Authors: Henry Kissinger
Western tradition requires support for democratic institutions and free elections. No American president who ignores this ingrained aspect of the American moral enterprise can count on the sustained support of the American people. But applied on behalf of parties who identify democracy with a plebiscite on the implementation of religious domination that they then treat as irrevocable, the advocacy of elections may result in only one democratic exercise of them. As a military regime has again been established in Cairo, it reproduces one more time for the United States the as yet unsolved debate between security interests and the importance of promoting humane and legitimate governance. And it appears also as a question of timing: To what extent should security interests be risked for the outcome of a theoretical evolution? Both elements are important. Neglecting a democratic future—assuming we know how to shape its direction—involves long-term risks. Neglecting the present by ignoring the security element risks immediate catastrophe. The difference between traditionalists and activists hinges on that distinction. The statesman has to balance it each time the issue arises. Events can occur whose consequences—such as genocide—are so horrendous that they tilt the scale toward intervention beyond considerations of strategy. But as a
general rule, the most sustainable course will involve a blend of the realism and idealism too often held out in the American debate as incompatible opposites.
The Syrian revolution at its beginning appeared like a replay of the Egyptian one at Tahrir Square. But while the Egyptian upheaval unified the underlying forces, in Syria age-old tensions broke out to reawaken the millennial conflict between Shia and Sunni. Given the demographic complexity of Syria, the civil war drew in additional ethnic or religious groups, none of which, based on historical experience, was prepared to entrust its fate to the decisions of the others. Outside powers entered the conflict; atrocities proliferated as survivors sheltered in ethnic and sectarian enclaves.
In the American public debate, the uprising against Bashar al-Assad was dealt with by analogy to the removal of Mubarak and described as a struggle for democracy. Its culmination was expected to be the removal of Assad’s government and its replacement with a democratic, inclusive coalition government. President Obama articulated this position in August 2011, when he publicly called on Assad to “step aside” so that the Syrian people could vindicate their universal rights:
The future of Syria
must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people. We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.
The statement was expected to mobilize domestic opposition to Assad and lead to international support for his removal.
This is why the United States pressed for a “political solution”
through the United Nations predicated on removing Assad from power and establishing a coalition government. Consternation resulted when other veto-wielding members of the Security Council declined to endorse either this step or military measures, and when the armed opposition that ultimately appeared inside Syria had few elements that could be described as democratic, much less moderate.
By then the conflict had gone beyond the issue of Assad. For the main actors, the issues were substantially different from the focus of the American debate. The principal Syrian and regional players saw the war as not about democracy but about prevailing. They were interested in democracy only if it installed their own group; none favored a system that did not guarantee its own party’s control of the political system. A war conducted solely to enforce human rights norms and without concern for the geostrategic or georeligious outcome was inconceivable to the overwhelming majority of the contestants. The conflict, as they perceived it, was not between a dictator and the forces of democracy but between Syria’s contending sects and their regional backers. The war, in this view, would decide which of Syria’s major sects would succeed in dominating the others and controlling what remained of the Syrian state. Regional powers poured arms, money, and logistical support into Syria on behalf of their preferred sectarian candidates: Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states for the Sunni groups; Iran supporting Assad via Hezbollah. As the combat approached a stalemate, it turned to increasingly radical groups and tactics, fighting a war of encompassing brutality, oblivious on all sides to human rights.
The contest, meanwhile, had begun to redraw the political configuration of Syria, perhaps of the region. The Syrian Kurds created an autonomous unit along the Turkish border that may in time merge with the Kurdish autonomous unit in Iraq. The Druze and Christian communities, fearing a repetition of the conduct of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt toward its minorities, have been reluctant to embrace regime change in Syria or have seceded into autonomous
communities. The jihadist ISIL set out to build a caliphate in territory seized from Syria and western Iraq, where Damascus and Baghdad proved no longer able to impose their writ.
The main parties thought themselves
in a battle for survival or, in the view of some jihadist forces, a conflict presaging the apocalypse. When the United States declined to tip the balance, they judged that it either had an ulterior motive that it was skillfully concealing—perhaps an ultimate deal with Iran—or was not attuned to the imperatives of the Middle East balance of power. This disagreement culminated in 2013 when Saudi Arabia refused a rotating seat on the UN Security Council—explaining that because the traditional arbiters of order had failed to act, it would pursue its own methods.
As America called on the world to honor aspirations to democracy and enforce the international legal ban on chemical weapons, other great powers such as Russia and China resisted by invoking the Westphalian principle of noninterference. They had viewed the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Bahrain, and Syria principally through the lens of their own regional stability and the attitudes of their own restive Muslim populations. Aware that the most skilled and dedicated Sunni fighters were avowed jihadists in league with al-Qaeda (or, in the case of ISIL, disowned by it for tactics that even al-Qaeda considered too extreme), they were wary of an outright victory by Assad’s opponents. China suggested it had no particular stake in the outcome in Syria, except that it be determined by “the Syrian people” and not foreign forces. Russia, a formal ally of Syria, was interested in the continuance of the Assad government and to some extent in Syria’s survival as a unitary state. With an international consensus lacking and the Syrian opposition fractured, an uprising begun on behalf of democratic values degenerated into one of the major humanitarian disasters of the young twenty-first century and into an imploding regional order.
A working regional or international security system might have
averted, or at least contained, the catastrophe. But the perceptions of national interest proved to be too different, and the costs of stabilization too daunting. Massive outside intervention at an early stage might have squelched the contending forces but would have required a long-term, substantial military presence to be sustained. In the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, this was not feasible for the United States, at least not alone. An Iraqi political consensus might have halted the conflict at the Syrian border, but the sectarian impulses of the Baghdad government and its regional affiliates were in the way. Alternatively, the international community could have imposed an arms embargo on Syria and the jihadist militias. That was made impossible by the incompatible aims of the permanent members of the Security Council. If order cannot be achieved by consensus or imposed by force, it will be wrought, at disastrous and dehumanizing cost, from the experience of chaos.
Amidst all these upheavals in the Middle East, a peace process has been going on—sometimes fitfully, occasionally intensely—to bring about an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, which for decades has resulted in an explosive standoff. Four conventional wars and numerous unconventional military engagements have taken place; every Islamist and jihadist group invokes the conflict as a call to arms. Israel’s existence and military prowess have been felt throughout the Arab world as a humiliation. The doctrinal commitment never to give up territory has, for some, turned coexistence with Israel from an acceptance of reality into a denial of faith.
Few topics have inspired more passion than how to reconcile Israel’s quest for security and identity, the Palestinians’ aspirations toward self-governance, and the neighboring Arab governments’ search for a policy compatible with their perception of their historic and religious
imperatives. The parties involved have traveled an anguished road—from rejection and war to halting acceptance of coexistence, mostly on the basis of armistices—toward an uncertain future. Few international issues have occupied such intense concern in the United States or commanded so much of the attention of American presidents.
A series of issues are involved, each having developed its own extensive literature. The parties have elaborated them in decades of fitful negotiations. These pages deal with only one aspect of them: the conflicting concepts of peaceful order expressed by the negotiators.
Two generations of Arabs have been raised on the conviction that the State of Israel is an illegitimate usurper of Muslim patrimony. In 1947, the Arab countries rejected a UN plan for a partition of the British mandate in Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states; they believed themselves in a position to triumph militarily and claim the entire territory. Failure of the attempt to extinguish the newly declared State of Israel did not lead to a political settlement and the opening of state-to-state relations, as happened in most other postcolonial conflicts in Asia and Africa. Instead, it ushered in a protracted period of political rejection and reluctant armistice agreement against the background of radical groups seeking to force Israel into submission through terrorist campaigns.
Great leaders have attempted to transcend the conceptual aspect of the conflict by negotiating for peace based on Westphalian principles—that is, between peoples organized as sovereign states, each driven by a realistic assessment of its national interests and capabilities, not absolutes of religious imperatives. Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt dared to look beyond this confrontation and make peace with Israel on the basis of Egypt’s national interests in 1979; he paid for his statesmanship with his life, assassinated two years later by radicalized Islamists in the Egyptian military. The same fate befell Yitzhak Rabin, the first Israeli Prime Minister to sign an agreement with the Palestine
Liberation Organization, assassinated by a radical Israeli student fourteen years after Sadat’s death.
Within Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian territories—especially in Gaza—considerable military and political power is now held by radical Islamists—Hezbollah and Hamas—proclaiming jihad as a religious duty to end what is usually denounced as the “Zionist occupation.” The ayatollahs’ regime in Iran regularly challenges the very existence of Israel; its erstwhile President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for its extirpation.
At least three viewpoints are identifiable in Arab attitudes: a small, dedicated, but not very vocal group accepting genuine coexistence with Israel and prepared to work for it; a much larger group seeking to destroy Israel by permanent confrontation; and those willing to negotiate with Israel but justifying negotiations, at least domestically, in part as a means to overcome the Jewish state in stages.
Israel, with a small population (compared with its neighbors) and territory and a width of just 9.3 miles at its narrowest point and some sixty miles at its widest, has hesitated to cede territory, particularly in areas adjoining major population centers, on behalf of what may turn into a revocable document. Its negotiating positions therefore tend to be legalistic, elaborating definitions of security and political assurances that have a combination of theoretical sweep and occasionally grating detail, with a tendency to reinforce the very passions a peace process is designed to overcome.
In the Arab world, the Palestinian issue has lost some of its urgency, though not its importance. The key participants of the peace process have diverted energies and reflection to dealing with the emergence of a possibly nuclear Iran and its regional proxies. This affects the peace process in two ways: in the diplomatic role major countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia can play in shaping the peace process; and, even more important, in their ability to act as guarantors of a
resulting agreement. The Palestinian leaders cannot by themselves sustain the result of the peace process unless it is endorsed not just in the toleration but in the active support of an agreement by other regional governments. At this writing, the major Arab states are either torn by civil war or preoccupied with the Sunni-Shia conflict and an increasingly powerful Iran. Nevertheless, the Palestinian issue will have to be faced sooner or later as an essential element of regional and, ultimately, world order.
Some Arab leaders have proposed to make an Arab-Israeli peace that reconciles Israel’s security concerns with Arab emotions by conceding the State of Israel as a reality without formally granting it legitimate existence in the Islamic Middle East. Israel’s basic demand is for binding assurance that peace will involve a kind of moral and legal recognition translated into concrete acts. Thus Israel, going beyond Westphalian practices, demands to be certified as a Jewish state, an attribute difficult for most Muslims to accept in a formal sense, for it implies a religious as well as a territorial endorsement.