Event Information

Register for the Event

Forty years after its initial publication, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff remains an influential work from one of the most important macroeconomists over the last century, Arthur M. Okun (1928-1980). Okun’s theory on market economies reminds readers of an engaging dual theme: the market needs a place, and the market needs to be kept in its place. Articulated in a way that remains relevant even during today’s discussions on broadening gaps in income inequality, Okun emphasized that institutions in a capitalist democracy prod us to get ahead of our neighbors economically after telling us to stay in line socially.

On May 4, The Brookings Institution Press re-released Okun’s classic work with a new foreword from Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, in addition to “Further Thoughts on Equality and Efficiency,” a paper published by Okun in 1977. The event included opening remarks from Brookings Senior Fellow George Perry, with a keynote address from Larry Summers. Following these remarks, David Wessel moderated a panel discussion with former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Greg Mankiw, Economic Studies’ Melissa Kearney and Justin Wolfers, and Washington Center for Equitable Growth's Heather Boushey regarding the history and impact of Okun’s work.

Download a copy of Lawrence Summers' opening remarks.

Ted Gayer, Vice President and Director of Economic Studies and Joseph Pechman Senior Fellow, reads Lawrence Summers's opening remarks.

David Wessel (right), Director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, moderates a panel discussion with N. Gregory Mankiw, Melissa Kearney, and Heather Boushey.

Janet Yellen, Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, listens to the discussion from the audience. To Yellen's right is former Congressional Budget Office director, Doug Elmendorf.

 

Video

• 40 years later- The relevance of Okun’s "Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff"

Audio

• 40 years later- The relevance of Okun’s "Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff"

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20150504_okun_equality_efficiency_transcript
• 050415 Summers Okun Speech

       

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes the willingness to pay for health insurance and hence the potential market for new low-cost health insurance product in Namibia, using the double bounded contingent valuation (DBCV) method. The findings suggest that 87 percent of the uninsured respondents are willing to join the proposed health insurance scheme and on average are willing to insure 3.2 individuals (around 90 percent of the average family size). On average respondents are willing to pay NAD 48 per capita per month and respondents in the poorest income quintile are willing to pay up to 11.4 percent of their income. This implies that private voluntary health insurance schemes, in addition to the potential for protecting the poor against the negative financial shock of illness, may be able to serve as a reliable income flow for health care providers in this setting.

Read the full paper on ScienceDirect »

      

Event Information

Education systems in many of the world's poorest countries are now experiencing the aftershock of the global economic downturn and millions of children are still missing out on their right to a quality education. After a decade of advances, progress toward the Education for All goals may stall or be thrown into reverse. Presenting a new estimate of the global cost of reaching the goals by 2015, the report challenges governments and the international community to act urgently to adopt targeted policies and practices to prevent a generation of children from being left without a proper education.

On January 20, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings hosted the launch of UNESCO’s 2010 Education for All Global Monitoring Report (GMR) with Kevin Watkins, director of the GMR. The report introduces a new, innovative tool to identify the "education-poor" who are excluded from accessing a quality education. A panel discussion followed featuring Elizabeth King of the World Bank; Barbara Reynolds of UNICEF; and Brookings Fellow Rebecca Winthrop. Brookings Senior Fellow Jacques van der Gaag moderated the discussion.

Audio

• Reaching the Marginalized: Is a Quality Education Possible for All?

Transcript

• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20100120_education_access
• 20100120_education_access_watkins

      

Event Information

On March 26, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings hosted an expert consultation on the development of the World Bank Group's new Education Strategy. The consultative meeting brought together a small group of experts from diverse fields. The purpose of the discussion was to gather input and suggestions aimed at strengthening the World Bank Group's work in the education sector.

Elizabeth King, Director of Education in the Human Development Network at the World Bank, opened the event by providing an overview of the Bank’s current approach to education, and how it has evolved over the last several decades. She described the Bank’s priorities as reconnecting education to the broader development agenda, supporting more equitable access, ensuring better learning, and strengthening education systems. The Bank’s main operating principals are taking a whole-sector approach, building the evidence base in education, and measuring the results and impact. Beginning with this extensive consultation process, the Bank is demonstrating its willingness to work with others in the development community to build a larger and more robust evidence base from which to draw lessons to improve the quality of limited staff to maximize the impact of Bank activities, to underscore its commitment to partnerships with other organizations and civil society groups, and to move toward improving the measurement of results so as to be able to further improve the Bank’s education programs around the world.

View the event summary »

Event Materials

• 20100326_world_bank_participants

      

Being able to read and write is the most basic foundation of knowledge accumulation and further skill development. Without literacy, there can be no quality education. Presently, 1 in 5 adults is illiterate, two-thirds of whom are women. At the current pace, over 700 million adults worldwide will still not be able to read in 2015. [1] In global education discussions, literacy rates are most often reported for adolescents and adults, an ex post facto measure of the failure of primary school systems to impart basic skills in the most formative schooling years. It is clear that much needs to be done to provide these adolescents and adults with access to successful literacy programs. But we must also ensure that children with access to schooling are not growing up to be illiterate.

Children enrolled and regularly attending school for the first three grades should be able to read basic text. Evidence shows that acquiring this ability to read sets students up for further learning, enabling them to read and comprehend progressively more advanced materials and acquire additional knowledge.

As explained in our earlier policy brief, data from numerous countries show that children in school are failing to acquire the most basic of skills, measured as the ability to read words of connected text. We called for a global paradigm shift that places learning at the center of the global education discourse. This shift requires the major bilateral and multilateral actors to refocus their own efforts on supporting learning in the classroom and measuring progress by increased learning outcomes. There has been some progress here, such as USAID’s goal to improve reading skills for primary school children in its new education strategy and the World Bank’s Education Strategy 2020, Learning for All: investing in people’s knowledge and skills to promote development.

This shift of focus also requires substantial changes on the ground, including encouraging and supporting a culture of literacy and learning at the community level. For example, Gove and Cvelich highlight some main factors contributing to low reading levels, including a lack of support for teachers, limited instructional time, poorly resourced schools, the absence of books in the home and policies regarding the language of instruction. [2] In Mali, a recent survey found that three-quarters of grade 2 students did not have a textbook and no student had supplementary reading books at school. [3] In The Gambia, the vast majority of students who demonstrated a level of reading fluency said that they had books at home. Globally, in both developed and developing economies, a relatively consistent proxy for “parental commitment to education” is the number of books in the home. A 20-year study of 27 countries found that children growing up in homes with many books get three years more schooling than their peers who come from homes without books. [4] There is no one-size-fits-all solution to improving the quality of education in developing countries. However, there is plenty of room for innovation to address some of the biggest barriers to improving reading levels, including availability of appropriate reading materials at school and at home. In disadvantaged communities, where there are relatively few books and even fewer books in local languages and that deal with culturally-relevant topics, innovation is needed to help develop a robust culture of literacy.

One such innovation is Worldreader.org’s iRead pilot in Ghana, which has put hundreds of e-readers into children’s hands. A lot has been written on similar classroom technology in developing countries, which cite examples of supplying hardware to schools without plans for its educational use, promoting technology from a single company, insufficient planning for sustainability, and inadequate investment in time to train teachers and administrators who will be the purveyors of the technology initiatives in the classrooms. [5]

However, the important difference between this e-reader program and similar projects focused on putting computers in classrooms is that e-readers usually operate on the mobile phone system, which has exploded in developing regions over the last few years. In Kenya, more than 80 percent of the population has mobile phone network coverage and more than half of the population has purchased a mobile phone subscription. The GSM compatibility of e-readers allows for downloading of new reading materials wherever there is mobile phone coverage and sufficient funds available to purchase new texts. E-readers also have relatively low levels of energy consumption (a one-hour charge can last more than a week). In addition to gaining the support of community leaders and teachers from the beginning, the pilot began with intense in-service training for teachers in how to use e-readers to complement their existing curricula. While Worldreader.org has not solved all of the challenges posed by technology initiatives in education, it has taken some important steps toward addressing the barriers to project success. [6]

The organization has also tackled specific challenges that are impeding reading success in the early primary grades:

• Additional support for emergent readers. E-readers provide additional support to teachers in teaching children how to read, an important supplement in primary school classrooms in low-income countries where there may be 40 or 50 students per teacher. In such cases, students are required to work independently or in small groups while the teacher is working with other students. The text-to-speech feature on e-readers can read books aloud to the student, exposing her to the written text as she hears it read aloud. Students can also use the downloaded dictionary while reading to look up unfamiliar words and continue to read without adult assistance.
  
• Students and teachers get to choose. While paper books donated by schools, libraries, and individuals from around the world have helped to get written materials into low-resource schools in developing countries, e-books allow students and teachers in developing countries to choose which books they teach and read. Although choices now are restricted by the dominance of English in the e-book market, the potential for the expansion of the digital market represents a step toward greater agency for teachers and students.
  
• Working with local publishers to increase access to books for emergent readers. Children learning to read need access to the types of books that engage their imagination and spark their interest. For children learning to read, this means stories with simple sentences in their local language. Yet, traditionally children’s books are not a good economic bet for publishers, particularly in developing countries. The high cost of printing the books are not recouped since so many families cannot purchase copies for their own household use. However, distributing books in e-reader format will actually allow publishers to reach more customers at a lower cost. To bring more books to the developing world through e-readers and e-books, Worldreader.org seeks to support a self-sustaining reading and publishing culture by working with local publishers to digitize books and materials to support local language curricula.
  
• Portability can increase reading opportunities. Anecdotal reports from classroom teachers in the Ghanaian pilot frequently reference how students would not stop reading, pulling out their e-readers in between lessons, during recess and lunch, and after school with friends, parents and siblings. An International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement study on reading literacy in 32 countries found that the amount of voluntary book reading that students did during out-of-school time was strongly positively related to students’ achievement levels. [7]

While the pilot is still in the early stages, the founders of the project are focused on the essential outcomes. Their USAID-funded impact study seeks to find out whether children are reading more than they were before the program and whether children read better than they were before the program. Measuring program success by understanding the impact on learning outcomes is a critical step for shifting the global education paradigm to one focused on learning.

---

[1] UNESCO. (2010). EFA Global Monitoring Report 2010: Reaching the Marginalized. Paris: UNESCO.
[2] Gove, A., and P. Cvelich, (2010). Early Reading: Igniting Education for All. A report by the Early Grades Learning Community of Practice. Research Triangle Park, NC: Research Triangle Institute.
[3] Evans, 2010
[4] M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikora, Donald J. Treiman. “Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2010; DOI: 10.1016/j.rssm.2010.01.002
The study controls for education levels, occupations, and socio-economic status of the parents.
[5] For example, Trucano, M. “Worst practice in ICT use in education,” 2010, accessed at http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/worst-practice
[6] Some of the core challenges identified by Worldreader.org and others include the upfront costs of e-readers, need for on-going training and support to teachers, students, and communities, buy-in of school systems and local governments to deploy technology and content, insufficient relevant materials in e-book format, and consistent access to electricity and mobile networks.
[7] Elley, W.B. (Ed.). (1994). The IEA Study of Reading Literacy: Achievement and Instruction in Thirty-two School Systems. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Downloads

• Download Paper

      

Editor's Note: This article was originally published in Pediatrics, a subscription-only journal. To obtain a subscription or log in to access the full article, click here.

ABSTRACT

Building a strong foundation for healthy development in the early years of life is a prerequisite for individual well-being, economic productivity, and harmonious societies around the world. Growing scientific evidence also demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development (because of scarcity, stress, or instability) can lead to short-term physiologic and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation, but which may come at a significant cost to long-term outcomes in learning, behavior, health, and longevity. Generally speaking, ministries of health prioritize child survival and physical well-being, ministries of education focus on schooling, ministries of finance promote economic development, and ministries of welfare address breakdowns across multiple domains of function. Advances in the biological and social sciences offer a unifying framework for generating significant societal benefits by catalyzing greater synergy across these policy sectors. This synergy could inform more effective and efficient investments both to increase the survival of children born under adverse circumstances and to improve life outcomes for those who live beyond the early childhood period yet face high risks for diminished life prospects.

Read the full article at Pediatrics »

       

The Chinese government has recently made early childhood development a national priority, recognizing the social and economic dividends that quality early learning opportunities reap for its human capital in the long term. As the country with the largest population in the world, 100 million children under the age of six in China stand to benefit from increased access to high quality early childhood education.

The quality of education in a country is indicative of its overall development prospects. Over the past two decades – building on the momentum generated by the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals – there have been significant increases in the number of children enrolled in school. Now, with discussions heating up around what the next set of development goals will look like in 2015, it is critical that learning across the education spectrum – from early childhood through adolescence and beyond – is included as a global priority. Starting early helps children enter primary school prepared to learn. High-quality early childhood development opportunities can have long-term impacts on a child’s later success in school.

Last month, the Chinese Ministry of Education, in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund, launched its first national early childhood advocacy month to promote early learning for all children. The campaign, which includes national television public service announcements on the benefits of investing early in education, builds on a commitment made by the government in 2010 to increase funding for early childhood education over the next decade. The Chinese government pledged to build new preschool facilities, enhance and scale up teacher training, provide subsidies for rural families for access to early learning opportunities, and increase support for private early childhood education centers.

A new policy guide by the Center for Universal Education outlines recommendations that education stakeholders, including national governments, can take to ensure that all children are in school and learning. These steps include establishing equity-based learning targets for all children, systematically collecting data for tracking progress against these targets, and allocating sufficient resources to education beginning in early childhood. The policy guide, based on a report calling for a Global Compact on Learning, is available in Mandarin, as well as Spanish, Portuguese, French and, soon, Arabic.

The success of China’s productivity and growth over the last few decades is attributable in part to its commitment to building a robust education system. As international attention mounts around the post-2015 education and development agendas, the priorities of national governments must be a central organizing principle. When national governments take bold steps to prioritize early childhood development, the global community should take its cue and integrate early childhood development into the broader push toward access plus learning. There is an opportunity for the global education community to push toward reaching the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals while ensuring that the post-2015 agendas include a focus on the quality of education, learning and skills development, beginning with the youngest citizens.

       

INTRODUCTION

In an earlier policy brief, Where is the Learning? Measuring Schooling Efforts in Developing Countries, we drew attention to what was labeled “the global learning crisis.” While tremendous progress has been made over the past couple of decades to get tens of millions of additional children to enroll in school, progress in improving learning outcomes has been considerably less impressive. Although, shockingly, comprehensive learning outcome data are not available for most of the developing world, the many small scale, local or, in some cases, national studies that have been done show a dismal picture. For instance, Uwezo, an East African initiative, found that in Tanzania, only 44 percent of students in Grade 4 were able to read a basic story from Grade 2. Similarly, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) facilitated by Pratham found that in rural India, less than half of Grade 4 students were able to do basic subtraction. These examples demonstrate the gravity of “the global learning crisis” as students fail to master competencies appropriate for their grade level, hindering the development of life skills and success in further schooling, as well as performance in the labor market.

With about 61 million children in the developing world still not yet in school, it is too early to declare victory on the “enrollment agenda”. But we would do a disservice to the 250 million children around the world who fail to reach Grade 4 or attain minimum learning standards, if we don’t step up efforts to improve learning outcomes.

This policy brief is part of a larger effort to link resources in the education sector with outcome measures. As we have documented elsewhere, few countries systematically collect comprehensive financial data on education, although fortunately an increasing number of initiatives is trying to address this issue by producing, for instance, National Education Accounts (NEAs). When the focus of the sector changes from enrollment to enrollment plus learning, efforts to better grasp the size and use of financial resources should evolve accordingly. For instance, much learning takes place outside of the classroom, especially in the early years. For NEAs to be a useful tool for adjusting the allocation of scarce resources, the “learning” sector should be defined more broadly than the education or “schooling” sector. We will address this and related issues in a subsequent policy brief.

Once our focus becomes enrollment plus learning, we have to broaden our view and look at the entire environment in which a child develops skills, starting with the households in which children are born. It has beenknown for many decades and throughout the world, that among the best predictors of future school performance are some basic household characteristics, such as income and mother’s education level.

Data from international assessments also show a relationship between income and educational performance, exemplified by intra and intercountry results. In Colombia, average Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) math scores at Grade 8 for the richest quintile of students were close to 100 points higher than those from the poorest quintile. On the other hand, the difference in average scores between the poorest quintile in the United States and the richest quintile in Colombia was about 50 points. Income is not the only predictor of success, as exemplified in Peru, where children whose mothers have completed primary school and whose maternal language is Spanish rather than an indigenous language, have a greater probability of reaching the appropriate school grade for their age. In Kenya, Uwezo found that the higher their father’s educational attainment, the more likely children were able to read a story at Grade 3 or attend extra tutoring sessions.

In addition, the larger environment (such as the village or the urban neighborhood) in which the young child grows up also has a major and lasting impact. In Tanzania, urban students in Grade 3 are three times more likely than their rural counterparts to meet standards in literacy and numeracy. Related to the impact of the larger environment, data from Nigeria suggest that girls are more disadvantaged in school attendance, as parents may be reluctant to send girls to school because of perceived fears for their safety while traveling and concerns about the physical strength required for walking the distance.

Clearly, especially in the early years, most learning takes place outside of the classroom. Consequently, children who grow up in deprived circumstances will start life with a disadvantage leading to a lack of learning in the early grades, which will have lifetime effects.

In the next section, we will summarize the evidence that the early years (ages 0 to 5) are crucial for subsequent learning achievements. From this evidence we conclude that many of the problems with learning outcomes in the developing world (and in many developed countries) need to be addressed well before school age. Before delving into what happens in schools, we explore the relationship between enrollment, learning and dropout. As the crux of this brief is to lay out the evidence on what contributes to learning, we must acknowledge the factors leading to low enrollment and dropout. Next, we turn our attention to what happens in schools and what can be done to improve these activities, as well as try to summarize the evidence about the relationship between specific school-based inputs and learning outcomes. As it turns out, this evidence is, in many cases, rather feeble. Therefore, we will first focus on school-level inputs that are necessary for a good learning environment, i.e. without which we cannot expect any learning to take place. Most of these inputs are rather obvious, but they are worth mentioning. Subsequently, we will discuss additional inputs that have proven to contribute to learning outcomes in some cases, but not in others. Clearly how these inputs are applied matters.

Next, we address factors that contribute to learning outside of a formal environment, after which we review issues in health and nutrition that are closely linked to learning outcomes. We then review the need for the collection and dissemination of learning assessments in order to impact further improvements in these areas and we try to answer the question: what are the building blocks for an education sector that promote learning? Finally we explore needs for future research in learning.

Downloads

• Download the full paper

       

In the developing world, more than 200 million children under the age of five years are at risk of not reaching their full development potential because they suffer from the negative consequences of poverty, nutritional deficiencies and inadequate learning opportunities. Overall, 165 million children (one in four) are stunted, and 90 percent of these children live in Africa and Asia. And though some progress has been made globally, child malnutrition remains a serious public health problem with enormous human and economic costs. Worldwide, only about 50 percent of children are enrolled in preprimary education, and in low-income countries a mere 17 percent. And though more and more children are going to school, millions have little to show for it. By some accounts, 250 million children of primary school age cannot read even part of a sentence. Some of these children have never been to school (58 million); but more often, they perform poorly despite having spent several years in school, which reflects not only the poor quality of many schools but also the multiple disadvantages that characterize their early life.

Ensuring that all children—regardless of their place of birth and parental income or education level—have access to opportunities that will allow them to reach their full potential requires investing early in their development. To develop their cognitive, linguistic, socioemotional and physical skills and abilities, children need good nutrition and health, opportunities for play, nurture and learning with caregivers, early stimulation and protection from violence and neglect.

The Case for Early Interventions 

The arguments for investing in children early are simple and convincing. Early investment makes sense scientifically. The brain is almost fully developed by age three, providing a prime opportunity to achieve high gains. We know that the rapid rate of development of the brain’s neural pathways is responsible for an individual’s cognitive, social and emotional development, and there is solid evidence that nutrition and stimulation during the first 1,000 days of life are linked to brain development. 

Early investment makes sense in terms of equity. The playing field has the highest chances of being leveled early on, and we know that programs have a higher impact for young children from poorer families. In the United States, for example, increasing preschool enrollment to 100 percent for low-income children would reduce disparities in school readiness by 24 percent between black and white children and by 35 percent between Hispanic and white children. We also know that equalizing initial endowments through early childhood development (ECD) programs is far more cost-effective than compensating for differences in outcomes later in life. 

Early investment makes sense economically. Investing early prevents higher costs down the road, and interventions yield a high return on investment. There is evidence of the benefits for the individual and for society more broadly. For instance, at the level of the individual, in Jamaica children participating in an early childhood stimulation program were found to have 25 percent higher earnings 20 years later compared with children who did not participate. At the economy-wide level, eliminating malnutrition is estimated to increase gross domestic product by 1 to 2 percentage points annually, while countries with school systems that have a 10-percentage-point advantage in the proportion of students

Downloads

• Download the paper (PDF)

       

In the developing world, more than 200 million children under the age of five years are at risk of not reaching their full human potential because they suffer from the negative consequences of poverty, nutritional deficiencies and inadequate learning opportunities. Given these risks, there is a strong case for early childhood development (ECD) interventions in nutrition, health, education and social protection, which can produce long-lasting benefits throughout the life cycle. The results from the 2012 round of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)—an international, large-scale assessment that measures 15-year-olds’ performance in mathematics, reading and science literacy—demonstrate the benefits of ECD: Students in the countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) who had the benefit of being enrolled for more than one year in preprimary school scored 53 points higher in mathematics (the equivalent of more than one year of schooling), compared with students who had not attended preprimary school. Although there is much evidence that ECD programs have a great impact and are less costly than educational interventions later in life, very few ECD initiatives are being scaled up in developing countries. For example, in 2010, only 15 percent of children in low-income countries—compared with 48 percent worldwide—were enrolled in preprimary education programs. Furthermore, even though the literature points to larger beneficial effects of ECD for poorer children, within developing countries, disadvantaged families are even less likely to be among those enrolled in ECD programs. For instance, in Ghana, children from wealthy families are four times more likely than children from poor households to be enrolled in preschool programs.

One of the major barriers to scaling up ECD interventions is financing. In order to address financing issues, both policymakers and practitioners need a better understanding of what is currently being spent on ECD interventions, what high-quality interventions cost, and what outcomes these interventions can produce. If stakeholder groups are made more aware of the costs of ECD interventions, they may be able to support decisionmaking on investments in ECD, to better estimate gaps in financing, and to work toward securing stable funding for scaling up service provision and for quality enhancement. One of the weakest areas of ECD policy planning is in the realm of financial planning.6 Good data are scarce on ECD spending and the costs of ECD interventions that are useful for program budgeting and planning; but these data are valuable for a number of reasons, including the fact that they support analyses of what different inputs cost and thus can facilitate considering various alternative modalities for service delivery. In this paper, we focus on what data are available to gain a clearer picture of what is being spent on ECD and what it costs to deliver basic ECD interventions in developing countries.

ECD interventions come in many varieties, and therefore we first define the package of ECD interventions that have been deemed essential. Then we outline a framework for better understanding ECD financing, which combines a top-down approach analyzing expenditures and a bottom-up approach analyzing the costs of delivering individual interventions. We comment on the general methodological issues stemming from these approaches and the limitations of the data that have been produced. Next, we delve into the available data and discuss the different funding sources and financing mechanisms that countries utilize to deliver ECD services and what patterns exist in spending. We provide a brief overview of how many public and private resources in both developed and developing countries are invested in young children, and in which specific subsectors. Although these data on spending illustrate the flows and help us understand how much is being allocated and by whom, the data are limited, and this top-down approach still leaves us with many unanswered questions. Therefore, we turn our attention to the actual costs of individual ECD interventions, which help us further understand what ECD spending can “buy” in different countries. We identify some trends in the actual costs of delivering these services, although there are a number of methodological issues vis-à-vis costing and the services delivered, which lead to wide variations between and within countries and make it difficult to compare programs over time.

Finally, we look at a number of initiatives that are currently under way to collect better data on ECD costs and expenditures, which will be useful for countries in planning programs and identifying funding sources. These initiatives are sponsored by organizations such as UNICEF, Save the Children, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Given the gaps in the available data that we identify and the interventions currently under way, we conclude with recommendations for increasing the knowledge base in this area for use in policymaking and planning.

       

      

      

      

      

      

      

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

Event Information

On December 4 to 6, the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings hosted its 12th annual Saban Forum, titled “Israel and the United States: Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” The 2015 Saban Forum included webcasts featuring remarks by Israel’s Minister of Defense Moshe Ya’alon, Chairman of the Yesh Atid Party Yair Lapid, National Security Adviser to President George W. Bush Stephen Hadley, Secretary of State John Kerry, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (via video), and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The forum’s webcast sessions focused on the future for Israelis and Palestinians, Iran’s role in the Middle East, spillover from the war in Syria, and the global threat posed by the Islamic State and other violent jihadi groups.

Over the past twelve years, the Saban Forum has become the premier platform for frank dialogue between American and Israeli leaders from government, civil society, business, and the media. As a result, the Saban Forum is a seminal event, generating new ideas and helping shape the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #Saban15

Video

• A conversation with Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s minister of defense
• How to restore order in the Middle East
• Keynote address: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry
• Address by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (via video)
• Keynote address: Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton

Audio

• Saturday, December 5, 8:00pm - How to preserve Israel as a Jewish and Democratic state

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript--Keynote address: Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (.pdf)
• Uncorrected Transcript--Address by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (.pdf)
• Uncorrected Transcript--How to preserve Israel as a Jewish and Democratic state (.pdf)
• U.S. Department of State Release--Remarks by Secretary of State John Kerry (.pdf)
• Uncorrected Transcript--How to restore order in the Middle East (.pdf)
• Uncorrected Transcript--A conversation with Moshe Ya'alon, Israel's minister of defense (.pdf)

Event Materials

• Uncorrected TranscriptKeynote addressFormer Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
• Uncorrected TranscriptAddress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
• Uncorrected TranscriptHow to preserve Israel as a Jewish and Democratic state
• US Department of State ReleaseRemarks by Secretary of State John Kerry
• Uncorrected TranscriptHow to restore order in the Middle East 2
• Uncorrected TranscriptA conversation with Moshe Yaalon Israels minister of defense

      

Event Information

An Alan and Jane Batkin International Leaders Forum

Israeli society is diverse, dynamic, vibrant, and challenged. Israel’s long-held social solidarity faces new pressure from growing internal fissures and from the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.

In bold and candid remarks earlier this year, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin identified four “tribes” in Israeli society, representing different worldviews, and called for a new effort to find common ground among secular, national-religious and ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis, and Arab citizens of Israel. How might Israel’s diverse society coalesce in the coming years? How will the future of Israeli society affect its democracy, its relations with its neighbors and with the United States?

On December 10, the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings hosted President Reuven Rivlin to discuss his vision for the future of Israeli society and the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Bruce Jones, vice president and director of Foreign Policy at Brookings, gave welcoming remarks, and Tamara Cofman Wittes, senior fellow and director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, introduced President Rivlin.

Following President Rivlin’s remarks, Natan Sachs, fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, engaged the president in conversation.

Join the conversation on Twitter at #IsraelsFuture.

Video

• The new Israeli society: From melting pot to partnership

Audio

• The new Israeli society: From melting pot to partnership

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20151210_israel_rivlin_transcript

      

What a way to start the new year. Decades of Saudi-Iranian tensions reached a new high this past week. The cycle of reactions to Riyadh’s execution of prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr on January 2 is a reminder of how the Saudis, and their Iranian rivals, have viewed and used sectarianism throughout the tumultuous period since 2011.

Al-Nimr was arrested in 2012 and subsequently sentenced to death for allegedly "seeking ‘foreign meddling’ in Saudi Arabia, ‘disobeying’ its rulers and taking up arms against the security forces." The arrest was meant not merely as a signal to Tehran, but at least as much to Saudi Arabia’s own Shiite minority. Shiites comprise as much as 20 percent of the Saudi population, and are concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern Province—and the community has regularly erupted in protests against its economic and political marginalization. In 2011, amid the Arab Spring uprisings in majority-Shiite Bahrain, Saudi Shiites also demonstrated for the release of long-held prisoners, and Saudi forces shot and killed several Shia in the streets.

Riyadh’s decision to carry out the death sentence was greeted with demonstrations in Iran and attacks on Saudi diplomatic facilities. This Iranian reaction must have been calculated, as al-Nimr has been on “death row” for a very long time. In response, Saudi Arabia quickly cut ties with its longtime geopolitical foe and urged fellow Sunni governments to follow suit. So far, Bahrain and Sudan have also cut off relations, and both Qatar and the UAE have downgraded them. 

Governments on both sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide found a sectarian narrative useful in rallying their populations and in justifying their actions in response to the 2011 Arab uprisings. The sectarian narrative has helped the parties in this larger regional power struggle mobilize support by playing up the sectarian dimension of protests in Bahrain, the Assad regime’s crackdown in Syria, and the breakdown of inclusive politics in Iraq. Likewise, many Sunni-led countries have found sectarian rhetoric an effective way to rally Sunni citizens, intimidate their own Shiite populations, and to justify crackdowns on dissent. 

Governments on both sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide found a sectarian narrative useful in rallying their populations and in justifying their actions in response to the 2011 Arab uprisings.

Last April, I wrote that Iran was likely to escalate its asymmetric efforts to destabilize Arab politics by exploiting the cracks within Arab societies. They have done so, and it is a form of escalation the Saudis are ill-equipped to match. Last summer, I suggested that the Sunni Arab states could defend best against this Iranian subversion by tamping down sectarian tensions and working to heal the rifts within their own societies through inclusive political and economic policies. So far, I have not seen much effort from the Arab Gulf states in that direction—instead, they have doubled down on divisive sectarianism in Yemen and elsewhere. As this escalatory spiral advances, civilians will pay the price. 

Some are portraying the decision to execute al-Nimr as a negative Saudi response to Iranian efforts at rapprochement over the last few weeks. I do not necessarily see it that way, because the Iranians have done as much as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to provoke and exploit tensions between the two in recent times. That notwithstanding, there is no question this execution will inflame sectarian tensions in the Gulf and Iraq, as well as present the Islamic State with new opportunities. 

It has been clear for some time that the U.S. focus on the threat from the so-called Islamic State is simply not matched by the Saudis, who are far more concerned about Iran and Shiite expansionism than by this violent extremist Sunni group in their neighborhood. As such, the execution and ensuing crisis brings the clash of U.S. and Saudi interests into sharp relief and has the potential to become an inflection point in regional affairs – not necessarily because of the way the Saudi and Iranian governments choose to play, but because of how others might react.

For example, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi quickly and publicly condemned the execution. The execution—and the inevitable crackdown on Shiite protests in Qatif—might increase pressure on Abadi from Shiites in Iraq (and from Iran) to demonstrate sectarian preferences in his rhetoric and policy. That could prevent him from moving forward on steps Washington has been pushing to bring Iraqi Sunnis back into the political fold. This easily could threaten the anti-Islamic State campaign in Iraq, since it relies on Sunnis in Ramadi, Mosul, and elsewhere turning away from Islamic State and back toward the Iraqi state. Iraqi counterterrorism forces have taken much of Ramadi, but they cannot hold it without local Sunni support.

Increased Islamic State influence in the Arabian Peninsula would certainly challenge the Saudi government and prompt a renewed securitization of domestic policy.

The Islamic State worked hard to stoke sectarian tensions within the Gulf states over the past year, carrying out attacks on Shiite mosques in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The GCC leaders were not drawn in at that stage, instead expressing solidarity with their Shiite compatriots. But this time, a Sunni Gulf government is taking steps that exacerbate sectarian tensions—and that could very easily push the Islamic State to take up the issue again by attempting more such attacks. Increased Islamic State influence in the Arabian Peninsula would certainly challenge the Saudi government and prompt a renewed securitization of domestic policy. It would be an ironic outcome of a Saudi move—47 executions, mostly of Sunni extremists—that was intended to deter ISIS sympathizers. At a moment when low oil prices and a tightened financial future constrain their capacity to coopt a large, underemployed, youthful populace, this is not a recipe for stability.

The possibility that ISIS will gain from this crisis illustrates the problem with governments self-interestedly wielding that sectarian narrative is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it actually increases the incentive on both sides of the sectarian divide to escalate their real power competition, both directly and through proxies. Today, that narrative of sectarian conflict is far more than rhetoric in Iraq and Syria, where a true intercommunal conflict is underway. 

More immediately, the ripple effects of al-Nimr’s execution spotlight American policy dilemmas in the region. The escalation in sectarian conflict threatens the nascent Syrian peace process. It increases the Islamic State’s scope for action there, threatens the political dimension of the anti-Islamic State strategy in Iraq, and incentivizes Sunni extremism in the Arabian Peninsula. It pushes the Yemen war further from resolution as well, leaving al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) with room to grow and plan attacks against the American homeland. And it puts the United States into a very tight spot as it continues diplomatic dialogue with Iran in the wake of the nuclear agreement. Given this beginning, 2016 looks to be an even tougher year for the United States in the Middle East than 2015.

      

Event Information

Register for the Event

Five years have passed since the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia sparked revolts around the Arab world and the beginning of the Arab Spring. Despite high hopes that the Arab world was entering a new era of freedom, economic growth, and social justice, the transition turned out to be long and difficult, with the Arab world now in turmoil with revolutions, counter revolutions, wars, civil strife, and the worst refugee crisis of our times. The response to the Arab Spring and its aftermath has focused almost exclusively on political and security issues, and on the very divisive questions of national identity and political regimes. Economic and social questions have been put on the back burner.

On January 15, Global Economy and Development at Brookings hosted a discussion on a new book, "The Arab Spring Five Years Later," which explores the critical economic and social issues driving the Arab Spring agenda and the real economic grievances that must be addressed in order to achieve peace, stability, and successful political transitions as well as provides an approach to addressing those grievances.

Hafez Ghanem and Shinchi Yamanaka presented the key findings of the book, followed by a panel discussion. 

Audio

• The Arab Spring Five Years Later: Toward greater inclusiveness

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160115_arab_spring_transcript

      

Editors’ Note: In a recent interview with Foreign Policy Interrupted, Tamara Wittes was asked about how the situation in the Middle East has changed since she published her 2008 book Freedom’s Unsteady March. Five years after the Arab uprisings and the start of the Syrian civil war, and a year and a half after the Islamic State captured Mosul (along with the world’s attention), Tamara says that many of the same fundamental dynamics in the Middle East are still at work.

The situation in the region has changed so dramatically since then, but I think that the fundamental insights that informed that book remain true. The underlying drivers of change in the Middle East are still there in terms of the demographic drivers, the economic drivers, the technological drivers that I described in the book; they are all still present.

Although there’s a lot of disorder and a lot of violence, and that leads people on the ground to prioritize security and to search for security in different ways, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be satisfied. It doesn’t mean that the, “well, at least it’s not ISIS” line is going to suffice for governments in the Middle East for very long.

The underlying drivers of change are still present, the pressure for change is still present, and a lot of those pressures are about the simple fact of individual empowerment. Expectations shifted, and people, individuals, have the ability to act in ways that they didn’t before. States and governments have to accommodate that. It’s affecting politics all over the world, and the Middle East is not immune.

So the question becomes: how are governments going to learn to accommodate that and turn it into a strength? I think that the United States does have a really important role to play there. There were mistakes that the Bush administration made—setting aside his vision of Iraq, which has of course been very thoroughly discussed and assessed. But even in terms of non-military intervention to try to advance reform, the critique I made in the book is that the Bush administration was overly focused on political process and elections in particular. I think that one of the other lessons that has come of recent years is that the United States and other Western countries get very focused on political institutions and think, well, if we set up a judicial system, and we set up a parliament, and a constitution, then the gears in the machine sort of start to turn, the states start to function. Look at the rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan, for example.

But what we see in the Middle East today is that formal institutions aren’t enough. People have to have trust in the institutions, and people and communities have to have sufficient agreement on the basic rules of the game to make those institutions legitimate and authoritative. And that’s what’s missing in a lot of places around the region right now, that there isn’t enough dialogue and debate and ultimately negotiated agreement on the basic rules of the game. So I think that the challenge for the United States and others who care about stability in the Middle East going forward is how to help cultivate platforms for that kind of dialogue, and how to help cultivate the skills and the mechanisms for resolving very fundamental questions about how government should be organized and what should be the role of religion and politics, and what’s the balance between individual rights and collective identity.

These are big, big, questions, and right now, in too many places, they are being fought over violently. But the questions still have to be answered, and so the challenge is helping develop ways to do that, to do it peacefully.

       

Editors’ Note: On March 23, the Working Group on Egypt sent a letter to President Obama urging him to publicly and privately object to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi’s accelerating crackdown on human rights and civil society organizations. Brookings senior fellow and director of the Center for Middle East Policy Tamara Wittes was among the letter’s signers, and she explains her decision to do so. The letter was originally published by the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED).

Tamara Wittes: In a disordered Middle East, America needs anchors of stability and reliable partners to help it achieve its goals. Both are in sadly short supply. 

For more than thirty years, Egypt was an anchor of stability and a reliable American partner in regional security. From the time Sadat expelled Soviet advisers and broached peace with Israel, ties with Egypt have been a core pillar of American Middle East policy. But, as my colleague Steven Cook presciently noted way back in February 2012, Egypt’s revolution accelerated the launch of what he calls a “long goodbye” between these two formerly indispensable partners. He argued back then that shifting from a “special relationship” to something more transaction would have four concrete benefits for Washington:

First, Washington will no longer be in the unseemly position of providing taxpayer largesse—however small in the grand scheme of things—to a government that resents the United States and clearly does not share its values. Second, it will provide an opportunity for a much-needed change in military-to-military relations in which the United States merely pays for the services it needs like expedited transit through the Suez Canal. Third, it is consistent with this moment of empowerment and dignity for Egyptians many of whom do not want U.S. assistance either because they believe it actually stands in the way of a democratic transition or accept Aboul Naga’s argument along with those who couldn’t care less about U.S. assistance because it doesn’t touch their lives. Finally, it will free up funds for the United States to help others who actually might want Washington’s help, perhaps the Tunisians, Moroccans, or some sub-Saharan African countries would be grateful for development assistance.

Since that blog post went up, Egypt has had three different governments and lost its place as a diplomatic and security leader in the region; while the United States has withdrawn from Iraq and begun to do the same in Afghanistan, while emphasizing burden-sharing in its new fight against ISIS. All of these shifts strengthen the argument for a more distant and transactional U.S.-Egyptian relationship. 

Moreover, since his accession to power (first in a military coup in July 2013 and then in a highly constrained election in 2014), President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has made decisions that are undermining both Egypt’s domestic stability and key American policy goals in the region. 

• Sisi’s failure to move forward on economic reforms (recommended by leading Egyptian voices, regional supporters, and international donors) has left his country in a spiral of shrinking cash reserves, capital flight and currency devaluation that together threaten the government’s ability to import needed food and medicine and to carry out core government functions. 
• Sisi’s counterterrorism campaign in the Sinai has succeeded in “making the sand jump,” as one regional security official told me, but it seems to have stoked more than tamped down the fire of violent extremism threatening both Egypt and Israel; meanwhile, its alleged military abuses have sparked a Senate request for investigation.
• The intense political polarization and relentless repression of post-coup Egypt are producing other destabilizing effects, which are detailed in the Egypt Working Group’s newest letter to President Obama posted below (I am a member of the Working Group). 

To top it all off, the Egyptian government continues to throw obstacles in the road of U.S.-Egyptian cooperation. Its military resists learning from the hard-won American experience in effective counterinsurgency. Its leadership has resolutely refused to allow core bilateral aid programs, like those supporting higher education, to move forward. And at the same time, the Egyptian government continues to promote conspiracy theories about the United States to its public through media smears and show trials, and now, apparently, to its newly elected parliamentarians. 

It’s long past time for the United States to undertake a strategic review of its approach to the Middle East, one focused on building anchors of stability and sustaining reliable partners in pursuit of American priorities. Egypt, as I told The New York Times, no longer qualifies as either one. That doesn’t mean the two countries can’t continue to work together in those narrow areas where they agree on interests, priorities, and approaches. 

But Secretary of State Kerry’s public embrace last week of Egyptian Foreign Minister Shoukry cannot hide the facts—there is no “back to business” option for the U.S.-Egyptian relationship, and it seems increasingly clear that even direct White House engagement would not shift Egypt’s leadership off of its self-destructive trajectory. Egypt's looming instability demands that the United States take steps now to safeguard itself from reliance on a country we cannot rescue, not least from its own leaders' worst impulses. 

---

March 23, 2016

Dear Mr. President,

We are writing to urge you to speak directly with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi and to express both publicly and privately your objection to his accelerating crackdown on human rights, including recent moves to prosecute civil society organizations. You were correct to declare in September 2014 that “America’s support for civil society is a matter of national security,” and nowhere is that more true than in Egypt today.

President el-Sissi’s campaign against civil society takes place against the backdrop of unprecedented abuses by Egyptian security forces, including extrajudicial killings, the detention of tens of thousands of political prisoners, the widespread documented use of torture, and the forced disappearances of hundreds of Egyptians. The killing of Italian student Giulio Regeni, whose tortured body appeared on a roadside near Cairo a week after his abduction in late January, has come to international attention, but many Egyptians have shared his fate since President el-Sissi came to power.

On March 24, an Egyptian court will hear a request to freeze the bank accounts and other assets of two internationally-respected human rights defenders, Hossam Bahgat and Gamal Eid, along with members of Eid’s family. Mr. Bahgat and Mr. Eid and other activists may soon be indicted and face trial for illegally accepting foreign funding—a criminal charge that violates their right to free association and could carry a sentence of up to 25 years in prison.

The imminent proceedings are a major step in Egyptian authorities’ campaign to crush the last remnants of Egypt’s independent civil society and human rights community. Egypt’s media has recently reported that dozens of organizations are under criminal investigation, essentially for their peaceful work to monitor abuses and to hold Egypt’s government accountable to its own constitution and international human rights commitments. In recent weeks, Egyptian authorities have ordered the closure of a prominent anti-torture organization, the Nadeem Center; summoned staff from several human rights organizations for interrogation; banned prominent rights activists and advocates from traveling outside Egypt in violation of the Egyptian constitution; and harassed and threatened human rights activists with arrest and violence. The media regularly propagate vitriol against human rights defenders, portraying them as traitors and security threats.

If this crackdown is allowed to reach its conclusion, it will silence an indigenous human rights community that has survived more than 30 years of authoritarian rule, leaving few if any Egyptians free to investigate mounting abuses by the state.

The current attacks on Egypt’s rights advocates are a continuation of the same criminal prosecution of American and German NGO workers in Egypt that began in 2011. That prosecution, driven by senior members of the Egyptian government still in high office today, resulted in the June 2013 criminal convictions, in a deeply flawed trial, of 43 Egyptian and international NGO staff, including 17 American citizens. President el-Sissi, who was the head of military intelligence in 2011 when Egypt’s military government launched the investigation, has refused repeated requests to overturn the convictions.

While the current crackdown is primarily targeting domestic organizations, there are indications that international NGOs may also face increased pressure, including some that currently do not even have offices or staff working in Egypt. On March 20, the newspaper Al Masry Al Youm published the names of more than 150 individuals and civil society organizations reportedly under investigation for receiving foreign funding, including prominent American and European organizations such as the Center for International Private Enterprise, the Solidarity Center, Transparency International, Save the Children, Catholic Relief Services, CARE, AMIDEAST, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute.

Mr. President, in your September 2014 Presidential Memorandum on Civil Society, you pledged that the United States government—including you personally—would stand firmly with those in civil society facing pressure or harassment from their governments. While the past five years have been tumultuous and challenging for U.S. policy toward Egypt, this is another defining moment for the United States, a moment that tests your pledge to “stand with civil society.” Secretary Kerry’s March 18 statement of concern was welcome, but further action is urgently needed. Past practice demonstrates that when the United States government speaks clearly, in one voice, and consistently on NGO freedom and human rights in Egypt, the government in Cairo listens.

It is essential that you act to stand up for human rights, freedom of association, and the rights of both Egyptian and international civil society organizations to work together on behalf of common goals. You must make crystal clear to President el-Sissi that continued assaults on civil society, including harassment of U.S. organizations, will make it difficult for the administration to cooperate across a range of issues, including your administration’s efforts to promote American investment in Egypt and to provide financial assistance to the Egyptian government and military. If Egypt’s government continues down a path to destroy its own civil society, American support and assistance will become, in both principled and practical terms, impossible.

Sincerely,

The Working Group on Egypt

       

Editor's note: Tamara Cofman Wittes testifies before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for a session on aggravating factors and ways to stem the violence in the Syrian conflict. Read her full written testimony below or watch the live coverage.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Senator Cardin, for the invitation to appear before you today. I’d like to request that my full statement be entered into the record, and I’ll give you the highlight reel. And let me begin by emphasizing, as always, that I represent only myself before you today – the Brookings Institution does not take institutional positions on policy issues.

Opportunities Lost

When I last testified before this committee regarding Syria, in April 2012, I expressed my concern that American reticence to act to shape the emergent civil war and the involvement of regional powers in it risked enabling an unbridled escalation of the conflict. I suggested then that uncontrolled escalation could entrench sectarian violence, empower radicals, destabilize the neighborhood, and generate wide human suffering. While the Obama Administration has taken incremental steps over the last four years to try and shape both the battlefield and the context for diplomacy, those steps have proved too little and too late to alter the conflict’s fundamental dynamics.

President Obama’s initial read of the Syrian conflict as holding only narrow implications for American interests was a signal failure to learn the lessons of the post-Cold War period, and the civil wars of the 1990s, by recognizing the risk that Syria’s civil war could spill over in ways that directly implicated U.S. interests. The experience of the 1990s clearly suggested how a neglected civil war offered easy opportunities for a violent jihadist movement—just as the Afghanistan war did for the Taliban in the mid-1990s—and how large-scale refugee flows would destabilize Syria’s neighbors, including key U.S. security partners like Jordan and Turkey. And as we now know, ISIS used the security and governance vacuums created by the Syrian civil war to consolidate a territorial and financial base that the United States has been seeking since late 2014, with limited success, to undermine.

Unfortunately, the realistic policy options available to the United States have narrowed considerably since 2012, the violence is entrenched, the spillover is creating serious challenges for the neighborhood and for Europe, and the number of actors engaged directly in the Syrian conflict has proliferated. All of this means that the continuation of the Syrian civil war has direct and dire consequences today, not just for regional order, but for international security. This reality, combined with the tremendous human suffering this war generates every day, drives two clear imperatives for U.S. policy: to intensify efforts to contain the spillover and misery, and to seek an end to the conflict as soon as possible.

Ending the War

We must be realistic, however, about what steps will, and will not, end the Syrian conflict. Recently, some policy experts have suggested that, in the name of advancing great-power concord to end the war, the United States should relax its view that Bashar al-Assad’s departure from power is a requisite for any political settlement. This view rests on the assumption that Russia will not bend in its insistence on Assad’s remaining in place, and on the assumption that a U.S.-Russian agreement on leaving Assad in place would override the preferences of those fighting on the ground to remove him. Both of these premises, in my view, are incorrect.

We must therefore understand clearly the interests and imperatives driving the major players in this conflict, and we must understand, too, that the battlefield dynamics will heavily condition the prospects of any political settlement. Ending the bloody war in Bosnia in the 1990s involved getting the major external powers with stakes in the outcome – the United States, the Europeans, and Russia – to agree on basic outlines of a settlement and impose it on the parties. But imposing it on the parties required a shift in the balance of power on the battlefield, brought about by Croat military victories and ultimately a NATO bombing campaign. Bosnia also required a large-scale, long-term United Nations presence to separate the factions and to enforce and implement the agreement.

So I believe that, absent a change on the ground, diplomacy alone is unlikely to end the Syrian war – but I certainly agree with diplomatic efforts to advance a country-wide cessation of hostilities and advance a vision for a political settlement. A full-scale cease-fire could create more space for political bargaining, and in the meantime reduce human suffering and mitigate the spillover effects of the ongoing violence. Right now, however, the Assad government and its patrons in Tehran and Moscow have no interest in a sustained cease-fire, because the battleground dynamics continue to shift in their favor. They used the partial cease-fires of the past weeks to consolidate territorial gains from opposition forces and to further weaken those forces through continued air attacks. Without agreement amongst the various governments around the table as to which fighting groups constitute terrorist organizations, a ceasefire will inevitably disadvantage opposition factions as the Assad regime targets them in the name of counterterrorism. That will likewise advantage the most extreme among the rebel factions as well as jihadi groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda’s affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, who will all continue to use force to acquire and hold territory and to force their political opponents and inconvenient civilians off the field.

Likewise, some suggest that the sectarian nature of the conflict, and the deep investment of regional powers in backing their preferred sides, mean that it is not possible to hasten an end to the war at all, and that it must be allowed to “burn itself out.” This policy option is infeasible for the United States, from moral, political, and security standpoints. The scale of death and destruction already, over nearly five years of war, should shame the conscience of the world. Those seeking to escape this misery deserve our succor, and those seeking to end the carnage deserve our support. And it is beyond question that Bashar al-Assad and his allies are the ones responsible for the vast majority of this death, destruction, and displacement.

In political and security terms, the war’s spillover into neighboring countries and now into Europe can still get worse. Key states like Lebanon and Jordan are at risk of destabilization and/or extremist terrorism the longer the conflict goes on and the more of its consequences they must absorb. Turkey, as we know, has already suffered attacks by extremist groups. And the war has continued to be a powerful source of recruitment for extremists, drawing fighters and fellow travelers from around the world. ISIS and Al Qaeda feed on the civil conflict and the chaos on the ground is what gives them room to operate. It is indeed imperative that the United States remain engaged, and intensify its engagement as needed, to secure an end to the conflict as soon as possible.

Understanding the Geopolitical Context

In the ongoing diplomacy over how the conflict ends and what political settlement results, there are two issues on which the parties involved in the Vienna talks demonstrate sharp disagreement, and about which the United States needs to advance clear views. The first is a disagreement over the primacy of preserving the central Syrian government, currently headed by Assad. Russia, along with some regional actors (even some opponents of Assad), believe that the most important determinant structuring a political settlement must be the preservation of the Syrian central government, even if that means preserving Bashar al Assad in office. If Assad is ousted without an agreed-upon successor in place, they argue, then Syria will become a failed state like Libya, in which ISIS will have even more space to consolidate and operate, with dire consequences for regional and international security. It is this concern over state collapse and the desire for strong central authority that keeps Russia united with Iran behind Assad.

It’s understandable to desire the preservation of Syrian government institutions as a bulwark against anarchy, and to want a central government in Syria with which to work on counterterrorism and postwar reconstruction. The problem with elevating this concern to a primary objective in negotiations is its embedded assumption that any Syrian government based in Damascus will be able to exercise meaningful control over most or all of Syria’s territory after rebels and government forces stop fighting one another. That’s a faulty assumption, for several reasons.

First, it is extremely unlikely that we’ll see swift or effective demobilization and disarmament of sub-state fighting factions in favor of a unified Syrian military force. If the central government remains largely in the form and structure of Assad’s government, and even more so if Assad himself remains in power, it is hard to imagine rebel groups agreeing to put down their weapons and rely on security provided by the central government. Thus, local militias will remain important providers of local order and also important players in either defeating or enabling extremist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Second, effective governance from Damascus is extremely difficult to imagine, much less implement. The degree of displacement, the extent of physical destruction, and the hardening of sectarian and ethnic divisions due to five years of brutal conflict (and decades of coercive rule before that) all present steep challenges to centralized rule. Those with resources and capacity within local communities will end up being the primary providers of order at the local level – and it is local order, more than a central government, that will enable communities to resist ISIS infiltration. Thus, countries concerned with having effective governance in Syria as a bulwark against extremists need to recognize the value and importance of local governance in any post-war scenario.

Finally, there is the unalterable fact that Bashar al-Assad and his allies have slaughtered perhaps as many as 400,000 of Syria’s citizens; have used chemical weapons against civilians; have imprisoned and tortured thousands and displaced millions; and, through Assad’s own horrific decisions, have broken Syria’s government, the Syrian state, and the Syrian nation to bits. Those who demand his ouster as a prerequisite for ending the war are justified in their view that Assad does not have and will not have legitimacy to govern from a majority of Syrians, that his continued rule would be divisive and destructive of Syrian unity and security, and that he should instead face justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity. As a practical matter, and because of all this, many Syrian fighting factions on the ground and their supporters, are committed to Assad’s ouster. US-Russian concurrence on setting that goal aside will not induce them to end their fight. The only way that might occur is if Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia – who are committed to Assad’s ouster – relent on their demands and agree to curtail support to rebel factions who continue to fight. This is hard to imagine in the current circumstances.

In other words, while preserving the Syrian state is a laudable goal, it will not alone achieve the objectives set by those who hold it out as the primary imperative in the political negotiations over the future of Syria. I would suggest that, while the fate of Bashar al Assad is not perhaps of primary concern from the perspective of U.S. interests, the United States should be pressing Russia and others involved in the talks to relax their fixation on Syria’s central government (and who runs it) as a counterterrorism goal, and to recognize that a significant degree of decentralization and international engagement with local actors inside Syria will be necessary to preserve the peace, to carry out reconstruction, and to defeat ISIS. Likewise, the Syrian opposition and those states demanding Assad’s ouster as a precondition for peace must recognize that they have even more to gain from insisting on decentralization and local autonomy than they do from Assad’s departure from power. They might even be able to trade their current demand for Assad’s immediate departure against robust assurances for empowerment of local authority, release of detainees and internationally guaranteed transitional justice.

The second major issue under contention regarding a negotiated end to the Syrian war is the role that Iran will play in post-conflict Syria. Iran’s efforts to expand its infuence – in Syria and in the region as a whole – present a concern that unites all of the United States’s partners in the region, and should be a major concern for Washington as well. The gains made by the Assad regime (with Russian and Iranian help) over the past eight months enhance the disturbing prospect of a Syrian government remaining in power in Damascus that is dependent on Iranian funding, Iranian military support, and the importation of Iranian-backed militias. While the Russians are perhaps concerned more about the Syrian state as a bulwark against extremism, Iran is deeply committed to the survival of its Alawi client and the maintenance of Syria as a channel for Iranian support to Hizballah. And while some Sunni Arab states embrace the goal of preserving Syrian territorial integrity and the central government, all are troubled at the prospect that this government would be under the thumb of Tehran. Any political settlement that institutionalizes Iran’s overwhelming role in Syria will likewise increase Iran’s ability to impact to threaten Israel’s northern border, to destabilize Lebanese and perhaps also Jordanian politics, and to interfere with ongoing efforts to assuage the anxieties of Iraqi Sunnis and bring them back into alignment with the government in Baghdad.

The rising likelihood of an Iranian-dominated Syria emerging from the war has induced a change in attitude toward the Syrian conflict by America’s closest regional partner, Israel. Israeli officials took a fairly ambivalent stance toward the civil war for several years, although they were always wary of the Syrian-Iranian alliance. But today, they judge Assad’s survival as possible only through effective Iranian suzerainty, putting their most powerful enemy right on their border. Iranian domination of post-conflict Syria would also likely spell an escalation in Iranian weapons transfers to Hizballah – and Israel cannot expect to have 100% success in preventing the provision of increasingly sophisticated rocket and missile technology to Hizballah. These and other types of support from Iran through Damascus could increase Hizballah’s capacity to wage asymmetric war against Israel, at great cost to Israel’s civilian population. Israeli observers are increasingly alarmed at this scenario, and Israeli officials now state clearly that, if faced with a choice, they’d prefer to confront ISIS than Iran across the Israeli-Syrian frontier.

American diplomacy in Vienna must take greater account of the destabilizing implications of an Iranian-dominated Syrian government, even a rump government that does not control all of Syrian territory. A U.S. focus on constructing a political settlement that limits Iran’s influence in postwar Syria could induce greater coherence among American partners in Vienna currently divided over the fate of Assad; and it could prevent a situation in which the United States trades the threat of ISIS in Syria for the threat of Iranian-sponsored terrorism and subversion emanating from Syria.

Al Qaeda and the Syrian conflict

Al Qaeda’s affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra has particularly benefited from the war’s continuation, from the weakness and partiality of the ceasefires negotiated earlier this year, and from the inability of the U.S.-Russian diplomatic process to generate any progress toward a political transition. Shrewdly, Nusra has focused on building its reputation as the most consistent, and most effective, military opponent of the Assad regime, and on its readiness to cooperate with anti-Assad factions with whom it has other, ideological and political, disagreements. The failures of diplomacy feed Nusra’s strength and win it allies amongst more nationalist rebel factions. And while it’s tempting for American efforts to focus on rallying forces to defeat ISIS, our diplomats and decision makers must beware that leaning too far back on the issue of political transition for the sake of building an anti-ISIS coalition might just end up pushing more hardline opposition elements into the arms of a different extremist movement, one with demonstrated intent and capability to attack the United States.

To summarize, it’s imperative that American diplomacy to produce a political settlement of the Syrian war be firmly focused achieving two goals crucial to the interests of the United States and its regional partners: first, enabling and institutionalizing local governance as a bulwark against ISIS (more than central government institutions), and second, establishing hard limits on Iran’s role in a post-conflict Syria and on its ability to use Syria as a conduit for support to Hizballah.

Managing Spillover and Restoring Stability

A second major priority for US policy, in addition to this refocused diplomacy, must be stepped-up efforts to mitigate the destabilizing consequences of the Syrian war, no matter how long it goes on. And, while the United States continues to work through diplomacy and pressure to produce an end to the war, work must also begin now to prepare for the long-term and wide-scale effort needed for post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction.

The scope of death, displacement and destruction threatens to rob Syria of the basic ingredients for social stability, regardless of what lines might be drawn at a negotiating table in Vienna. Without concerted effort to ameliorate the effects of this conflict for people on the ground, to rebuild social trust, and to nurture resilience within these battered communities against conflict and division, any peace settlement could quickly unravel the face of local security dilemmas and intercommunal tensions, as well as in light of the unaddressed scars and grievances of Assad’s brutality against the Syrian people.

Meeting this challenge requires at least four lines of effort:

• doing more to engage Syrians in building local governance and community resilience, especially skills and platforms for conflict resolution;
• doing more to stabilize and secure frontline states, including support for integrating refugees into the economy and society;
• helping more refugees create new lives far from the conflict zone, including much more resettlement in the United States; and
• working diligently with regional partners to tamp down the sectarianism that both drives and is driven by the war, and that feeds extremist recruitment and violence.

As we have seen, ISIS markets itself partly on the order it provides to local communities – a brutal order to be sure, but still a contrast with the chaos and insecurity of civil war. To counter ISIS effectively, we must help local communities with governance and service delivery. More can be done even now to put into place the ingredients for successful and sustainable conflict resolution for Syrians. These steps include enabling and encouraging Syrians displaced by the fighting, whether in neighboring countries or in areas of Syria not under ISIS or regime control, to engage in dialogue over, and planning for, their own communal future. Neighboring states accepting refugees have understandably sought to tamp down political discussion and debate within refugee camps, for example. But these refugee populations need to engage in dialogue to build the basis, in social trust, that will enable them to manage daily governance and resolve differences peacefully if and when they are no longer living under refugee agencies and host-government security services. These processes can also connect, over time, to negotiating efforts on a political transition in which the Syrian opposition is represented, yielding greater legitimacy and efficacy to that more formal political process.

Too often, in discussing Syria, we posit a choice between working with the central government and working with unsavory non-state actors. There is an obvious additional option, already in play, that deserves greater emphasis: empowering and engaging local municipalities, local business sectors, local civil society, and other actors who exist in territory not under extremist or regime control and who have an obvious stake in the success of their own communities and their defense against coercion either from ISIS or from the Assad government. It is these local actors who will make or break the implementation of any political settlement, because they are the ones who will give it life and legitimacy. They are the ones who will help manage differences within their own communities and with their neighbors to avoid outbreaks of violence, and they are the ones who will lead the establishment of a new social compact to enable long-term stability in Syria. USAID and its implementing partners have been creative in developing programs to engage local communities and local governing institutions, and this work deserves robust, sustained support from Congress.

The United States continues to lead in international support for refugee relief – but it lags woefully in refugee resettlement. Only about 1300 of the 10,000 Syrian refugees the Obama Administration promised to admit into the United States have been resettled here so far; and the United States can and should accept more.

In addition, American policy efforts to address the refugee crisis must go beyond humanitarian relief and expanded resettlement. Working with European partners, the United States government can work to save lives along the transit routes for refugees fleeing the region, can support successful integration of refugees into European cities (again, working at the municipal level), and can do more to support social stabilization, livelihoods, and development for the large refugee communities in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey and for the societies hosting them.

On June 14 and 15^th, the Brookings Institution will convene a high-level gathering of regional, European, and American leaders to develop new responses and more robust forms of cooperation to meet this global humanitarian crisis. I look forward to reporting back to you on our results.

Downloads

• War in Syria: Next steps to mitigate the crisis

       

“When I go to meetings today, I see more women, and I see many more younger women coming into the field.  But what’s really struck me, as I’ve been thinking about this issue of women in foreign policy in the last couple years, is the difference between presence and voice.  There are many more women working in foreign policy today, but you don’t see the same proportion of women prominent in foreign policy speaking in the media, in senior positions, or even when you’re all in the room together sitting at the table and speaking as the lead speaker at a conference.  It’s that distinction between presence and voice and what accounts for that gap.  That’s what I find both fascinating and frustrating.”—Tamara Wittes

“I think it is getting better. I think women are starting to see examples of other women who are  at the table, who are speaking up, who are volunteering, who are being more confident and starting to learn that just because you might not think you are the greatest expert on something, doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to give your opinion and start speaking up.”—Sarah Yerkes

In this week’s episode of “Intersections,” Tamara Wittes, senior fellow and the director of the Center for Middle East Policy, and Sarah Yerkes, a visiting fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy, discuss their experiences as women working in foreign policy, both in and out of government. They also shed light on progress regarding the active participation of women in foreign policy, while looking forward to potential improvements in order to promote more equality for women’s representation in government.

Show Notes

The Absence of Women from Middle East Policy Debates: An Update

Women still overlooked in vital peacekeeping process, study finds

An All-Women Symposium: The Missing XX-Factor

Foreign Policy Interrupted

Women Are Underrepresented In Cable News Segments On Foreign Affairs, National Security 

With thanks to audio engineer and producer Zack Kulzer, Mark Hoelscher, Carisa Nietsche, Sara Abdel-Rahim,  Eric Abalahin, Fred Dews and Richard Fawal.

Subscribe to the Intersections on iTunes, and send feedback email to intersections@brookings.edu.

       

How has the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—signed between the P5+1 and Iran one year ago—played out in practice? Several Brookings scholars, many of whom participated prominently in debates last year surrounding official congressional review, offered their views.

Strobe Talbott, President, Brookings Institution: At the one-year mark, it’s clear that the nuclear agreement between Iran and the major powers has substantially restricted Tehran’s ability to produce the fissile material necessary to build a bomb. That’s a net positive—for the United States and the broader region.

Robert Einhorn, Senior Fellow, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and Senior Fellow, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative, Foreign Policy program: One year after its conclusion, the JCPOA remains controversial in Tehran and Washington (as I describe in more detail here), with opponents unreconciled to the deal and determined to derail it. But opponents have had to scale back their criticism, in large part because the JCPOA, at least so far, has delivered on its principal goal—blocking Iran’s path to nuclear weapons for an extended period of time. Moreover, Iran’s positive compliance record has not given opponents much ammunition. The IAEA found Iran in compliance in its two quarterly reports issued in 2016. But challenges to the smooth operation and even the longevity of the deal are already apparent. A real threat to the JCPOA is that Iran will blame the slow recovery of its economy on U.S. failure to conscientiously fulfill its sanctions relief commitments and, using that as a pretext, will curtail or even end its own implementation of the deal. But international banks and businesses have been reluctant to engage Iran not because they have been discouraged by the United States but because they have their own business-related reasons to be cautious. Legislation proposed in Congress could also threaten the nuclear deal.  For now, the administration is in a position to block new legislation that it believes would scuttle the deal. But developments outside the JCPOA, especially Iran’s regional behavior and its crackdown on dissent at home, could weaken support for the JCPOA within the United States and give proponents of deal-killing legislation a boost.  A potential wildcard for the future of the JCPOA is coming governing transitions in both Washington and Tehran. Hillary Clinton would maintain the deal but perhaps a harder line than her predecessor. Donald Trump now says he will re-negotiate rather than scrap the deal, but a better deal will not prove negotiable. With President Hassan Rouhani up for re-election next year and the health of the Supreme Leader questionable, Iran’s future policy toward the JCPOA cannot be confidently predicted. A final verdict on the JCPOA is many years away. But it is off to a promising start, as even some of its early critics now concede. Still, it is already clear that the path ahead will not always be smooth, the longevity of the deal cannot be taken for granted, and keeping it on track will require constant focus in Washington and other interested capitals.

Suzanne Maloney, Deputy Director, Foreign Policy program and Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy program: The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has fulfilled neither the worst fears of its detractors nor the most soaring ambitions of its proponents. All of the concerns that have shaped U.S. policy toward Tehran for more than a generation—terrorism, human rights abuses, weapons of mass destruction, regional destabilization—remain as relevant, and as alarming, as they have ever been. Notably, much the same is true on the Iranian side; the manifold grievances that Tehran has harbored toward Washington since the 1979 revolution continue to smolder. An important truth about the JCPOA, which has been wielded by both its defenders and its detractors in varying contexts, is that it was transactional, not transformational. As President Barack Obama repeatedly insisted, the accord addressed one specific problem, and in those narrow terms, it can be judged a relative success. The value of that relative success should not be underestimated; a nuclear-armed Iran would magnify risks in a turbulent region in a terrible way.  But in the United States, in Iran, and across the Middle East, the agreement has always been viewed through a much broader lens—as a waystation toward Iranian-American rapprochement, as an instrument for addressing the vicious cycle of sectarian violence that threatens to consume the region, as a boost to the greater cause of moderation and democratization in Iran. And so the failure of the deal to catalyze greater cooperation from Iran on a range of other priorities—Syria, Yemen, Iraq, to name a few—or to jumpstart improvements in Iran’s domestic dynamics cannot be disregarded simply because it was not its original intent.  For the “new normal” of regularized diplomatic contact between Washington and Tehran to yield dividends, the United States will need a serious strategy toward Tehran that transcends the JCPOA, building on the efficacy of the hard-won multilateral collaboration on the nuclear issue. Iranians, too, must begin to pivot the focus of their efforts away from endless litigation of the nuclear deal and toward a more constructive approach to addressing the deep challenges facing their country today.

Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy and Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and Director, Intelligence Project, Foreign Policy program: As I explain more fully here, one unintended but very important consequence of the Iran nuclear deal has been to aggravate and intensify Saudi Arabia's concerns about Iran's regional goals and intentions. This fueling of Saudi fears has in turn fanned sectarian tensions in the region to unprecedented levels, and the results are likely to haunt the region for years to come. Riyadh's concerns about Iran have never been primarily focused on the nuclear danger. Rather, the key Saudi concern is that Iran seeks regional hegemony and uses terrorism and subversion to achieve it. The deal deliberately does not deal with this issue. In Saudi eyes, it actually makes the situation worse because lifting sanctions removed Iran's isolation as a rogue state and gives it more income.  Washington has tried hard to reassure the Saudis, and President Obama has wisely sought to build confidence with King Salman and his young son. The Iran deal is a good one, and I've supported it from its inception. But it has had consequences that are dangerous and alarming. In the end, Riyadh and Tehran are the only players who can deescalate the situation—the Saudis show no sign of interest in that road.

Norman Eisen, Visiting Fellow, Governance Studies: The biggest disappointment of the post-deal year has been the failure of Congress to pass legislation complementing the JCPOA. There is a great deal that the legislative branch could do to support the pact. Above all, it could establish criteria putting teeth into U.S. enforcement of Preamble Section III, Iran's pledge never to seek nuclear weapons. Congress could and should make clear what the ramp to seeking nuclear weapons would look like, what the triggers would be for U.S. action, and what kinds of U.S. action would be on the table. If Iran knows that, it will modulate its behavior accordingly. If it does not, it will start to act out, and we have just kicked the can down the road. That delay is of course immensely valuable—but why not extend the road indefinitely? Congress can do that, and much more (e.g. by increasing funding for JCPOA oversight by the administration and the IAEA), with appropriate legislation.

Richard Nephew, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative, Foreign Policy program: Over the past year, much effort has gone into ensuring that the Iran deal is fully implemented. To date, the P5+1 has—not surprisingly—gotten the better end of the bargain, with significant security benefits accruing to them and their partners in the Middle East once the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verified the required changes to Iran's nuclear program. Iran, for its part, has experienced a natural lag in its economic resurgence, held back by the collapse in oil prices in 2014, residual American and European sanctions, and reluctance among banks and businesses to re-engage. But, Iran's economy has stabilized and—if the deal holds for its full measure—the security benefits that the P5+1 and their partners have won may fall away while Iran's economy continues to grow. The most important challenge related to the deal for the next U.S. administration (and, presumably, the Rouhani administration in its second term) is therefore: how can it be taken forward, beyond the 10- to 15-year transition period? Iran will face internal pressure to expand its nuclear program, but it also will face pressure to refrain both externally and internally, should other countries in the region seek to create their own matching nuclear capabilities.  The best next step for all sides is to negotiate a region-wide arrangement to manage nuclear programs –one that constrains all sides, though perhaps not equally. It must ensure—at a minimum—that nuclear developments in the region are predictable, understandable, and credibly civilian (something Bob Einhorn and I addressed in a recent report). The next White House will need to do the hard work of convincing countries in the region—and beyond—not to rest on the victory of the JCPOA. Rather, they must take it for what it is: another step towards a more stable and manageable region.

Tamara Wittes, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy program:  This week, Washington is awash in events and policy papers taking stock of how the Iran nuclear deal has changed the Middle East in the past year. The narratives presented this week largely track the positions that the authors, speakers, or organizations articulated on the nuclear deal when it was first concluded last summer. Those who opposed the deal have marshaled evidence of how the deal has "emboldened" Iran's destabilizing behavior, while those who supported the deal cite evidence of "moderated" politics in the Islamic Republic. That polarized views on the deal last year produce polarized assessments of the deal's impact this year should surprise no one. In fact, no matter which side of the nuclear agreement’s worth it presents, much of the analysis out this week ascribes to the nuclear deal Iranian behavior and attitudes in the region that existed before the deal's conclusion and implementation. Iran has been a revisionist state, and a state sponsor of terrorism, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The Saudi-Iranian rivalry predates the revolution; Iran's backing of Houthi militias against Saudi and its allies in Yemen well predates the nuclear agreement. Most notably, the upheavals in the Arab world since 2011 have given Iran wider opportunities than perhaps ever before to exploit the cracks within Arab societies—and to use cash, militias, and other tools to advance its interests and expand its influence. Iran has exploited those opportunities skillfully in the last five years and, as I wrote last summer, was likely to continue to do so regardless of diplomatic success or failure in Vienna. To argue that the nuclear deal somehow created these problems, or could solve them, is ahistorical.  It is true that Iran's access to global markets might free even more cash for these endeavors, and that is a real issue worth tracking. But since severe sanctions did not prevent Iran from spending hundreds of millions of dollars to support and supply Hezbollah, or marshaling Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and militia fighters to sustain the faltering regime of Bashar Assad in Syria, it's not clear that additional cash will generate a meaningful difference in regional outcomes. Certainly, the nuclear deal's conclusion and implementation did not alter the trajectory of Iranian policy in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, or Lebanon to any noticeable degree—and that means that, no matter what the merits or dangers of the JCPOA, the United States must still confront and work to resolve enduring challenges to regional instability—including Iran's revisionist behavior.

Kenneth M. Pollack, Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy program:  When the JCPOA was being debated last year, I felt that the terms of the deal were far less consequential than how the United States responded to Iranian regional behavior after a deal was signed. I see the events of the past 12 months as largely having borne that out. While both sides have accused the other of "cheating," the deal has so far largely held. However, as many of my colleagues have noted, the real frictions have arisen from the U.S. geostrategic response to the deal. I continue to believe that signing the JCPOA was better than any of the realistic alternatives—though I also continue to believe that a better deal was possible, had the administration handled the negotiations differently. However, the administration’s regional approach since then has been problematic—with officials condemning Riyadh and excusing Tehran in circumstances where both were culpable and ignoring some major Iranian transgressions, for instance (and with President Obama gratuitously insulting the Saudis and other U.S. allies in interviews).  America's traditional Sunni Arab allies (and to some extent Turkey and Israel) feared that either the United States would use the JCPOA as an excuse to further disengage from the region or to switch sides and join the Iranian coalition. Their reading of events has been that this is precisely what has happened, and it is causing the GCC states to act more aggressively. I think our traditional allies would enthusiastically welcome a Hillary Clinton presidency. She would likely do all that she could to reassure them that she plans to be more engaged and more willing to commit American resources and energy to Middle Eastern problems. But those allies will eventually look for her to turn words into action. I cannot imagine a Hillary Clinton administration abrogating the JCPOA, imposing significant new economic sanctions on Iran, or otherwise acting in ways that it would fear could provoke Tehran to break the deal. Our allies may see that as Washington trying to remain on the fence, which will infuriate them.  So there are some important strategic differences between the United States and its regional allies. The second anniversary of the JCPOA could therefore prove even more fraught for America and the Middle East than the first.

       

       

       

       

       

Event Information

Register for the Event

Many within the United States and others abroad continue to question the United States’ role in the world. Understandably, Americans have grown wary of the country’s role in the world, some asking whether the U.S. still has the power and influence to lead the international community, while others question why the United States must still take on this seemingly singular responsibility. On the eve of a major speech by President Obama addressing these questions, Senior Fellow Robert Kagan released a new essay entitled, "Superpowers Don't Get to Retire: What Our Tired Country Still Owes the World," which was published in the latest edition of The New Republic. Kagan argued that the United States has no choice but to be “exceptional.”

On May 27, the Foreign Policy program at Brookings and The New Republic hosted an event to mark the release of the Kagan essay and in advance of President Obama’s address to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Kagan, a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at Brookings, was joined by The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier and The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt.

After the program, the panelists took audience questions.

Read the full article»

Video

• America’s Leadership in the World and President Obama’s Foreign Policy
• America Has Never Been Isolationist
• Americans Take U.S.-Made World Order for Granted
• Obama Foreign Policy Looking for Dead Center of American Public
• Presidents Shouldn’t Hide Behind Polls on Foreign Policy

Audio

• America’s Leadership in the World and President Obama’s Foreign Policy

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20140527_americas_leadership_transcript

      

Event Information

This event has been postponed, and will be rescheduled for a later date.

With ongoing crises in Ukraine, Syria, and other regions of the world, U.S. global leadership is arguably as critical now as it has ever been. However, many question how the United States should exercise its leadership, what foreign policy agenda it should pursue, and how it should configure its military and security agencies going forward. In a recent speech at West Point, President Obama laid out his foreign policy agenda for the remainder of his presidency. While the Obama Administration will pursue the president’s agenda as laid out at West Point, others in Washington have different views on how best to manage U.S. foreign policy going forward.

On June 11, the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings will host Senator John McCain (R-AZ), former presidential candidate and member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, for an address on the future of U.S. foreign and security policy. The address will be introduced by Brookings Senior Fellow and Director of Research for Foreign Policy Michael O’Hanlon, and the discussion following the Senator’s address will be moderated by Senior Fellow Robert Kagan.

After the program, Senator McCain will take audience questions.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #McCain

      

Event Information

Register for the Event

On October 17, the Brookings Project on International Order and Strategy hosted a discussion with Brookings Senior Fellow Robert Kagan and MIT Professor Barry Posen on U.S. grand strategy. Amid a background of seeming geopolitical upheaval, the discussion focused on whether the United States should pursue a strategy that seeks to maintain U.S. pre-eminence and global leadership or whether the United States can or must adopt a more restrained posture.

In his May 2014 New Republic essay "Superpowers Don't Get to Retire," Kagan argued that the United States has an enduring responsibility and capacity to shape the world order.

Posen is the Ford international professor of political science and director of the security studies program at MIT. He is the author of the new book, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Cornell University Press, 2014). Posen argues that consistent U.S. overreaching has led to numerous failures and unexpected problems and cannot be sustained. Posen urges the United States to adopt a strategy of restraint in the future use of U.S. military strength.

Brookings Fellow Jeremy Shapiro moderated the discussion.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #USStrategy

Audio

• U.S. Grand Strategy: World Leader or Restrained Power?

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20141017_us_grand_strategy_transcript