4 GEOPOLITICS AND
CONTAGION IN THE
MIDDLE EAST

The Middle East is an exception in the U.S.-led liberal order. It has, for many decades, been one of the three most strategically important regions to the United States along with Europe and East Asia. Yet unlike those regional orders that the United States encouraged in Europe and East Asia, there was virtually nothing liberal about the U.S.-led regional order in the Middle East. The United States propped up or assented to authoritarian leaders in Arab states and completely failed to democratize and modernize these allies. Nevertheless, the order did promote peace and stability—Egypt and Jordan made peace with Israel, and the U.S.-led coalition that liberated Kuwait in 1991 was applauded as an unprecedented success.

American leaders have long recognized the risks of authoritarianism and excused the illiberalism as a temporary necessity. They also understood that this illiberal regional order could not last forever. And it did not. As my Brookings colleague Tamara Wittes astutely noted, “The United States was a status quo power defending a regional order that worked to its advantage. That order collapsed and now there is no status quo to defend. Every actor in the region is a revisionist power.”1

To look at the Middle East today is to see a region unraveling in real time. Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen are wracked by civil war and strife. The formal borders of Iraq and Syria have disintegrated. The Islamic State (ISIS) rose rapidly and poses a global terrorist threat. Millions of refugees have destabilized the European Union. The Kurds are increasingly eager to form their own state. Turkey, once hailed as a potential model of Middle Eastern or Muslim democracy, is trending toward dictatorship. And all the while, the conditions that Arabs protested against in 2010 and 2011 remain in place and are, if anything, more pronounced than before.

A full account of the unraveling of regional order in the Middle East is outside the scope of this book. Such an analysis would have to deal in depth with the weakness of the state in Arab countries, the split within Sunni Islam that led to the rise of ISIS, and Shia-Sunni sectarianism, among other factors. Instead my focus is on the role that the Middle East plays, and is likely to play, in great-power competition and how important it is for the global order. After over a decade of war and revolution, the United States is genuinely torn about its approach. Some are in favor of reducing America’s role in the region because there are severe limits on what can be achieved at an acceptable cost. Others wish to increase U.S. engagement to prevent the situation both from getting worse and from destabilizing key U.S. allies and interests, including in Europe. America’s strategic rethinking occurs in parallel with, and is a contributing factor to, an intensification of a sectarian-fueled cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia and fought over the vacuums created by the Arab Awakening. Meanwhile Russia has intervened in Syria and signaled its intention to influence the course of events in the Middle East while China takes a back seat, preferring to concentrate on economic ties. All of this occurs against a backdrop of a continuing ISIS terror threat.

The disorder in the Middle East is likely to continue to command the attention of the United States, European nations, and to some extent Russia, for at least the next decade, and probably more. There is no clean exit to be had. But despite hopeful signs in civil society throughout the region, the Middle East is not some prize to be won in a game between the great powers. It is a crisis to be managed with the goal being to limit its deleterious effects on vital national interests and global order more generally.

AMERICA’S REAPPRAISAL OF THE MIDDLE EAST

Obama can claim some credit for foreseeing the upheaval that would rock the Arab world in late 2010 and early 2011. In a New Yorker article, Ryan Lizza published extracts from a five-page memorandum that President Obama sent to his senior national-security and foreign-policy officials in March 2010, nine months before the Arab Awakening. Titled Political Reform in the Middle East and North Africa, Obama wrote that “progress toward political reform and openness in the Middle East and North Africa lags behind other regions and has, in some cases, stalled,” but there was “evidence of growing citizen discontent with the region’s regimes.” Obama believed that America’s allies would “opt for repression rather than reform to manage domestic dissent” but that this would be counter-productive and “our regional and international credibility will be undermined if we are seen or perceived to be backing repressive regimes and ignoring the rights and aspirations of citizens.” He noted that “the advent of political succession in a number of countries offers a potential opening for political reform in the region” and according to Lizza, “he asked his staff to produce ‘tailored’ ‘country by country’ strategies for political reform.” He worried that if the United States managed coming transitions “poorly,” it “could have negative implications for US interests, including for our standing among Arab publics.”2

The preparation, however, was in vain. When the Arab Awakening finally occurred, the Obama administration tried to limit its involvement and let matters take their own course. As Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution describes it,

From the very start, there was a temptation to discount the importance of foreign powers in the Arab Spring. It became commonplace to hear some variation of the following: that the uprisings were a truly indigenous movement and that Arabs themselves did not want other countries to “interfere” in it—meddling that would, the thinking went, go against the very spirit of the revolutions. President Barack Obama and other US officials repeatedly insisted that this was “not about America.” In reality, it was partly about America, not just because of the past US role in backing Arab dictatorships, but because of the critical role it would continue to play in the region.³

The Obama administration would intervene diplomatically to persuade Hosni Mubarak to step down and it supported democracy in Egypt, including by recognizing and working with the Muslim Brotherhood government that was elected to power in 2012. Initially, it looked like Obama may have been able to midwife in democracy in Egypt and elsewhere in the region. Within a few short years, however, it had become clear that “the Arab Spring” had failed. The Arab Awakening was, as the journalist and author Robert Worth has put it, “not so much a beginning as an end.”4 It was, he wrote, “the final disintegration of something that had been rotting for decades: the Arab republican states, which finally collapsed of their own weight.”⁵

The spread of conflict in the region convinced Americans, including the president, that the Arab world was not on the brink of a new era of democracy and progress.

In President Obama’s 2016 interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, the contrast with his 2010 memo on political reform was dramatic. Goldberg quotes Obama:

“Right now, I don’t think that anybody can be feeling good about the situation in the Middle East,” he said. “You have countries that are failing to provide prosperity and opportunity for their people. You’ve got a violent, extremist ideology, or ideologies, that are turbocharged through social media. You’ve got countries that have very few civic traditions, so that as autocratic regimes start fraying, the only organizing principles are sectarian. Contrast that with Southeast Asia, which still has huge problems—enormous poverty, corruption—but is filled with striving, ambitious, energetic people who are every single day scratching and clawing to build businesses and get education and find jobs and build infrastructure. The contrast is pretty stark.”⁶

The president had determined that U.S. engagement in the Middle East had little chance of success. Obama felt helpless in preventing the region from becoming a mess, but he hoped to keep it from being America’s mess: consequently he tried to reduce the U.S. role in the Middle East.

Obama worried that he would be pressed to intervene militarily to deal with the aftermath of the Arab Awakening. He was a skeptic of U.S. military engagement in the Middle East prior to the Arab Spring and aware of the pressures on American presidents to intervene and deepen military engagement in ongoing conflicts. Shortly after taking office, Obama sent more troops to Afghanistan only to have his military commanders immediately request tens of thousands more. Obama and some of his key foreign-policy aides believed that the U.S. national security establishment—including much of the apparatus of government—was pushing the administration to intervene militarily in the Middle East, while the administration felt the United States was overinvested in the region and must limit its role.

Obama also steadily reduced U.S. engagement in Iraq, as Emma Sky described in her memoir The Unraveling. Sky, formerly the political adviser to General Ray Odierno, who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq, shows how the Obama administration disengaged diplomatically from Iraq upon taking office. Its most catastrophic decision came after the 2010 Iraqi elections. The Iraqiya Party, led by Ayad Allawi, had emerged as the largest party, while the incumbent Nouri al-Maliki came in close second. Allawi was born a Shiite but had a cross-confessional mindset and stood a good chance of unifying the various factions in Iraq. Maliki was deeply sectarian and the chosen candidate of Iran. U.S. commanders in Iraq wanted the Obama administration to make the diplomatic investment to help Allawi form a government. Instead, the Obama administration wanted to reduce its engagement and was loath to make the investment of time and political capital necessary to help Allawi. Vice President Biden, who once advocated for the partition of Iraq, went to Iraq shortly after the elections and backed Maliki, much to the dismay of Saudi Arabia and other Sunnis who had backed the nominally Shiite Iraqiya over sectarian Sunni alternatives.

Maliki could secure the premiership only by winning the support of the Iranian-backed Sadrists, who during the occupation had been among America’s fiercest enemies. Iran’s price for this support? No U.S. troops in Iraq and a more sectarian government.7 Sky concluded that “Biden was a nice man but he simply had the wrong instincts on Iraq. If only Obama had paid attention to Iraq. He more than anyone, would understand the complexities of identity and how people can change. But his only interest in Iraq was ending the war.”⁸ According to Allawi, he “needed American support,” but the United States “wanted to leave, and they handed the country to the Iranians. Iraq is a failed state now, an Iranian colony.”⁹ In the years that followed, Maliki reneged on understandings with Sunni leaders in northern Iraq, doubled down on sectarianism, pushed U.S. troops out, and used violence against Sunni protestors.¹⁰ All of this created fertile ground for ISIS to reemerge and then expand in Iraq starting in 2013.

The instability that followed the Arab Awakening raised the prospect that Obama would be dragged back into Middle Eastern wars despite his best efforts. He was determined to avoid that fate. He opposed intervention in the Libyan civil war until February 2011, when Qaddafi promised to destroy Benghazi and kill off its inhabitants. Having spoken out forcefully against genocide and mass killing, Obama and his team quickly changed their position and played a limited role in the campaign to lift the siege and topple Qaddafi. One adviser famously described the strategy as “lead from behind.”¹¹

It was after Libya that the United States sought a conceptual framework to describe and rationalize its decision to strictly limit its engagement in the Middle East. Leading from behind in Libya and avoiding engagement in Syria would be part of a broader regional strategy of retrenchment. In an article in Foreign Affairs, Marc Lynch of George Washington University called it “rightsizing.” “Rightsizing the United States’ footprint in the region,” Lynch wrote, “meant not only reducing its material presence but also exercising restraint diplomatically, stepping back and challenging allies to take greater responsibility for their own security. Obama has adhered consistently to this strategy, prioritizing it ruthlessly along the way and firmly resisting efforts to force it off track.”12

This “rightsizing” entailed a significant reduction in America’s role in shaping the future of the Middle East. Dennis Ross, who served as Obama’s senior director for the Middle East on the National Security Council, wrote that “Obama believes in the use of force only when our security and homeland might be directly threatened,” and that this mindset “frames US interests and the use of force to support them in very narrow terms.”¹³ Some of Obama’s closest aides confirmed this point of view. As Obama’s deputy national security adviser Benjamin Rhodes described it to Politico Magazine: “The default view in Washington is that if there’s a challenge in the Middle East, the US has to solve it. Our basic point has been, no, sorry, we learned the opposite lesson from Iraq. It’s not that more US military engagement will stabilize the Middle East. It’s that we can’t do this.” Obama, Rhodes said, was “trying to cabin our engagement so it doesn’t lead to an overextension” and so the United States could focus on potential opportunities like climate change and Latin America.¹⁴

Obama’s strategic approach culminated in his policy toward Syria. As the Syrian war escalated, Obama ruled out intervening to topple Bashar al-Assad and arming the rebel forces, only to do so later incrementally and without commitment. He drew a red line over the use of chemical weapons and promised to bomb Assad when it used these weapons, mainly as a way of avoiding intervening to quell lower-level violence. When Assad called his bluff, Obama was left with an awful dilemma—make good on his threat and intervene despite his best instincts, or back down. Obama committed to action but had a change of heart while planes were fueling on the runway. When Putin offered an olive branch a couple of days later, the United States was able to strike a deal that led to the removal of much of Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal.

In his address to the UN General Assembly weeks after the Syrian red line crisis, Obama made a distinction between core U.S. interests in the Middle East and broader issues of regional security. He identified four core interests—preventing aggression against U.S. allies and partners, ensuring the free flow of energy, dismantling terrorist networks that threaten Americans, and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.15 “We’re not in a Cold War. There is no great game,” he said. America had no agenda for Syria beyond what was best for its people. He accepted that America had other interests—such as a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic Middle East—but was convinced that these could not be achieved by America alone. These interests could be advanced only with the cooperation and commitment of the international community. If other nations were serious about addressing these issues in a constructive way, the United States would help, but otherwise, it would strictly limit its role.

The logic of this retrenchment was somewhat paradoxical. Obama and many American observers believed that the turmoil in the Middle East was so bad that it was close to hopeless. The United States could do little to arrest the descent into chaos.¹⁶ Obama would often ask advocates of greater engagement where their strategy would lead ten or eleven steps down the road. Could they guarantee that it would ultimately succeed and that they would not be back asking for ground troops? They could never convince him. For Obama, the region was in the midst of a tumultuous upheaval over which America had little control. In his 2016 State of the Union address, Obama declared, “The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia.”17

Philip Gordon, who served as Obama’s top White House aide for Middle East Affairs, wrote shortly after leaving the administration, “We cannot master the historical forces that probably mean the region will be plagued by instability for years or even decades to come. But we can and should manage this instability as best we can and protect our core interests, which include defending our allies, preventing regional war, keeping sea lanes open, avoiding nuclear proliferation and preventing a terrorist safe haven from which the United States or its allies could be attacked.”¹⁸ In the battle against terrorism, the United States would rely on drones, air strikes, and intelligence operations rather than ground troops. Despite difficult relations with the Netanyahu government, the Obama administration also substantially increased military assistance to Israel.

Bad as the situation was, it was not bad enough to threaten vital interests. Even safeguarding the free flow of energy, a longstanding vital interest, no longer requires the same level of intense U.S. engagement in the Middle East as it has since World War II: the surge in natural gas supplies due to domestic hydrofracking has considerably reduced America’s dependence on Middle East oil. Further dampening the need for U.S. engagement in the Middle East is the apparent weakening of the link between instability and price spikes. The last three years have been among the most turbulent the region has experienced since World War II, but the price of oil reached near record lows and stayed there for a protracted period.

The Iran nuclear deal is an excellent example of the logic, opportunities, and limits of a narrowly focused Obama Middle East policy. With a laser-like focus, the president succeeded in rallying an international coalition to intensify sanctions on Iran and negotiate an agreement that prevented Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. A consequence of the deal was that it promised to strengthen Iran’s conventional capability by reviving its economy and allowing it to normalize its relations with many states. There is little wrong with that—after all, Iran is entitled to economic prosperity just as much as its neighbors—but this had a strategic consequence, coming as it did in 2015 as regional rivalry in the vacuums created by the Arab Awakening reached new heights. The prospect of a newly empowered Iran alarmed Saudi Arabia and its allies and led to an escalation of the Middle Eastern cold war. Obama argued that this cold war would have been worse if Iran had developed nuclear weapons, which was clearly correct, but he did little to address Saudi fears. He told Jeffrey Goldberg that Saudi Arabia and Iran must learn to share the region. He made it clear that the Middle East was unfixable and he would prefer to be someplace else. And he repeatedly claimed that the rivalry was tribal and sectarian and thus imperious to outside influence. Not everyone agreed. General James Mattis, then head of U.S. Central Command, repeatedly raised his concern that the administration did not have a strategy for dealing with the more general challenge that Iran posed, an assertion for which he was pushed out of his position.19

From Obama’s perspective, it was simply not worth the cost in terms of lives and resources to engage in the Middle East with a view to propping up authoritarian leaders with whom the United States has little in common. The Gulf states read the “abandonment of Mubarak” as a sign that the United States would not care about internally driven and transnational regime change in their countries. If they wished to fight or compete with each other, they would have to do it themselves. But the Arab Awakening had dramatically increased the rivalry between Iran and Sunni Arab states. The United States was limiting its role precisely when geopolitical risks were growing.

A STRUGGLE FOR REGIONAL CONTROL

Relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran were fraught prior to the Arab Awakening, but contrary to popular perception, the rivalry was much more limited than it is now. One indicator of this can be found in 2009 study by the RAND Corporation on Saudi-Iranian relations since the fall of Saddam Hussein.20 The report, coauthored by six regional experts, concluded that Saudi Arabia’s policy toward Iran was complex and multifaceted. It included elements not only of containment and rollback, but also of engagement and accommodation. The Saudis did see themselves as locked in a zero-sum competition with Iran for the future of Iraq, but they did not see the overall relationship through that prism. The authors concluded that the United States could not count on Saudi Arabia being the backbone of an alliance to contain Iran because Riyadh had adopted a more nuanced approach than the United States.

The Arab Awakening removed the complexity and cooperation from the Saudi-Iranian relationship. Arab states were weak and vulnerable to collapse. Ongoing or latent revolutions created a vacuum inside states of great strategic importance. Sectarianism filled this void and Tehran and Riyadh quickly followed to keep the regional balance of power from tipping in the other’s favor. The result was a massive intensification of regional rivalry and the outbreak of a new cold war with the two countries competing to control the weak and collapsed states in the region. Both sides are driven by fear that the other will gain the upper hand.

As Professor Gregory Gause of Texas A&M University put it, the objective of this cold war for Saudi Arabia and Iran, and other countries, “is not to defeat their regional rivals militarily on the battlefield. It is to promote the fortunes of their own clients in these weak state domestic struggles and thus build up regional influence.”21 The key to success, he wrote, “is for a regional power to be able to support these non-state clients and allies effectively in their domestic political battles in the weak states of the Arab world.”²² It is an unconventional struggle. It involves proxy wars, covert operations, and coercive diplomacy. And all participants in the region view it as integral to their very survival.

The two primary protagonists in the Middle Eastern cold war are Saudi Arabia and Iran, but they are not alone. As Gause noted, the non-state clients are the true actors shaping the future. And there are other states. Qatar is a prime example. It is a Sunni state like Saudi Arabia, but it was on the opposite side of the Egyptian revolution to Riyadh. Qatar was a strong financial backer of the Muslim Brotherhood within Mohamed Morsi’s government in Egypt. It has an intense rivalry with the United Arab Emirates and the two states found themselves at loggerheads in Libya with each backing rival parties and militias, all of which served only to prolong and worsen the conflict. Qatar has also been active in Syria, backing various Islamist forces. As we shall see later, Turkey and Russia also intervened in the Syrian civil war on opposite sides. Nevertheless, the two most important players are Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The Iran–Saudi Arabia rivalry is deeply rooted in religion but it was not caused by it. In an essay titled “The Sunni-Shia Divide: Where Religion Masks Geo-Strategy,” Olivier Roy, a French scholar of political Islam, shows how no monarch used the divide as an instrument of foreign policy from the fall of the Safavid dynasty in Persia in 1736 until the Iranian revolution of 1979. After the Iranian revolution, however, the ayatollahs used Shiism as a means of justifying their regional ambitions. This reignited a sectarian divide that had been largely hidden. According to Roy, “The growing antagonism between Shias and Sunnis had nothing to do with a ‘millennial’ hatred, but with a strategic realignment … The geostrategic struggle for hegemony in the Middle East enlarged and even re-created the religious divide between Shias and Sunnis, as did the wave of re-Islamization, because the latter focused precisely on ‘who owns Islam?’”23

Roy acknowledges though that religion does not need to be the root cause of the conflict for it to have a profound impact on it. He writes, “The religious divide is not the cause of the conflict between a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the pro-Iran axis; nevertheless, the exacerbation of religious mobilization makes it harder to find domestic political settlements (in Yemen for instance) and to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis.”

Gause has warned that the “sectarian framing profoundly misunderstands the nature of the regional crisis.” Sectarianism is a part of the crisis but “it is not imposed on the region by Riyadh and Tehran.” They “take advantage of sectarianism but they do not cause it.”²⁴ Indeed, Iran and Saudi Arabia have both reached beyond the religious divide when it has served their interests to do so.²⁵

For decades, the Saudi grand strategy has been to keep the United States engaged in the region as a hegemonic power and the provider of order. The Saudis perceived a significant American retrenchment in the region during the Obama administration—as evidenced by America’s shunning of al-Iraqiya in Iraq in 2010, its support for the ousting of Mubarak, the way it backed down over the chemical weapons red line in Syria, and its pursuit of the Iran nuclear deal—and this has shaken Saudi strategic assumptions to their foundation. In particular, the Saudis worry that Iran will emerge stronger from the nuclear deal and that it will use its resources to wage and win the cold war in the region. Even worse from the Saudi perspective, the Americans seem to have responded to this prospect with nonchalance.

As the rift between Washington and Riyadh grew, Saudi Arabia has adjusted its strategy under new leadership. King Abdullah died in early 2015 and was replaced by King Salman, who shocked the world by changing the line of succession. He made his nephew Mohammed bin Nayef crown prince and his young son, Mohammed bin Salman, deputy crown prince. Mohammed bin Nayef, the most pro-American of the Saudi royals, has led Saudi Arabia’s counter-terrorism efforts for two decades. By contrast, Mohammed bin Salman, who is around thirty-one years old (his exact age depends on whom you ask), has emerged as a very influential and hawkish voice, surpassing the crown prince by many accounts. He is an advocate of domestic reform and a hawkish foreign policy. He is also a critic of American retrenchment and once told the Economist, “The United States must realize that they are the number one in the world and they have to act like it.”26

The shift in power in Saudi Arabia has caused its foreign policy to harden significantly. Having lost confidence in the United States, the Saudis decided to take matters into their own hands and balanced against Iran directly. They led a counter-revolution in the region, which included intervening in Bahrain and providing financial assistance to al-Sisi after he took power in Egypt. In March 2015, Saudi Arabia led a coalition and intervened in the civil war in Yemen against the Iranian-backed Houthis.

Saudi Arabia has also escalated tensions through their actions at home. In early 2016, Saudi Arabia executed a Shiite cleric named Sheikh Nimr-al-Nimir. Al-Nimir was no ordinary cleric. He was a vocal opponent of the Saudi regime who had worked to get more rights for Saudi Shia, who comprise 10 to 15 percent of the Saudi population and who reside in the oil-rich eastern part of the country. Iranian hardliners were outraged by his execution. To the embarrassment of the Rouhani administration, which sought to project an image of regional moderation, the Saudi embassy in Tehran was besieged and ultimately overrun by a hardline mob. In response, Saudi Arabia cut off diplomatic ties with Iran and banned commerce and travel between the two countries. Bahrain and Sudan followed suit, while Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates downgraded their diplomatic relations with Iran.27

Other Arab powers have different attitudes toward Iran. The United Arab Emirates is as concerned as Saudi Arabia about Iranian power and influence. UAE leaders feel abandoned by the United States and want Washington to restore trust with its Sunni allies by doing much more to contain Iran. Al-Sisi’s Egypt, on the other hand, is less concerned about Iranian hegemonic desires and instead sees Islamic extremism, whether in its Sunni or Shiite form, as an existential threat. Egypt would like to see the United States try to ease tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran, while providing assistance to Cairo without attaching conditions of political reform.

Iran’s strategy also became more assertive and expansionist after the Arab Awakening, although its initial reaction to the revolutions was one of ambivalence. The Iranians first had to come to terms with their own recent history. Much like the protests in Moscow in 2012, Iranian leaders saw the 2009 Green Movement as part of a Western “soft war” against Iran. Iran’s leading security institution, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), studied the concept of soft war to understand the threat and how to respond. An IRGC report, Overcoming Sedition, compared the 2009 revolution to color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, and placed the blame squarely on the United States.28 Thereafter Arab regimes began to fall. On the one hand, Iranian leaders were thrilled to see their enemies, like the Saudis and Hosni Mubarak, in retreat and opportunities opening up for increasing Iran’s influence throughout the Arab world. On the other hand, the Awakening was too close for comfort—in form and time—to the Green Movement. It also threatened Iran’s close ally in Syria.²⁹

Nevertheless, the Revolutionary Guard spearheaded an effort to take advantage of the vacuum. In May 2011 Qassem Soleimani, the head of the elite Quds Force of the IRGC, said in a speech that “today, Iran’s defeat or victory will not be determined in Mehran and Khorramshahr, but rather our borders have spread. We must witness victories in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria.”³⁰ Iran was aggrieved by Saudi counter-revolution efforts and had responded by launching a covert campaign against Saudi Arabia. Most bizarrely, this included a failed plot to enlist a Mexican drug gang to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States in 2011 by detonating a bomb at Café Milano, a Washington, DC, restaurant popular with diplomats.³¹ The very public failure of the Washington plot, and the fact that Iran’s involvement was discovered, spooked the Iranian government and led it to narrow its focus to a more regional emphasis on the Middle Eastern cold war.

The epicenter of this cold war is the Syrian civil war, which as of the spring of 2016 has claimed the lives of over 400,000 people.32 For Iran, Syria was the linchpin of its influence in the Levant. The alliance with Assad went back to the darkest days of Iran’s war with Iraq. For Iran, influence in Syria provided leverage over Israel and the United States and gave it the ability to project power through Hezbollah. Mehdi Taeb, a former commander of the Basij, an auxiliary force of the IRGC, put it bluntly when he explained that “Syria is the 35th province and a strategic province for Iran … If the enemy attacks and aims to capture both Syria and Khuzestan [the province attacked in the Iran-Iraq War], our priority would be Syria. Because if we hold on to Syria, we would be able to retake Khuzestan; yet if Syria were lost, we would not be able to keep even Tehran.”³³

Iran supplied vast quantities of arms to Assad and sent military advisers who assisted in setting up new militias, similar to the Iranian Basij, which fought in parallel to the regular Syrian army.³⁴ For Saudi Arabia, Syria is especially important because Iran has been able to capitalize on changes elsewhere in the region, especially in Iraq. Saudi Arabia knows how important Syria is to Iran and therein lies its importance to the Saudis. If Riyadh cannot deal a blow to Iran in Syria, and Tehran emerges victorious, the Saudis believe that the balance of power in the region could be permanently shifted in favor of Iran. It is not that Riyadh covets influence in Syria for its own sake—it is that the Saudis fear that an Iranian victory there would be a tipping point for the entire region.

This highlights a particularly tragic characteristic of the Syrian civil war, which is that it is also a proxy war between outside powers. Civil wars are most bloody and protracted when outside powers are involved.³⁵ Powerful external sponsors are strong enough to prevent their side from losing but are rarely willing to intervene on a scale that cannot be countered by another. They are usually content to avoid losing, even at a great humanitarian cost. Proxy wars were common during the Cold War but they largely disappeared after the fall of the Soviet Union. Now they are back.36 In addition to Iran and Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United States, France, and Turkey are all militarily engaged in Syria in what has become a proxy geopolitical contest for the region as a whole.

Proxy warfare comes with the risk of inadvertent escalation. A striking example of this came in November 2015 when a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian military aircraft that had violated its air defenses for fifteen seconds. As tensions between Russia and Turkey escalated Western powers looked on with concern that a NATO member state would be drawn into a direct conflict with Russia. The deep divisions created by this conflict are underscored by the fact that prior to the Russian intervention in Syrian civil war, Putin and Erdog˘an had been relatively close. Turkey was the only NATO member that did not impose sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Crimea, and Erdog˘an sought to deepen ties with Russia when the West was trying to isolate it. Putin visited Turkey in November 2014 and had turned to it as an energy partner. But tensions rose over Syria. Turkey vociferously opposed Assad, while Russia just as vociferously backed him. Erdog˘an grew increasingly agitated by Russia’s intervention and Putin was infuriated by the shooting down of his plane. Putin retaliated by increasing the pressure on Erdog˘an from multiple directions. One European expert on Russia, Ivan Krastev, described Putin’s policy toward Erdog˘an as regime change.³⁷ Russian state media accused Erdog˘an’s son of profiting from oil deals with ISIS. Putin invited the leader of Turkey’s Kurdish People’s Democratic Party to Moscow. Russia suspended its visa waiver program for Turkish citizens, cut tourism to Turkey, and imposed new restrictions on Turkish business. Erdog˘an attempted to deescalate tensions but Putin responded by escalating. It was only in August of 2016, after a failed coup in Turkey that Erdog˘an blamed on the United States, that he and Putin mended fences. The spat revealed just how dangerous civil wars in the Middle East can be. Each side in each conflict has outside backers and the risk of escalation is ever-present. It also demonstrated how tactical, flexible, and temporary partnerships and rivalries can be in the new Middle East.

The Syrian civil war is a calamitous conflict that has ravaged Syria and destabilized much of the region as well as Europe. Its unintended consequences have rocked the entire world. One of the most worrisome of these unintended consequences has been the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS). ISIS is a horrific symptom and catalyst of disorder in the Middle East but it is not the underlying cause. ISIS, which first arose during the turmoil of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Iraq’s civil war, found a second breath in the vacuum created by the Arab Awakening. It benefited in several ways from the emerging regional rivalry. First, Bashar al-Assad empowered jihadism in Syria by targeting the mainstream opposition and allowing the rise of Islamist extremism to force the choice to become one between his regime and rule by the latter, rather than between his regime and a moderate alternative. In this, Assad was helped by Iran and later by Russia.

Second, Soleimani and the Quds force made a catastrophic mistake in Iraq. When Soleimani helped Maliki retain power in 2010, he insisted on a more sectarian government and the removal of U.S. forces from Iraq. The result was brutal repression of Sunnis in northern Iraq—including mass killings of Sunnis in Buhriz, Fallujah, and Ramadi in the spring of 2014—and a vacuum that ISIS could fill. The ISIS takeover of much of northern Iraq in 2013–2014 was initially a calamity for Iran and weakened Soleimani’s position for a while.38

Third, the United States deserves some of the blame because its diplomatic disengagement from Iraq in 2010, which was driven by the American desire to extract itself from the situation, led Washington to miss an opportunity to encourage a more inclusive Iraqi government and to allow for a continuing U.S. presence that would have gathered intelligence, maintained networks with Sunnis, and been alert to the risk posed by ISIS.

The fourth, and most important, way that the regional rivalry has bolstered ISIS is as a distraction. The decisive defeat of ISIS is not the number-one priority of any state in the region. Assad wants to preserve power and sees the mainstream rebels as the greater danger. Iran sees ISIS as a foe but is more concerned about protecting Assad. Saudi Arabia sees Syria through the prism of its struggle with Iran. Limiting Iran’s influence is its top goal. ISIS comes in third among Turkey’s perceived threats in Syria, after the Kurds and Assad. Even the Russians, who intervened in Syria in 2015, saw other Syrian rebel groups as a greater threat to its interests than ISIS, as evidenced by the targets of their September air campaign.³⁹ If ISIS had taken over large swathes of Syria and Iraq in the mid-2000s, it is inconceivable that the region and outside powers would not have cooperated to prioritize its defeat. The uncomfortable reality is that in the present context of advanced fragmentation and rivalry, the major powers have competing priorities.

The United States initially saw ISIS as a local actor. In early 2014, President Obama told David Remnick of the New Yorker that we should be careful not to exaggerate the threat posed by Islamist terrorist organizations in Iraq. “The analogy we use around here sometimes, “Obama said, “and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.”40 ISIS’s rise, and its progression from an organization focused on local fights in Iraq and Syria to one with global ambitions, were game changers. Repeated attacks in Western countries, and even more horrific attacks throughout the greater Middle East, captured the world’s attention, deepened tensions between the West and Islam, and sparked a major rethinking of U.S. strategy. President Obama would find himself dragged back in to Iraq with more than four thousand U.S. ground troops, including special operations forces in Syria. Military disengagement was not an option if a terrorist organization with global reach and hostile intent could find a safe haven.

LOOKING AHEAD: LIKELY APPROACHES
BY THE GREAT POWERS

The deterioration of the Middle East after the Arab Awakening and the attempted retrenchment of the United States showed that the problems of the region would have major implications for global order. The Middle East is destined to play a role in strategic competition, not as a new great game or prize but as a crisis to be managed. The major powers, and leaders in those countries, will differ on how this should be accomplished.

The United States

Because the United States is deeply divided on how to approach the Middle East, its role is uncertain. As we saw earlier one school of thought, led by President Obama, posits that the Middle East is just not that important to the United States as long as a narrow set of interests—the defense of Israel, counter-terrorism, the supply of oil—are protected.41 Advocates of this position will argue for military engagement if they feel like they have no other option, but they will do so grudgingly and with strict limits, much as Obama has done to counter the ISIS threat. The irony is that despite his best efforts to retrench, Obama found himself drawn back in to the Middle East to wage war against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The second school of thought is that ignoring the Middle East was a major strategic mistake and it is imperative to reengage in the region, even if it is only to achieve the least-bad outcome attainable. Historically when a region has been allowed to descend into war and anarchy, the effects are very rarely contained. Already the conflict in the Middle East has spread to four countries. It has pulled in outside powers. The refugee crisis is threatening the stability of the European Union, which has long been a vital U.S. interest. And although terrorist organizations like ISIS still find it difficult to carry out attacks in the United States, they are attacking Western targets with greater intensity, especially in Europe. If the situation deteriorates further, it could become a hub for nuclear proliferation. It is true that there are few good options, but the United States must reengage with its allies, as imperfect as they are, to restore a sense of regional equilibrium and stop the unraveling. If the Middle East is in the early stages of a Thirty Years’ War, then surely it makes sense to do everything possible to reverse this troublesome trajectory.

The debate between these two positions also must be viewed in the context of a global strategy. If the United States invests heavily in restoring an equilibrium in the Middle East, will that detract from priorities elsewhere? During his second term, Obama very clearly was convinced that it would. But others believed that a deteriorating Middle East would be catastrophic for vital U.S. interests, especially those in Europe but also those in East Asia. The American strategic debate on the Middle East is no longer just, or even mainly, about the Middle East. It is now about the strategic importance of the region for U.S. global interests, including the future of the liberal order.

It is unclear which of these two views the Trump administration will take. Trump has signaled that he views the Middle East as of greater strategic importance than Europe or East Asia, but he also has less desire to uphold regional orders. However, the debate between these two views will continue for many years. Even if the United States retrenches, there will be powerful voices favoring renewed engagement. Thus, the United States is very unlikely to be capable of disengaging from a chaotic Middle East.

Russia and the Middle East

As Vladimir Putin sees it, the United States has willfully ignored Russia’s interests and wreaked havoc in the Middle East. It has toppled or weakened the legitimate governments of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, and others in pursuit of a utopian dream. In the process, it worsened the terrorist threat from the region. In September 2015, Putin gave an address to the UN General Assembly that was scathing in its criticism of U.S. policy in the Middle East. He said: “Aggressive foreign interference has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions and the lifestyle itself. Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster. Nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life. I cannot help asking those who have caused the situation, do you realize now what you’ve done?”42

Putin increased Russia’s engagement in the Middle East for two reasons. The first was to deal Russia in on diplomacy in the region so that its interests would not be ignored. The intervention in Syria meant that the United States had to take Russia’s interests into account. Russia believes that Assad is the best bulwark against Islamic extremism in Syria and it wants a pro-Russian regime in Damascus. Putin wants to uphold friendly regimes and raise the cost to the West of deposing regimes not to the West’s liking, or even prevent this from happening altogether. He sees economic opportunities for Russia, especially through coordination with energy producers in order to keep the price of oil high and for investment and trade. The second reason is that the Middle East offers Putin an opportunity to reestablish Russia as a great power outside of Europe. According to Dmitri Trenin, “Moscow seeks to present itself to countries in the region as a pragmatic, non-ideological, reliable, savvy, no-nonsense player with a capacity to weigh in on regional matters by both diplomatic and military means. As a major outside power, Russia offers itself as a credible partner to those seeking to diversify their foreign policy.”43

Iran does not trust Russia, but there is common ground between the two countries on trade, on the Syrian civil war where they are de facto allies, and on rivalry with the United States. But Russia is also aware of the risk of being seen to side with Iran in its struggle with Saudi Arabia and Sunni states—a risk that is heightened as a result of Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war. Putin has no interest in alienating Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, so he will attempt to maintain some neutrality in regional geopolitics.

China and the Middle East

As the United States relies less on the Middle East for its energy supplies, China has become more reliant on it, with 52 percent of China’s oil imports now coming from the Gulf.⁴⁴ It is not surprising, then, that China has been increasing its engagement in the region. In January 2016, President Xi was the first foreign leader to visit Tehran after the nuclear deal. He also stopped in Riyadh and Cairo. Around the same time, China released a strategy paper on its approach to the Arab world, which emphasizes energy cooperation, investment, and infrastructural development.45 It has also dabbled in diplomacy in regional crises. Foreign Minister Wang Yi invited representatives of the Syrian government and opposition to Beijing for meetings.⁴⁶ Previously, China had hosted Israeli and Palestinian officials and reportedly tried to ease tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Over the longer term, China’s One Belt, One Road initiative is intended to increase economic engagement with the Middle East, among other regions. So does this mean that China is about to become a player in the great game for Middle Eastern energy resources? No, it does not.

Even as China pays more attention to the Middle East, it is also abundantly clear that China is very reluctant to play a substantial role in trying to stabilize the region. High-profile diplomatic meetings are one thing, but taking responsibility for the region, with all of the tradeoffs involved, is quite another. China has tried to stay impartial and friendly with all countries in the region—which would quickly become an impossible task if it really tried to stabilize or shape that part of the world. Chinese policymakers are wary of becoming embroiled in the Middle East and they are reluctant to undermine the role the United States chooses to play.⁴⁷ They are aware that they lack expertise on the Middle East and that any big play entails a high likelihood of failure. They will play a constructive role if asked—as in the Iran nuclear talks—but otherwise they prefer to concentrate their geopolitical efforts on East Asia and leave the problems of the Middle East to others. In any event, Chinese and U.S. interests in the Middle East are well aligned. Both want stable governance, no safe haven for terrorists, and the steady flow of oil. Democracy promotion used to be a point of contention, but the post–Arab Awakening trajectory makes this less of an American objective, at least in the short run.

The greatest risk the Middle East poses to the United States is not that it will fall into Russia or China’s orbit. China does not even seek to play a major geopolitical role in the region, and it is content for the United States to take the lead. Russia has and will challenge U.S. interests there, but it is nowhere near capable of replacing the United States in its role. The real risk is that the regional security competition—driven by Iran and Saudi Arabia with interventions by outside powers, including Russia—will deteriorate to the point that it endangers key U.S. interests in the Middle East and in Europe. It may even drag the United States into a general regional war. It is not just a matter of the United States staying out. Leaving Sunni states to fend for themselves may lead them to become more hawkish and risk acceptant vis-à-vis Iran. And as much as the United States may try to stay aloof, there is always a chance, as in Europe in 1917 and 1941, that things will get so bad that it gets dragged in anyway.

Chaos in the Middle East also threatens the global order even if it stops short of a general war. Migration flows from Syria will continue to undermine the European Union, and if other states were to collapse this problem could get much worse. Conflict zones in the Middle East provide a base for terrorist organizations like Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, putting much of the world at risk. Although the Iran nuclear deal provides some respite, the nuclear proliferation risk has not vanished and could easily return, thus undermining the global non-proliferation regime. And the Middle East is still important for oil supplies, even though prices are relatively low at the moment.

Apart from the risks posed by the region, we should also remember that there are signs of hope. There is a constituency for liberalization—in civil society and even in some Arab governments. The Middle East is not destined for conflict because of ancient hatreds or tribalism. These green shoots have been hard to see in recent years, but they are there. A period of stability may provide them with the time and space to grow.

The United States should seek to play an active role in stabilizing the Middle East, not just to protect narrowly defined U.S. interests, but also because the broad goal of a stable Middle East is itself a key U.S. interest. There is no doubt that doing so will be extremely difficult. Getting the geopolitics right will not be sufficient, but it will be a necessary component of a successful strategy. The United States must restore the balance of power in the region by working with Sunni states to balance against Iran and to stabilize the region against Sunni extremism. Once that balance has been restored, and if Iran’s behavior improves, Washington could engage Tehran from a position of strength with a view toward cooperation beyond the nuclear file, including on Syria.