The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (30 page)

When it came to drones there were four formidable unanimous voices in the Situation Room: the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Pentagon, and the White House’s counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan. Defense Secretary Robert Gates may have said no to military involvement in Libya, but he was fully supportive of more drone attacks. Together, Brennan, Gates, and the others convinced Obama of both the urgency of counterterrorism and the imperative of viewing America’s engagement with the Middle East and South Asia through that prism. Their bloc by and large discouraged debate over the full implications of this strategy in national security meetings.

Quietly, and without any fanfare or debate, counterterrorism became the cornerstone and principal objective of American policy in the Middle East and South Asia.
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However, the policy of disengagement paired with drone strikes is not likely to prove viable in the long run. We have learned from our experience in Pakistan that drones are a difficult sell,
though local populations may put up with drone campaigns longer if there is deep engagement with the United States and economic assistance to add other dimensions to the relationship.

Drones rely heavily on cooperative regimes that can tie America’s hands in terms of supporting change. Yemen is a good example. Washington was rightly concerned that al-Qaeda would take advantage of the pro-democracy protests that engulfed Yemen throughout 2011 and eventually forced President Saleh out of office. But Washington had to balance its support for political change with its desire to keep in place the security apparatus that supported drone attacks on al-Qaeda targets. Washington left the political negotiations around Saleh stepping down to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council and focused its attention on al-Qaeda. The outcome kept the Saleh regime in place but without Saleh himself, a sop to the protesters. In the bargain, America protected and expanded its drone program. (It was in the midst of protests that a drone strike killed the Yemeni-American al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been identified as, among other things, a player in the failed Times Square attack.) The message was that even after Arabs themselves did what America had been asking of them for so long—break with Arab nationalism and its dictatorships—America is still sticking with the same game plan, fighting al-Qaeda. Drones, not democracy, drive American policy.

There is no doubt that drone attacks have worked locally (in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s FATA region, and Yemen) to quickly decimate al-Qaeda’s ranks. Yet it is open to question whether the drones’ success in one location masks the creation of bigger problems elsewhere. The record in Pakistan and Yemen shows that drone attacks disperse al-Qaeda farther afield; the metastasis of terrorism in turn requires more drone attacks in more places. That is no success at all.

Drones are also not as innocuous as they sound. Drone strikes are aerial attacks that happen in collusion with a local government or in violation of a country’s sovereignty and in either case run the risk of inflaming public opinion. They provoke anti-Americanism and the extremism that goes with it, and once those sentiments are inflamed it will be difficult to sustain the program—Pakistan and Yemen both provide ample evidence of that. Compared with other methods of striking from a distance,
drones can indeed be surgical. But drones are like an economist’s fiscal tool, clean and efficient until they encounter real-world politics.

When we were planning for Hillary Clinton’s October 2009 trip to Pakistan, her first as secretary of state, Holbrooke was adamant that we organize a town hall with women. He said that whenever Hillary got together with women the atmosphere was electric—“Just look at what happened in South Korea,” he would say. She could connect with women around issues that mattered to them, and that could produce a critical breakthrough in Pakistani public opinion.

It made sense, and the embassy invited a large group of affluent, English-speaking women—the type who cared about women’s rights, democracy, and cultural freedoms. Four young women journalists would interview Clinton, and then the crowd would get to ask questions. The atmosphere was indeed “electric,” but not because Clinton was bonding with the crowd. These modern Pakistani women were brimming with anger. From the get-go every other question was about drones, the civilians they killed, and the humiliation they visited on Pakistan by violating its sovereignty. Sitting through that inquisition, I could not see a future for a foreign policy built on drones.

In April 2012, Pakistan’s parliament recommended that the government end the drone program. The next step could be street protests—which have been on the rise since September 2012, when a YouTube video clip insulting the Prophet Muhammad went viral. That would not only make the program untenable but also radicalize politics. Drones could be promoting the very problem that they are intended to solve.

At a time when the Arab world is grappling with economic and political change, American foreign policy is marching to a different drummer. The White House favors containment rather than engagement, and drones are the main tool. And the policy is spreading fast, from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Middle East. Yemen is the Middle Eastern target for the drone strategy, but if al-Qaeda proliferates in Syria, or in an Iraq now stripped of U.S. troops, or elsewhere—Somalia or Libya—the program could extend to those places as well.
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Al-Qaeda thrives in failed states. The right strategy for America is to shore up states battered by the winds of change.
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Some have argued that the Arab Spring has not given America much
to work with. It has not produced liberal forces marching toward democratic capitalism. Libya is hardly a state, Syria is falling into civil war, and Egypt is descending into the unknown, caught for now between Islamic fundamentalists and their only real rival for power, a clique of authoritarian generals. Nor do democrats seem to predominate in Yemen or Bahrain. Others argue that locals themselves have waved away U.S. involvement. Egypt has been cool to the IMF and has been growing more anti-American. In fact, some say, it is a good thing that America has stayed away, making sure that it is not an obstacle to change.

But not being an obstacle to change is not enough. America should be making sure that change moves in the right direction, is not reversed, and does not go off the rails. Our policy, in the end, will be judged by whether the Arab Spring produces better Arab states that do right by their people and live up to their responsibility to the international order and its institutions. Only then will we have brought our values and interests into alignment. On that score, Obama’s disengaged attitude toward the Middle East has served neither America’s values nor its long-term interests.

At a private meeting in London in January 2012, a senior Saudi prince with influence over the oil kingdom’s foreign policy told an audience of prominent Americans that he did not like the term “Arab Spring” because it did not feel like a spring. “What about Arab Awakening?” asked one of his listeners. He did not like that either; the Arabs had not been asleep. “What would you call it then, Your Highness?” The prince thought for a moment. Then he said, “Arab headaches—that is what they are.”

We are now fairly certain that in the new Middle East, the fruit of the Arab Spring will not be a rising liberal Arab order, but an ascendant Islamist one that, if it is able to assert itself, will be a rival to Iran and Turkey and an enemy to the United States and Israel. The shape of this reality will be decided by intensifying regional rivalries playing out amid rising sectarian tensions and the still-bleak economic picture. America will have to contend with these dynamics, which will affect American interests and set the context for American policy.
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As we look down that difficult road, we can sum up our interests in the Middle East under three headings: oil, Israel, and terrorism. Americans have come to believe that their country is engaged in the Middle East because we want a cheap and stable supply of oil. That is true, but in reality even if the Middle East had no oil, it would still hold our attention. America cares deeply about Israel, and Israel is in the Middle East. Wishing to change Arab attitudes toward Israel was one big reason why the George W. Bush administration pushed for the war against Saddam Hussein. Those on the right who favored the war saw extremism,
anti-Americanism, and antagonism toward Israel as different faces of the same problem, which they blamed on decaying states built on Arab nationalism. As we have seen, that bellicose ideology, which captured the Arab imagination after the Suez Crisis of 1956, launched much of the region into decades of economic stagnation under brutal dictators such as Saddam. Ironically, Arab nationalism made a wasteland of Arab intellectual life, and even after the ideology lost its grip on the popular imagination, the states that it built suffocated whole societies and pushed numerous young people into the arms of Islamic extremists. Destroy those states, free Arab society, and bring democracy to the Middle East, the logic went, and extremism will begin to evaporate while the Arab-Israeli conflict grows more tractable. How unsound this reasoning was became apparent very quickly in 2011.

What is true, what must be openly discussed, is that it was largely in response to our dependence on the Middle East for oil and our concern for Israel’s security that we became so focused on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the specter of al-Qaeda, and the rise of a nuclear Iran as a threat. The 9/11 attacks lent new urgency to our worries in these areas, but the roots of concern run deeper, and the lingering fear continues to preoccupy us even after the killing of bin Laden, the visible weakening of al-Qaeda, and the Arab world’s tentative turn to democracy.

The Obama administration may talk of pivoting to Asia—and, by implication, washing our hands of the Middle East—but that goal will likely run up against the reality of challenges that oil, Israel, and terrorism and the host of issues tied to them will put before us. Moving on from the Middle East was an aspiration divorced from hard facts facing American foreign policy. Continued worry over terrorism is still a consuming concern that belies our proclaimed desire to deploy our resources elsewhere in the world.

Let us consider oil, our most obvious reason for being in the Middle East. By the end of the First World War, Great Britain had one overriding interest in the Middle East, and that was oil. The Royal Navy’s switch from coal to oil made the precious liquid a strategic commodity of the first rank. Moreover, the British government stood to benefit from the taxes that British oil companies would pay into London’s exchequer.
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Americans inherited this concern for oil along with management of
the region when the British moment in the Middle East ended with the Suez Crisis in 1956. During the Cold War, America jealously guarded the Persian Gulf against Soviet designs. But in time, America also came to worry about Arab threats to cut off oil. One such disruption in 1973, led by Saudi Arabia to punish America for its support of Israel, wreaked havoc on the American economy. Before long, the price of oil had quadrupled as oil-producing countries banded together as OPEC to get a better deal for their precious export.
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The “oil shock” of the 1970s jolted America into action. Since then, we have coddled dictators, built military bases, gone to war, and generally kept deepening our engagement in the Middle East—all to secure oil. The costs of this strategy have been anti-Americanism, war, and terrorism. The columnist and author Thomas Friedman, a longtime observer of the region, thinks that our problems in the Middle East would go away if we ended our dependence on oil—if we kicked the habit and “went green.” For some time now, he has rallied the American Left to embrace alternative energies as the remedy to our Middle East headaches—“go green and end the green menace,” one might call this. Every time someone asks Saudi oil minister Ali Al-Naimi about green energy making oil obsolete, he simply laughs and says, “It’s not going to happen.” Getting off oil is a far-fetched, long-run answer to an immediate strategic problem.

The Right’s solution is to find more oil at home, a sentiment most clearly captured by the battle cry “Drill, baby, drill!” And this might well work. According to a 2011 report from the Congressional Research Service, the sum of all fossil-fuel reserves plus technically recoverable but undiscovered oil and natural gas in the United States and Canada nearly equals the sum of such resources found in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, and Qatar put together.
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If you add Mexico, then North America’s total exceeds that of these Middle Eastern oil and gas producers. The past decade has seen the rapid expansion of oil and natural gas production via methods such as slant drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in U.S. shale deposits, including the Bakken Formation beneath North Dakota and Montana and the Marcellus Formation that extends from a corner of Tennessee in the south as far north as western New York State and as far east as New Jersey. Buoyed by
such finds (some say the most significant since the discovery of the vast East Texas Oil Field in 1930), America could be on the road to becoming energy self-sufficient. By as soon as 2020, the United States could be the world’s leading producer of oil and natural gas. There is also a great deal more oil and gas stored in Canada’s Alberta tar sands and the outer continental shelf than anyone had realized—the problem is that the environmental costs of getting to it are as yet not fully known.