51. Time to Recalibrate America’s Middle East Policy
- Author:
- Raphael BenLevi and Michael Doran
- Publication Date:
- 01-2023
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Hudson Institute
- Abstract:
- Our understanding of reality in the Middle East has changed significantly in the last seven years. At a conference on US-Israel relations in 2016, then Secretary of State John Kerry highlighted, now famously, the impossibility of Israel making peace with the Gulf states. In an obvious reference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his associates, Kerry said, “I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, ‘Well, the Arab world is in a different place now. We just have to reach out to them. We can work some things with the Arab world, and we’ll deal with the Palestinians.’” Kerry dismissed Netanyahu’s thesis with total certainty: “No. No, no, and no. I can tell you that I’ve talked to the leaders of the Arab community. There will be no advanced and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace. Everybody needs to understand that. That is a hard reality.” Just two years later, Netanyahu refuted Kerry’s view of reality by, with the help of President Donald Trump, signing the Abraham Accords with Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani and Emirati Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan. But the flaws that Trump and Netanyahu revealed were not Kerry’s alone. Nor were the flaws limited to thinking about Arab-Israeli relations. Trump and Netanyahu were attacking the entire strategic belief system of the Obama administration, which had identified reconciling with Iran and brokering a Palestinian-Israeli peace as the two top priorities of the United States in the Middle East. In the Trump-Netanyahu conception, the Abraham Accords were the cornerstone of a regional alliance that aimed not just to improve relations between Israel and its neighbors but also to contain Iran militarily and to prevent it, through the application of hard power, from acquiring a nuclear weapon. With a Middle East staff consisting almost entirely of veterans of the Obama administration, the Biden administration intended to prove the utility of Obama’s effort to reconcile with Iran. It therefore rejected the Trump-Netanyahu view of the accords as a key component of an Iran-containment strategy. However, the accords have fashioned a new “hard reality” of Arab-Israeli coordination that the administration cannot ignore. That reality includes formal Israeli representation at US Central Command, the military’s combatant operations command responsible for, among other things, deterring Iran. In other words, beneath the umbrella of the United States military, the Israeli military and its Arab counterparts are now liaising daily. Weren’t Trump and Netanyahu pursuing this outcome? The simple answer is no. To prevent trilateral military cooperation among the Arab states, Israel, and the United States from turning into a coalition designed to pressure Iran regarding the aggression of its proxy forces and the expansion of its nuclear weapons program, the Biden administration instructed CENTCOM to focus exclusively on defensive measures and integrated missile defense, and to avoid any offensive countermeasures against Iran. But defending against an aggressor with only a shield is impossible. Arming oneself with a sword is also necessary. Enter Raphael BenLevi, the director of the Churchill Program for Strategy, Statesmanship and National Security at the Argaman Institute of Tikvah Fund Israel. BenLevi is at the forefront of a new generation of foreign policy strategists in Israel who have come of age in an era when what seemed like a “hard reality” to the generation of John Kerry is now obviously history. In this article, he lays out a strong case for the potential of the kind of trilateral cooperation to which the Biden administration, under the weight of stale ideas, has turned a blind eye.
- Topic:
- Security, Foreign Policy, Defense Policy, and Alliance
- Political Geography:
- Middle East, North America, and United States of America