The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (35 page)

And Hejaz is not alone. Asir (on the border with Yemen) and Ha’il (in the heart of the kingdom) also claim a proud heritage in defiance of Najdi cultural hegemony. Could a Shia campaign for autonomy in matters of religious observance encourage the long-murmuring, never-stilled voice of Hejazi nationalism to make itself heard more loudly? The House of Saud created a single country, but its roots may be shallower than we think. Shias cannot break away from Saudi Arabia, but they might be able to break it up.

This is why Saudi Arabia fears Iran and its nuclear ambitions. It is not that a nuclear Iran would invade Saudi Arabia as Saddam overran Kuwait in 1990. Nor is it a question of Iran twisting Saudi Arabia’s arm on oil prices or the Palestinian issue. Saudi Arabia is afraid, rather, that a bullish Iran armed with nuclear weapons will ask for the broadcasting of Shia prayer calls in Mecca, and then for a Shia mosque there. Next, Iran might seek to build a massive shrine and pilgrimage destination dedicated to certain Shia saints who are buried in Medina. The first Saudi king razed the cemetery where they lie into rubble decades ago, but if it were to be rebuilt, Shia pilgrims would doubtless return there in huge numbers, much as they did when the fall of Saddam restored access to the holy cities of Iraq. The Saudi rulers and their clerical allies find such a prospect deeply frightening and disconcerting: it would threaten the end of Wahhabism. Saudis fear not so much Iran, but the pluralism that Iran has promised to force on their country if ever the chance arises—a pluralism that would speak loudly to the multitude of Saudi citizens whose ethnic and sectarian aspirations do not line up with the Saudi-Wahhabi ideology of state.

In Saudi Arabia, the pillars of American policy in the region rest on quicksand. When Saudi Arabian troops arrived in Bahrain to help
the monarchy there suppress its pro-democracy opposition—claiming that it was putting down an Iranian-backed Shia power grab—Iranian parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani observed that “Saudi Arabia has now moved all its pawns, and its queen is exposed.”
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Saudi Arabia has embarked on an audacious foreign policy offensive to contain and defeat the Arab Spring across the Arab world and snuff out Iranian influence in the region. Saudis are deeply involved in the politics of Arab countries from Morocco to Yemen, spending billions to decide political outcomes. They are involved in the internal struggles of Sunni regimes with their Shia populations in Yemen (against the Shia tribal Hooti rebellion), Bahrain, Syria, and Lebanon, and against Iran at the international level. This offensive is stretching Saudi Arabia’s military, diplomatic, and economic capacity, an overreach that could indeed expose the kingdom’s “queen.”

The specter of cataclysmic change demands continued engagement from America. Gone are the days when the United States could easily safeguard its interests by relying on a handful of pliant dictators. America is inclined to hold on to that old and tired strategy even as it claims to be welcoming the winds of change sweeping across the region. But the ground is shifting in the Middle East. Power is moving from rulers to the masses, from the secular elite to Islamist challengers, and from the Arab heartland to the Persian Gulf (Iran’s lair) and Turkey. These transitions will be fraught with conflict that will cause instability and put American interests at risk. The least good option is to double down on the monarchies of the Persian Gulf and in so doing take sides in the sectarian power struggle driving the region’s conflicts. It is better that American policy rely on a broader set of countries, and then not just on their rulers but also their people. That nimbleness is all the more important as the complexities of the Middle East will also become fodder for the approaching American rivalry with China.

In the spring of 2012, I asked a senior member of President Obama’s cabinet, who had just returned from high-level talks in China, where he thought the Chinese leadership was on the host of issues that worried America: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, the Arab Spring. “We don’t know,” he said. “What most worries us is that we don’t know what they want, and what they are afraid of.”

Others wonder the same about us. They don’t know what we are thinking and where we are heading. We have abandoned Iraq and Afghanistan to instability, pushed Pakistan away, destabilized but not “denuclearized” Iran, let down countries of the Arab Spring, and still managed to also alienate authoritarian allies in the Persian Gulf. We have done all that and then declared our intention to shrink our presence in the Middle East, because we don’t see an upside to investing in the region’s future. We think the future lies in the east, and that the great game of global power politics will be against China in the Asia-Pacific.

President Obama’s “pivot to Asia” policy is at its core a policy of containing China—it is a “forward-deployed diplomacy to face China in its backyard.”
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Hillary Clinton used the term “pivot” first, in an article in
Foreign Policy
magazine, to argue the administration’s case that America ought to pay less attention to the Middle East and more attention to Asia.
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She wrote that China (and not the Middle East) is the real strategic challenge facing America. What is needed, she went on, is a “reset” of global strategy in which Washington deemphasizes the Middle East and camps at China’s doorstep to make sure that Beijing’s influence remains limited. “The future of the United States is intimately intertwined with
the future of the Asia-Pacific,” she declared.
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Global politics “will be decided in Asia,” went the subhead, “not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action.”
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But it would be folly for America to build its new strategy thinking that the Middle East has nothing to do with China. Folly to think that we can abandon one to contend with the other, or that what happens in the wake of our departure from the Middle East will stay in the Middle East. The Middle East remains the single most important region of the world—not because it is rich in energy, or fraught with instability and pregnant with security threats, but because it is where the great power rivalry with China will play out and where its outcome will be decided. The various strands of our Middle East policy—in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with regard to Iran and the Arab Spring—already intersect with our broader interests with regard to China. In China’s eyes, the region is growing in importance—and in the coming decades it will matter more to Beijing than Africa or Latin America. If we could tell what the Chinese were thinking, or what they were afraid of, we would see the Middle East right at the heart of it. A retreat from the Middle East will not free us to deal with China; it will constrain us in managing that competition.

We not only have to remain fully engaged with the Middle East, we have to increase our economic and diplomatic footprint there to match our show of military force.

I am hardly the first to see rising China as a global challenge—the most significant strategic challenge facing the United States today.
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Economically, China accounts for growing shares of global output and consumption and has a voracious appetite for commodities that it feeds via trade and investment links reaching deep into every continent. China has risen by participating in the global economy, but that interdependence does not necessarily mean that China’s rise will be peaceful or that its coexistence with the United States at the helm of the global order will be harmonious.
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China is building up its military; its navy has extended its reach as far as the Gulf of Aden (to suppress Somali pirates) and the shores of Libya (to evacuate Chinese citizens endangered by the fighting there). Chinese warships now routinely make port calls in the Middle East.
Building bases on a series of islands along its own periphery and extending deep into the Indian Ocean will give China the necessary foundation for building a dominant naval position in some of the world’s most strategic waters. China is expanding its second-strike nuclear capability, improving the effectiveness of its anti-ship missiles, and building its capabilities in new domains such as cyberspace and outer space.
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The goal is to replace America as Asia’s preeminent power and to fold all of East Asia into a Chinese sphere of influence. Some may dismiss such fears as exaggerated, but there is no doubting that China’s ambitions are increasingly running up against American interests. Hillary Clinton confirmed this trend when she told an audience in Senegal that the continent’s infatuation with China was misplaced. Africa should not look to China, but to “a model of sustainable partnership that adds value, rather than extracts it.” Unlike China, she continued, “America will stand up for democracy and universal human rights even when it might be easier to look the other way and keep the resources flowing.”
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China was stung by that volley and joined the rhetorical battle, highlighting the growing competition for influence and access between two powers across the globe.

The rise of China as an economic and military powerhouse is changing the global balance of power and challenging the United States with a return to a bipolar world.
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The boundary lines will not be as stark as during the Cold War; there are fewer ideological differences, no clear sense of “us and them” jealously guarded by threat of war and nuclear annihilation. But we are inching our way to something similar—a global rivalry that although not ideological is real and is still about global power.

America’s interest lies in an open international economic system—built on the principle of free trade and open exchange of goods, services, and money. Our great fear is that China sees its interests in exactly the opposite way: carving out various regions of the world into spheres of influence from which America would be excluded.
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We would like to avoid this outcome by encouraging China to fully embrace the rules and institutions that govern global economics and international politics—in short, the normative global order that we helped create and have enforced for more than sixty years, and which China had no part in creating. We hope China will enter into more multilateral treaties, participate in more
multilateral organizations, embrace shared global values, and live by them at home and abroad. We would like China to act as a partner with the United States in addressing global issues. But this may all be too much to ask, at least in the short run. And if China’s growth is going to challenge international norms then it is bound to run up against the global order, which means conflict with the United States. Conflict is not in our interest, but we are preparing for it. The Middle East will have much to do with whether that will come to pass.

We have been joined at the hip with China when it comes to economic concerns; trade, investment, and the financing of U.S. debts with Chinese surpluses have interwoven the U.S. and Chinese economies in intricate ways.
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We have sought its support in tackling thorny issues from Libya to Iran to Pakistan. But when it comes to global affairs we see a clear line separating our interests from those of China. The Chinese see us as a challenge too—they are the rising power and we the established one; they are elbowing their way to the top and we do not want to make room.

From Beijing’s perspective, American reassurances to the contrary notwithstanding,
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“pivoting to Asia” sounds a lot like “containing China.”
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It looks to them like Obama has settled the long-running debate in America over whether to “engage” or “contain” China in favor of the latter. America has sharpened its rhetoric on China and declared its intention to confront its ambitions in Asia and Africa. America’s vision is “that we continue to be what we have been now for seven decades: the pivotal military power in the Asia-Pacific region, which has provided peace and stability.” The emphasis on “military” is what worries China.
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We are forging new military ties with India, Vietnam, and the Philippines; wooing Myanmar and Mongolia; and pursuing a free-trade pact (the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP for short) with several Asian countries to link them closely with America. Beijing sees all these efforts as components of a strategy to put China in a cage. “China’s greatest strategic fear,” writes Henry Kissinger, “is that an outside power or powers will establish military deployments around China’s periphery capable of encroaching on China’s territory and meddling in its domestic institutions. When China deemed that it faced such a threat in the past, it went to war.… in Korea in 1950, against India
in 1962, along the northern border with the Soviet Union in 1969, and against Vietnam in 1979.”
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China is not thinking of war with America, but its instinct is to build its capability to resist American pressure and push back against American encirclement, and that could be a slippery slope to confrontation.

Signs of China’s greater influence are all around for American leaders to see. As one high administration official noted, “We go to country after country through airports built by China, and meet [those countries’] leaders in new buildings paid for by China.” In Pakistan, Holbrooke was told time and again, “We can point to the bridge that China built here; we cannot point to a bridge that you have built.” Yet America’s attention has turned to China’s regional backyard. Recent sage advice on how to handle China from Kissinger as well as Zbigniew Brzezinski has focused on maintaining the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific—popularly viewed as the arc from the Sea of Japan to the Straits of Malacca.
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