America has learnt the hard way that it cannot fix the problems of the Middle East. But Barack Obama’s deliberate neglect risks making them all worse

IN THE white-marbled amphitheatre of Arlington National Cemetery, on the final Monday of May, Barack Obama delivered a short oration that said much about his view of the exercise of American military power. “Today”, the president said, “is the first Memorial Day in 14 years that the United States is not engaged in a major ground war.” America’s military presence in Afghanistan, which once stood at more than 100,000 troops, has dwindled to a tenth of that number. It has even fewer troops in Iraq (some of whom are pictured above), providing training and air support, not fighting.

On the day that America remembers its fallen soldiers, 7,000 of them lost in the conflicts that followed the attacks of September 2001, Mr Obama spoke from the belief that the country had had enough of wars. Little matter that Afghanistan is worryingly unstable. Or that Iraq and Syria are in pieces, their chaos filled by Sunni and Shia militias of all stripes. Or that Libya and Yemen are also torn by civil war. Or that America’s friends, Israel and Arab monarchies alike, feel abandoned.
When the world is falling apart it is inevitable that people will blame whomever is in the White House. This is especially true in the Middle East, a particular focus of decades of American policy for a host of strategic reasons: stopping cold-war Soviet expansion; preserving access to the Gulf’s oil; supporting Israel in its conflicts with Arab states; containing revolutionary Iran; and changing the regime in Iraq as a putative first step to promoting democracy across the region.

Deciphering Obama

Now, in part as a result of the 2003 invasion which brought down Saddam Hussein, the region is in turmoil. The Arab spring of 2011 toppled more strongmen and brought change aplenty, but rarely of the sort America would like. A democracy may be putting fragile roots down in Tunisia. But Egypt under Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has reverted to a harsher authoritarianism than that of the ousted Hosni Mubarak. Next door Libya is in meltdown; elsewhere Iraq and Syria are in the grip of civil wars, with the new ugliness of the so-called Islamic State (IS) holding territory in both. Iran and Saudi Arabia are engaged in proxy conflicts in Yemen and elsewhere. Countries that have withstood the turmoil, like Lebanon and Jordan, are awash with refugees.

Mr Obama stands accused, at home and abroad, of having no strategy to deal with the mess. Jeb Bush, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, accuses the president of alienating America’s friends and failing to inspire fear in its enemies. Critics say Mr Obama is so keen on his “pivot” to a security policy focused on East Asia that he neglects the Middle East—or that he is simply too gutless to act.

The alternative is to see Mr Obama’s position on the sidelines as a deliberate choice. For a president elected to extricate America from its wars in the region it makes sense to commit American forces only in circumstances of great need and on a limited scale. In general he will intervene only when convinced that to do so will not make things worse—which is to say, in the Middle East, rarely.

Mr Obama is no pacifist and no isolationist. The charge that he has ignored the Middle East is denied by insiders. One White House veteran says “it never felt like we pivoted away from the Middle East. About 80% of our main meetings at the National Security Council have focused on the Middle East.” At such meetings Mr Obama often stands at the most reluctant end of the spectrum covered by his advisers. But he has been willing to act; even as he has scaled back America’s main military operations, he has intensified counter-terrorist drone strikes. He has bombed targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Syria. And he ordered the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.

A recognition of the limits of the possible, though, does not absolve Mr Obama from all the charges against him. The bill of particulars runs as follows: the fine words about promoting democracy in his “new beginning” speech in Cairo in 2009 were not followed up by meaningful action; an erratic response to the Arab spring upset both the army and the Islamists in Egypt; the French- and British-led military intervention against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, with America consciously “leading from behind”, was squandered by the failure to help rebels create a stable government; the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 was too hasty.

And above all these others stands Mr Obama’s action—or, rather, his inaction—in Syria. When Bashar Assad slaughtered protesters, Mr Obama said the dictator had to step down. But he did little to support moderate rebels. He said clearly in 2012 that Mr Assad would be crossing a “red line” if he used chemical weapons. But when a sarin nerve-gas attack in Ghouta, outside Damascus, killed more than 1,000 civilians in August 2013 the dictator did not suffer the “enormous consequences” that Mr Obama had threatened. A diplomatic deal removed a lot of Syrian chemical weapons, which was good; Israel no longer feels it has to issue gas masks to its people. But even Obama loyalists agree that the lack of retribution left America’s standing diminished.

A few weeks later, in response, Mr Obama summarised his policy on the Middle East in a speech to the UN. There were four core interests in defence of which America was prepared to deploy “all elements of our power, including military force”: protecting allies against “external aggression”; ensuring the free flow of oil and gas; preventing terrorist attacks against America; and stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction. On these America would be willing to act alone; to promote its other interests, such as the spread of democracy and access to free markets, it preferred multilateral action. In the near term, America would focus on pursuing two elusive diplomatic goals: a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, and an accord with Iran to limit its nuclear programme. Syria’s civil war, he suggested, could not be resolved by American force: “The United States has a hard-earned humility when it comes to our ability to determine events inside other countries.”

Is that humble, or heartless? The costs of Mr Obama’s humility, unlike those of George W. Bush’s hubris, cannot be clearly seen; lost opportunities are hard to measure. But on humanitarian grounds standing back from the Syrian civil war in the face of more than 200,000 deaths and the continued use of chemical weapons (now in the form of everyday chlorine) seems callous. You do not have to believe that America could have stopped, or won, the war to believe that it could have done more, perhaps through stronger and better judged support for some rebels, perhaps through no-fly zones.

With more American support, would Syria’s mainstream rebels—the “farmers and dentists and folk who have never fought,” as Mr Obama dismissively called them—have been able to defeat Mr Assad or even hold more extreme jihadists at bay? No one can say. But without it they could not. That allowed IS to take over much of eastern Syria and, in 2014, to sweep across northern and western Iraq, take Mosul and declare a caliphate.

Embracing enemies, alienating friends

Thus, like Michael Corleone in “The Godfather, Part III”—“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”—Mr Obama was compelled to return to the bloody business he thought he had escaped. He ordered air strikes, ostensibly to protect American officials working in Baghdad and Erbil, in northern Iraq. The murder of two American hostages led to a broader strategy to “degrade and ultimately destroy” IS.

This involved two separate but related operations. In Iraq, American and Western trainers would rebuild the hollowed-out army and provide air support to help it roll back IS. In Syria, American and Arab air forces would disrupt IS by bombing its rear bases, while training a “third force” of moderate Syrian rebels. Mr Obama insisted there would be “no boots on the ground”.

The training of the new Syrian force has been slow. The tempo of air operations has been moderate. IS has lost towns in both Iraq and Syria, but though under strain it has proved resilient: in May it pushed the Iraqi army out of the town of Ramadi, the long-contested capital of Anbar province, and evicted the Syrian army from the oasis town of Palmyra. At a meeting in Paris on June 2nd the Iraqi prime minister bemoaned the lack of American support. American surveillance drones, he said, were only “surveying one area at a time, but IS is mobile.” The jihadists’ recent victories may reflect the weakness of their enemies on the ground but they give the caliphate an aura that will attract recruits. That nearly a year of bombing should leave IS in such a position is an embarrassment for Mr Obama.

Iran openly mocks America’s timidity. “Obama hasn’t done a damned thing” in Ramadi, said Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force, which runs Iran’s numerous foreign operations; only Iran and its militia clients were willing to fight IS.

Yet it is on the possibility of a deal with Iran that Mr Obama’s best hope for a positive legacy in the Middle East lies. Under the terms of April’s “framework agreement” on Iran’s nuclear programme, the Islamic republic’s capacity to enrich uranium and produce plutonium will be curtailed and subjected to unprecedented monitoring in return for the lifting of sanctions. The capacity constraints, though not the inspection regime, would ease off after a decade. Iran says it with then greatly enlarge its programme, bringing its “breakout time” (the time needed to produce enough fissile material for a single bomb) down from the year or so that the deal is meant to guarantee to weeks or days.

Mr Obama sees the deal, due to be finalised at the end of this month, as making good his promise to curb weapons of mass destruction. But it upsets old allies. Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has openly agitated against it, aggravating relations with Mr Obama already strained by rows over settlement-building and the lack of progress on a Palestinian peace deal. White House officials now say America might no longer block all UN resolutions that Israel dislikes.

And the Arab monarchies are aghast at the prospect of an Iran free from sanctions stirring up even more trouble. At a summit in Camp David last month, the leaders of the six-member Gulf Co-operation Council did not get the American commitment to contain Iran that they wanted. Mr Obama reassured them about America’s readiness to defend them against a direct attack; but behind closed doors he told them the likelier threats were internal, and “asymmetric” prodding by Iran, for instance on the safety of shipping lanes.

The allies’ worries are not helped by Mr Obama’s mixed signals. Sometimes he presents the nuclear negotiation as a transaction with which to secure a specific arms-control goal; at other times he talks of the possibility of a broader rapprochement with Iran creating a “new equilibrium” in the region. Some critics suspect Mr Obama wants to align America more closely with Iran. But for Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official, now at the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, “the Iran deal is not an attempt to get into bed with Iran; it is an attempt to get out of bed with Saudi Arabia.” He argues that America’s dependence on Gulf oil has diminished, and the price has become less sensitive to political crises in the region (see chart). If the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb is set aside, says Mr Shapiro, America could disengage more easily, relying on a lighter military presence to keep the Gulf’s sea lanes open.

But if America retains an interest in the region’s overall stability, such disengagement would not serve it well. Even if a deal strengthens Iran’s doves, its hawks may either try to sabotage the deal or demand greater latitude to expand their influence abroad as the price of acquiescence. On the evidence of the Saudi-led coalition’s actions against the Houthis Iran supports in Yemen, nervous Gulf allies can be expected to react forcefully, even overreact, to perceived Iranian adventurism. They may, despite American entreaties, seek to develop a nuclear capacity to match Iran’s; a deal to halt nuclear weapons proliferation may lead instead to the proliferation of nuclear-threshold states. And Israel makes no secret of the fact that another round of fighting with Lebanon’s Hizbullah, Iran’s main proxy, is only a matter of time.

In a recent book, “National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear”, David Rothkopf, the publisher of Foreign Policy magazine, sees a fateful symmetry between the policies of Mr Obama and his predecessor, Mr Bush. One president went too deep into Iraq, the next got out too soon; the first over-reached, the second under-shot; the Republican wanted to use American power to strike enemies everywhere; the Democrat often seemed to treat American power itself as dangerous. But whereas Mr Bush improved in his second term, writes Mr Rothkopf, Mr Obama has not learnt from his mistakes.

Return to the centre

Few in Washington expect any change to Mr Obama’s do-little policy in his final 19 months. So the city’s myriad foreign-policy experts are busy drafting presentations and memos advising the next president on how far to swing back towards action. Opinion polls, which long gave Mr Obama a higher approval rating on foreign policy than for his overall job performance, now give him poorer marks for his handling of the world, suggesting such a swing might be welcome.

Mr Obama’s likeliest successors, including the Democrats’ front-runner, Hillary Clinton, will want to be seen as more forceful. In the Republican camp there is one isolationist, Senator Rand Paul, who blames his own side’s “hawks” for the mess in Iraq and Syria. The rest talk of doing more—much more in the case of Senator Lindsey Graham, who is calling for the deployment of 10,000 troops in Iraq (see page 38). Some Republicans have hinted that they would repudiate an Iran deal.

Between these positions, though, there is a centre ground that both Jeb Bush—who has said that, had he known in 2003 what he knows now, he would “not have gone into Iraq”, as his brother did—and Mrs Clinton might well stake out. You can see it in the recommendations of a bipartisan group of foreign-policy panjandrums issued by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: inflict large enough losses on IS to reduce its recruiting appeal; build up a moderate opposition in Syria with a haven from which it can “change the balance of power”; improve ties with Egypt as the starting point for rebuilding the states of the Arab world; and halt the fraying of relations with Israel.
The authors know the next president will operate under constraints. The budget cuts of the so-called sequester will limit Pentagon spending. Russian expansionism and Chinese muscle-flexing will demand attention and resources. The public will not want war. Tellingly, the authors say that American “ground forces are not the answer” to IS. They also accept that a nuclear deal “can provide the basis of an effective control regime”, although it should be matched by clear American warnings about the consequences of cheating. If Sunnis are to be mobilised to confront IS, “Iran cannot be a putative ally”.

The next president may well be warmer towards Israel, and more willing to turn a blind eye to new settlements in the occupied territories. He or she might do more to reassure Gulf monarchies and speak more sternly to Iran. In Iraq, special forces might be allowed out of their bases to help spot targets for air attack, and to stiffen Iraqi units. In Syria, a more robust effort to train a moderate force, if only to gain a place at the negotiating table, could be instituted. There might be no-fly zones of some sort.

Such moderate activism could do good—though it could also lead to reverses which, unlike Mr Obama’s lost opportunities, are plainly visible. What it will not do is change the fact that the Middle East, still a vital source of energy and the cradle of great religions, is undergoing a profound upheaval. Discredited Arab states, many created out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire after the first world war, are collapsing in their turn. America cannot stop that. By taking an active role it may be able to help in the transition to some new, possibly better, arrangement, and to stave off the worst outcomes. But the process will still be bloody, and long-drawn-out.