Tag: Israel/Palestine

Pompeo midway to failure

Posted in Daniel Serwer - March 27, 2019 - 0 Comment

Secretary Pompeo in testimony todaycited the Administration’s foreign policy priorities:

  • Countering Russia and China,
  • Denuclearization of North Korea,
  • Venezuela,
  • Iran,
  • and supporting allies and partners.

So how are they doing?

The only serious effort to counter Russia has come from the Congress, which has levied several layers of sanctions on Moscow for interference in the 2016 US election, and from the State Department, for Moscow’s murder of a defector in the United Kingdom. President Trump has still not said an unkind word about President Putin and continues to cite him as more reliable than the American intelligence community, without acknowledging Russian electoral interference.

On China, the Administration has been walking on eggshells, since it needs Beijing’s cooperation both on North Korea and on trade. There is little to no sign of a serious strategy to contain or compete with China (in anything but trade). China continues its buildup of military bases in the South China Sea, where it has also escalated its challenges to US naval vessels.

The North Korea talks are at a standstill after the failure in February of the second Kim/Trump summit in Vietnam. Trump is demanding immediate denuclearization in one step while the Pyongyang has maintained its vague commitment to a phased process whose endpoint is unclear. All those promises of Trump-like hotels are not going to convince Kim Jong-un that he should abandon his regime’s only real guarantee: its nuclear arsenal and ballistic missiles.

Venezuela is grinding to a stalemate, with the Russians deploying troops there and no sign of the military defections required to seat President Guaido’ in President Maduro’s chair. A US military intervention would have to be massive and long-term. Nothing short of that seems to be working. Venezuelans are voting with their feet by leaving the country, but that does not help bring down Maduro.

Sanctions on Iran have so far had little visible impact, other than giving the Europeans an incentive to find a way to continue to expand trade with Tehran. China and Russia will also find the ways and means. The Iranian economy is a mess, not only because of sanctions. The Administration hopes to compel the Iranians back to the negotiating table or to precipitate regime change. Neither outcome is visible on the horizon. In the meanwhile, hardliners have gained strength and continue to pursue regional interventions.

Support for allies and partners is a lot easier than dealing with adversaries, but the Trump Administration has been selective about it. The ultranationalists who govern Hungary and Poland and the Brexiteers in the UK get Trump’s blessing. France, Germany and the European Union get kicked hard. Israel gets endorsement of whatever it wants (so far, recognition of Jerusalem as its capital and of the annexation of the Golan Heights, not to mention a green light for killing Gaza demonstrators), leaving crumbs for the Palestinians. Saudi Arabia gets American top cover for Mohammed bin Salman against charges that he was implicated in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

To add insult to injury, Pompeo said this about the State Department, whose budget the President has proposed to cut back by 23%:


And I take it as a personal mission to make sure that our world-class diplomatic personnel have the resources they need to execute America’s diplomacy in the 21st century.

Trump’s cuts target especially the State Department’s cooperation with the military in stabilizing conflict situations like Syria and Afghanistan, which is a required prelude to the withdrawals he has rashly announced.

I suppose I need to give Pompeo an incomplete rather than an F, since it is possible the next 22 months will provide better results than the last 26. Real diplomacy does take time. But there is precious little sign of real diplomacy on the priorities Pompeo identifies.

Tags : , , , , , , ,

Your Saturday video

Posted in Daniel Serwer, Uncategorized - March 9, 2019 - 0 Comment

I’ve written many screeds against partition schemes, but none more effective than this from Yes Prime Minister:

Tags : , , , , ,

From War to Peace

Posted in Daniel Serwer - February 14, 2019 - 1 Comment

Here are the notes I used for my presentation of From War to Peace in the Balkans, Middle East, and Ukraine yesterday at Johns Hopkins/SAIS, which has made it available free world-wide at that link. I am grateful to colleagues David Kanin and Majda Ruge for commenting and critiquing. 

  1. It is a pleasure to present at this Faculty Research Forum, which will I think be a bit different from others. I’ll be concerned not only with analyzing what happened and is happening now in the Balkans but also with what should happen. I will try to fill the academic/practitioner gap.

 

  1. I am particularly pleased as the event includes two of the best-informed people I know on the Balkans: David Kanin, whom I first met when he worked in the 1990s at the CIA Balkans Task Force, teaches the Balkans course here at SAIS; and Majda Ruge, who is both a native of the Balkans and a colleague at the Foreign Policy Institute.

 

  1. Some of you will remember the Balkans in the 1990s: the US and Europe fumbling for years in search of peaceful solutions in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo only to find themselves conducting two air wars against Serb forces.

 

  1. But most Americans have forgotten this history. Europeans often believe there were no positive results. In the Balkans, many are convinced things were better under Tito.

 

  1. I beg to differ: the successes as well as the failures of international intervention in the Balkans should not be forgotten or go unappreciated.

 

  1. That’s why I wrote my short book, which treats the origins, consequences, and aftermath of the 1995, 1999 and 2001 interventions that led to the end of the most recent Balkan wars.

 

  1. As for the causes of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, my view is that there were three fundamental ingredients: the breakup of former Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević’s political ambitions and military capability, and ethnic nationalism, particularly in its territorial form.

 

  1. Where all three were present in good measure, as in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, war was inevitable. Where Milosevic’s political ambitions were limited, as in Slovenia, war was short. Where his political ambitions and others’ ethnic nationalism were attenuated, as in Macedonia and Montenegro, war was mostly avoided.

 

  1. The breakup of Yugoslavia is now a done deal, even if Serbia continues to resist acknowledging it. So too are Milosevic’s political ambition AND military capability. No one has inherited them. The third factor—ethnoterritorial nationalism—is still very much alive. All the Balkans peace agreements left it unscathed.

 

  1. Conflict prevention and state-building efforts since the 1990s have been partly successful, though challenging problems remain in Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Serbia. My former SAIS colleague Michael Mandelbaum is wrong: the transformation mission in the Balkans is not a failed mission, but rather an incomplete one.

 

  1. He thinks it failed because his explicit point of comparison is an ideal: the U.S. he says did not “succeed in installing well-run, widely accepted governments in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, or Kosovo.” I think Bosnia and Kosovo are works in progress because they are so obviously improved from their genocidal and homicidal wars. State capture is better than mass atrocity.

 

  1. The book examines each of the Balkan countries on its own merits, as well as their prospects for entry into NATO and the EU, whose doors are in theory open to all the Balkan states.

 

  1. {slide} Bottom line: all the states that emerged from Yugoslavia as well as Albania are closer to fulfilling their Euroatlantic ambitions than they are to the wars and collapse of the 1990s.

 

  1. All can hope to be EU members, and NATO allies if they want, by 2030, if they focus their efforts.

 

  1. {Slide} They were making decent progress when the financial crisis struck in 2007/8. The decade since then has been disappointing in many different respects:
  • Growth slowed and even halted in some places.
  • The Greek financial crisis cast a storm cloud over the EU and the euro.
  • The flow of refugees, partly through the Balkans, from the Syrian and Afghanistan wars as well as from Africa soured the mood further.
  • Brexit, a symptom of the much wider rise of mostly right-wing, anti-European populism, has made enlargement look extraordinarily difficult.

 

  1. {Slide} The repercussions in the Balkans have been dire:
  • Bosnia’s progress halted as it slid back into ethnic nationalist infighting.
  • Macedonia’s reformist prime minister became a defiant would-be autocrat.
  • Kosovo and Serbia are stalled in their difficult normalization process.
  • Russia has taken advantage of the situation to slow progress towards NATO and the EU.

 

  1. Moscow tried to murder Montenegro’s President to block NATO membership, finances Bosnia’s Serb secessionist entity, campaigned against resolving the Macedonia name issue, and undermines free media throughout the Balkans.

 

  1. Now the question is whether the West, demoralized and divided by Donald Trump and other populists, can still muster the courage to resolve the remaining problems in the Balkans and complete the process of EU and, for those who want it, NATO accession.

 

  1. Plan A is still viable. I also don’t see a Plan B that comes even close to the benefits of completing Plan A.

 

  1. When I wrote the book, three big obstacles remained. Now there are only two.

 

  1. The first obstacle was the Macedonia “name” issue. For those who may not follow the Balkans, the Greeks claim the name “Macedonia” belongs exclusively to the Hellenic tradition and would like the modern, majority Slavic country that uses that name to stop using it.

 

  1. Skopje and Athens have now resolved this issue. New leadership was key to making it happen.

 

  1. For those who claim the West is prepared to tolerate corruption and state capture in order to ensure stability in the Balkans, I suggest a chat with Nikola Gruevski.

 

  1. Washington and Brussels helped chase him from office in 2017, once his malfeasance was well-publicized and a popular alternative appeared on the horizon. If there is a viable liberal democratic option, the West has been willing to support it.

 

  1. The solution to the name issue is deceptively simple: now ratified in both parliaments, the Republic of Macedonia will become the Republic of North Macedonia, which most of its inhabitants and most of us will continue to call just Macedonia.

 

  1. The Republic of North Macedonia can now hope to join NATO, perhaps by the end of this year, and become a candidate for EU accession.

 

  1. There is a lot more to it, but that is all that will matter to you and me. The rest is for the Greeks and Macedonians.

 

  1. The second big obstacle is normalization between Belgrade and Pristina, which will require mutual recognition and exchange of diplomatic representatives at the ambassadorial level.

 

  1. This is closer than most think. Serbia has already abandoned its claim to sovereignty over all of Kosovo, in an April 2013 Brussels agreement that established the validity of the Kosovo constitution on its whole territory and foresaw Kosovo and Serbia entering the EU separately and without hindering each other. Only sovereign states can enter the EU.

 

  1. {Slide} Belgrade has also implicitly acknowledged Kosovo’s sovereignty in opening the question of partition along ethnic lines. Serbia would like to absorb the 3.5 or 4 (depending on how you count) municipalities in northern Kosovo, three of which were majority Serb before the war.

Read more

Tags : , ,

Money and Israel

Posted in Daniel Serwer - February 12, 2019 - 0 Comment

Newly elected Member of Congress Ilhan Omar has generated accusations of anti-Semitism for her tweet implying that money (Benjamins) from AIPAC is the main reason for support for Israel. This was by way of explanation of her claim that

Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.

I don’t much like that appeal to Allah, but in addition Omar certainly oversimplified the situation: many members of Congress support Israel for religious reasons, and others because they think it is in America’s national security interest or because the two countries share democratic values. But charging that money is also a main factor in blinding Congress to Israeli wrongdoing is not in my view anti-Semitic, as many have charged.

Mehdi Hasan makes the point graphically in a series of tweets:

So, on the whole controversy, I wanted to do this pointing out the absurdity of saying it’s off limits to mention money and support for Israel, when the US media (rightly) does mention money, influence-peddling & lobbying when it comes to Saudi Arabia and DC. 1/

Why is it okay to talk about Saudi lobbies, and Saudis buying Trump, and Saudi-first policies, why is it not Islamophobic to say all of that, but it’s anti-Semitic when it comes to Israel? Try changing Saudi to Israel in some of these mainstream headlines – here we go: 2/

Here’s the Washington Post; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 3/

Here’s the Washington Post again; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 4/

Here’s the New York Times; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 5/

Here’s more from the New York Times; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 6/

Here’s Vox; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 7/

Here’s NPR; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 8/

Here’s more NPR; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 9/

Here’s MSNBC; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 10/

Here’s the Tablet; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 11/

Here’s the FT; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 12/

Here’s Vanity Fair; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 13/

Here’s Time magazine; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 14/

Here’s Politico; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 15/

To be clear, it’s not illegal, & of course above it’s the Saudi *government* buying influence in DC vs pro-Israeli *American* groups buying influence in DC but the point is that influence *is* bought. Don’t be naive or play dumb. We see it with Saudi, why not with Israel? *ENDS*

The short answer to that question is that many of us do see it, and that includes the majority of American Jews who, like me, would like to see an end to Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians and creation of a Palestinian state that will live in peace and prosperity with its Israeli neighbors. AIPAC and the money of its supporters is opposing that goal. There is virtue in recognizing reality. It’s not the whole story, but it is an important piece of it. Would anyone pay attention to Sheldon Adelson if he were poor?

Ilhan Omar has apologized unequivocally for using an anti-Semitic “trope.” I wonder how many of her antagonists who expressed anti-Muslim sentiments in response to her will do likewise.

 

Tags : ,

Keeping rigor in a shallow environment

Posted in Bouela Lehbib - February 7, 2019 - 0 Comment

The Middle East Institute hosted a discussion on Thursday 30 about the role of think tanks in shaping Middle East policy, with Randa Slim, Senior Fellow and Director of Conflict Resolution at MEI. She was Joined by Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Paul Salem, President of Middle East Institute, Steven Kenney, Principal of Foresight Vector LLC, and Sami Atallah, Director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies.

Katulis stated that Thinks Tanks are in an existential crisis; the weak and incoherent policy planning process inside the US government has affected the analysis they are doing. There is also a growing tendency towards advocacy as opposed to analysis, reflecting Trump’s disruptive style of politics and decision-making. This approach has created an incentive for many think tanks just to react to the latest decisions without examining more holistically what is going on. Katulis claims the sectarianism and tribalism that exist in the Middle East are also echoed in DC in the sense that think tanks tend not to bring together people with different views. Worse, the media has affected the way policy and politics are conducted, making scholars too reactive to events and statements coming out of the current Administration.

Slim mentioned that there is too much Track I dialogue and not enough emphasis on Track II. She stated that Track II diplomacy had become a growing field of study, to which MEI has devoted particular attention. The work done by Herbert Kelman on the Arab -Israeli conflict has fertilized this field in the Middle East. The Taif agreement for Lebanon was negotiated in a three-year Track II process that started before the official negotiations, subsequently producing an outcome that translated into Track I official negotiations.  When there is no working policy process as in the current US administration, or when there are no relations between the antagonists in a conflict such as the Saudi-Iranian conflict, there is no Track I to hook to.

Reflecting on the role of thank tanks in the Middle East, Salem gave an overview of how the civil society organizations fuel of these research centers. They have had a significant impact in producing policy ideas and creating young leaders who are empowered, informed and moving into public space. Think tanks were part of the awakening and empowerment that led up to the Arab Spring.  For Salem, that impact had two effects; it empowered civil society, but at the same time it drew government antagonism. In the US, it is challenging to impact the government due to the lack of a political process that is real, meaningful, and coherent. The same thing can be said about the resurgent authoritarian regimes in the Middle East inspired by China and Russia and encouraged by the current illiberal president Donald Trump.

Atallah described the political environment thinks tanks are operating in as not inclusive or transparent, leaving little chance for them to influence decisions. There is also a problem of financial sustainability. Think tanks need a long-term income stream to hire senior staff to deal with emerging issues. According to Atallah, through research, advocacy and conferences think tanks have been able to introduce key ideas and influence decision-making in Lebanon.

Kenney spoke about the few mainstream think tanks tjat are employing the methods of foresight in a concerted way, alongside the other research and analysis they have traditionally done. For Kenney, the rigor, comprehensiveness and objectivity of think tanks and the methodology behind them do not often get recognized. The misconception many have is that think tanks are the equivalent of looking into a crystal ball and trying to predict the future. Kenny clarified that think tanks explain why things are the way they are today and extrapolate forward from that.

Tags : , , , ,

Hard to know how to please the US

Posted in Bouela Lehbib - January 29, 2019 - 0 Comment

The Middle East Policy Council hosted a discussion January 25 assessing Trump Administration mid- term policy on the Middle East, with Philip Gordon, Fellow in US Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was joined by Michael Doran, Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute and Jon B. Alterman, Senior Vice President and Director of the Middle East Program.

Gordon described Trump Administration policy in the Middle East as based on a core contradiction. On one hand, it sets out to constrain Iran from meddling in the region, to defeat ISIS, to achieve a Palestinian/Israeli peace, and show US leadership. On the other hand, the President regards the Middle East as only sand and death where the US has spent around $6 trillion without getting anything in return. The US thus wants to leave and make others pay for the expenses incurred.

Two years of trying to inflict pain on the Iranian economy did not make Iran change its behavior in the region. However costly and risky the mission might be, Gordon thinks the US should have maintained troops in Syria to prevent a Turkish invasion, giving the Kurds the leverage they need in negotiations with Damascus, and finishing the job against ISIS. Trump wants Gulf states to invest invest in the US, buy US weapons, and fight ISIS in return for backing them on countering Iran. This policy has signaled a green light to do what they want to boycott Qatar, continue the bombing campaign in Yemen, and repress dissidents.

Doran offered a different assessment of Trump Administration policy in the Middle East based on what the President promised during his election campaign: doing more with less. Trump’s approach is totally different from Obama’s of no enemies or friends, only stakeholders and problems. The US works to reach an agreement accepted by all friendly parties. Trump looks after US interests and seeks to save blood and treasure by working with allies who accept the US security umbrella in the region, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. This policy favors a coalition of allies to contain Iran. Doran claims this policy is much better than Obama’s.

Ultimately, it’s all about how you read the Iranians for Doran. Obama downplayed Iran’s aspirations. Trump thinks Iran wants to destroy the US alliance system and kick it out of the Gulf region and the Middle East.

Confused about US policy in the Middle East, Alterman pointed out what he sees as Trump’s contradictory policies in the region. John Bolton, National Security Adviser, stated the US is staying in Syria, while the president contradicted him by declaring the withdrawal. Trump said it would take thirty days to pull out and now it’s six months. In Gulf states, Trump disengaged on Yemen, embraced Saudi Arabia, and ignored the GCC conflict. The president is divorced from his government and has a poorly functioning staff.  That said, Trump’s three main objectives are reasonably clear: building close ties with Saudi Arabia, countering Iran (and reversing Obama strategy of engaging it), and holding the Middle East at arm’s length.

But this strategy, Alterman argued, is not working. It is bizarre for Trump to make Iran the core of the Middle East strategy, since Tehran is weak. Its GDP is between the state of Maryland and Michigan. Mississippi, which has the lowest income per capita in the US, has seven times the income per capita of Iran. Iran has no allies in the Middle East. It can be a spoiler in the region but cannot be a winner.

For Alterman, the biggest mistake the US is making is an idiosyncratic embrace of some Middle Eastern states and the abandonment of many, rendering it hard for countries to understand how to please the US.

Tags : , , , ,
Tweet