There is some weird and complicated

There is some weird and complicated stuff going on right now in the Middle East, and in U.S. Middle East policy—even weirder and more complicated than what has been going on for the past half dozen years. We have shifted gears in recent days into an even more frenetic phase of accelerated experience.

That shift registers in three keys: new developments in U.S.-Israeli relations and the domestic politics churning beneath both sides; the launching of a new phase of war in Yemen that evokes loud echoes of both World War I and the Spanish Civil War prelude to World War II, as mapped onto regional realities; and, of course, the supposed countdown to a do-or-die (perhaps literally) deadline over the P5+1/Iran nuclear negotiations. (I say “supposed” because, even if a framework agreement is reached in the next few days, the parties are bound to abuse the next three months trying to turn unavoidable vagueness into an explicit operational program. The “implementation” phase will be an extension of the negotiations that are, both sides claim, not to be extended. Put a bit differently, a skinny lady is on stage now; the fat lady’s number awaits the end of June. My guess is that it will fall flat then if the show doesn’t close sooner.)

Each of these keys is complicated in its own right and has its own separate internal logic, and the weirdnesses consist in part of a cacophony of speculative interpretation that, as often as not, reads too much—especially too much coherence—into assorted motives. But alas, an additional layer of complexity flows from the indissoluble fact that these three keys overlap, both in reality and in the interpretations thereof. Imagine, if you can, a three-voiced fugue in the interwoven keys of D major, F# minor, and A♭major: occasional harmonies will emerge, but mainly what you’ll get is a lot of irritating noise.

One sees this in the oft-noted fact that of late in Iraq we are operating as objective allies of Iran, where Iranian-directed Shi’a militias outnumber the forces of the Iraqi Army in the battle for Tikrit and environs; but we are supporting the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen against Iranian-supported Houthi rebels. Never mind the next layer of contradictions concerning Syria and Libya. And never mind the fact that complications reside within the complications: The use of U.S. airpower in the battle for Tikrit has led some Iranian-aligned militias to pull out of the campaign and others to threaten to do so in protest, and so we have a competition of sorts to persuade the government in Baghdad that we are more useful friends to it than is Iran. That competition may gain a further bloody edge if things come to a point where it makes sense for Iran to order the militias to attack U.S. soldiers in Iraq, where there are enough Americans to die but not enough to win a serious battle.

Some observers think that this seeming contradiction and these concentric rings of complexity stand as proof of strategic incoherence, but it is no such thing—at least not necessarily. Tactical inconsistencies can be the very stuff of strategic coherence in messy situations. Study 16th-century Ottoman strategy toward the Wars of the Reformation if you need a case in point. (The next issue of The American Interest will help you do that, soon.)

My burden here is to interrogate the “stuff” and its interpretations, and by way of the latter particularly to push back against excessively simplified, invariably speculative, and often partisan-driven assessments of motives. But before we can deal with each key, we need to assess the degree of their overlap, presumed and actual.

There is a line of talk out there lately that the Obama Administration is engaged in a bold, strategically coherent, historically rare, and, in most versions, exceedingly stupid or futile attempt to rebalance U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. The plot holds the White House to be intent on transforming U.S. relations with Iran to create what amounts to a Nixon Doctrine-like pillar of stability to replace a United States that either does not wish or believes itself unable to take care of regional security-competition suppression tasks itself. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Sunni Arab associates get downgraded in this rebalancing act, whether gleefully or resignedly depending on which version of the plot is open before you.

Some commentators think this is a pretty good idea, if it can be done—good work if you can get it, in other words. And some think it can indeed be done, with a nuclear portfolio deal the lustrous open gate to a new path for U.S.-Iranian relations. These are supporters of the Administration, of course, but in recent weeks their ranks have grown ever thinnerThese are supporters of the Administration, of course, but in recent weeks their ranks have grown ever thinner. Those abandoning ship include prominent former employees of the President, including a former CIA Director and a Special Envoy for peace process matters. They have jumped the deck either because they do not credit the wisdom or they do not grant the attainability of the strategy, which usually goes under the shorthand name of “offshore balancing.”

Others think the whole attempt a chimera, and the nuclear negotiations vanguard approach a particularly harmful one, for both are based, they charge, on a miasmic misreading of Iranian intentions floating on a fetid swamp of neoliberal self-delusion. Prominent amid that self-delusion, it is averred, is a crypto-(secularized) theological worship of arms control as a deus ex machina that can achieve what ordinary, mortal statecraft cannot.

Whether inflected with approbation or condemnation, both views tend to exaggerate the coherence and single-mindedness of this Administration—more particularly this White House and this President. Not that it, or he, is reacting in a completely random, crisis-management “one damned thing after another” mode. There are abiding themes and hopes articulated in a would-be causal skein, and there is by now considerable experience with the obstacles and uncertainties involved in translating hopes into accomplishments. Ross Douthat’s column in today’s New York Times gets it just right: Yes, it’s good work if you can get it (for us if not for the region); but you can’t get it. The United States can’t get that work because it’s too entwined in the region to begin with, and because the standard breakage that comes with offshore balancing postures—wars and multilateral security competitions—is too dangerous, even from afar, in a era of all-too-easy nuclear proliferation. So here is the rub: The real contradiction in U.S. policy is that to the extent it succeeds in solving the U.S. “overinvestment” problem in the region, it will sire exactly the security/proliferation nightmare it is trying to prevent.

Hence, even if the Administration started with a tightly reasoned, coherent offshore balancing strategy (which I doubt, and have said so before), as opposed to some rather abstract ideas that have always fallen well short of an actual synoptic strategy (which I don’t doubt), its experience to date must have taught it that it is now caught in a proverbial pickle, a rundown with low odds of successful escape defined by a devil of an opponent to one side and a deep blue sea of an opponent to the other.

The devil remains the threat to U.S. interests posed by Iran in the form of its noxious regional behavior—in Syria and Lebanon, in Yemen, in Iraq, toward Israel and Jordan, and toward Saudi Arabia and Bahrain by using fifth column Shi’a communities within those Sunni-led monarchies. Even as the Administration hopes to transform U.S.-Iranian relations by dint of an arms control deal, and even more ambitiously thereby to throttle down Iranian revolutionary energies into Thermidor if not actual regime change, it acknowledges and occasionally discusses these threats. What it has not done is forcibly push back against Iranian probes and other mischief, apparently thinking that so doing might reduce prospects for a nuclear deal. At the same time, the Administration’s reluctance to get kinetic in places like Syria, though clearly a signal to Tehran, has its own rationale based on an assessment of difficulty separate from any connection to Iran.

The deep blue sea is composed of Da’esh, but Da’esh seen in context of the general institutional exhaustion of the Sunni Arab states. The so-called Islamic State is institutionally weak, its order of battle is a brittle combination of fissiparous elements: salafi true believers both foreign and native, unreconstructed Ba’athis, tribal elements making highly temporary deals in parlous circumstances, desperate unemployed young men, criminals and sadists, and rural riffraff dead set on taking revenge on snooty urbanites in places like Mosul. Its temporary success has been owed to the even greater institutional weaknesses of what is left of the Syrian and Iraqi states, the fecklessness of the rest of the Sunni Arab world, and the consequent helplessness felt by so many Sunni Arabs in the face of a terrifying region-wide Shi’a assault.

Together the devil and the deep blue sea are churning up demonic waves of blood and mayhem, and those waves are washing over the deck of the American ship of state. Yemen, the second key, has now joined Syria as a platform for a squaring off between Saudi Arabia and Iran in a new rendition of the Battle of Karbala. But Yemen is a better built platform for the purpose for two reasons: Saudi Arabia borders Yemen it but does not border Syria, and a Saudi-Egyptian alliance can come to fruition there but not in Syria because Egypt has obvious geopolitical stakes in preventing a hostile power from lording over the Bab al-Mandeb. So the Administration is now in a position concerning Yemen of having to objectively align with Egypt, a country it recently criticized for wanting to protect its own security i

Hasil (Bahasa Indonesia) 1:

Ada beberapa hal yang aneh dan rumit yang terjadi sekarang di Timur Tengah, dan di Timur Tengah US kebijakan — bahkan aneh dan lebih rumit daripada apa yang telah terjadi selama tahun setengah lusin. Kami telah bergeser gigi dalam beberapa hari ke fase bahkan lebih ingar-bingar pengalaman dipercepat.Itu pergeseran register di tiga tombol: perkembangan baru dalam hubungan AS-Israel dan politik dalam negeri berputar di bawah kedua sisinya; peluncuran sebuah tahap baru dalam perang di Yaman yang membangkitkan keras Gema dari Perang Dunia I dan Perang Saudara Spanyol pendahuluan kepada Perang Dunia II, sebagai dipetakan ke realitas regional; dan, tentu saja, penghitung seharusnya dilakukan-atau-mati (mungkin secara harfiah) tenggat waktu atas P5 + 1 Iran perundingan nuklir. (Saya mengatakan "seharusnya" karena, bahkan jika kesepakatan kerangka dicapai dalam beberapa hari berikutnya, pihak-pihak yang terikat untuk penyalahgunaan tiga bulan ke depan berusaha mengubah tidak dapat dihindari ketidakjelasan ke program operasional yang eksplisit. Fase "implementasi" akan menjadi perpanjangan negosiasi bahwa adalah, kedua belah pihak mengklaim, untuk tidak diperpanjang. Menempatkan sedikit berbeda, seorang wanita kurus adalah pada tahap sekarang; jumlah wanita gemuk menunggu akhir Juni. Saya duga adalah bahwa hal itu akan jatuh datar kemudian jika acara tidak menutup cepat.)Each of these keys is complicated in its own right and has its own separate internal logic, and the weirdnesses consist in part of a cacophony of speculative interpretation that, as often as not, reads too much—especially too much coherence—into assorted motives. But alas, an additional layer of complexity flows from the indissoluble fact that these three keys overlap, both in reality and in the interpretations thereof. Imagine, if you can, a three-voiced fugue in the interwoven keys of D major, F# minor, and A♭major: occasional harmonies will emerge, but mainly what you’ll get is a lot of irritating noise.One sees this in the oft-noted fact that of late in Iraq we are operating as objective allies of Iran, where Iranian-directed Shi’a militias outnumber the forces of the Iraqi Army in the battle for Tikrit and environs; but we are supporting the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen against Iranian-supported Houthi rebels. Never mind the next layer of contradictions concerning Syria and Libya. And never mind the fact that complications reside within the complications: The use of U.S. airpower in the battle for Tikrit has led some Iranian-aligned militias to pull out of the campaign and others to threaten to do so in protest, and so we have a competition of sorts to persuade the government in Baghdad that we are more useful friends to it than is Iran. That competition may gain a further bloody edge if things come to a point where it makes sense for Iran to order the militias to attack U.S. soldiers in Iraq, where there are enough Americans to die but not enough to win a serious battle.Some observers think that this seeming contradiction and these concentric rings of complexity stand as proof of strategic incoherence, but it is no such thing—at least not necessarily. Tactical inconsistencies can be the very stuff of strategic coherence in messy situations. Study 16th-century Ottoman strategy toward the Wars of the Reformation if you need a case in point. (The next issue of The American Interest will help you do that, soon.)My burden here is to interrogate the “stuff” and its interpretations, and by way of the latter particularly to push back against excessively simplified, invariably speculative, and often partisan-driven assessments of motives. But before we can deal with each key, we need to assess the degree of their overlap, presumed and actual.There is a line of talk out there lately that the Obama Administration is engaged in a bold, strategically coherent, historically rare, and, in most versions, exceedingly stupid or futile attempt to rebalance U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. The plot holds the White House to be intent on transforming U.S. relations with Iran to create what amounts to a Nixon Doctrine-like pillar of stability to replace a United States that either does not wish or believes itself unable to take care of regional security-competition suppression tasks itself. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Sunni Arab associates get downgraded in this rebalancing act, whether gleefully or resignedly depending on which version of the plot is open before you.Beberapa komentator rasa ini adalah ide yang cukup baik, jika dapat dilakukan — baik bekerja jika Anda bisa mendapatkannya, dengan kata lain. Dan beberapa berpikir bisa memang dilakukan, dengan kesepakatan nuklir portofolio pintu berkilau untuk jalan baru untuk hubungan AS-Iran. Ini adalah pendukung administrasi, tentu saja, tapi dalam beberapa pekan terakhir barisan mereka telah tumbuh pernah thinnerThese adalah pendukung administrasi, tentu saja, tapi dalam beberapa pekan terakhir barisan mereka telah tumbuh pernah lebih tipis. Orang-orang yang meninggalkan kapal termasuk terkemuka mantan karyawan Presiden, termasuk mantan Direktur CIA dan utusan khusus untuk masalah-masalah proses perdamaian. Mereka melompat dek baik karena mereka tidak kredit kebijaksanaan atau mereka tidak memberikan attainability strategi, yang biasanya pergi dengan singkatan nama "menyeimbangkan lepas pantai."Lain berpikir seluruh mencoba menjadi angan-angan, dan pelopor perundingan nuklir pendekatan yang sangat berbahaya, karena keduanya, mereka mengisi, miasmic didasarkan Iran niat mengambang di rawa berbau busuk neoliberal penipuan diri sendiri. Menonjol di tengah-tengah itu penipuan diri sendiri, itu adalah averred, adalah penyembahan teologi crypto-(secularized) pengendalian senjata sebagai deus ex machina yang dapat mencapai apa biasa, fana statecraft tidak.Apakah kedua pandangan infleksi kalimat yang halus dengan persetujuan atau penghukuman, cenderung untuk membesar-besarkan koherensi dan single-mindedness administrasi ini — lebih khusus ini Gedung Putih dan Presiden ini. Tidak bahwa itu, atau dia, bereaksi dalam manajemen krisis benar-benar acak, "satu hal terkutuk lain" modus. Ada tema taat dan harapan diartikulasikan dalam gulungan kausal calon, dan ada oleh sekarang cukup pengalaman dengan rintangan dan ketidakpastian yang terlibat dalam menerjemahkan harapan menjadi prestasi. Ross Douthat kolom di hari ini New York Times mendapatkannya tepat: Ya, itu adalah pekerjaan baik jika Anda bisa mendapatkannya (bagi kita kalau bukan untuk wilayah); tetapi Anda tidak bisa mendapatkannya. Amerika Serikat tidak bisa yang bekerja karena terlalu terjalin di wilayah untuk memulai dengan, dan karena kerusakan standar yang datang dengan menyeimbangkan lepas pantai postur — perang dan multilateral keamanan kompetisi — terlalu berbahaya, bahkan dari kejauhan, di era proliferasi nuklir semua terlalu mudah. Jadi, inilah gosok: kontradiksi nyata dalam kebijakan AS adalah bahwa sejauh ini berhasil memecahkan masalah "overinvestment" AS di wilayah, itu akan sire persis keamanan proliferasi mimpi buruk itu mencoba untuk mencegah.Hence, even if the Administration started with a tightly reasoned, coherent offshore balancing strategy (which I doubt, and have said so before), as opposed to some rather abstract ideas that have always fallen well short of an actual synoptic strategy (which I don’t doubt), its experience to date must have taught it that it is now caught in a proverbial pickle, a rundown with low odds of successful escape defined by a devil of an opponent to one side and a deep blue sea of an opponent to the other.The devil remains the threat to U.S. interests posed by Iran in the form of its noxious regional behavior—in Syria and Lebanon, in Yemen, in Iraq, toward Israel and Jordan, and toward Saudi Arabia and Bahrain by using fifth column Shi’a communities within those Sunni-led monarchies. Even as the Administration hopes to transform U.S.-Iranian relations by dint of an arms control deal, and even more ambitiously thereby to throttle down Iranian revolutionary energies into Thermidor if not actual regime change, it acknowledges and occasionally discusses these threats. What it has not done is forcibly push back against Iranian probes and other mischief, apparently thinking that so doing might reduce prospects for a nuclear deal. At the same time, the Administration’s reluctance to get kinetic in places like Syria, though clearly a signal to Tehran, has its own rationale based on an assessment of difficulty separate from any connection to Iran.The deep blue sea is composed of Da’esh, but Da’esh seen in context of the general institutional exhaustion of the Sunni Arab states. The so-called Islamic State is institutionally weak, its order of battle is a brittle combination of fissiparous elements: salafi true believers both foreign and native, unreconstructed Ba’athis, tribal elements making highly temporary deals in parlous circumstances, desperate unemployed young men, criminals and sadists, and rural riffraff dead set on taking revenge on snooty urbanites in places like Mosul. Its temporary success has been owed to the even greater institutional weaknesses of what is left of the Syrian and Iraqi states, the fecklessness of the rest of the Sunni Arab world, and the consequent helplessness felt by so many Sunni Arabs in the face of a terrifying region-wide Shi’a assault.Together the devil and the deep blue sea are churning up demonic waves of blood and mayhem, and those waves are washing over the deck of the American ship of state. Yemen, the second key, has now joined Syria as a platform for a squaring off between Saudi Arabia and Iran in a new rendition of the Battle of Karbala. But Yemen is a better built platform for the purpose for two reasons: Saudi Arabia borders Yemen it but does not border Syria, and a Saudi-Egyptian alliance can come to fruition there but not in Syria because Egypt has obvious geopolitical stakes in preventing a hostile power from lording over the Bab al-Mandeb. So the Administration is now in a position concerning Yemen of having to objectively align with Egypt, a country it recently criticized for wanting to protect its own security i