Regional Security Dialogue in the Middle East

Changes, Challenges and Opportunities

Chen Kane, Egle Murauskaite

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138018389
• eBook ISBN: 9781317682691
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

At this time of considerable political turmoil in the Middle East, there is a pressing need to explore alternative frameworks for regional security. The book discusses the Helsinki Process as one potentially relevant historical model to learn from.

The Helsinki Process began in a divided Europe in the early 1970s and, over 40 years, achieved major successes in promoting cooperation between the Warsaw Pact and NATO member states on social, human rights, security, and political issues. In this volume, established Middle East experts, former diplomats, and emerging scholars assess the regional realities from a broad range of perspectives and, with the current momentum for reform across the Middle East, chart a path towards a comprehensive mechanism that could promote long-term regional security.

Providing a gamut of views on regional threat perception and suggesting ways forward for regional peace, this book is essential reading for students and scholars with an interest in Politics, the Middle East and Conflict Studies.

Part I

The Helsinki Process

1 Cautious optimism

The Helsinki Process as a model for negotiations in the Middle East

Lynn M. Hansen

A bit of history

As I sat among the representatives of 35 states participating in the Stockholm Conference on Confidence- and Security-Building Measures and Disarmament in Europe, I wondered to myself whether such a process could be useful in resolving problems in the Middle East.¹ I even mentioned to a high-ranking official in the US government my view that the Helsinki Process – the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) – could be adapted and utilized in the Middle East. The response was quite negative.

This was in the mid-1980s and bilateral negotiations with the Soviet Union on nuclear and other issues were beginning to look positive. The prevailing political views in Washington seemed not to favor multilateral negotiations if these issues could be addressed bilaterally. There was always the concern that it was difficult to achieve agreements in the United Nations that served American interests and the same would be true for other multilateral forums. Moreover, some were concerned that the United States would often be pressured by its allies to agree to something it really did not want put in an agreement.

Negotiations within the Helsinki Process began in 1973 and ended in 1975 with the so-called Final Act that established the CSCE. It is noteworthy that the United States was not in favor of this forum, but was more or less forced to participate because it hoped to initiate negotiations with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty Organization on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) that eventually opened in Vienna in January 1973. The MBFR negotiations were a response to Senator Mike Mansfield’s efforts to withdraw US forces from Europe. It was, then, a tit-for-tat trade. Still, the CSCE had few, if any, devotees in Washington. A memorandum from Henry Kissinger to President Ford makes this clear: “We have never seen much to be gained for ourselves in CSCE” – as the negotiating portion of the Helsinki Process came to be known.²

While MBFR did not accomplish anything, the CSCE process resulted in the signing of the Helsinki Final Act on August 1, 1975. No further agreements of substance were reached until the conclusion of the Madrid Follow-Up Meeting in September 1983, which provided a mandate for the Stockholm Conference. Success in Stockholm led to fruitful negotiations on conventional forces in Europe and agreement on the “Charter of Paris for a New Europe” that was signed on November 21, 1990.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as arms control successes (such as the treaties on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE); Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF); and Strategic Arms Reduction (START)), brought about changes in the role of the CSCE. Its name was changed to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on January 1, 1995, with principal offices established in Budapest and Vienna.

The OSCE is the world’s largest regional organization in which security issues play a dominant role. The organization’s concerns, however, are not limited to security issues. It recognizes that security is tightly linked to the economy, the environment, and humanitarian issues, including human rights. The goal is comprehensive security for each of its members. Agreements within the OSCE do not have the legal force of a treaty; rather, they are political obligations (some say politically binding), expressing a common goal of security and cooperation in Europe. This facilitates the political process within OSCE states, allowing them to remain flexible in a common search for cooperation while avoiding disputes and/or sanctions over implementation.

The OSCE has been involved in matters such as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the Caucasus, the Transdniestrian conflict in Moldova, and the August 2008 conflict in Georgia. It also has field operations in Albania and Uzbekistan, as well as a mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Created in 2002 at the initiative of Kyrgyzstan, the OSCE Academy in Bishkek is a regional center of postgraduate education and a forum for regional security dialogue and research.

As already noted, Washington’s political elite were initially very skeptical about the value of the Helsinki Process in the mid-1970s. Apart from a few State Department professionals, Helsinki had few devotees in the Reagan administration. Many senior officials believed it had been a grave mistake to even sign the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, let alone abide by it.³

By the time of the first Follow-Up Meeting, held in Belgrade on October 4, 1977, it was quite clear that agreements reached in 1975 were not being implemented or respected, particularly in the field of human rights. This strengthened the views in the US government about the incompetence of the Helsinki Process and multilateral negotiations more generally. There were then (and there remain now) those on the political right in the United States who rejected all multinational negotiations and even opposed the efforts of the United Nations.⁴

Nonetheless, a serious effort to look at the process as a whole would have to conclude that the Helsinki Process has been a resounding success in dealing with the problems that plagued Europe during the Cold War and in the subsequent period of instability in the former Yugoslavia and other places in Europe. Moreover, it has advanced the cause of human rights in ways that are often not understood. Many were willing to dismiss the Helsinki Final Act as worthless at the time of the first Follow-Up Meeting to the CSCE held in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade (October 4, 1977–March 8, 1978) because the Soviet Union and its allies had not implemented the Helsinki Accords in the field of human rights.

It must be remembered that the US Delegation in Belgrade, led by Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, established the principle that the United States would not negotiate further security measures without progress in the field of human rights and fundamental freedoms. In September 1986, after the 32 European states plus the United States, the Soviet Union, and Canada, participating in the Helsinki Process reached agreement, those rights were spelled out in the 1975 Final Act in the seventh of the ten principles that were to guide relations among them: “Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion, or belief.”

This position was reinforced at the second Follow-Up Meeting in Madrid (September 1980–September 1983). In general, however, the Madrid Meeting is remembered for the agreement on a mandate for the Stockholm Conference on Confidence- and Security-Building Measures and Disarmament in Europe. Nonetheless, other meetings were also mandated to comprise the human rights and human contacts dimensions of the Helsinki Process – including such issues as immigration, family visits, family reunification, and contacts between people – thus preserving the idea of a balanced process within the CSCE. This principle also played a significant role in the Stockholm negotiations.

The Stockholm Conference

In September 1986, after the 35 European states participating in the Helsinki Process reached agreement – along with the United States and Canada – on the Stockholm Document on Confidence- and Security-Building Measures (CSBMs), there was much jubilation among the Conference delegates. Champagne bottles were uncorked, and old quarrels were forgotten. After all, this was the first time that East and West had been able to agree on an arms control document of any significance to Europeans.

While others were celebrating, my negotiating partner, General Viktor Tatarnikov of the Soviet General Staff, sought me out and said more or less the following: “It is good that we have an agreement, but it is far more important that we were able to agree.” For the first two years of the negotiations, Tatarnikov had avoided me like the plague. At one point, he even sent a Hungarian diplomat, whom I knew from the Madrid CSCE Follow-Up Meeting, to tell me that if the United States wanted an agreement in Stockholm, the French would have to be NATO’s primary interlocutor. My reply was brief and to the point: “then there will be no agreement.” I could not agree more with Tatarnikov’s statement to me at the end of the Conference. The fact that we were able to agree on a set of militarily significant CSBMs was indeed a milestone in East-West relations of perhaps greater political than military significance. Upon further reflection, I saw an even deeper meaning to his statement. We had succeeded in replacing the Feindbild (a German term for the image of an enemy), which each of us held of the other, with respect and the knowledge that we could work together to produce such agreements.

Ambassador Oleg Grinevsky, who was Head of the Soviet Delegation, has told me many times that the Stockholm Accords were vital to the negotiation of both the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) of 1987 and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) signed on July 31, 1991. This was precisely because the Feindbild had undergone substantial change. The on-site inspection provisions contained in the Stockholm Accords had desensitized the Soviet military to having foreign inspectors present at their facilities.

The Stockholm negotiations had an inauspicious beginning. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko gave one of the nastiest, most controversial, and provocative speeches on record – accusing the United States of developing first-strike weapons to initiate a nuclear conflict in Europe. The deployment by US of Pershing II missiles, as well as ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs), to Europe at approximately the same time as the Stockholm Conference got underway strengthened the conviction of some in the Kremlin that the United States was planning to conduct a nuclear war. The word in Soviet security circles was that the Pershing II missiles would be able to reach Russian targets four to six minutes after their launch, hardly allowing enough time for Soviet leaders to reach their defensive bunkers. Moreover, President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) seemed to undermine the doctrine of deterrence, since strategic defense lessened mutual vulnerability to nuclear strikes, which had been the foundation for an uneasy peace for decades. It is small wonder, then, that Tatarnikov was initially reluctant to enter into weighty discussions about confidence-building.

It has been noted that there was substantial paranoia on the part of senior officials in the Kremlin.⁵ Certainly, Foreign Minister Gromyko’s opening remarks at the beginning of the Stockholm Conference were reflective of that paranoia. Previous regimes in the Kremlin – from Leonid Brezhnev, to Yuri Andropov, to Konstantin Chernenko – had formed a Feindbild that precluded a positive relationship between the two adversaries. The principal negotiating goal for the Soviet Union therefore seemed to be an agreement on the nonuse of force. They also proposed an agreement on the no first-use of nuclear weapons, which went nowhere because of the NATO doctrine of flexible response. Handicapped by outmoded thinking and acute distrust, it is easy to comprehend why Tatarnikov was so reluctant to enter into any bilateral talks with the United States.

In fact, it was not until Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze took over the reins of government in the Soviet Union in 1985 that Tatarnikov and I established a positive relationship. After that, he and I must have spent over 100 hours together trying to discover solutions to problems that plagued the negotiations. Considering the application of the Helsinki Process to the Middle East, one must understand that changes in leadership and attitude will be necessary before any significant progress can be made. It remains to be seen whether the “Arab Spring” uprisings will develop into a more hospitable place for multilateral negotiations that hold promise for finding solutions to the region’s problems.

Unprecedented commitments in the field of human rights became an integral part of the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, which was adopted by a summit meeting of European governments as well as those of Canada and the United States on November 21, 1990. All of this was accomplished within the Helsinki Process. Moreover, it would be natural for one to consider such a process as a means of dealing with issues that confound those who seek peace in the Middle East.

The more one looks at the Middle East, the more sobering the difficulties become. Nonetheless, at the end of the day, it may be possible to start a sort of Helsinki Process there, on a modest basis. That attitude notwithstanding, after following events in the Middle East, I became pessimistic about any negotiation bearing fruit in that region. It seemed as though when former US Secretary of State James A Baker III gave the chapter on the Middle East in his memoirs the title “An encounter with the quagmire”, he provided an apt description. In his opening paragraph, he writes the following: “I frankly saw the Arab-Israeli dispute as a pitfall to be avoided rather than an opportunity to be exploited.”⁶ Despite Baker’s best efforts to make peace, it was a quagmire for him.

As time progressed, I thought the 2003 Iraq War was a disincentive to any peace negotiations in the region. Nonetheless, it seems that an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians was within reach a couple of times, but then slipped away because of unwillingness to compromise on some issue or because one or the other’s constituency did not support an agreement. The issue of Iran’s development of nuclear capability, and possibly a nuclear weapon, further soured the possibility of holding a regional process designed to resolve these issues and bring peace to the Middle East. Indeed, the prospect of an attack on Iran’s nuclear development facilities kept resurfacing. Such an attack would, in my view, wreck any chances for a comprehensive negotiation on security issues for a substantial period of time.

Then, however, I remembered that the 1980–1983 Madrid CSCE Review Meeting and the 1984 Stockholm Conference were held at a time in the Cold War when we were closer than ever to nuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. During a closed meeting with KGB officers in May 1981, General-Secretary Brezhnev and KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov announced that the United States was preparing a secret nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Brezhnev and Andropov were old-fashioned Communists who believed Reagan’s rhetoric about the Soviet Union being reduced to the “ash heap of history.”⁷ Consequently, Soviet intelligence services commenced the largest peacetime intelligence operation in Soviet history. In Washington, Soviet agents were even counting the number of lights on at night in the Pentagon. To make matters worse, in November 1983, the United States and NATO conducted the exercise Able Archer 83, which was a command post exercise that simulated conflict escalation culminating in a nuclear release. The realistic nature of this exercise, along with the deployment of Pershing II missiles in Europe, caused Soviet forces to increase their alert status and strengthened the view of some in the Kremlin that the West was indeed preparing the first nuclear strike.⁸ For its part, the Soviet military was prepared to launch first a nuclear strike, contrary to its stated policy. “Do not forget that we will not wait until we are attacked,” Chief of the Soviet Genera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I The Helsinki Process
• Part II Perspectives from the region and outside
• Part III The Middle East today: Changes, challenges, and opportunities
• Part IV Possible futures
• Conclusion: Charting a course inspired by the Helsinki experience
• Index