Authors: Henry Kissinger
Several Arab states have declared their willingness to establish diplomatic relations with Israel if it returns to the 1967 borders—a cease-fire line in a war that ended half a century ago. But the real issue is what diplomatic relations imply in terms of concrete actions. Will diplomatic recognition of Israel bring an end to the media, governmental, and educational campaign in Arab countries that presents Israel as an illegitimate, imperialist, almost criminal interloper in the region? What Arab government, wracked by pressures ignited in the Arab Spring, will be willing and able to publicly endorse and guarantee a peace that accepts Israel’s existence by a precise set of operational commitments? That, rather than the label given to the State of Israel, will determine the prospects of peace.
The conflict of two concepts of world order is embedded in the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Israel is by definition a Westphalian state, founded as such in 1947; the United States, its principal ally, has been
a steward and key defender of the Westphalian international order. But the core countries and factions in the Middle East view international order to a greater or lesser degree through an Islamic consciousness. Israel and its neighbors have differences inseparable from geography and history: access to water, resources, specific arrangements for security, refugees. In other regions, comparable challenges are generally solved by diplomacy. In that sense, the issue comes down to the possibility of coexistence between two concepts of world order, through two states—Israel and Palestine—in the relatively narrow space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Since every square mile is invested by both sides with profound significance, success may in turn require testing whether some interim arrangements can be devised that, at a minimum, enhance the possibility of a practical coexistence in which part of the West Bank is granted the attributes of sovereignty pending a final agreement.
As these negotiations have been pursued, the political and philosophical evolution of the Middle East has produced in the Western world a study in contradictions. The United States has had close associations with parties along the entire spectrum of Middle East options: an alliance with Israel, an association with Egypt, a partnership with Saudi Arabia. A regional order evolves when the principal parties take congruent approaches on issues that affect them. That degree of coherence has proved elusive in the Middle East. The principal parties differ with respect to three major issues: domestic evolution; the political future of the Palestinian Arabs; and the future of the Iranian military nuclear program. Some parties that do agree on objectives are not in a position to avow it. For example, Saudi Arabia and Israel share the same general objective with respect to Iran: to prevent the emergence of an Iranian military nuclear capability and to contain it if it becomes unavoidable. But their perception of legitimacy—and Saudi sensitivity to an Arab consensus—inhibit the promulgation of such a view or even very explicit articulation of it. This is why too much of the region
remains torn between fear of jihad and fear of dealing with some of its causes.
The consequences of the religious and political conflict described in this chapter present themselves as seemingly distinct issues. In fact, they represent an underlying quest for a new definition of political and international legitimacy.
With some historical irony, among the Western democracies’ most important allies through all of these upheavals has been a country whose internal practices diverge almost completely from theirs—the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has been a partner, at times quietly but decisively behind the scenes, in most of the major regional security endeavors since World War II, when it aligned itself with the Allies. It has been an association demonstrating the special character of the Westphalian state system, which has permitted such distinct societies to cooperate on shared aims through formal mechanisms, generally to their significant mutual benefit. Conversely, its strains have touched on some of the main challenges of the search for contemporary world order.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a traditional Arab-Islamic realm: both a tribal monarchy and an Islamic theocracy. Two leading families, united in mutual support since the eighteenth century, form the core of its governance. The political hierarchy is headed by a monarch of the Al Saud family, who serves as the head of a complex network of tribal relationships based on ancient ties of mutual loyalty and obligation and controls the kingdom’s internal and foreign affairs. The religious hierarchy is headed by the Grand Mufti and the Council of Senior Scholars, drawn largely from the Aal al-Shaykh family. The King endeavors to bridge the gap between these two branches of power by fulfilling the role of “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”
(Mecca and Medina), reminiscent of the Holy Roman Emperor as “Fidei defensor.”
Zeal and purity of religious expression are embedded in the Saudi historical experience. Three times in as many centuries (in the 1740s, the 1820s, and the early twentieth century) the Saudi state has been founded or reunified by the same two leading families, in each case affirming their commitment to govern Islam’s birthplace and holiest shrines by upholding the most austere interpretation of the religion’s principles. In each case, Saudi armies fanned out to unify the deserts and mountains of the peninsula in waves of conquest strikingly similar to the original sacred exaltation and holy war that produced the first Islamic state, and in the same territory. Religious absolutism, military daring, and shrewd modern statesmanship have produced the kingdom at the heart of the Muslim world and central to its fate.
What is today Saudi Arabia emerged from Turkish rule after World War I, when Ibn Saud reunified the various feudal principalities scattered across the Arabian Peninsula and held them together by patriarchal allegiance and religious devotion. The royal family has since faced daunting tasks. It governs tribes living in the traditional nomadism and fiercely loyal to the crown, as well as urban concentrations approaching—in some cases surpassing—those of Western metropoles, though placed like mirages across otherwise barren plateaus. An emerging middle class exists in the context of an age-old, semifeudal sense of reciprocal obligation. Within the limits of an extremely conservative political culture, the ruling princes have combined a monarchy with a system of consensus by which the far-flung members of the extended royal family have some share in decisions, and ordinary citizens have gradually been granted a degree of participation in public life.
Millions of foreign workers—Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Pakistanis, and Yemenis—combine in a mosaic held together by the bond of Islam and respect for traditional authority.
Every year several million Muslim travelers from across the world arrive in Saudi Arabia simultaneously to perform the hajj—a pilgrimage to Mecca to perform rites sanctified by the Prophet Muhammad in his own lifetime. This affirmation of faith, obligatory for able-bodied believers to perform at least once in their life, confers on Saudi Arabia a unique religious significance as well as an annual logistical challenge undertaken by no other state. Meanwhile, the discovery of vast oil reserves has made Saudi Arabia wealthy almost without parallel in the region, generating an implicit challenge to the security of a country with a sparse population, no natural land borders, and a politically detached Shia minority living in one of its key oil-producing regions.
Saudi rulers live with the awareness that the covetousness of their neighbors might translate itself into attempted conquest—or, in an era of revolution, potential sponsorship of political or sectarian agitation. Conscious of the fate of nearby nations, they are inevitably ambivalent about economic and social modernization—knowing that an absence of reform may alienate their youthful population, while reform undertaken too rapidly may develop its own momentum and ultimately endanger the cohesion of a country that has known only conservative monarchy. The dynasty has tried to lead the process of social and economic change—within the pattern of its society—precisely in order to control its pace and content. This tactic has allowed the Al Saud to produce just enough change to prevent the accumulation of potentially explosive social tensions while avoiding the destabilizing effects of overly rapid change.
Saudi foreign policy, for most of the existence of the modern Saudi state, has been characterized by a caution that has elevated indirectness into a special art form. For if the kingdom pursued a very forward policy, if it made itself the focal point of all disputes, it would be subjected to entreaties, threats, and blandishments by far more powerful countries, the cumulative impact of which could endanger either independence or coherence. Instead, its authorities achieved security
and authority by remoteness; even in the midst of crises—sometimes while carrying out bold changes of course that would reverberate globally—they were almost invariably publicly withdrawn and detached. Saudi Arabia has obscured its vulnerability by opaqueness, masking uncertainty about the motivations of outsiders by a remoteness equally impervious to eloquence and to threats.
The kingdom maneuvered to keep itself out of the forefront of confrontation even when its resources sustained it, as was the case in the oil embargo in 1973, as well as the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan of 1979–89. It facilitated the peace process in the Middle East but left the actual negotiations to others. In this manner, the kingdom has navigated among the fixed poles of friendship for the United States, Arab loyalty, a puritanical interpretation of Islam, and consciousness of internal and external danger. In an age of jihad, revolutionary upheavals, and a perceived American regional withdrawal, some of the obliqueness has been set aside in favor of a more direct approach, making its hostility and fear of Shiite Iran explicit.
No state in the Middle East has been more torn by the Islamist upheaval and the rise of revolutionary Iran than Saudi Arabia, divided between its formal allegiance to the Westphalian concepts that underpin its security and international recognition as a legitimate sovereign state, the religious purism that informs its history, and the appeals of radical Islamism that impair its domestic cohesion (and indeed threatened the kingdom’s survival during the seizure of the Grand Mosque of Mecca by fanatic Salafis in 1979).
In 1989, one of the kingdom’s disaffected sons, Osama bin Laden, returned from the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and proclaimed a new struggle. Tracking Qutb’s script, he and his followers founded a vanguard organization, al-Qaeda (the Base), from which to mount an omnidirectional jihad. Its “near” targets were the Saudi government and its regional partner states; its “far” enemy was the United States, which al-Qaeda reviled for supporting non-sharia-based state
governments in the Middle East and for supposedly defiling Islam by
deploying military personnel to Saudi Arabia
during the 1990–91 Gulf War. In bin Laden’s analysis, the struggle between the true faith and the infidel world was existential and already well under way. World injustice had reached a point where peaceful methods were useless; the required tactic would be assassination and terrorism, which would strike fear into al-Qaeda’s enemies both near and far and sap their will to resist.
Al-Qaeda’s ambitious campaign began with attacks on American and allied facilities in the Middle East and Africa. A 1993 attack on the World Trade Center displayed the organization’s global ambitions. On September 11, 2001, the offensive reached its apogee by striking New York, the hub of the world financial system, and Washington, the political hub of American power. The deadliest terrorist attack yet experienced, the 9/11 assault killed 2,977 within minutes, nearly all civilians; thousands of others were injured in the attacks or suffered severe health complications.
Osama bin Laden had preceded the attack
with a proclamation of al-Qaeda’s aims: The West and its influence were to be expelled from the Middle East. Governments in cooperative partnership with America were to be overthrown and their political structures—derided as illegitimate “paper statelets” formed for the convenience of Western powers—dissolved. A new Islamic caliphate would take their place, restoring Islam to its seventh-century glory. A war of world orders was declared.
The battlefield of that conflict ran through the heart of Saudi Arabia, which eventually—after al-Qaeda mounted a failed attempt to overthrow the Al Saud dynasty in 2003—became one of the organization’s fiercest opponents. The attempt to find security within both the Westphalian and the Islamist orders worked for a time. Yet the great strategic error of the Saudi dynasty was to suppose, from roughly the 1960s until 2003, that it could support and even manipulate radical Islamism abroad without threatening its own position at home. The
outbreak of a serious, sustained al-Qaeda insurgency in the kingdom in 2003 revealed the fatal flaw in this strategy, which the dynasty jettisoned in favor of an effective counterinsurgency campaign led by a prince of the younger generation, Prince Muhammad bin Nayif, now Saudi Interior Minister. Even so, the dynasty was at risk of being overthrown. With the surge of jihadist currents in Iraq and Syria, the acumen displayed in this campaign may again be tested.
Saudi Arabia has adopted a course as complex as the challenges facing it. The royal family has judged Saudi security and national interests to lie with constructive relations with the West and participation in the global economy. Yet as the birthplace of Islam and protector of Islam’s holiest places, Saudi Arabia cannot afford deviation from Islamic orthodoxy. It has attempted to co-opt radically resurgent Islamist universalism by a tenuous amalgam of modern statehood and Westphalian international relations grafted onto the practice of Wahhabism, perhaps the most fundamentalist version of the faith, and of subsidizing it internationally. The outcome has at times been internally contradictory. Diplomatically Saudi Arabia has largely aligned itself with the United States while spiritually propagating a form of Islam at odds with modernity and implying a clash with the non-Muslim world. By financing madrassas (religious schools) preaching the austere Wahhabist creed throughout the world, the Saudis have not only carried out their Muslim duties but also taken a defensive measure by making its advocates act as missionaries abroad rather than within the kingdom. The project has had the unintended consequence of nurturing a jihadist fervor that would eventually menace the Saudi state itself and its allies.