This post is part of an ongoing series preparing for the AEI/CNN/Heritage National Security & Foreign Policy GOP presidential debate on November 22. See the rest of the posts here.
When Franklin Roosevelt met with King Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al-Saud at the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt in 1945, one of the first orders of business was to discuss building an Allied military base at the city of port Dhahran along the Persian Gulf in eastern Saudi Arabia to aid in the redeployment of forces from Europe to the Far East. But Roosevelt, returning from the conference at Yalta and with thoughts of the post-war order on his mind, also had concerns about the balance of power in the region and America’s position there.
Roosevelt’s first dealings with the Saudis, in 1933, had been commercial; the United States sought access to the vast energy resources of the kingdom but had no taste for empire, colonies, or political proxies in a region far distant from its shores. But a dozen years later, with the British and French influence in the region ebbing and with Stalin driving a very hard Soviet bargain at Yalta, Roosevelt now understood that a return to the pre-war status quo was all but impossible. America would have new security and power concerns as well as economic interests in this region.
The U.S. role across the greater Middle East has grown many times and in many ways since 1945. Until the multiple shocks of 1979—the Iran hostage crisis and the coming of the “Islamic Republic” to Tehran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the rise of Saddam Hussein to power in Baghdad, and the seizure of the Grand Mosque by Sunni extremists—America generally assumed the posture of an “offshore balancer,” remaining over the horizon and intervening when needed to tip the scales one way or another to prevent any hostile hegemon—either external, as in the case of the Soviets, or among the local aspirants—from controlling the region’s resources or politics.
Since 1979, the continued weaknesses of the U.S. partners (principally Saudi Arabia), the continued hostility of Iran, the problems caused by Saddam, and the growing menace of al Qaeda and its associated movements have drawn us into a deeper commitment to regional security. South Asia has been added to the original “theaters” of concern, the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf; indeed, today, Pakistan may be the biggest worry of all. The only thing worse than getting involved with the states of the region—states and societies so unlike our own—was leaving them to their own devices.
In 2012 we may be approaching another watershed as large as that of 1979—but this time marking the ebbing of American power and influence. In withdrawing all but a tiny few U.S. forces from Iraq and indicating that he is weighing an accelerated drawdown from Afghanistan, President Obama is reversing a generation’s course in American strategy and policy. That our retreat may coincide with Iran establishing a nuclear capability that becomes a deterrent to the United States puts the Obama shift in strategy in even starker relief. Iran’s breakout may not happen in 2012, but, if the recent report of the International Atomic Energy Agency is correct, it’s coming sooner rather than later. That it would follow our leading-from-behind approach to Libya—a textbook example of an “offshore balancing” campaign, albeit swathed in genocide-prevention disguise—would send a message that those in the region, and indeed elsewhere in the world, would much note and long remember. After the Arab Spring comes the American fall.
Yet in our domestic political debate, we resolutely refuse to see each “war”—be it in Iraq, Afghanistan, or against the global al Qaeda network—except as a one-off. In truth, President Obama is not “ending” anything; the struggle for power in the Middle East will be newly renewed and renewed with greater violence in the wake of our withdrawal. Thus the question for any Republican challenger to Obama will be whether to double down on the strategy of retreat or rather to reassert the American tradition established by Roosevelt and carried forward—even through the first years of the Obama term—by presidents of both parties ever since. Indeed, there is no better measure of decline as a choice than to walk away from the hard-won, painful, costly, but very real successes of Iraq, Afghanistan, and 60 years of the energetic exercise of American power in the greater Middle East.
For all the pomp and state-dinner circumstance, Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington generated little actual news. The Chinese “paramount leader” agreed to buy a few airplanes, agreed to talk a bit about human rights (with Chinese characteristics), and got some good press back home. All that our China hands could say was that the trip was a welcome punctuation to the declining relations of the past year.
“The United States in the 20th century is an example of a state achieving eminence without conflict with the then-dominant countries.”
The $78 billion in defense budget cuts announced by the Pentagon takes the Obama administration’s assault on American military strength across a new threshold. Recent leaks indicated that there would be new rounds of weapons program terminations—on top of the $330 billion of cuts made in 2009. But to also announce substantial land-force cuts in the midst of a successful-but-incomplete “surge” in Afghanistan is shocking. Six weeks ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates described the defense cuts recommended by the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission as “math, not strategy.” Today, he announced many of the very same cuts—and commits the same error.
President Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan has always been contingent. Still, in announcing the results of the latest White House review of the war, the president at least passed up an exit-ramp opportunity.