The Middle East In Global Perspective

Judith Kipper, Harold Saunders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367293888
• eBook ISBN: 9781000303353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Well before events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe dramatized the rapidity with which a new political world is evolving and before the Gulf War sharpened the focus on the Middle East agenda, scholars and policymakers alike were searching for different concepts for addressing the intractable problems facing the Middle East. Even though the re

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Introduction: The United States, the Middle East, and Our Changing World

Judith Kipper and Harold H. Saunders

Our dramatically changing world demands new perspectives to bring our experience into focus, new vocabulary for describing what shapes that experience, and new political tools for changing it creatively and peacefully. The new century before us demands a new way of thinking about how the world works and how peoples and nations relate. In few places is that need greater or more urgent than in the Middle East following the Gulf crisis and war of 1990-1991.

The concepts developed over almost five centuries to explain a world of nation-states amassing military and economic power to pursue objectively defined national interests do not adequately explain how peoples and nations act today. The instruments of force, economic pressure, diplomacy, negotiation, and propaganda that leaders have used to initiate and direct change do not reliably produce expected results. Neither these familiar concepts nor the potential of those instruments seems to inspire leaders today to guide change with imagination and direction. It may one day be said that the Gulf war was among the last wars of a traditional era, not among the first of the crises handled in the perspective that will have to govern as the nuclear age matures beyond the East-West rivalry that has begun fading away.

Nowhere have events taught this lesson more sharply than in the Middle East. The lesson is a global one, but focusing on this one area makes vivid the need for new approaches and the price of continuing to live with old perspectives and stalemates. Until we develop new perspectives, we have little chance of dealing creatively with these intractable problems. Yet in this area where more than half the inhabitants are still in their formative years, an unusual opportunity exists to help a new generation find more constructive ways to live. Just as the period following the 1973 war became a period of political change—sometimes creative, sometimes destructive—the years following the Gulf crisis and war could bring historic changes to the region. How leaders and people alike interpret what they are experiencing will determine in large part how they direct the course of change.

This book addresses the compelling need to redefine the concepts we use to bring our rapidly changing world into focus so that we may act more effectively, peacefully, and creatively in it. The book is rooted in the experiences of the Arab-Israeli peace process after the 1973 war and written against the background of a fading cold war and dramatic global change. It is presented in the wake of another war in the Middle East. It reflects the concepts and vocabulary we were learning to use in the Arab-Israeli arena, but it offers insights for coping with the aftermath of conflict and the changes that will follow in the Gulf. It is an effort to conceptualize experience, not to recount it. It is intended both to transcend particular moments and to offer a wider framework for working effectively within them.

Refocusing our thinking about how nations relate is not an abstract theoretical exercise—whether in the Middle East or on the global stage. How people and governments perceive what they do heavily influences how they do it. Our assumptions about how our world works could determine whether nuclear, chemical, or biological war destroys us or peace flourishes. They could determine whether most of the world's people continue to live in grinding poverty or share in economic and technological change. They could determine whether conflicts such as those in the Middle East give way to peaceful political processes or to fanatical violence. They could determine whether great powers pursue conflicting interests in the developing world or work in complementary ways with people there for peaceful development. This discussion is not about theories and ideologies but about how leaders will use the instruments of peacemaking and economic progress or destruction in a nuclear and still poverty-plagued world. A shift in how leaders and publics think about international relationships could focus attention on a broad array of political—and therefore peaceful—instruments that have been too often neglected but may now have become more usable.

This rethinking reflects the beginnings of what scholars have called a paradigm shift. Clearly, sovereign states and military or economic power remain central on the world scene. The Gulf war left us in no doubt of that. This rethinking does not suggest otherwise. It does suggest that we need to understand familiar concepts such as states and power in new ways. Most of us do not yet see the decline of sovereign states, but many of us observe that national sovereignty is increasingly limited in what it can accomplish by itself and argue that genuine influence in the third millennium will not come alone from the use of raw power. Others argue that any "great power" will steadily decline over the next century if it does not recognize that the nature of power and genuine influence has changed.

Three observations about international relationships today are worth setting down briefly because they set a global perspective for our discussion of the Middle East. They reflect the analysis of our authors and establish a link connecting that analysis to the larger task of reconceptualizing relationships among nations around the world.

First, more and more events confront nations that no one nation can deal with alone. Only in active relationships with others and only by cooperating can nations deal with events that cut across borders. Nations are confronted by the nature and limits of national power outside a relationship with others who have interests or influence in any particular situation.

Borders have become so permeable that nations define part of their own identity in relationship to their larger environment, and they define their larger environment partly as a projection of their own experiences and perceptions. On the level of perception, there is an intertwining of one nation's experience and its relationships with others. Robert Pranger, citing Professor Carl Brown of Princeton, writes in Chapter 2 of the "domestication of the international and internationalization of the domestic in the Middle East."

In the past, nation-states have been pictured as rational systems in which leaders amass power to pursue interests in a strategic chess game with other states. In that picture, states resolve problems by the unilateral use or threat of military or economic power and by formal negotiation. Today unilateral action seems less and less effective. As Ghassan Tuéni advises in Chapter 12, "The United States must renounce its determination to solve problems alone."

Governments acting alone, for instance, may no longer be able to meet one of their most basic responsibilities—providing security for their peoples with their own military power against external threat. Most dramatically, in a nuclear world one government's drive to build superior military force may tempt a preemptive attack by an adversary that would inflict the unacceptable losses the drive is committed to prevent. In East-West relations, the concept of "common security" has come to connote the paradoxical recognition that each party to a conflict has an interest in the other party's sense of security and that neither may be able to provide security without some cooperation with the other.

This point is not limited to East-West relations. The destructive capacity of sophisticated nonnuclear weaponry—including chemical and biological—amassed in regions such as the Middle East may make war prohibitively costly. The Gulf war underscored the point. As General Avraham Tamir notes in Chapter 9, these nations, too, are on the threshold of facing nuclear weapons on their battlefields. Many people in these nations, including those writing in this book in one way or another, also understand that real security may come only from building new relationships with neighbors. Although no military planner can lessen the efforts of a nation to strengthen itself, our authors write in agonizing awareness that military power alone cannot ensure security. Even while a state of war continues, as Ahmed S. Khalidi and Hussein Agha point out in Chapter 8, Israel and Syria depend in some part on unwritten understandings that establish limits of military action between them in Lebanon and on the Golan Heights. Whatever their strength, it seems unlikely by itself to resolve their conflict or prevent war.

Finally, mounting attention to the rights of individual human beings has steadily become a factor affecting relations among states. When asked in conversation why he gave priority to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, former President Jimmy Carter responded that he "saw it as a human rights problem," Crown Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan writes in Chapter 13 of the centrality of an effective U.S. commitment to the right of self-determination for the Palestinians as an important factor affecting U.S. influence in the Middle East.

Governments still jealously guard the principle of noninterference by others in relations between them and their people. Yet the legitimacy of one government's concern for the rights of individuals in another sovereignty has been established in such interstate agreements as the Helsinki accords and in the watchfulness of such nongovernmental organizations as Amnesty International. Nations can and do choose to ignore these new norms of international behavior, but the existence of such norms and international attention can serve as a brake on abuses of human rights. Whatever governments may get away with, they will be judged in some way by those standards. Their stature and credentials for leadership will be affected. Military and economic power are no longer the only standards.

Second is a broadening popular participation both within and between nations. Change seems often to swell from the bottom up rather than to come from the state institutions down, Focusing on the political energies and interaction of communities of people—not just on state institutions—causes us to think in different ways about concepts such as the national interest, national policy, and the causes and resolution of conflict. Key chapters that follow focus on the intercommunal character of the Arab-Israeli conflict—Meron Benvenisti in Chapter 3— and on the dynamics of policymaking within those communities—Rashid Khalidi on the Palestinians in Chapter 4 and Naomi Chazan on Israel in Chapter 5.

There are two aspects to this observation. One relates to the larger participation of people in some nations in policymaking. The other relates to the wider role of communities of people as significant elements of whole nations interacting across national boundaries.

As Robert Pranger writes: "This means that the tasks of foreign policy now include much more than the traditional management of a nation's foreign relations: Successful policy also involves an ability to forge domestic consensus about ends and means in conditions that grow steadily more complex for every nation and to take advantage of the diversity of interests and actors in other countries as well as in one's own."

Pranger goes beyond focusing on the decisionmaking institutions of states and beyond the conflicts of state-defined interests to bring into focus the fact that conflict, especially in a region like the Middle East, is often not between states but between communities of people. He does not lay aside insights into the formal policymaking of states but says rather that the effectiveness of that policymaking requires a capacity to show sensitivity and understanding for the communal aspects as well as the state dimensions of conflict. He argues that the capacity of governments to make foreign policy involves the skillful mixing of key international and domestic variables for peaceful achievement of nations' vital interests. In establishing this focus, he points to the need of those who govern nations to show an ability both to understand interests as they are defined by domestic constituencies in the give-and-take of the internal political arena and to explore ways of pursuing those interests peacefully in the interaction with other nations. Facing a broad regional Middle East agenda following the Gulf war, leaders will have to reexamine the capacity of their bodies politic to develop and conduct a political process large enough to deal with such an agenda.

Meron Benvenisti—as Pranger notes—also draws attention in Chapter 3 to the implications of regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not as a traditional state-to-state conflict within the international system but rather as a communal conflict between two peoples with claims in the same land. He believes that a peace process designed in the context of traditional diplomacy does not address fundamental issues of communal identity that must be dealt with if two peoples are to live together in peace. Formulas for negotiation do not produce movement toward peace until the fundamental resistance of peoples to negotiate at all can be addressed and removed. In short, Benvenisti adds a range of issues and of devices for pursuing intercommunal peace that are not normally found on the agenda of governmental diplomacy. If we are to think of a broader Middle East process in the years following the Gulf war, taking into account the needs and identities of the different communities in the region will add a critical dimension to the peacemaking.

Rashid Khalidi provides a vivid picture of the texture of policymaking in the Palestinian movement, in which the conventional attributes of sovereignty and state decisionmaking are not present but intensive and often coherent political life is possible. In discussing the evolution of the policy of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), he provides insight into the way an internationally significant movement can have attributes of self-government even without the normal attributes of statehood. This view provides a basis for considering some of the problems Palestinian leaders must deal with in moving toward consolidation of Palestinian politics and a normal relationship with Israel. As Khalidi points out, the choices made by the PLO leadership during the Gulf crisis will have a "profound and lasting impact on the Palestinian polity" and on how others deal with it.

In a chapter that complements both Benvenisti and Khalidi, Naomi Chazan paints a detailed picture of Israeli politics and society in transition by reviewing the four stages through which Israeli government passed in the 1980s. Throughout Chapter 5, she emphasizes that "the foreign policy orientations of Israel and its responses to external actions and initiatives are directly related to domestic social and political currents."

Whereas Israel had responded decisively to the 1973 war, Israel's responses to external events were far more hesitant in the 1980s because they "highlighted contradictions in the Israeli body politic." As she explains, "The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, progressively internalized on the societal level, has remained external to the political system that has primary responsibility for coming to terms with its various manifestations. The policy aspects of the Palestinian question and its relationship to the Arab-Israeli conflict have continued to be seen as a matter of security and foreign affairs, handled according to the principles guiding the determination of external relations in the past."

Chazan makes clear that domestic change in Israel and steps toward an Israeli-Palestinian settlement are intimately intertwined. Analysts of the present situation in Israel, she says, "have raised doubts about the possibility of reorienting or unifying the diverse strands of Israeli political culture without bringing about basic changes in the political conditions that have allowed these opinions and constellations to flourish. In this view, a negotiated political solution to the ongoing conflict is a precondition for real change in the Israeli body politic."

Chazari's point about Israel if more generally stated could apply to a number of bodies politic around our changing world, including the Palestinian movement: "Because Israel's external outlook and the possibilities open to the international community in relating to Israel are determined to no mean degree by domestic configurations, a more careful look at Israeli political dynamics is vital to any projection of prospects for change in the Middle East." If relations between nations are indeed a political process of continuous interaction between significant elements of whole bodies politic, the analyses of Benvenisti, Khalidi, and Chazan in effect urge a much broader focus on the peace process as a political process essential in changing relationships between peoples in conflict, whether in the Arab-Israeli arena or in the wider Middle East.

William Green Miller points out in Chapter 6 that in a large, constitutionally established government such as that of the United States, policymaking is influenced not only by the political dynamics of the body politic at large but by the dynamics of the relationship between major branches within the government itself. He describes how in some circumstances members of the U.S. Congress have over the years become almost more personally familiar with the problems of a region such as the Middle East than have members of an incoming presidential team in a new administration. He describes the active relationship that developed between President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and members of the Congress, as well as the more familiar relationship with prime ministers of Israel. In both these cases, ambassadors and their staffs have spent almost as much time cultivating relationships with the members of Congress as they have with members of the executive branch. All of this is an evolution beyond the traditional diplomatic view that heads of government deal only with heads of government, not with their political constituencies or with other elements of their government except for the appropriate ministries.

Although they are more difficult to analyze, the revolutions in communication and transportation open the door to a wide range of relationships among these communities. What one leader says or does one day in his or her own country will be heard, seen, and assessed within hours by another leader's constituencies. In addition, peoples in many nations are more aware of each other as human beings and not just as institutional abstractions. Nowhere is this more evident than in the breadth and intensity of media coverage during a crisis such as that in the Gulf in 1990-1991. It is also physically possible today for many more people to experience international relationships by visiting back and forth. Those who cannot yet travel are still in touch with the world beyond them by transistor radio and, increasingly, by television. Groups of people in distant places can experience the same event and each audience's interaction with the other via communications satellites.

It is the potential of these relationships that has only barely begun to be introduced into the process of peacemaking. As Robert Pranger states in Chapter 2: "Successful negotiations may seek more than one track: Although participants must never neglect the opportunities provided by official state-to-state relations or ignore the limitations of these techniques, they must also make an effort to get communities involved through negotiating methods quite different from those of formal diplomacy." The proliferation of Israeli-Palestinian meetings provides a ready opportunity.

Governments have encountered the consequences of an increased popular role in other ways. Both the Soviet Union and the United States, for instance, have seen aims thwarted by popular movements in Vietnam and Afghanistan. They saw the strategic balance between them shift following the popularly based Khomeini revolution in Iran, and each experienced the difficulties of relating to the go...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: The United States, the Middle East, and Our Changing World
• PART ONE New Perspectives
• PART TWO The Political Foundations of Policymaking
• PART THREE Military Force
• PART FOUR Economic Interdependence and Leverage
• PART FIVE The Peace Process in a Changing World
• About the Book
• About the Contributors
• Index