectantly. Secretary Clinton stood next to the president, clutching a cup of coffee from the White House Mess. Those around the table contorted their heads every which way to catch a glimpse of the television. Tom Donilon, seated to the left of the president, didn’t even bother. He knew what was coming.

  Predictably, Mubarak offered half a loaf. He promised not to run again in the fall elections, but had nothing to say about not grooming his son as successor or beginning to transfer some of his powers in the meantime. “That won’t cut it,” Obama concluded. The television screen faded to black, and the room fell quiet. Obama, as he often did, went around the table and asked us to offer our views on whether to ask the Egyptian leader to leave office now. There was no disagreement—our entreaties were falling on deaf ears in Cairo, and our hopes for an orderly transition were fading. The president decided to call Mubarak and press him to step down immediately, while he could still shape a transition and avoid greater chaos and violence.

  I joined the president and several of his White House aides in the Oval Office for the call. I always admired how any president managed to focus on a phone conversation with a foreign leader with so many aides buzzing around. Donilon, Denis McDonough, and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes were huddled in one corner looking over the president’s talking points. The president’s two senior Middle East advisors, Dennis Ross and Dan Shapiro, took notes furiously against the back of the Oval Office couch, where Chief of Staff Bill Daley was sitting and listening intently. Robert Gibbs, the president’s spokesperson, shed his suit jacket and began to pace. Obama was leaning back in his chair, legs crossed, working through his argument.

  As I stood off to the side listening, I could piece together Mubarak’s patronizing and inflexible response. The Egyptian leader thought Obama was hopelessly naïve—unaware of just how indispensable Mubarak was to order in Egypt. As the call continued, I could see Obama’s frustration rising, and I couldn’t help thinking of scenes I had witnessed there going back to the Reagan administration. Each of Obama’s recent predecessors had been sucked, some more willingly than others, into the morass of a region that remorselessly drained their political capital and consumed their attention.

  Obama had entered office determined to change the terms of American involvement in the Middle East. He had no illusions about massive disengagement from a region he knew he couldn’t ignore; what he sought was a different kind of engagement, a reversal of the unilateral and overly militarized habits of his predecessor. He would wind down America’s troop presence in Iraq, rely on a smaller counterterrorism footprint made up of drones and special operations forces, and place a bigger emphasis on diplomacy to deal with Iran’s nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. He would shift more of America’s strategic bets to Asia, and a whole range of other pressing global questions, like nuclear nonproliferation and climate change, that had sometimes been neglected or undermined in the decade since 9/11. But now the Arab Spring, the revolutionary drama of which Egypt was only one act, was inexorably tugging him back to the crisis-driven Middle East focus that he had hoped so much to escape.

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  THE BRITISH PRIME minister Harold Macmillan may or may not have actually said, in response to a question about what most affects the course of government strategies, “Events, dear boy, events.” But it’s an apt observation. Statesmen rarely succeed if they don’t have a sense of strategy—a set of assumptions about the world they seek to navigate, clear purposes and priorities, means matched to ends, and the discipline required to hold all those pieces together and stay focused. They also, however, have to be endlessly adaptable—quick to adjust to the unexpected, massage the anxieties o
f allies and partners, maneuver past adversaries, and manage change rather than be paralyzed by it. “Events” can create openings and opportunities; they can just as easily reveal the limits of even the most thoughtful and nuanced strategies. Playing the long game is essential, but it’s the short game—coping with stuff that happens unexpectedly—that preoccupies policymakers and often shapes their legacies.

  The Middle East is particularly challenging terrain for American strategy. By the time the revolts of the Arab Spring began to erupt, the region had twice as many people as it did when I arrived at my first post in Amman in the early 1980s. Sixty percent of the population was under the age of twenty-five, and it was urbanizing nearly as fast as Asia. Job markets couldn’t cope, and youth unemployment ran higher than in any other part of the world. Corruption was endemic. The emerging middle class was frustrated, with economic growth siphoned to elites. Arab political systems were almost uniformly authoritarian, generally repressive and unresponsive to demands for political dignity and better governance. A generational change in leaderships had been under way for more than a decade, but hopes of new directions wilted quickly. Educational systems had little to offer young people eager to compete in a relentless twenty-first-century world, and the deficit in women’s rights was robbing societies of half their potential.

  The Arab order in early 2011 was still one that had the United States as its principal frame of reference. The Arab street despised most aspects of American policy, whether in Iraq or Palestine or elsewhere, and its leaders resented the Bush 43 administration’s crusades and blunders. They were, however, accustomed to America’s centrality in their world, schizophrenic in their simultaneous resentments and expectations of American influence. They continually exaggerated our ability to affect events, and we did the same.

  We also both underestimated how unsettling a changing American role might be. When Obama laid out his broad strategy for the region in an eloquent speech in Cairo in June 2009, the immediate reaction across the Arab world was enthusiastic. He was the anti-Bush—in tone and substance. He promised a “new beginning,” and conveyed an understanding of the many ills of the Arab world, and a realization that jobs, security, opportunity, and dignity were the keys to a better order, not democratization through the barrel of a gun. Many Arab leaders, not surprisingly, cherry-picked from the speech—embracing Obama’s willingness to reexamine America’s role while ignoring his call for them to undergo their own reexamination. His message also inflated expectations in Washington and the region far beyond his ability to deliver. That was certainly true when his early efforts to bridge Israeli-Palestinian differences ran aground on Bibi Netanyahu’s artful intransigence, the habitual inclinations of an aging Palestinian leadership, and the lack of interest of most of the Arab states in investing in the issue. It was true when it became clear that there was little appetite and even fewer resources to support political and economic reform more robustly and creatively. And it became even more evident when another element of Obama’s Middle East policy came into sharper focus—his intention to reduce our military role and shift America’s strategic investments to other parts of the world.

  Extricating ourselves from the central security role to which regimes had become accustomed proved far harder than Obama anticipated. Nervous Arab autocrats feared American abandonment nearly as much as the reckless exercise of our power. The new U.S. administration discovered that it was tied to the old regional order in more ways than it had first thought. When the early rumblings of the Arab revolts began, the difficulty of the trade-offs between significant security relationships and aspirations for change—and the sheer unpredictability and erratic course of events—became painfully apparent.

  Few people in the Obama or George W. Bush administrations needed to be persuaded of the fragilities of the Arab political and economic order. Obama’s Cairo speech made clear his concerns. Clinton was even more pointed in an address she gave in Doha in January 2011, just a dozen days before Tahrir Square erupted, warning that “the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand.” After 9/11 and the Bush administration’s shift from a traditional Republican foreign policy of restraint and containment to unilateralism and preemption, Secretary Rice had spoken bluntly about the weaknesses of autocratic rule, and the risks of confusing authoritarian order with stability. It was the right message; after the Iraq War, however, the Bush administration was the wrong messenger.

  Career diplomats in the Middle East had been arguing for decades that stability was not a static phenomenon, and that the United States shouldn’t be blind to changes that were inevitable. I had tried to make the same arguments going back to my time as a junior officer in Jordan in the early 1980s. Like many of my colleagues, I continued to make them from the Policy Planning Staff, as an ambassador in the region, and from the Near Eastern Affairs bureau. None of this was particularly new.

  What was new, and profoundly challenging, was the speed with which change moved once it began—propelled by advances in technology and social media. On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old proprietor of a street stall, self-immolated outside a local municipal building in Tunisia, in a desperate final protest against the harassment of local police. Demonstrations and violent clashes followed, spreading rapidly across the country. Within a month, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled, and secular and Islamist oppositionists began to negotiate transitional arrangements. When I visited shortly thereafter, my report to Secretary Clinton was cautiously upbeat: “Tunisia’s revolution is still incomplete, and its transition only just begun, but so far Tunisians are handling the challenges before them with more steadiness than most would have imagined before Ben Ali’s sudden ouster, and considerable national pride in being the first of the Arabs to set out to reclaim their sense of dignity.”1

  The revolution in Tunisia quickly spread to the biggest and most consequential Arab state of all, Egypt. On January 25, the first crowds began to form in Tahrir Square, calling for extensive reforms and the end of Mubarak’s rule. Most of the protestors were young, peaceful, passionate, tech-savvy, and energized by what had happened in Tunisia. The scenes were incredibly powerful, especially for someone like me, who had walked on that square and long admired Egyptians and the stoicism with which they coped with poverty and an overweening state. This all seemed hopeful, a genuine bottom-up movement to bend the arc of history. But events were soon to get a lot more complicated.

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  THE FIRST OFFICIAL American reactions to the Tahrir demonstrations were guarded. Egypt had weathered countless political storms over seven millennia, and after thirty years in power Mubarak’s rule seemed tattered but durable. The military was the one truly national institution. It was vested in the status quo, and in the large slice of the Egyptian economic pie that it possessed. The United States was similarly vested in that status quo, with $1.3 billion in military aid and a substantial economic assistance program reinforcing Egypt’s willingness to keep the peace with Israel, allow the American military access and overflight rights, share information about regional threats, and cooperate (more often than not) diplomatically.

  In the initial aftermath of the January 25 protests, Clinton said in a press conference, with more hope than conviction, that “our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.” Vice President Biden said he “would not refer to Mubarak as a dictator.”2 Obama himself, mindful of what the United States had at stake, and of growing agitation among regional leaders desperately hoping that the Arab Spring fever would break in Egypt, shared the instinctive caution of his most senior advisors.

  That all changed swiftly over the next week. While the armed forces kept a studied distance, Egyptian police and security forces clamped down hard, beating and arresting hundreds of protestors. After Obama’s early calls failed to make a dent in Mub
arak’s thinking, and after Suleiman’s appointment as vice president failed to impress the Tahrir crowds, concerns in the administration grew. On the Sunday talk shows on January 30, Clinton dodged questions about whether Mubarak should resign, but emphasized the need for an “orderly transition,” warning of the dangers of chaos in the absence of a careful process.

  Her comments masked an increasingly uneasy debate in unending meetings that week in the Situation Room, as some of the president’s younger advisors pressed for a more forceful stance. At different times and in different ways, Susan Rice (then ambassador to the United Nations), Ben Rhodes, and Samantha Power (then a senior NSC staff official) all argued that the United States risked being “on the wrong side of history,” and should identify itself much more clearly with the demands of the protestors and insist publicly upon Mubarak’s immediate resignation. Biden, Clinton, Gates, and Donilon were more wary, concerned about the consequences of too strong an American push on Mubarak, both in Egypt and in the wider region.3