Regional Security in the Middle East

Past Present and Future

Zeev Maoz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135253059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Oriente Medio

Middle Eastern politics of the 1990s have been characterized by a drive towards peace. Whether this is successful or not will depend on the negotiating process. These articles discuss the challenges, and provide some practical advice on how risks of failure could be avoided.

Great Powers and Regional Peacemaking: Patterns in the Middle East and Beyond

BENJAMIN MILLER

With the end of the Cold War many things have changed in world politics, most notably in US-Russian relations and in Russia’s behaviour in foreign affairs. Yet, some recent diplomatic positions and actions of Russia in the domain of regional conflict management and resolution are quite reminiscent of past Soviet conduct in this domain. At the same time, some of the US reactions remind us of earlier American attitudes dating back at least to the Cold War era. Thus, there is much in common to President Boris Yeltsin’s call in June 1994 for an international conference on the North Korean nuclear crisis, the Russian proposal in early 1994 to reconvene an international conference to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, and to the Russian broker urging the West during the Sarajevo crisis of February 1994 to treat his country as an ‘equal partner’. Despite the warming of US-Russian relations in the last few years, the US reaction to these ideas has been somewhat lukewarm. At the same time, there is a growing worry in the West that Russian treatment of the ex-Soviet republics resembles earlier imperialist tendencies of both the Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia vis-à-vis its weak neighbors. These coercive tactics can be contrasted with US hesitations about using force in its own backyard against Haiti, its reluctance to impose a settlement on the weak party in the Bosnian conflict – the Muslims, and its relatively benign leadership of the post-Gulf War Middle East peace process. I will argue that such diplomatic positions and actions by the US and Russia reflect, at least to some extent, a continuation of certain patterns demonstrated during the Cold War, most notably in the Middle East. Since these patterns were not caused by the Cold War, they are likely to continue in the post-Cold War era so long as the causal factors which have led to their emergence in the first place are going to be in effect. Thus, these causal factors are likely to affect the prospects for great power concerted diplomacy vis-à-vis the numerous regional conflicts in the post-Cold War period.

Indeed, the seemingly growing possibility of the formation of a great power concert for dealing with regional conflicts in the post-Cold War era has recently attracted considerable interest among international relations scholars.¹ The major question explored by most recent studies has been the willingness of the great powers to work together with regard to promoting the resolution of regional conflicts. Yet, great power approach to regional peacemaking has two distinct aspects: the preference of a unilateral or a multilateral path vis-à-vis the other great powers; and the attitude toward the small states in the region: coercive or benign. The lack of a clear-cut distinction between these two dimensions by studies of great-power concerted diplomacy (the second aspect especially has been overlooked) has precluded a useful explanation of this phenomenon. I propose a model of great power approach to regional peacemaking including both dimensions.

The explanation will be based on the combined effects of two factors. One factor is derived from a realist perspective, while the other (the type of domestic regime of the great power) stems from a liberal approach. The model is examined with regard to the different approaches of the superpowers to the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict during the Cold War era. Indeed, the Middle East is an appropriate region for such an analysis because of the intensity and persistence of the Arab-Israeli conflict during the Cold War era. Moreover, there were some notable superpower attempts at resolving this regional conflict, either unilaterally or multilaterally,² probably more than in any other region during the post-1945 era. After introducing the model, I shall elaborate below why the selection of the Middle East as the case-study is justified in terms of the model and for the purpose of examining it empirically.

The starting point for the following discussion will be that great powers have different approaches toward regional conflict resolution. Indeed, as I will show, there were persistent differences between the US and Soviet approaches to regional conflict resolution during the Cold War, notably with regard to the Middle East. The persistent differences between the superpowers with regard to the question whether or not to cooperate show the limitations of one of the most common explanations of why superpower cooperation in regional conflict resolution failed during the Cold War – namely, ideological antagonism. This explanation should lead us to expect a similar behaviour on the part of both superpowers, namely, rejection of cooperation with the ideological rival. Yet, as this study shows, only one of the powers persistently rejected cooperation in Middle East regional peacemaking while the other superpower persistently favored it. Moreover, the continuities in attitudes from the Cold War era despite the ending of the ideological conflict may also testify to the inadequacy of the ideological explanation, and seem to suggest that the explanation of great power approaches to regional peacemaking has to be based on factors that carried over to the post-Cold War era.

Like the ideological explanation, systems theory³ also cannot satisfactorily account for the variation in the great power approaches (as well as for the continuities in their attitudes following the end of bipolarity). On the contrary, this theory expects that states located similarly in the international system will tend to behave similarly irrespective of their internal attributes. The superpowers of the Cold War era should especially conform to this expectation because of the highly intense effects exerted by bipolar systems on great power behaviour. However, when the great powers behave differently in a certain domain under the same international system, we must turn to explanatory factors other than polarity. Moreover, there is an indeterminacy in the neorealist analysis of certain outcomes.⁴ For example, despite the crucial importance that structural theory attributes to the effects of polarity on international outcomes, it is not clear from that literature whether one should expect more great power cooperation in bipolarity or in multipolarity.⁵ Consequently, instead of focusing on polarity, it might be useful, as some studies have recently suggested, to integrate the effects of systemic and domestic factors.⁶

Accordingly, the explanation presented here is based on the combined effects of a power-related factor, namely the relative capabilities of the great powers vis-à-vis each other, and a unit-level element – the type of domestic regime of the great powers. Each of the two factors is related to one of the two dimensions of the great power attitude toward regional peacemaking. More specifically, whereas relative capabilities account for the great power preference of a multilateral or a unilateral path in the region vis-à-vis the other great powers, the attitude to the small regional states is shaped by the type of the great power’s domestic regime. I introduce the two dimensions of the great power approach toward regional peacemaking in the first section. The next two sections discuss theoretically the effects of relative capabilities on the inclination toward a multilateral or a unilateral approach and of the great power domestic regime on the attitude toward small states. The following two sections provide an empirical application of the main propositions to US and Soviet behaviour in Middle East diplomacy in the Cold War era. The last section and the conclusions discuss seemingly deviant cases and apply the model to the post-Cold War Middle East, respectively.

The Dependent Variables: Great Power Approaches to Regional Conflict Resolution

For the purposes of this study, peacemaking may be defined as a strategy pursued by an external power, based mainly on diplomatic, although possibly also on economic and military measures, and designed to promote conflict resolution between parties to a regional conflict. This study discusses the situation where the great powers are genuinely interested in promoting the resolution of a regional conflict – if only in order to prevent its escalation and enhance international stability. Such a focus on negotiated conflict resolution by diplomatic means has to be distinguished from crisis management, on the one hand, and from military intervention by one of the great powers in a regional state, on the other. Both crisis management and unilateral military interventions are beyond the scope of diplomatic peacemaking and thus are excluded from the model discussed here. They differ from peacemaking in terms of both objectives and means. The objective in peacemaking is resolving the fundamental issues in a regional conflict but this is usually not the goal in crisis management and military interventions. Crisis management is the attempt to balance between protecting one’s vital interests and avoiding war but without necessarily settling the underlying issues in a conflict.⁷ Thus, the situation discussed in this study should be differentiated from a crisis situation among the great powers themselves which might arise from the escalation of a regional war to a dangerously high probability of a resort to military force directly involving the great powers. As for a military intervention of a great power, it may be designed as part of a peacemaking strategy (in which case it constitutes peace enforcement), but it may frequently be unrelated to peacemaking.⁸

As for the means employed, although peacemaking might also make use of military power (including the threat or use of force), the difference is that it is only one of the means in a wide range of policy tools available to peacemakers, and not necessarily the most useful or prevalent of these tools in many cases of conflict resolution and regional reconciliation. This is in contrast to the obvious centrality of military force in both crisis management (primarily threats of force) and military interventions. An additional difference between peacemaking on the one hand and crisis management and military interventions on the other concerns explanatory factors. Under conditions of crisis and threat of war that are typical of both crisis management and military intervention, realist factors such as polarity and balances of capabilities and interests are the dominant explanatory factors, but this is not the case to the same extent with regard to peacemaking which often extends beyond the time of a specific regional crisis into noncrisis situations.⁹ Such is the theoretical logic behind the argument of this model that domestic factors must be included in explaining attitudes toward peacemaking and conflict resolution which take place beyond the time o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Of Related Interest
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor's Introduction
• Regional Security in the Middle East: Past Trends, Present Realities, and Future Challenges
• Patrons, Clients, and Allies in the Arab-Israeli Conflict
• War and Peace as Rational Choice in the Middle East
• Great Powers and Regional Peacekeeping: Patterns in the Middle East and Beyond
• Confidence and Security Building Measures in the Middle East
• The Middle East Peace Process and Regional Security
• About the Contributors
• Index