The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era

by Michael Mandelbaum

  The shift of American focus took place because the three great ideas whose spread brought historically unprecedented tranquillity to Europe and to a lesser extent to East Asia—peace, democracy, and free markets—did not take hold in the Middle East. For most of the countries in the region, war is neither unthinkable, as in Europe, nor unlikely, as in East Asia. To the contrary, almost all are involved, to one degree or another, in geopolitical competition, contested borders, expensive arms races, and occasionally war itself. From the Middle East, moreover, have come much of the ideological inspiration and the financing for twenty-first-century terrorism, as well as many of the terrorists themselves.

  Not coincidentally, none of the governments in the region except Turkey and Israel has ever had a democratic government or a fully developed market economy: governments’ roles in economic affairs in the Middle East are more extensive than in the West.

  Peace, democracy, and free markets do not dominate the politics, economics, and international relations of Africa, either, and that continent has served as a breeding ground for terrorism as well; but Africa attracts far less attention from the United States because it lacks, among other things, a particular kind of threat to American interests that is found in the Middle East: the one posed by nuclear weapons.

  Nuclear weapons preoccupied the United States during the Cold War but American officials were then concerned with the large stockpile controlled by the Soviet Union. With the end of the Cold War, what had been a secondary although serious issue came to the fore: nuclear proliferation—the spread of nuclear weapons to countries (and even rogue groups) not previously in possession of them. The Middle East is a region ripe for proliferation; Africa is not. Nuclear proliferation seems particularly menacing to the United States, to its friends and allies, and to global order in general, for two reasons.

  First, the more independent centers of control of nuclear weapons there are, the more likely it seems that one of them will eventually order a nuclear attack, with all the horrific destruction that it will cause: proliferation makes nuclear war more likely. Second, nuclear weapons make their owners more powerful, so nuclear proliferation can turn a government unfriendly to American and Western interests from a nuisance into a serious danger. It can shift the balance of power in the region such as the Middle East in a threatening direction.

  Nuclear proliferation actually occurred in South Asia two years before the new century began, when India and Pakistan both exploded nuclear devices, and a nuclear-armed Pakistan, with its unstable government and terrorism-sponsoring Islamic fundamentalist groups, had become by the end of the twenty-first century’s first decade a major problem for the United States and the world. South Asia becomes all the more problematic if it is defined to include Afghanistan, the base from which al Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, and where American troops subsequently waged an ongoing battle against a nasty insurgency. Yet Afghanistan and Pakistan, dangerous though they are, lack what in the end makes the Middle East so important for American interests and global security: oil.

  Because it is the fuel for approximately 90 percent of the planet’s transportation, it is almost literally the case that the world runs on oil. Certainly no industrial economy or urban society could currently function without it. Almost two-thirds of the world’s readily accessible reserves of oil are located in countries with borders on the Persian Gulf. It is the region’s colossal endowment of the most valuable mineral on Earth that has drawn the United States to the Middle East.

  The American government’s strategic interest in the modern Middle East dates from 1945, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on his way home from the World War II summit meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at the Black Sea port of Yalta, met King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia on an American destroyer docked at the entrance to the Suez Canal. The Saudi kingdom, radically different from the United States in every significant way, had attracted the attention of the United States because of the enormous deposits of oil beneath its sands, which Western oil companies had begun to exploit. During the Cold War, the United States developed another interest in the Middle East, as it did in every other part of the world: minimizing the influence of its great political and military rival, the Soviet Union.

  As exports from Saudi Arabia and its neighbors came to account for an ever larger part of the world’s total consumption of petroleum, the United States took on an oil-related task: patrolling the seas and oceans through which Persian Gulf oil had to pass to reach the countries that increasingly depended on it for powering their farms and factories and running their cars, trucks, buses, and airplanes. Japan, for example, had to import more than 90 percent of its oil from the region. It became one of the missions of the U.S. Navy to protect, and therefore to guarantee, the world’s supply of oil.

  Beginning in the 1950s American security policy periodically faced yet another kind of challenge in the Middle East: the rise of radically inclined regimes that attempted to dominate the region, threatening to tilt the local balance of power against the United States and its oil-producing friends and, in the worst case, to take control of the region’s oil fields. Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser emerged as the first such challenger when it seized control of the Suez Canal in 1956. Nasser’s political standing collapsed with Israel’s sweeping military victory over his country, as well as Syria and Jordan, in June 1967. In 1979 a revolution in Iran toppled the hereditary ruler, the Shah, and brought to power anti-Western clerics dedicated to spreading their fundamentalist Islamic message and exerting Iranian influence throughout the region and in Muslim countries beyond it. A third regional challenge came from Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, who consolidated supreme power in the same year as the Iranian Revolution, against which he launched a war that lasted for more than eight years. In the aftermath of that war, for much of the 1990s, the United States opposed both Iran and Iraq, pursuing a strategy of “dual containment” toward them. The American armed forces fought two wars against Saddam’s army, in 1991 and 2003, with the second destroying his regime and leading to a protracted and difficult American occupation.

  In its decades-long effort to prevent the domination of the Middle East and its oil supplies by a hostile power, the United States conformed to the nineteenth-century British statesman Lord Palmerston’s dictum that his country had no permanent friends and no permanent adversaries, only permanent interests. At different times the American government found itself both opposed to and allied with all three aspirants to regional hegemony. After 1973 Egypt, once America’s Middle Eastern nemesis, joined the American camp; Iran under the Shah was an American ally, under the mullahs a bitter enemy; and during the Iraq-Iran war the American government provided modest assistance to the same Saddam Hussein against whom it subsequently waged two wars.

  Through all the twists and turns of American policy in the region, however, a single interest—ensuring the unimpeded flow of oil—remained constant. Oil also served as the midwife of the most conspicuous and longest-running American initiative in the region: its effort to broker a settlement between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Because it had the strongest local military forces, and because it invariably attracted the enmity of the radical powers of the Middle East, Israel consistently served as a strategic asset to the United States, helping to check the regimes that threatened American interests; cultural and political affinities bound the two countries together as well. Israel was also at odds, however, with America’s Arab clients.

  In response to American military assistance to Israel in its 1973 war against Egypt and Syria, the ordinarily pro-American Arab oil producers attempted to impose an embargo on oil shipments to the United States, as well as to the Netherlands. Oil being a globally traded commodity, they could not successfully single out these two countries, but the reductions they made in their exports did cause the global price of oil to soar. To persuade the Arabs to increase production and relieve the upward pressure o
n the oil price, American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger undertook energetic mediation between Israel and its adversaries.

  Although no further embargoes were attempted, the United States continued its efforts to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict for the next thirty-five years. It achieved some significant successes, in the form of Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Jordanian peace treaties. The American diplomatic efforts continued through seven presidential administrations. Indeed, they came to be expected of any American chief executive: success brought approval at home and abroad, failure seemingly had little or no cost, and most Israelis and American friends of Israel supported these efforts most of the time.

  American mediation continued, as well, because the leaders of the Arab countries aligned with the United States insisted that the unresolved conflict with Israel was the largest obstacle to peace throughout the region and presented the greatest single threat to their political survival and to American interests in the Middle East. Although they often said this, however, there was little evidence that they believed it, and one reason that they did not believe it was that it was not true. The Arab-Israeli conflict was only one of many in the Middle East, and resolving it would do nothing to end the disputes between, for example, Sunni and Shia Muslims, or Arab nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists. Moreover, Israel and its policies did not pose a serious threat to the Arab regimes or to American interests in the Middle East. The serious danger to both came from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

  The twenty-first-century challenge that Iran presents resembles the issue around which American foreign policy was organized for most of the second half of the twentieth century: the Soviet threat to Europe. Western Europe then, like the Middle East now, was a crucial region for the United States, one where the local governments could not be counted on to defend themselves: in Europe because when the United States first assumed responsibility for its defense European societies had been shattered by World War II; in the Middle East because the Arab regimes are weak, lack popular legitimacy, and for the most part have ineffective military forces.

  Iran now, like the Soviet Union then, is larger than any of the countries it threatens and has a long history of conflict with them: the animosity between Persians and Arabs dates back centuries. Like the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic of Iran is a state created out of a violent revolution and based on a radical ideology that puts it in opposition to its neighbors, an ideology that it attempts to spread through any tactics that offer promise of success including the use of force. Just as the Soviet Union sought to subvert the non-communist governments to its west through local communist parties, for example, so Iran has tried to make use of its fellow Shia Muslims living in majority Sunni countries to expand its influence.

  The Soviet Union of the Cold War and Iran of the post–Cold War era differ in one major way: the magnitude of their power. The Soviet Union was a multinational empire of 300 million people and geographically the largest country on the planet, with an enormous military establishment that had defeated Germany’s mighty Wehrmacht in four bitter years of fighting in World War II. It deployed tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and its land, sea, and air forces were capable of operating all over the world. The Islamic Republic of Iran, by contrast, is a medium-sized country of 72 million people with very modest military forces that struggled to battle those of its smaller neighbor, Iraq, to a standoff in the 1980s. Iran’s armed forces have no capacity to conduct operations beyond the Middle East. This difference has made it cheaper and easier for the United States to deal with Iran in the twenty-first century than it was to cope with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but the American strategic mission was the same in both cases: deterrence.

  During the Cold War, the American armed forces were organized and deployed so as to dissuade the Soviet Union from launching a military campaign to seize Western Europe. The task was made both more urgent and more dangerous by the fact that both countries had nuclear weapons. Twenty-first-century Iran aspires to have them as well. Should it obtain them, the United States would have a new incentive to provide protection for the other countries of the Middle East: nuclear weapons can only be reliably offset by other nuclear weapons, and while the United States already has them, Iran’s neighbors do not and would have to acquire them to ensure their own security. Absent an American guarantee, therefore, the need to deter Iran would likely generate a burst of nuclear proliferation. To be sure, Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons and so would be able to practice nuclear deterrence against Iran. But Israeli nuclear weapons would not protect the Arab countries. Saudi Arabia might be willing to rely for its protection against Iran on American, but not on Israeli, nuclear deterrence. Deterring a nuclear-armed Iran would not necessarily be appreciably more expensive than keeping in check a non-nuclear Iran, but it might well be politically more complex. It would reprise the Cold War American policy of providing nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union for Western Europe because it would involve a promise to defend, with nuclear weapons if necessary, countries within range of an Iranian attack but separated from the continental United States by thousands of miles. To ensure that the Soviet Union believed that the United States would defend Western Europe—to make the policy of deterrence credible in the eyes of the Soviet leaders—American policy-makers deemed it necessary to station American forces on the European continent. The American troops were, on the whole, welcome there and their presence caused relatively little friction between America and Europe. If the American government decided that the credible deterrence of a nuclear-armed Iran required the presence of American forces in the Arab countries being defended, however, these troops would not, for cultural and political reasons, receive a similarly cordial reception. To the contrary, such a policy would create political difficulties both for the host governments and for the United States.

  Even if the deterrence of a nuclear-armed Iran should turn out to be both inexpensive and relatively free of political friction, it would have an inherent drawback: it would require an open-ended effort. Iran would remain a serious threat even with extensive American diplomatic engagement with the Islamic Republic. There was, after all, considerable Soviet-American engagement during the Cold War, in the form of regular diplomatic contact, cultural exchanges, athletic contests, summit meetings, and elaborate negotiations concerning arms limitations. None of these relieved the United States of the need to maintain a robust policy of deterrence in Europe and around the world. Deterrence is a policy akin to managing a chronic, incurable disease. Braced by the magnitude of the Soviet threat and mindful of the disastrous consequences of failing to stand up to totalitarian powers in the 1930s, the American public supported the policy of deterring the Soviet regime for four decades. Americans might not, however, be so steadfast toward the less formidable Iran in the economically straitened circumstances of the second decade of the twenty-first century and beyond, especially because personal memories of Hitler and World War II (and even the Cold War itself) are growing dimmer.

  The collapse of the Soviet Union and its fragmentation into fifteen separate sovereign states paved the way for the emergence of a new, less ideological, less aggressive Russia, which did not pose the same threat to its neighbors. It did not dominate Central and Eastern Europe and so no longer threatened the countries of Western Europe. For geopolitical as well as for ideological reasons, therefore, post-Soviet Russia did not have to be deterred as the Soviet Union had had to be. Partly inspired by what happened in Europe in 1989 and 1991, during the first two post–Cold War decades the United States attempted to bring about a similar transformation in the Middle East. The American government carried out two sets of policies, each intended to transform the region and thus dramatically ease the burden of defending Western and global interests there. They failed, but a third transformative strategy does have the potential to make that burden lighter.

  The Clinton administration devoted a great deal of time and effort to trying to broker final polit
ical settlements between Israel and two of its neighbors: Syria to the north, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the representative of the Palestinians living to Israel’s east between the pre-1967 armistice line and the Jordan River as well as in the Gaza Strip to Israel’s south. Arab-Israeli peacemaking became the highest priority of the foreign policy of this administration, which believed that an overall settlement would make it much easier to assure American interests in the Middle East. These, of course, included the uninterrupted outflow of its oil.

  The Clinton administration did not succeed in producing the agreements that it sought. Although the Israeli government offered territorial concessions of the magnitude that had been almost universally assumed to be adequate to satisfy the demands of its neighbors, in the end both Hafez al-Asad, the dictator of Syria, and Yasir Arafat, the autocratic leader of the PLO, refused these offers, preferring instead to continue their respective conflicts with Israel. Lacking the political legitimacy that democracy confers, and having failed to deliver any economic improvements to the people they governed, both men had come to rely on the conflict with Israel, and their own adamant commitment to prosecuting it, for such popular support as they enjoyed. For them, and for other Arab leaders as well, the Arab-Israeli conflict was too valuable an asset to give up. Nor can an explanation for the persistence of this particular Middle Eastern conflict omit the genuinely and deeply held belief in the Arab world that Jews, being neither Arab nor Muslim, are not entitled to their own sovereign state in the region.