Necessary Risks

Shadi Hamid writes that the United States needs to rethink its approach to the Middle East in a more fundamental way than perhaps many progressive leaders are thus far prepared to do:

While there is a well-deserved consensus that the Bush administration has caused untold damage to our relationship with the Arab
and Muslim world, it would be a mistake to think that eight years of Republican rule are an anomaly in an otherwise proud history of
successful engagement. The reality is more troubling: American policy has been consistently self-defeating under administrations of both parties for more than five decades.

I think that’s right. As Hamid says, America’s cozy relationship with unpopular Arab despots is, in many ways, at the root of our larger problem vis-a-vis the Muslim world. Simply stepping back from Bush-style unilateralism is a good idea, but it won’t actually resolve that problem. And I think most of his policy recommendations are good. I’m a bit wary, however, of the idea that we should “elevate democracy promotion through aid conditionality.” This is a popular suggestion, but I think it has a lot of problems. One way you could implement it would be to say to the King of Jordan “either write and adopt a democratic constitution and hold free and fair elections to fill the office by 2010 after which you step aside or we’re cutting you off.” That would presumably result in the King telling us to get lost, and us cutting off aid. But that’s typically not what democracy promoters have in mind. Instead, they want us to make more moderate demands (“a set of benchmarks, including respect of opposition rights, freedom of expression, and progress toward holding free elections, even if only on the municipal level at first”) that, presumably, the incumbent authorities are more likely to accept.

But this sets up an odd dynamic. In effect, clever State Department bureaucrats are trying to trick the Mubaraks and Husseins of the world into accepting deals that lead to them losing their grip on power. But common sense indicates that this is closer to the core area of competence of the dictators than of the State Department. Most likely, they’ll trick us, proposing cosmetic reforms that fundamentally change nothing. Meanwhile, we’re now officially certifying shame reform processes. Beyond that, in a larger sense the nexus of terrorism, US policy, and Arab autocracy isn’t just about electoral systems, it’s about control and autonomy and specifically the sense that the United States is trying to push Arabs around, tell them what to do, and control their lives and their countries. Attempting to micromanage political reform in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere is likely to compound that problem rather than ameliorate it. This is especially true in light of the fact that, as Hamid says, American motives are viewed with enormous suspicion in the region.

Better would be to embrace Hamid’s other ideas and then, I think, just distance ourselves from some of these autocratic regimes. The next president should decline to invite Saudi princes to his vacation house. Instead of selling these regimes advanced weaponry and then offsetting that with special extra goodies for Israel, we could just not sell the advanced weaponry and eschew the extra goodies for Israel. And the president can say that while he won’t dictate internal policy to Arab governments, America’s view is that democracy is good, and we would be happy to deal with democratically elected governments no matter who won which elections.