Jon Alterman: Most of the U.S.-Soviet confrontations during the Cold War were between diplomats, not soldiers. U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals discouraged armed conflict, so superpower competition played out in other arenas. One of the most important was diplomacy.
U.S. diplomats came off the Cold War on a roll, and they continued rolling. After the Soviet Union fell, they built new relationships across Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet republics, and they embraced Middle East peace with renewed enthusiasm. U.S. diplomacy built the coalition that pushed Iraq out of Kuwait, ended a war in the Balkans, helped bring peace to Northern Ireland and brought Israeli and Palestinian officials into direct peace talks for the first time in history.
After 9/11, that shifted. U.S. policymakers came to see the threats the country faced as too urgent for the slow back-and-forth of diplomacy, and too vital to brook any compromise. Warriors came to the fore, and diplomats receded.
Brian Katulis is a senior fellow and vice president of policy at the Middle East Institute. During the Clinton administration, he served in the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Department of Defense. He says that the experience of Richard Holbrooke, the chief architect of the Dayton Accords that ended war in the Balkans in late 1995, demonstrates this shift.
Brian Katulis: Ambassador Richard Holbrooke—who truly was the lead in strategy and diplomacy to end wars in Bosnia and Kosovo—called General Wesley Clark his wing man back in the 1990s. Ten years later—and ten years after the over-militarization of U.S. foreign policy post-9/11—Holbrooke is back in another job as a special rep. on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and David Petraeus referred to Holbrooke as his wing man.
Jon Alterman: Holbrooke’s fall – from having a wing man to being a wing man – is larger than Holbrooke. While the story of that shift goes beyond the Middle East, there are few regions around the world where the change has been so acute—or so consequential.
Welcome to the U.S. in the Middle East podcast miniseries. In this series we talk to leading experts and former policymakers about the role of U.S. power and influence in the Middle East. I’m your host, Jon Alterman, senior vice president, Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy and director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.
In this episode, we look at the United States diplomatic toolkit in the Middle East and the successes and failures of U.S. diplomacy in the region.
In the second episode of this series, I noted that the United States has 85 soldiers for every foreign service officer around the world. By 2009, the year that Richard Holbrooke was appointed special representative to Afghanistan, some U.S. policymakers thought that ratio needed to change. The incoming Obama administration had big plans for U.S. diplomacy. That year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched the first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR)—modeled after the Department of Defense’s Quadrennial Defense Review. The review was meant to provide a blueprint for elevating the role of diplomacy—and the State Department—in U.S. foreign policy and to put diplomats on par with the military in advancing U.S. national security objectives.
The review faced serious obstacles, and the implementation of its recommendations faced serious ones, too. The problem isn’t merely that the State Department is not set up for quick change. Katulis says that it’s not really set up for change at all.
Brian Katulis: There often isn't the sort of management and learning culture in organizations like the State Department that need to be in place to actually help them perform their jobs better.
The fun topic that people talk about is how much money the Pentagon gets each year, compared to the State Department budget. That's the easy criticism. The harder criticism is actually that, operationally, the State Department—and many of the other civilian agencies—don't actually do a lot of the things that they’re charged to do efficiently.
Jon Alterman: What exactly is the State Department—and its nearly 14,000 career diplomats—charged to do? Thomas Pickering had a four-decade career in diplomacy, serving as U.S. ambassador the United Nations and to six countries—including Jordan and Israel. He ended his time in government as the undersecretary of State for political affairs, the State Department’s third-highest position. He says that, at its heart, diplomacy is about negotiation and compromise—advancing certain U.S. interests that the United States can’t give up, while conceding on others that it can.
Thomas Pickering: We should be judging diplomacy on whether we can evade the trap of “zero-sumism” and move the process into “win-win-ism.” The win-win has to be a mutually shared outcome in which both sides have given up significant activities in return for significant activities.
Jon Alterman: For U.S. policymakers to make the call on what interests to advance—and which ones to give up—they need a clear assessment of what an end goal might be. They need to know which outcomes they can live with—and which ones they can’t.
Thomas Pickering: Do we have a clear sense of our objectives? And do we have a clear sense, going in, of what might be acceptable and unacceptable at the end of the day? Indeed, part of the process of diplomacy is to so hone your thinking about outcomes, that you can begin to move those objectives in the direction of a mutual win-win
That means that we have to have an ongoing diplomatic equation that can work for us over a period of time. That is where we can begin, against the backdrop of military and other leverage, to put forward diplomatic carrots—or at least efforts that are disguised as diplomatic carrots—to begin the process of entangling the other side in trying to defend a diplomatic outcome that they could live with.
Jon Alterman: What Pickering is describing is a process where the United States sets out knowing it won’t get everything it wants, but it creates an environment in which, at the end of the day, it can get what it needs. The end of the day can sometimes be a long way off. Pickering says that the success of that looks a lot like:
Thomas Pickering: Henry's step-by-step process in the Middle East…
Jon Alterman: The Henry that he’s talking about is Henry Kissinger.
Thomas Pickering: Henry's step-by-step process in the Middle East was based on an ability to understand that abandoning “zero-sumism” could never be done in public—and could never be explained as stepping down from something you had already agreed you were going to achieve—but that it was about slicing the pie in whatever shapes, horizontal or vertical, you wanted to shape it in order to achieve an objective that was reasonable taken alone, but not reasonable in terms of the whole problem.
Jon Alterman: That requires persistent agility:
Thomas Pickering: No negotiation—particularly if it's advancing—is always so static that you always have the same objectives, the same giveaways, the same compromises, and the same outcomes.
Jon Alterman: As Pickering tells it, diplomacy requires not only patience, persistence, and creativity, but also a clear vision of where you’re ultimately trying to go. It involves giving up something you want but can live without to try to get something that you want even more. It’s about oftentimes reaching a point where neither side is happy, but each side can live with the outcome. And it’s about building leverage and deploying it in calculated ways.
In the decades after 9/11, that’s not how the United States did most things in the Middle East. Threats were immediate, and the stakes were high. The last thing the United States wanted to pursue was a slow process of compromise and back-and-forth, and policymakers didn’t see security as something on which the United States should be willing to compromise.
Thomas Pickering: We have an essential, conservative bias in our approach to international relations—particularly to security or security-tainted issues—and as a result, we will always choose the hardest line initiative to avoid the question of losing when it comes to a security issue.
Jon Alterman: Over the past two decades, that’s led to an approach in the Middle East that favored attempts for immediate solutions and what Pickering calls “zero-sumism,” over the slow compromises of diplomacy.
Thomas Pickering: We take it that our superior military power, operating in its own environment, can always produce the resolution of the problem—like dropping a ripe fig from the tree into our lap without any political preparation, without any real shaping, and without any of the durability that is so hard won over long and confidential diplomatic processes.
Pickering sees the attraction of military solutions, but he doesn’t think most of them are really solutions.
Thomas Pickering: One is a very costly, very difficult, very “crapshoot” type process, and the other is an absolute failure because of structural and strategic mis-estimations of what a military victory can produce.
Katulis thinks that the near-term effectiveness of U.S. military action blinded policymakers to the long-term consequences of a military-led strategy.
Brian Katulis: When you have an effective tool—and certainly the military is effective, intelligence agencies, especially the CIA has been effective with drones and other tools—it’s intellectually hard for people to say, "Okay, this is how we could use diplomacy to shape the politics in other countries or shape trends so that we can get more done."
Nathalie Tocci is an Italian scholar who served as a key adviser to the European Union’s chief diplomat. She argues that the United States was right to use force to respond to 9/11, but she says that it relied too much on it.
Nathalie Tocci: Clearly the terrorist threat requires a military response, but the kind of military response that the United States advanced was not one that was limited to the terrorist threat. Had it been that way, we would be talking about very different things than what we've in the last 20 years.
There was this moment of hubris in the United States with the assumption that through the military instruments, it could also achieve long lasting political results. That experiment failed.
Jon Alterman: It failed because when you try to force an outcome on others, it’s hard to make it sustainable, and a large power disparity between the United States and its adversaries can make winning even harder.
Thomas Pickering: The other side has only to avoid losing and we have to win. We have to win so big that we can dictate the outcome on the ground—and not dictate the outcome but make it stick forever.
Zero-sum short of a military victory which decimates the other side on the ground and allows you to dictate the terms of the outcome is not a very good option, and it has a very low durability. It’s hard to stick that victory, on a permanent basis, to a settlement which will both endure and prosper.
Brian Katulis says that a lot of what we think of as U.S. diplomatic failures in the Middle East occurred when diplomacy wasn’t really done at all.
Brian Katulis: A lot of the failures in my mind are linked to the use of military force and the lack of any sort of integrated strategy that put the use of force within a context of a diplomatic or political strategy—what used to be called “smart power” in this town.
Pickering agrees that the military has a role to play in diplomacy:
Thomas Pickering: But it is not the role taught in all the military schools. It is a role to be available when you need it to exercise discrete, well-defined leverage—up to a particular point—to enhance your capacity to positively affect the outcome of diplomatic engagement over a significant period of time.
Tocci agrees, and she thinks the United States mostly had the balance right into the early 1990s.
Nathalie Tocci: There was obviously a major military involvement— the first Gulf War—but there was also an equally significant diplomatic involvement. You actually saw the way in which hard power underpins diplomacy and soft power, in many respects. The two were mutually reinforcing.
Jon Alterman: The United States used the momentum from the 35-country coalition that united to liberate Kuwait to make unprecedented diplomatic progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace.
But 9/11 happened, and the United States rushed troops into Afghanistan—and later Iraq. The mantra of the U.S. military approach was “shock and awe,” and for a time, both efforts seemed to be going well. Remember the “Mission Accomplished” banner on that aircraft carrier? The times seemed to call for maximalist goals and unbridled ambition. It was a very different age. Now, two decades of fighting but not winning in the Middle East has changed the United States and its approach to the world.
Nathalie Tocci: I realize it's a very Eurocentric thing to say, but American foreign policy is “Europeanizing.” It is basically moving towards a situation whereby there is an assessment of the United States’ own power—which is in absolute terms still very strong, but which in relative decline—as limited. That essentially means that there is less reliance on military instrument.
Tocci says that feeling goes beyond merely a hesitancy to use the military.
Nathalie Tocci: Now we're back in a situation where there is less military involvement, but there is also less diplomatic and political involvement. On one level, you can say that is a balance that is being reconstituted, but it's being reconstituted as a lower ambition, steady-state equilibrium.
Jon Alterman: But where that leaves the United States, and the world, isn’t entirely a good thing.
Nathalie Tocci: Has the United States been helpful in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? I think it's actually been a good part of the reason why there is no viable two state solution, but at the same time, given how far things have gone, would the United States stepping out of the scene be conducive to getting to a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine? Probably not. Because the United States has been so entangled in Middle Eastern politics, simply subtracting the United States from the equation doesn't necessarily mean that everything falls magically into place.
Jon Alterman: And is a United States that acts more like Europe in the Middle East good for Europe?
Nathalie Tocci: For Europe, I would say it's yes and no. It would be a straight yes if Europeans were in the position of filling the vacuum that the United States is leaving behind. I wish I could say that that is the position that we're in, but we're not What is clear is that the vacuum that is being left is being filled not by Europeans, but by others. It's being filled by Russia, Iran, Israel, the Gulf, or Turkey.
Jon Alterman: Where Tocci sees a vacuum, Brian Katulis sees opportunities, especially if the United States is able to up its diplomatic game.
Brian Katulis: And now there's an effort to at least deescalate and reduce tensions—to end boycotts and to open ties. Build on that, U.S. diplomats. Build on it, and actually say "Okay, we like what you're doing here. How can the United States be a part of this, and play a key role that's not simply just on the security front?” Increasing security cooperation is one aspect of it, but so is promoting things like greater economic interdependence.
And Katulis thinks part of upping the diplomatic game is also recognizing the role that Americans who aren’t foreign service officers play in diplomacy.
Brian Katulis: I started my career in the Middle East, working for a non-governmental organization called the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in places like the West Bank, Gaza, and Egypt. I believe what we were doing and what those groups still try to do is the type of diplomacy of helping to try to plant seeds. Those seeds are not only skills, but also relationships—which are a key part of diplomacy that leads to trying to get things done. They are building a thickness of relationships and ties between countries, so outside of our State Department, USAID and the typical structures of the U.S. government, there's a whole other part of American society that in some ways is very much independent—but in some other ways is synced with it—that shapes the conditions on the ground. That's another type of engagement that doesn't necessarily produce quick wins, but which produces the networks of relationships that I think become essential at times of crisis.
Tocci says that the real shift that’s going on is an approach that includes:
Nathalie Tocci: More limited objectives and an assumption that it's not really up to us to determine the fate of the world. It's really about trying to induce regional powers to find their own ententes. That's really the aim of diplomacy. Rather than defining the solution, diplomacy is simply seeing to what extent you can create a conducive context for regional powers to do what they will agree on.
Jon Alterman: But that sounds a little bit like passivity, and that’s not what Katulis has in mind at all. He thinks that U.S. diplomats have to be more active, and more self-critical.
Brian Katulis: There's not enough of an after-action assessment or analysis of what the State Department does. To this day—more than ten years after the Arab uprising started— I don't know of any study, inside or outside of government, that looked at how the civilian agencies of government, especially the State Department, responded to that. A key part of the challenge is in the culture. I think that if you're trained as a foreign service officer, a key part of it is to report back and to convey messages. Some people do more than that, and are more effective at it, but there isn't as much of an active learning culture that helps improve the processes there.
And Pickering thinks that the United States needs to do a lot more to sharpen its thinking. He cites a comment attributed to President Harry Truman, who was asked what America’s vital interests are.
Thomas Pickering: And he said, “Only two: survival and prosperity.”
Jon Alterman: If Truman was right, he argues,
Thomas Pickering: In the Middle East and elsewhere, we have for a large part of the time been involving ourselves very deeply and very expensively in what I would call “high-level second-order issues” that do not directly affect our survival and our prosperity.
Jon Alterman: Some of our involvement has come from the responsibilities we attribute to being a Great Power, and our sense that:
Thomas Pickering: We have to be seen as more than just the prisoner of our own narrowest definition of what it is that we should most seek to achieve or avoid in the globe.
Jon Alterman: Our mistake, he thinks, is that we’ve forgotten about the distinction, and we keep accumulating things that we describe as vital interests—and behave as if they are vital interests—but are not.
So that hangs out there around our necks. And this is what I would call a strategy deficit.
Jon Alterman: Over the last two decades, the United States has emphasized military solutions to problems in the Middle East. The pendulum has swung back, and now there are widespread calls for more U.S. diplomacy. Diplomacy is a very different process, with different goals, different outcomes, and different timelines. While it requires a reinvigorated State Department, it also requires harder thinking about what really matters to the United States. In short, calling for less military engagement and more diplomatic engagement is not simply an answer to a problem. Instead, it highlights the importance of answering hard questions that the United States hasn’t addressed for a long time.
Next time on the podcast, we look at the United States soft power efforts in the Middle East and the mark that U.S. ideals and culture have left on the region. This is the United States in the Middle East podcast miniseries.