Tag: Egypt

The buck still stops with the Syrians

It has taken longer than Syria-watchers predicted, but President Obama today finally called on Bashar al Assad to “step aside” in Syria.  This is an interesting formulation that implies he could remain nominally president but allow reforms to move forward.  UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon seems to have also taken that line yesterday with Bashar in a phone call.

Let’s look at the options from Bashar’s perspective.  Egyptian President Mubarak stepped down and now finds himself on trial.  Libyan non-president Qaddafi refused to step down and now is fighting a war he is likely to lose.  Yemen’s President Saleh is recovering from wounds his opponents inflicted in retaliation for his military attacks on them, but he has managed to continue to dominate Sanaa from Saudi Arabia, using his son and other loyalists as proxies.  Only former Tunisian President Ben Ali is managing an untroubled, but powerless, retirement somewhere in Saudi Arabia.  None of those options looks as good as “step aside,” though I have my doubts the protesters would accept Bashar remaining even nominally in power for more than a brief transition period.

President Obama also signed an executive order that

  • blocks the property of the Syrian government,
  • bans U.S. persons from new investments in or exporting services to Syria, and
  • bans U.S. imports of, and other transactions or dealings in, Syrian-origin petroleum or petroleum products.

The trouble of course is that there is little Syrian government property in the U.S., few new investments or service exports to Syria and almost no U.S. import of Syrian oil or oil products.

For President Obama’s new rhetorical line to be effective, other countries–especially Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Europeans–will need to play hard ball with the Syrian regime.  Both the Turks and Saudis have sounded recently as if they are willing to do that, and the Europeans in their own complicated way seem to be moving in the same direction.

Diplomacy is getting other people to do what you want them to do.  As many in the blogosphere are noting, Washington’s direct influence on events in Syria is small.  President Obama himself said:

The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people. We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.

So that’s where the buck stops: with the Syrian people, who have shown remarkable courage and determination so far. Here they are in Aleppo yesterday:

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Anyone still think it was the downgrade?

Yesterday’s sharp bump upwards on the stock market following the Fed’s announcement that it would keep interest rates low for two years demonstrates all too clearly that the sharp falls the previous two days were not reactions to the S&P downgrade of U.S. government debt. I shouldn’t say it, but I will:  I told you so.

The press this morning attributes the Fed action to concern about growth, which is surely in part true.  But it also reflects concern about banks and the financial system, which are always close to the Fed’s heart.  Low interest rates have helped to save the banks for several years now–their profits are soaring–and will continue to help in the future, as a result of the Fed’s commitment.

Does this change the picture for foreign policy?  Is the Federal budget under any less pressure?  The short answer is “no.”  If Congress sticks with the debt deal, it still has to cut expenditures sharply starting in fiscal year 2013.  All the Fed has done is to make monetary policy carry the burden of adjustment until then.

The longer answer is a bit more nuanced.  Certainly U.S. government borrowing costs for the next two years will continue to be unusually low, unless the markets really do lose confidence in the dollar or inflation rears its you know what.  Low interest rates will ease the government’s fiscal situation.  I confess to  relief about this, but it does not reduce the need for triage on foreign policy.

Nina Hachigian, who was overly optimistic about the American role in the world a few years ago, is overly pessimistic now.  America is no less indispensable today that it was last week, but it is likely to be less available in the future.  People who have grown to rely on the United States to help them out of the deep holes they dig for themselves–from the Balkans to Israel/Palestine to Iraq and Afghanistan–are going to find us preoccupied elsewhere, with our own top national security risks.

This is not a bad thing–most of them will discover their own capacities to manage are greater than they had imagined.  And it is high time some of America’s burdens shifted to Europe and the Arab League, even if the former has financial problems of its own and the latter lots of money but little experience.  Far more often than in the past, the message from America will be handle it on your own, or figure out a cheap way to get it done.

What we need to be careful about is cheap shortcuts that end up of creating expensive longterm problems.  In the Balkans, that expensive delusion comes from those who advocate rearranging borders to accommodate ethnic differences, a sure formula for instability if not war.  In the Middle East, it comes from those who resist defining clearly the borders of the Palestinian state or want to turn a blind eye to the Arab spring, ignoring Egypt and Tunisia because the revolutions there have been “successful.”  Backing a revolution doesn’t necessarily mean paying for it or bombing a regime into submission, as Robert Ford (our man in Damascus) has demonstrated with his deft visits to protesters in Hama.

Diplomacy is not inherently expensive.  Military action is.  In tight financial times, we’ll do better with a foreign policy that relies less on deployed forces and more on alert diplomats.

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The rich get richer

Yesterday’s conference on investment prospects in the wake of the Arab Spring over at the World Bank’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) was a lively couple of hours–these economic types are briefer and more to the point than their political counterparts–but the bottom line was gloomy:  the GCC states and Iraq are likely to attract the lion’s share of investment while Egypt and Tunisia (Syria, Yemen and Libya weren’t even mentioned) go begging in the short term.  There was disagreement on longer-term prospects, with Ian Bremmer registering a strong minority view that the geopolitics are unfavorable, both because of Iran and the Israel/Palestine conflict.

An upbeat and indefatigible Afshin Molavi started off underlining that we live in a world of surprisingly interconnected risk, that there is a lot of diversity in what we should not really label “Arab Spring,” and that the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) has a young population, many unable to get married because of the lack of jobs and looking for “dignity.”  Growth has now slowed, hurting their prospects.

Citibank’s Hamid Biglari said investors have adopted a wait and see attitude toward the more revolutionary part of the region and are shifting their attention towards the GCC and Iraq, whose prospects are good if Baghdad can get security under control.  Multinationals are not pulling out.  Egypt is a larger and better known market than Tunisia, which however is more homogeneous, more secular, more middle class and better educated.  Tunisia is more likely to succeed economically, but Egypt is the bigger prize.  The immediate concerns of investors are about legitimacy and whether the new governments will treat the old elite decently, but it will be a decade before “equilibrium” returns.

Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group admitted enthusiasm for the Arab Spring (“it feels good”) but noted that Ukraine and Georgia felt good at first too.  Tunisia seems to be moving in the right direction, Egypt less so but will likely muddle through.  Iraq is the most exciting investment opportunity in the region.  U.S. influence is declining, and Saudi influence is increasing.  Saudi policy objectives and conditionality will differ from those of the U.S.  Overall though the immediate political risks have been overvalued.  The problem is in the longer term, both because of Iran and the Israel/Palestine conflict.  Europe and the U.S. will increasingly be occupied with other problems.

Cairo-based Walid Bakr of Riyada Enterprise Development, Abraaj Capital, was more optimistic in the medium and long term.  Egypt’s big market and tourist attractions are not going away.  Half the population is under 24, well educated and internet savvy, with lots of entrepreneurial spirit.  The revolution has unleashed strong feelings of national pride and dignity.  Youth is the engine of growth and can contribute to the all-important creation of small and medium enterprises so vital to job creation and wealth distribution.

Dubai-based Yasar Jarrar of PwC Middle East underlined that we are still at the beginning of the changes in the Middle East, which suffered a long period of stagnation (not real stability).  The GCC countries are moving well to kickstart job creation for youth, major infrastructure investments and dialogue between their governments and the citizens.  But it is going to be a long spring in a region that really does matter.  Philip Haddad of Mubadala Infrastructure Partners agreed that we need to take the long view, but in the meanwhile as much as $38 billion is being invested in infrastructure, which is not bad.

The Omani ambassador, Hunaina Sultan Ahmed al-Mughairy, led off with a very upbeat assessment of the Sultanate’s prospects.  The message was “yes, we can” reform ourselves, if we put our minds to it.  Jean Francois Seznec of Georgetown said he was very pessimistic about Bahrain, where the basic issue is governance.  In recent weeks, only 5% of the hotel rooms in Bahrain have been occupied.

There was a good deal of agreement that the issue everywhere is at least in part governance.  Citizens did not feel they were benefiting under the old regimes, because of a lack of accountability.  Political and economic reform need to go together, but it is not clear that new parliamentary democracies will credit competence and choose economic reform, which is discredited because it is associated with the old regimes.

Wrapping up, Ravi Vish of MIGA confirmed the importance of governance, addressing social inequality and the income gap, and job creation, mainly through a stronger and more entrepreneurial private sector.  He also reviewed MIGA’s portfolio of political insurance products, for which demand is naturally rising in the region.

 

 

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A brighter view of the Arab spring

I wrote yesterday about the pessimistic views of the Arab spring prevalent among experts at a Harvard/Carnegie Endowment event.  They know a whole lot more about the Middle East than I do–that’s why I go to their events and write them up.  But I think they are overly pessimistic.  Why?

First, because I’ve seen things come out all right.  I am not just talking South Africa, where admittedly Nelson Mandela’s leadership and stature counted for a lot, as did F.W. de Klerk’s.  I am not seeing any Mandelas or de Klerks in the Middle East.  Nor do there seem to be any Vaclav Havels or Lech Walesas.  But in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia protest leaderships that were notably lacking in vision and stature had at least temporary success and left their countries better off than they would otherwise have been.

Second, because it seems to me the protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Yemen have shown a combination of nonviolent restraint and persistence that is laudable, and likely to lead in good directions.  I am less convinced of the wisdom of the demonstrators in Libya and Bahrain, where it seems to me they fell victim to the temptations of violence and recalcitrance, respectively.  But the Libyan Transitional Council shows at least some signs of promise.  We’ll see if the Bahrainis can do better in the next “dialogue” phase.

Third, because I have more confidence in a bottom-up process than a top-down one.  Here I disagree with Marwan Muasher, who explicitly prefers to see top-down reform.  I don’t really know any place where that has worked terribly well in the transition from dictatorship to democracy, though obviously there are leaders like Gorbachev (or de Klerk for that matter) who made the process easier than it might otherwise have been. But people have to want democracy and freedom–it really can’t be given to them.

Nor do I think the consequences of the Arab spring will be quite as negative for U.S. interests as many of the experts say.  Middle Eastern leaders who have to be more responsive to public opinion may be more supportive of the Palestinians, but they would be foolish to take their countries to war when the people they lead are looking for prosperity.  So, okay, we’ll get Egypt opening the border with Gaza, but closing it was an approach that wasn’t worth a damn anyway.  Hamas is likely to need to cut its margins on smuggled goods when they can enter more freely. Maybe an open border will serve American purposes better than the closed one.

I admit that it is hard to see how Yemen comes out of this anything but a basket case, which is where it was headed under Saleh anyway.  Certainly it will be a while before any future government in Sanaa gets a grip on the provinces.  Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula may have a field day in the meanwhile, but they don’t appear so far to have been particularly effective at exploiting the chaos.

That said, the Arab spring is not about American interests, which will have to take a back seat for a while throughout the Middle East.  It is however about American values.  We should  be happy to see them spreading among young Arabs willing to demand their rights.  Let’s see where things go before we get too pessimistic.

 

 

 

 

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A soggy version of the Arab spring

Big Carnegie Endowment/Harvard discussion of Arab Spring yesterday.  Outcome:  pretty gloomy.  But these are experts, who admittedly failed to see the budding of the Arab Spring and are unlikely to be able to predict its course either.  They all acknowledged the many unknowns and the difficulties of prediction.

Marwan Muasher, who prefers reform from above, thinks doing nothing in response to the protests is no longer an option but also noted there is more “empire strikes back” (Libya, Yemen, Syria) and “buying time with money” (the Gulf) than “promises of reform” (thin in Jordan, a bit more serious in Morocco).  And his criteria for successful reform from above were exacting:  it has to be holistic and inclusive, power has to be shared seriously, it should be gradual and measurable.  Nothing makes the cut yet.

No optimism from Marina Ottaway either.  She noted that even in Tunisia and Egypt there are problems of political will to complete the reform process, that some of the politicians formerly associated with the ruling parties will be able to recycle themselves, that secular parties are weak and fragmented, that Islamists may be a bit stronger but also fragmented, with Salafi influence rising.  It is not clear yet what the protesters will be able or willing to do politically, and it is too early to count the military out.

Tarek Masoud did not like what he sees in Egypt.  He noted the intense conflict among political forces and between political forces and the military, with the military wary of democracy.  They don’t want democratic oversight, fear the demand for justice and don’t want to break with past policy on Israel and the U.S.  The military would like to reign without ruling, keeping out of the public eye and avoiding responsibility for governing.  They have already made mistakes by scheduling the constitutional referendum, then having to fix the amended constitution with their own constitutional declaration.  Early elections will favor Islamists, and opening the constitution to a constituent assembly will open the question of the relationship between state and religion, which is not a good idea.  The future holds more discord.

So spring wasn’t so cheery.  How about the U.S. policy response?

Nick Burns praised President Obama’s relatively rapid and thoroughly nuanced response in a difficult international situation.  He was not too late to support the Tahrir protesters, correctly hesitated about Libya but signed on in response to the Arab League appeal in light of Gaddafi’s threat to Benghazi, and gave the Gulfies more slack because there was no rebellion to sign on to in Saudi Arabia, Oman or Qatar.  Only under questioning did Nick state baldly that he could not understand why we hadn’t zapped Bashar al Assad earlier and admit that in Bahrain Washington had chosen interests over values.  Nick urged that we focus on Egypt, decrease out focus on governments  and security, increase our focus on development and outreach to people, move on Israel/Palestine and shift to a containment policy on Iran.

Agreeing that the case-by-case contextual approach was the right one, Steve Walt concluded that we would soon face Arab governments more sensitive to public opinion, that there would be no easy fixes for the problems of over-centralization and corruption in the Arab countries, Western governments are not flush and would find it hard to ante up, Israel’s position would be weakened as Egypt and Jordan became less compliant to U.S. wishes and that U.S. strategy in the region is obsolete even if its interests are the same as always:  unhindered flow of oil and gas, nuclear nonproliferation, countering terrorism and protecting Israel.  A more effective policy would pay more attention to Arab public opinion, embrace reform, sustain multipolarity in the region, get U.S. troops out (to an offshore balancing role, naturally, that would still prevent others from exerting control), internationalize the Israel/Palestine peace process (including encouragement of European support for the Palestine resolution at the GA and a possible settlement imposed by the Security Council).  Most importantly:  we need to stop threatening Iran, which gives Tehran incentives to build nuclear weapons and attempt more creative (unspecified) diplomacy. In response to a question, Walt said he also thought we need a residual force in Iraq to counter Iran.

Chris Boucek, focused mainly on Yemen, warned of economic meltdown, suggested we manage the Saudis better and noted that the youthful protesters are espousing our ideals.

There was a good deal more, but this gives you the flavor:  the U.S. focus on stability, peace and democracy has failed:  no stability, little prospect for peace and not much for democracy either.  Burns and Walt, each in his own way, thought the U.S. could still play an important role, but no one was sanguine about the prospects for the Arab spring or U.S. interests in its aftermath.

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Après eux?

President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and non-president of Libya Muammar Gaddafi will soon be gone.   They have cracked their respective countries beyond repair.  It looks unlikely that Bashar al Assad will last much longer in Syria.  What can, or should, come next?

There is no reason why these revolutions should follow a common pattern, but it may be worthwhile to look at what is happening in Egypt to get an idea of the issues that will arise.  The New York Times has made a brave effort in this week’s magazine to give us a well-rounded, if optimistic, snapshot.  I was struck with this compelling observation:

The revolutions of 2011 were led by a generation that is tired of ideologies and that tends to see its own struggle in terms of more concrete personal rights and freedoms.

Many observers worry that the generals who now run Egypt may want to remain in power, or that the well-organized Muslim Brotherhood may dominate the post-revolution political space, or that economic distress will upend hopes for democracy.  All these worries are real, but the Times found the generals interested in returning to barracks, the Muslim Brotherhood split and other Islamist groups less threatening than imagined.  Economic problems may well endure and present the most serious threat to improvements in personal rights and freedoms.

Jane Novak, a keen observer of Yemen blogging at Armies of Liberation, proposes a locally-based approach to politics, social services and jobs once Saleh is gone.  I don’t really know if her “Interim Transitional Mechanism” and its local “Community Centers” is realistic.  Is it too schematic?  Cartesian organization doesn’t strike me as a likely formula for success in Yemen.  But she is on to something:  the Saleh regime’s attempt to run Yemen from Sanaa has been notably unsuccessful, and the political “opposition” seems also to lack strong roots outside the capital.  It might be a lot smarter post-revolution to try something more locally based, drawing on tribal loyalties. There is of course a risk that southerners will take advantage of the opportunity to secede, but Novak seems to feel this can be prevented, at least temporarily.

It is easy to imagine something similar in Libya, where the resistance to Muammar Gaddafi seems to have evolved largely along municipal and tribal lines, starting in Benghazi but certainly extending also to Misrata and other towns.  The same is true on Gaddafi’s side of the ledger, where his tribal strength in Sirte helps to protect Tripoli from the insurgent forces.  Building the new Libyan state from the grassroots up strikes me as preferable to replacement of Gaddafi with some internationally acclaimed worthy.  Far better a decentralized approach that makes Tripoli listen to other population centers more than it has in the past. Libyans seem fully committed to national unity, despite the current civil war, and economic hardship could pass quickly if the oil revenue is used effectively.  But of course that is a tall order.

In Syria, the risk of disintegration is serious.  Some of its Kurds–treated as second class citizens in an Arab Republic–aspire to the kind of autonomy they see next door in Iraq.  So too is the risk of a Sunni Islamist takeover that would breach one of the current regime’s only virtues:  commitment to religious pluralism. Many Syrians will be looking to settle accounts with the Alawites who run the current regime, and they will not wait to be attacked before defending themselves (that in a sense is already what they are doing).  Constitutional succession in Syria seems even more unlikely than in Egypt, which abandoned that route mid-stream. Economic problems are likely to be at least as challenging, as Syrian oil production is declining and the current regime’s repressive efforts are no doubt emptying the treasury (if it hadn’t already been emptied by the kleptocrats).

I don’t have a ready-made formula for Syria, Yemen or Libya except this:  we need to listen to the locals, and follow their lead if we can figure out what it is.  It is striking, as the Times observes, how the street protesters are committed to individual rights and freedoms.  We should be finding and supporting that vein of gold in each of these societies.  I remember all too well how we quickly abandoned the Otpor youth who led the revolt against Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, because we were more concerned to support the new government than to make sure it was true to democratic ideals.  Above all, we should not make that mistake again.

 

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