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The Only Way Out of the Middle East Is Through It
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The Only Way Out of the Middle East Is Through It
Patient Engagement Will Finally Allow the United States to Withdraw
by Vali Nasr
The United States has long made containing Iran a focus of its efforts in the Middle East, from troop deployments to diplomatic dealmaking. But so far, containment has largely failed. Since 2018, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has withdrawn from the 2015 nuclear deal and exerted maximum pressure on Iran, even moving an additional 20,000 troops into the Middle East. The Iranian threat has only grown. Iran has expanded its nuclear and missile programs and its investment in proxy forces, sophisticated drones, and cyber-capabilities. Critics of the Iran nuclear deal claim that the agreement failed to curb these threats and insist that any new deal with Tehranmust address them.
A comprehensive settlement is unrealistic. Iran will not easily part with strategic assets in which it has invested time and great expense, and it will be reluctant to make major concessions in light of Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 agreement. The United States would do better to mount a sustained diplomatic effort-one that seeks to resolve multiple disputes and to forge key arms control deals. Such a process can build the trust that is needed for Iran to
A staff removes the Iranian flag from the stage after a group picture with foreign ministers and representatives at Austria International Centre in Vienna, Austria on July 2015 ,14. (Getty)
reach broad agreements with the United States and with its neighbors. The current occupant of the White House may not be inclined to pursue diplomacy with Tehran, but a new administration should recognize that a different approach to the Middle East-one that relies less on military might than on diplomatic willpower and one that considers each issue soluble on its merits rather than holding out for an aggregate solution that may never come-can relax tensions, resolve disputes, and reduce threats.
IRAN’S MOTIVATIONS
in the Middle East. Once that goal is achieved, the United States can more easily reduce its troop presence. In 2015, the United States had this sequence confused: officials saw the Iran deal as a means to expedite the departure of U.S. troops, regardless of the surrounding state of tension. To assuage anxious allies, Washington sanctioned the sale of over $30 billion in weaponry to Persian Gulf countries, a significant addition to its already sizable arms transfers to those states. Iran reacted to this military buildup by increasing its own investments in missile systems, proxy forces, and sophisticated weapons capabilities. The nuclear deal did not itself stoke regional instability, as its critics claimed-but the way the United States ignited a regional arms race did.
The conflicts that beset the Middle East-civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, for example, and unrest in Iraq and Lebanon-place Washington in a bind. It can remain tethered to the Middle East to protect an increasingly unpopular status quo- its expensive entanglements in conflicts that it cannot resolve and that could spiral into larger wars. Or it can leave and let the chips fall where they may, leading to further strife as countries scramble to fill the vacuum-not only would Arab states spar with Iran, but Israel and Turkey, and then China and Russia, would also get involved. Iran would find greater room to maneuver in the Persian Gulf as it presses its neighbors militarily and takes advantage of disputes between the region’s monarchies. The outcome would be what U.S. containment sought to prevent in the past four decades: growing Iranian hegemony.
To truly achieve regional stability, such that the United States might constructively withdraw from the Middle East, Washington must adopt a new approach-one that takes into account the fears and concerns of the region’s powers, including Iran. The United States can begin by recovering the tattered 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which provides the controls Washington wants on Iran’s nuclear program in return
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for sanctions relief that Tehran values and believes it has earned through its compliance. Only then can the United States push for further talks and tighter safeguards. But separately, U.S. officials should seek to dampen regional disputes, such as the war in Yemen. Doing so will require the United States to better grasp the priorities of all the region’s players.
Iran’s chief rivals-Saudi Arabia and the newly anointed allies Israel and the United Arab Emirates-see Iran’s missiles and proxy forces as evidence of an expansionist agenda. But Iran sees its capabilities as necessary checks to its rivals’ conventional military superiority. Tehran’s actions in the region reflect the deep insecurities of a Persian Shiite state surrounded by U.S.-backed Sunni powers. The memory of Iraq’s invasion and occupation of parts of southwestern Iran in the 1980s still shapes Iran’s strategic outlook. Since the bloody Iran-Iraq War, Iran has cultivated allies and clients and maintained outposts in Arab countries as part of what the Iranians call a strategy of “forward defense.”
The collapse of order in the Arab world since the U.S. invasion of Iraq encouraged Iran to pursue this strategy but also tempted it into overreach. People in Iraq and in Lebanon have protested in recent years against Iranian meddling in their countries. A dangerous escalation of tensions with Israel has resulted in an attritional shadow war as evident in the Israeli bombing of Iranian targets in Iraq and Syria, mysterious explosions in Iranian nuclear and missile facilities, and tit-for-tat cyberattacks. Israel fears that Iran’s expanding footprint in Syria will lead to its own encirclementIran already backs Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
But Iran does not want to stoke anti-Iranian Arab nationalism, nor does it want war with Israel. If Iran is to roll back its forward defense strategy, it will have to try to mend fences with its regional rivals. Direct negotiations between Iran
and Israel are unlikely, but negotiations between Iran and its Arab antagonists could help address some Israeli concerns. For instance, regional agreements limiting the number and range of the missiles in Iran’s arsenal will soothe fears among Iran’s Arab neighbors as well as in Israel.
BRINGING TEHRAN TO THE TABLE
The United States can encourage Iran to be a more constructive force in the region if it better understands Tehran’s interests. Iran wants the United States to end the policy of containment, to withdraw many if not all U.S. troops from the region, and to recognize that Iran is a regional power with legitimate regional interests. For the past 40 years, Iran has relied on confrontation to realize these objectives. That combativeness has failed to achieve its aims. The killing in January of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian general largely responsible for executing the strategy of confrontation, brought Iran and the United States to the brink of war, making clear the limitations of Iran’s approach. Tehran’s bristling foreign policy has exacerbated both economic
President Donald Trump displays a presidential memorandum after announcing his intent to withdraw from the JCPOA Iran nuclear agreement in the Diplomatic Room at the White House in Washington, U.S., May 2018 ,8. (Reuters)
hardship and political unrest at home. Iran’s leaders are more likely to reckon with these negative outcomes if the United States offered an alternative route. Yes, they are instinctively suspicious of U.S. overtures and promises of compromise. But, as was the case when Iran dealt with the Obama administration, Iran’s leaders are not impervious to a serious diplomatic effort that might get them closer to the goals that have so far eluded them.
The necessary diplomatic process will have to unfold through an intricate geometry of talks yoking together Iran, the monarchies of the Persian Gulf, and the United States. Negotiations should take two tracks. Diplomats must seek to stabilize the region by ending conflicts in Syria and Yemen and by buttressing fragile states in Iraq and Lebanon, including through establishing new power-sharing arrangements. Iran and Saudi Arabia did that once before, implementing the Taif Agreement of 1989 that ended Lebanon’s civil war. Iran and the United States achieved something similar in the 2001 Bonn Agreement that remade Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. Negotiators need to also address concerns about Iran’s missile program and its use of proxies. They should strive to build regional agreements on the permissible range and capabilities of missiles, the scale of conventional military buildups, and the deployment of new weapons technologies. Such agreements might help convince Iran, for instance, to reduce support for its proxy groups in the region. Tehran measures its investments in these groups against the military capabilities of its foes. If it has less to fear from its rivals, then it may feel less compelled to back its proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.c Negotiators would make progress on one track toward settling regional conflicts and on the other toward limiting nuclear weapons development and proxy wars. By so doing, they would lay the groundwork for broader agreements, including one on maritime security in the Persian Gulf among Iran, the Persian Gulf states, and the United States. Ultimately, the goal should be to formulate a regional security framework: an arrangement in the Middle East akin to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe or the African Union.
THE RIGHT MOMENT
The United States is rethinking its Middle East policy more comprehensively than at any time since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Soaring domestic deficits and looming confrontation with China compel the United States to extract itself from entanglements in a region that many on both sides of the aisle increasingly agree has lost its strategic significance.
The same structural forces that are compelling Washington to rebalance its global priorities are also tearing into the Middle East. The coronavirus pandemic has hit Iran hard, bringing the country’s struggling economy to the brink of collapse, and low oil prices and a prolonged global economic downturn have hurt Saudi Arabia and its allies. The sheer magnitude of the calamity will force shifts in national priorities. Iran and the Persian Gulf states will have less appetite for arms races or lavish spending on regional clients and proxies. Already, Iran and the United Arab Emirates have started talking. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia seem inclined to end the war in Yemen. Tehran has also withdrawn some of its troops from Syria and pulled back in Iraq-even supporting the election of a prime minister whom the United States favors.
The conditions are ripe for diplomacy that eases the region’s tensions and fosters stability. The United States must take advantage of this moment or risk squandering a rare and vital opportunity.
This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.
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Belarus Goes Its Own Way Thanks for the Advice, but This Movement Knows What It’s Doing
by Maryia Sadouskaya-Komlach
An extraordinary wave of protest has swept Belarus since its presidential election on August 9. The incumbent president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, claimed to have won reelection with 80.1 percent of the vote. Protesters rose to demand a fair and transparent vote count: it would be the country’s first in 20 years. In the days that followed, police detained thousands of protesters under horrible conditions that included psychological and physical torture. Hundreds more have been beaten and wounded. And yet Belarusians continue to flood the streets of their cities, demanding that the government acknowledge election fraud and begin a dialogue on transferring power.
Opposition activists sing in Independence Avenue. Since the announcement of Belarusian2020the presidential election ,9results on August mass protests against the election results have been hitting major cities across Belarus. Natalia Fedosenko/TASS Photo by Natalia Fedosenko\TASS via Getty Images ing governmental buildings, or looting shops. Rather, they build barricades in the evening, then go back to work in the morning. And yet the riot police confront the demonstrators with tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, stun grenades-even, some witnesses claim, live ammunition. After days of documented brutality, the government released thousands of detained protesters the night of August 14.
According to the pro-government news media, the protests are the work of foreign powers. But the narrative is hard to sustain when state-employed workers denounce police violence and demand a fair vote count. Prominent national figures, including actors, doctors, the Olympic biathlon champion Darya Domracheva, and the former tennis champion Victoria Azarenka, have recorded videos and signed petitions calling for an end to the violence and respect for the demands of the demonstrators. Police have reportedly singled out men for abuse: in response, women have organized all-female protests, at which women of all ages and social backgrounds dress in white, hold flowers, and talk to the police, asking them to stop fulfilling criminal orders. A Facebook and PayPal campaign called BY_Help has raised more than $2.5 million to help protesters pay medical bills, legal bills, and fines.
The protest movement has coalesced around three clear demands. The government should release all prisoners whose arrests were politically motivated-including former presidential candidates Viktar Babaryka and Siarhei Tsikhanouski. Authorities should investigate police violence and bring those responsible to justice. And then they must either recognize Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya as the election’s winner or organize new elections, registering all candidates and allowing the news media and independent observers free access.
UNSOUGHT ADVICE
To read the coverage of the demonstrations in the major Western, Russian, and Ukrainian media outlets is to understand little about the upheaval in Belarus. These sources are instead busy The protesters in Belarus are not organizing riots, getting into standoffs with the police, attacking governmental buildings, or looting shops. Rather, they build barricades in the evening, then go back to work in the morning.
comparing the events in Belarus with peaceful revolutions or failed coups in an endless chain of other countries. When Internet access was restored after three days of little to no connectivity, a high-ranking European diplomat posted sarcastically on Facebook: “I am surprised to find among my international friends so many experts on Belarus protests.” He later deleted the post and adopted a more official tone, but many Belarusians share the frustration he expressed.
Advice-and invidious comparisons-has poured in from all sides. Well-meaning pro-democratic Russians and Ukrainians offer Belarusians lessons on how to act more strategically. Not-sowell-meaning actors, such as the official social media account of the Russian president’s press pool, mock their indecisiveness. “If Fidel Castro fought for Cuba only in the evening after work, he would never gain it,” representatives of the official Kremlin pool of journalists wrote on August 11 on Telegram. Americans, absorbed in their own drama, project domestic narratives onto Belarus. The New York Times concludes that President Aleksandr Lukashenko “has lost the aura of an invincible popular leader”-without ever having critically analyzed whether such an aura has even existed in the last ten years. CNN describes street protests as “riots,” giving them a connotation of violence. “Who let Bill Barr and Donald Trump into Belarus?” demands the anti-Trump Lincoln Project on Twitter, posting a video of brutal Belarusian police actions and adding that “police thuggery” is “America’s latest export.”
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Back in June, Vitali Shkliarov, a Washingtonbased political analyst, described the Belarus protests as “the most unusual . . . in the world.” No one could have predicted that the average Belarusian would take to the streets, he wrote in Foreign Policy, but as it turned out, “there has been unrest simmering all this time, so deep and low that it didn’t register with most people; it just took a destabilizing event as big as a global pandemic to uncover it.” Shkliarov was arrested in Belarus in July and accused of disturbing the social order.
There is in fact nothing sui generis about Belarus’s nonviolent protests, nor are they rooted in the pandemic. And as much as Belarus shares with its neighbours to the south and east, it has absorbed its experience differently. The country has a long history of civic cooperation and peaceful expression, and it is one that has unfolded against a backdrop of breath taking state violence. Nearly every third Belarusian perished in World War II at the hands of either Nazis or communists. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin decimated the country’s intellectual elite, killing its brightest minds by the hundreds. The trauma of the twentieth century is still present in every Belarusian family. Today’s authorities have skilfully manipulated that memory by promising Belarusians the peace and stability that elude their volatile post-Soviet neighbours.
When Ukrainians on social media tried to compare the current protests in Belarus with those in Ukraine, many Belarusians replied with anger: even Ukraine’s 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” struck them as too violent. Belarusians fear the comparison with Ukraine for many reasons. Kremlin-sponsored television, widely accessible in Belarus, depicted Ukraine’s revolutionaries as “Nazis” burning down houses. But even many of those who don’t believe such propaganda flinch from the possibility of any violence whatever on the side of protesters. Ukraine’s bitter experience of losing control over parts of its territory stands as a cautionary tale-one that pro-Lukashenko forces continue to invoke as the reason for him to stay.
Advice from Russian opposition activists strikes many in Belarus as even more problematic. For decades, under Soviet rule, Russia was presented to the other republics as an “older sister” and a supposedly more advanced society. Then, when
A participant in an opposition rally in Independence Avenue. Since the announcement of the 2020 Belarusian presidential election results on August 9, mass protests against the election results have been hitting major cities across Belarus. Natalia Fedosenko/TASS - Photo by Natalia Fedosenko\TASS via Getty Images
the Soviet Union fell, Russia inherited most of the energy resources, wealth, and political power in the region. It has used these to demand concessions from Belarus, with Russian President Vladimir Putin making no secret that he aims for “deeper integration” between the two countries, or even incorporation. Russia’s opposition has given Belarusians little reason to trust that it would stand in the way of such a future: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has not openly questioned his government’s position on Crimea, for example.
Moreover, activists in Belarus are aware of few instances of local civic activism in Russia, and those they do know of seem far removed from Belarusian circumstances. Residents of the Russian city of Khabarovsk, for instance, have risen to demand the release from prison and reinstatement of their elected governor. Activists in Brest, Belarus, have expressed solidarity with those protests and vice versa. But the long-running protests in Khabarovsk also illustrate the gulf between the two countries. In Belarus, no local official could be elected from the nonruling elite-such officials are not elected at all-and the police would pacify any one-city protest quickly and efficiently. Advice from Russia can therefore seem out of touch with Belarusian experience.
A BROKEN CONTRACT
The current regime has ruled Belarus for 26 years. Back in 1994, Lukashenko won a free and fair election with an impressive 80.6 percent of the vote. Two years later, he proposed changes to the constitution that would grant him nearly unlimited powers. Parliament resisted, and Lukashenko dissolved it, appointing new deputies. Since that time, he has removed presidential term limits by referendum. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has not recognized any Belarus election since 1994 as either free or fair.
Under Lukashenko, Belarus’s government has shut down or censored independent news outlets and jailed hundreds of political opponents. In 1999, two opposition politicians and a businessman mysteriously disappeared-the cases remain open. All the while, Belarus has grown exponentially more dependent on Russia. The Belarusian language is formally an equal counterpart to Russian, but it is marginalized and often disparaged as the “language of opposition.” Quality of life is poor in much of the country. And yet for all the limitations of this life, Belarusians are well educated and well traveled. Before the pandemic, Belarus led the world in the number of EU Schengen visas issued per capita.
When COVID-19 hit Belarus in March, Lukashenko publicly dismissed its seriousness, much in the manner of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. But the nation self-organized to provide hospitals and clinics with personal protective equipment, whether by 3D-printing protective shields or by reorienting factories to sew full-body protection suits. These actions were particularly remarkable because Belarus’s government discourages state-owned enterprises from working with nonprofits, which it distrusts
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as potentially political or connected to the West.
The spirit of mutual support awakened by the pandemic continues to animate these volatile days. Volunteers provide protesters access to their homes and Wi-Fi connections, supply them with food and drinks, and form long lines to meet released detainees and bring them home. Until very recently, most citizens would fear doing such things.
Belarusians have seen enough to know that a swift change will not necessarily improve their lives. In Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia, the path to democracy has been littered with obstacles: corruption, economic hardship, even military conflict. Still, Belarusians who came out to protest before the election told reporters that they wanted greater freedom of expression and to have the government respect the constitution. Almost none said that they were there to demand better pay or that they hated the regime. This restraint may signify that the protesters want their government to leave peacefully rather than being forced to flee in the manner of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych or Kyrgyzstan’s Kurmanbek Bakiyev (incidentally, the latter has been hiding from the new Kyrgyz authorities in Belarus, where he was granted citizenship). Nonetheless, the authorities have responded by instigating fear and treating citizens with inhumanity. In so doing, Belarus’s government has
broken its quarter-century-long contract with the society to shield it from conflict.
The people of Belarus are giving their government a last chance to listen to the voices of those who silently agreed to its policies before, as well as to the regime’s more vocal opponents. For the first time since the early 1990s, workers from the major state-controlled factories and plants have halted production and come out to protest. Even Minsk underground station workers visibly joined the protests in the city center. Belarus’s prime minister, Roman Golovchenko, presumably shaken by the presence of what was normally considered the regime’s loyal base, came to talk to the workers in an attempt to prevent a national strike. On state television, the minister of internal affairs apologized for the “accidental” injuries and trauma that innocent people have suffered.
Law enforcement officers detain a man during a rally of opposition supporters to protest against disputed presidential elections results in Minsk on August 24, 2020. - Getty
The opposition candidate for president, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, currently in Lithuania, recently broke her silence. Tsikhanouskaya believes that she won the majority of votes on August 9. In a YouTube video, she demanded that local authorities allow demonstrations in all Belarusian cities on August 16 and then afterward enter a dialogue to organize a peaceful transfer of power. More than 200,000 people marched in the streets of Minsk on the appointed day, as did tens of thousands in other cities. Some protesters disappeared after being pulled onto buses without license plates. But for the first time since the protests began, they did not meet open police brutality. Nor did citizens engage in violence, despite the fact that the government brought some 5,000, according to Reuters-65,000, by the official estimate of the Belarus police-Lukashenko voters from all over the country to meet with the president in the center of Minsk. If the second part of Tsikhanouskaya’s plan is as successful as the first, Belarus can affirm to the world that it is truly a nonviolent society-one that lives up to a national anthem that begins with the words “We,
This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.
Belarusians, are peaceful people.”
A woman holds flowers during an opposition demonstration to protest against presidential election results at the Independence Square in Minsk, Belarus August 23, 2020
