Amidst the many worrisome trends the next president will face when he assumes office in January, he will be able to take comfort in at least one major bright spot: The strategic landscape in the Middle East will be more favorable to the United States than at any point in recent history.
Throughout the Cold War, every U.S. president encountered a Middle East mired in conflict and largely hostile to U.S. interests. Many countries in the region — including Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, and Yemen — were aligned with the Soviet Union. Those that were not often chose to focus singularly on the military defeat of Israel. Jordan, for example, sent troops to Syria so that they could participate in the October 1973 attack against Israel, and all the Gulf States — Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — punished the United States for its support of Israel by coordinating the 1970s oil embargo that crippled our economy. Other major conflicts, such as the Iran-Iraq war that lasted almost throughout the entire 1980s and the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan that same decade, created very difficult policy dilemmas for the United States.
Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and other factors, the region remained volatile and dangerous to U.S. national security throughout the 1990s. Indeed, in 2001, at the time of George W. Bush’s inauguration, a second Intifada was underway after failed peace talks between Israel and Palestine; Afghanistan was a terrorist sanctuary; Iraq was under the leadership of a violent, anti-American dictator; Iran had begun developing nuclear weapons; Libya was a state-sponsor of terrorism; Saudi Arabia was funding radical madrassas throughout the Middle East and using hate-mongering textbooks in its own schools; and Pakistan’s relations with the U.S. were at best unclear, given the 1999 military coup and the country’s support of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
But today, the strategic landscape is shockingly and fundamentally different. Only two countries — Iran and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Syria — remain hostile to U.S. interests. Another two — Libya, which in a major victory for the Bush administration decided in 2003 to renounce terrorism and its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, and Lebanon, which for domestic reasons does not currently speak with one clear voice — are pursuing what can be described as foreign policies that are neutral to U.S. interests. Remarkably, all remaining sixteen countries in the region are U.S. allies.
These alliances are more than cosmetic and have several important ramifications, starting with our force posture in the region. The United States now has troops and other naval, air, and ground assets in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar. This will allow the next president to respond rapidly to threats that develop in the region, whether from terrorist networks or nation-states. Indeed, Iran will not be able to pursue any course of action without first considering whether it would provoke retribution from U.S. troops in the region, including the nearly 200,000 troops stationed along Iranian borders in Iraq and Afghanistan, two new U.S. allies.
With the already noted exceptions of Iran and Syria, the entire Middle East is now taking concrete steps to fight terrorism generally and al-Qaeda specifically. Our allies throughout the region are training and equipping their security forces to better handle counterterrorism missions. They are providing the United States with valuable intelligence and they are helping to disrupt terrorist finances. As important, popular support for al Qaeda is declining along with al-Qaeda’s recruitment figures, no doubt in part because of al-Qaeda-in-Iraq’s indiscriminate brutality towards Muslim civilians in Iraq and because of the U.S. military’s success in defeating al-Qaeda-in-Iraq — nobody wants to join a losing team.
As for Iran, our allies in the Middle East are now in full agreement with the United States that Iran poses a serious threat to international peace and security. Foreign ministers from Amman to Abu Dhabi to Riyadh are eager to aggressively confront Iran, and are in the process of signing arms agreements with the United States for exactly that purpose. To be sure, the threat of a nuclear Iran is very real and is certainly disconcerting, but for once the U.S. warnings of that threat are not falling on deaf ears, and the United States will not have to meet the threat alone.
The Middle East has always posed challenges to the United States, and the same will be true in January 2009. The next president will need to deal with Iran and Syria. He will need to ensure that our gains in Iraq and Afghanistan are not reversed. He will need to continue strengthening our alliances throughout the region, help set Lebanon on the right track, and work towards resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But what is unique today is that the next president will be able to confront these challenges in the context of an extremely favorable strategic environment.
— Alexander Benard is an attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. He has worked at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Department of Defense.