Editors' Note: U.S.-Israeli relations have taken a hit in recent years as the United States has become increasingly frustrated with the Netanyahu government's lack of initiative on advancing a peace process with the Palestinians. Tamara Wittes examines the domestic Israeli and American trends poised to further strain relations if the countries' leaders do not address these challenges head on. This article originally appeared in Haaretz on December 3, 2015—before the annual Saban Forum.

The past year brought unprecedented tensions in the U.S.-Israeli relationship, with many arguments and counterarguments about who is to blame. Beyond the tactical debates—about personality clashes, or the propriety of Israel parachuting into arguments between Congress and the U.S. president—are deeper challenges facing these two close allies. Last weekend, the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings convened the Saban Forum in Washington to address these issues and to understand the future trajectory of the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

The first question that needs to be asked is why a bilateral relationship that for so long was kept above politics has now become a subject of bitter partisanship—in Israel, as well as in the United States. How did distasteful personal rhetoric become politically acceptable in a relationship that used to be carefully protected? Why did politicians lose their self-restraint about using the U.S.-Israel relationship as a wedge issue against their opponents? Why were opponents of the Iran nuclear deal, in Israel and in the United States, prepared to drag the American Jewish community and Democratic friends of Israel into the fray and force them to choose between supporting Israel and supporting their president?

Some argue that these trends result from differing levels of public support for Israel among Democratic and Republican voters. Polls show that Democratic voters are less supportive of the current Israeli government’s policies than Republican voters. If voters in the United States are splitting on partisan lines, the theory goes, then their elected representatives should follow. But polls that ask simplistic questions produce crude results.

A more detailed survey by my colleague Shibley Telhami shows us something deeper: the lenses Americans use to evaluate Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians have changed over time. Today, Americans increasingly look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of human rights—and this is especially true for younger Americans, African Americans and Hispanic Americans. This makes them sensitive to the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and to heavy handed Israeli counter-terrorism policies. These groups form a larger proportion of the voting public than they have in past, and a growing proportion of the Democratic Party’s core constituency. Likewise, American Evangelical Christians look at Israel through a lens of prophetic fulfillment, which combined with their conservative political preferences puts them squarely on the side of more hawkish Israeli policies. And Evangelicals are a core constituency for the Republican Party. These underlying changes in attitudes have shifted the calculus for American politicians. But that doesn’t mean a partisan split on “support for Israel” is inevitable. It does point to specific aspects of Israeli policy that affect how Israel is viewed. As American society becomes “majority-minority,” where no group, including Americans of European origin, constitutes a majority of the population, Israelis should keep these underlying lenses in mind.

[T]he lenses Americans use to evaluate Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians have changed over time.

A second issue to examine is Israelis’ combination of vulnerability and national pride. Even in a post-9/11 era, Americans have a hard time appreciating the sense of vulnerability and fear that Israelis face from ongoing terrorism and rocket fire. The Gaza War last year brought this vulnerability into sharp focus—the war went on longer than any in Israel’s history other than War of Independence, and the rocket threat affected most of the country’s civilian population. The large numbers of Palestinians killed and wounded led some in America to question Israeli tactics.  U.S.-Israeli cooperation on Iron Dome produced impressive results and was trumpeted in the American media—but when you are walking outside and an air raid siren goes off, your faith in Iron Dome does not erase your sharp sense of fear.

Israelis’ sense of vulnerability is compounded by the asymmetric nature of the threats Israel is facing, and by the sense among many Israelis that their effort to reach a resolution of their conflict with the Palestinians has reached a dead end. The fear of another war and a sense that the neighborhood has turned deeply hostile, weigh heavily, in a way Americans have trouble understanding. Israelis become all the more anxious when they sense that their most important international ally might not see their security threats the same way they do.

Paradoxically, though, this sense of vulnerability coexists for Israelis with a sense of greater self-confidence about Israel’s military strength, its economic dynamism, and its wider relationships with the world. Particularly on the Israeli political right, there is today a stronger strain of nationalism and national pride (as evidenced in the “No Apologies” slogan of the Jewish Home Party in the last elections). In many countries around the world, including U.S. allies, the rise of right-wing nationalism is marked in part by politicians thumbing their nose at the global superpower: the United States. Israel, it appears, is no longer an exception to that rule.

Israelis become all the more anxious when they sense that their most important international ally might not see their security threats the same way they do.

These issues—Americans’ perceptions of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, and Israelis’ combination of fear and self-confidence—go beyond the personalities of leaders or the choices of politicians. To bridge these gaps, the U.S.-Israel dialogue must reach beyond government meetings and Israel-Diaspora engagement— instead, Israelis and Americans must commit to understanding one another’s societies better than we do today.

Finally, and unavoidably, there is a policy problem driving U.S.-Israeli tensions—but it’s not what you might think. The Israeli and American governments are both struggling to deal with the disintegration of a twenty-year-old framework for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the Oslo Declaration was signed in September, 1993, Americans, Israelis and Palestinians shared an approach to settling the conflict: direct bilateral negotiations mediated by the United States. But after the failure of the Kerry talks last spring, the two leaders in Jerusalem and Ramallah have no inclination to return to direct bilateral talks, and each of them in their own way emerged from the latest effort with questions about the role of the United States.

In the international community and the region, meanwhile, the loss of faith in the U.S.-led bilateral process has led to experiments with other modes of shaping the conflict, from economic pressure on Israel to new proposals for action by the UN Security Council. Netanyahu’s controversial words before Election Day last spring— that there would be no Palestinian state under his watch—were less of a unilateral declaration than a recognition of reality. The White House now more-or-less agrees, with Obama aides telling reporters that they did not expect peace on Obama’s watch. The longstanding, bilateral negotiating process was Washington’s main leverage in pushing back against other international efforts—and now that the negotiating process has ended, these efforts will inevitably escalate. Without U.S.-Israeli agreement on a way forward, further policy gaps are likely.

The Israeli and American governments are both struggling to deal with the disintegration of a twenty-year-old framework for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This begs a question many American officials and analysts are asking: If there is no prospect for renewed bilateral talks toward a two-state solution, what is Israel’s Plan B? Does the Israeli government have a clear vision for its future relationship with the Palestinians? Israel expects American understanding as it takes steps it deems necessary to protect its citizens and ensure their future security. But American patience with Israel’s control over the West Bank is predicated on that control being temporary. There is impatience in Washington that Israel’s leadership has not tried to articulate a path forward beyond the immediate crisis—indeed, my colleague Natan Sachs argues that the current Israeli leadership has embraced “anti-solutionism” as a strategy. That's a very difficult position for any American administration to support.

If their modern history is any guide, Israelis will not remain passive before the forces now reshaping the Middle East; instead, they will insist on charting their own path into the future. When Israelis finally do develop a clear view of their chosen road, their first stop to explain it and seek support will inevitably be Washington. But Washington may not wait forever—especially as the stalemate is generating sustained violence. The time is now to lay the foundations for that crucial policy discussion, by updating American and Israeli understandings of one another’s dynamic societies, and by building on the Saban Forum and similar platforms to enrich our bilateral dialogue.

Event Information

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

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

Event Information

A conversation with Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken

One year after the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, the United States continues to adapt its efforts to blunt the appeal of violent extremism. As part of this effort, the State Department is launching a series of new initiatives to better coordinate the U.S. response to terrorist propaganda and recruitment.

On February 16, the Foreign Policy program at Brookings hosted The Honorable Antony J. Blinken, deputy secretary of state, for a discussion of the United States’ civilian-led initiatives to counter the spread of the Islamic State and other violent extremist groups. Blinken will chart the path forward, to include partnerships with industry and civil society, and outlined the challenges that lie ahead.

Brookings President Strobe Talbott offered welcoming remarks. General John Allen, senior fellow and co-director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings, introduced Deputy Secretary Blinken, and Tamara Cofman Wittes, senior fellow and director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, joined Deputy Secretary Blinken in conversation following his remarks.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #CVE

Video

• New frameworks for countering terrorism and violent extremism
• American diplomacy best instrument against extremism
• Islamic State numbers lowest since 2014
• Common denominators of violent extremists
• Progress in Syria against Islamic State

Audio

• New frameworks for countering terrorism and violent extremism

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160216_cve_blinken_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.

Event Information

The United States alliance with Saudi Arabia dates back to 1943, making the U.S. relationship with the Kingdom one of America's longest-standing in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is a key counterterrorism and diplomatic partner within the region, yet the alliance has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, especially in the period following the 9/11 attacks, when questions about Saudi support for extremist causes emerged. Saudi Arabia’s prosecution of the war in Yemen has added to the criticism, with many observers blaming the Kingdom for the unfolding humanitarian crisis within the Arab world's poorest state. In recent comments, President Barack Obama has been critical of Saudi policies, despite U.S. logistical and intelligence support to Saudi Arabia’s war effort in Yemen.

On April 21, the Intelligence Project and Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings hosted U.S. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut to discuss the U.S.-Saudi alliance with Senior Fellows Bruce Riedel and Tamara Cofman Wittes. Senator Murphy has urged a more rigorous approach to cooperation with Riyadh that balances U.S. counterterrorism interests, strategic imperatives, and human rights concerns, and has led efforts on Capitol Hill to debate the war in Yemen. Cofman Wittes, director of the Center for Middle East Policy, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion. 

 Join the conversation on Twitter at #USSaudi.

Video

• Reassessing the U.S.-Saudi partnership

Audio

• Reassessing the U.S.-Saudi partnership

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160421_us_saudi_transcript

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

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.

Event Information

With the rise of ISIS and a growing terrorist threat in the West, unprecedented attention has focused on Islam, which despite being the world’s fastest growing religion, is also one of the most misunderstood. In his new book “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World” (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), Senior Fellow Shadi Hamid offers a novel and provocative argument on how Islam is, in fact, “exceptional” in how it relates to politics, with profound implications for how we understand the future of the Middle East. Hamid argues for a new understanding of how Islam and Islamism shape politics by examining different modes of reckoning with the problem of religion and state, including the terrifying—and alarmingly successful—example of ISIS.

On June 9, Shadi Hamid and Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy Leon Wieseltier discussed the unresolved questions of religion’s role in public life and whether Islam can—or should—be reformed or secularized.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #IslamicExceptionalism

Video

• Islamic exceptionalism: How the struggle over Islam is reshaping the world - Part 1
• Islamic exceptionalism: How the struggle over Islam is reshaping the world - Part 2

Audio

• Islamic exceptionalism: How the struggle over Islam is reshaping the world

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160609_islamic_exceptionalism_transcript

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.

Event Information

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

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

The U.S.-led international order faces three simultaneous challenges—a rising power in East Asia, a declining but aggressive power in Eastern Europe and the unraveling of regional order in the Middle East. Left unchecked, events in Ukraine, the East China Sea and Iraq and Syria have the potential to seriously undermine an international system that has helped to guarantee peace and stability since the end of World War II.

On October 2, the Project on International Order and Strategy and the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings co-hosted an event on these growing threats and the policies or strategy the United States needs to meet these challenges. The event brought together scholars from across the Brookings Foreign Policy Program with a range of regional and functional expertise.

The first panel focused on the range of threats the international order faces and whether (and how) the United States should prioritize these challenges and threats. The second panel asked whether the United States needs new regional strategies or a new grand strategy, how the United States can deter and rollback acts of revisionism and how the campaign against the Islamic State can fit into a broader Middle East strategy. Both panels sought to address the question of whether or not the United States can ultimately restore the international order to good health.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #InternationalOrder

Audio

• The International Order Under Siege

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20141002_international_order_transcript

Event Information

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

On October 17, the Brookings Institution’s Project on International Order and Strategy hosted two of the most prominent thinkers on American grand strategy to discuss whether Washington should remain forward-leaning in its posture, or if it should adopt a more restrained approach to global engagement.

The event was moderated by Brookings Foreign Policy Fellow Jeremy Shapiro, and featured a debate between Brookings Foreign Policy Senior Fellow Robert Kagan and Barry Posen, Ford International Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kagan argued that the United States has an enduring responsibility and capacity to shape the world order and must remain actively engaged abroad to prevent the international order from collapse. Posen, on the other hand, warned against American overreach in foreign policy and urged Washington to embrace restraint, focusing on its own national security interests and limiting engagement – particularly military - abroad.

In their discussion of the Middle East, both scholars sought to define American regional interests with greater precision. Posen argued that “affective” relationships, such as those with Israel, do not explain the U.S. defense budget dedicated to the region or contingency plans for the region. Posen also disputed the view that oil is the primary driver of U.S. regional policy, suggesting that threats to major suppliers could be managed with a less robust regional security commitment than Washington has traditionally maintained.

Kagan argued that President Obama is more intellectually inclined toward Posen’s strategy of restraint than most of his predecessors, and yet he too has been drawn into the Middle East. “It can’t just be pure stupidity that has had the United States involved in the Middle East as consistently as it has been for almost 70 years now, taking the place of the previous powers that had been involved in the Middle East,” he said.

Posen discussed U.S. efforts against the Islamic State group (also called ISIS or ISIL). He noted that President Obama’s rhetoric on ISIS has gone beyond what is prudent, describing the strategy as one of “containment that’s augmented by the promise of future counter-offensives and destruction.” Washington’s current strategy, Posen argued, has demobilized allies by enabling them to skirt responsibility for the crisis.

Posen and Kagan differed in their interpretations of the track record of American interventions in the region. Posen criticized American understanding of the causes and effects of intervention, saying that it is easier to oust a government than to generate internal consensus or transform a country into a stable democracy. By contrast, Kagan argued that the U.S. has never invaded a Middle Eastern country with the purpose of rearranging domestic politics.

There was little discussion of terrorism and nuclear proliferation, though Posen identifies these two threats as major items on which the U.S. should remain engaged. More information about Posen’s arguments can be found in his new book, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Cornell University Press, 2014). Kagan’s argument for continued pre-eminence and engagement in grand strategy can be found in his influential May 2014 New Republic essay “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire.”

Politics follows geopolitics, or so it has often seemed throughout history. When the Athenian democracy’s empire rose in the fifth century B.C.E., the number of Greek city-states ruled by democrats proliferated; Sparta’s power was reflected in the spread of Spartan-style oligarchies. When the Soviet Union’s power rose in the early Cold War years, communism spread. In the later Cold War years, when the United States and Western Europe gained the advantage and ultimately triumphed, democracies proliferated and communism collapsed. Was this all just the outcome of the battle of ideas, as Francis Fukuyama and others argue, with the better idea of liberal capitalism triumphing over the worse ideas of communism and fascism? Or did liberal ideas triumph in part because of real battles and shifts that occurred less in the realm of thought than in the realm of power?

These are relevant questions again. We live in a time when democratic nations are in retreat in the realm of geopolitics, and when democracy itself is also in retreat. The latter phenomenon has been well documented by Freedom House, which has recorded declines in freedom in the world for nine straight years. At the level of geopolitics, the shifting tectonic plates have yet to produce a seismic rearrangement of power, but rumblings are audible. The United States has been in a state of retrenchment since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. The democratic nations of Europe, which some might have expected to pick up the slack, have instead turned inward and all but abandoned earlier dreams of reshaping the international system in their image. As for such rising democracies as Brazil, India, Turkey, and South Africa, they are neither rising as fast as once anticipated nor yet behaving as democracies in world affairs. Their focus remains narrow and regional. Their national identities remain shaped by postcolonial and nonaligned sensibilities—by old but carefully nursed resentments—which lead them, for instance, to shield rather than condemn autocratic Russia’s invasion of democratic Ukraine, or, in the case of Brazil, to prefer the company of Venezuelan dictators to that of North American democratic presidents.

Meanwhile, insofar as there is energy in the international system, it comes from the great-power autocracies, China and Russia, and from would-be theocrats pursuing their dream of a new caliphate in the Middle East. For all their many problems and weaknesses, it is still these autocracies and these aspiring religious totalitarians that push forward while the democracies draw back, that act while the democracies react, and that seem increasingly unleashed while the democracies feel increasingly constrained.

It should not be surprising that one of the side effects of these circumstances has been the weakening and in some cases collapse of democracy in those places where it was newest and weakest. Geopolitical shifts among the reigning great powers, often but not always the result of wars, can have significant effects on the domestic politics of the smaller and weaker nations of the world. Global democratizing trends have been stopped and reversed before.

Consider the interwar years. In 1920, when the number of democracies in the world had doubled in the aftermath of the First World War, contemporaries such as the British historian James Bryce believed that they were witnessing “a natural trend, due to a general law of social progress.”[1] Yet almost immediately the new democracies in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland began to fall. Europe’s democratic great powers, France and Britain, were suffering the effects of the recent devastating war, while the one rich and healthy democratic power, the United States, had retreated to the safety of its distant shores. In the vacuum came Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy in 1922, the crumbling of Germany’s Weimar Republic, and the broader triumph of European fascism. Greek democracy fell in 1936. Spanish democracy fell to Franco that same year. Military coups overthrew democratic governments in Portugal, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Japan’s shaky democracy succumbed to military rule and then to a form of fascism.

Across three continents, fragile democracies gave way to authoritarian forces exploiting the vulnerabilities of the democratic system, while other democracies fell prey to the worldwide economic depression. There was a ripple effect, too—the success of fascism in one country strengthened similar movements elsewhere, sometimes directly. Spanish fascists received military assistance from the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. The result was that by 1939 the democratic gains of the previous forty years had been wiped out.

The period after the First World War showed not only that democratic gains could be reversed, but that democracy need not always triumph even in the competition of ideas. For it was not just that democracies had been overthrown. The very idea of democracy had been “discredited,” as John A. Hobson observed.[2] Democracy’s aura of inevitability vanished as great numbers of people rejected the idea that it was a better form of government. Human beings, after all, do not yearn only for freedom, autonomy, individuality, and recognition. Especially in times of difficulty, they yearn also for comfort, security, order, and, importantly, a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves, something that submerges autonomy and individuality—all of which autocracies can sometimes provide, or at least appear to provide, better than democracies. 

In the 1920s and 1930s, the fascist governments looked stronger, more energetic and efficient, and more capable of providing reassurance in troubled times. They appealed effectively to nationalist, ethnic, and tribal sentiments. The many weaknesses of Germany’s Weimar democracy, inadequately supported by the democratic great powers, and of the fragile and short-lived democracies of Italy and Spain made their people susceptible to the appeals of the Nazis, Mussolini, and Franco, just as the weaknesses of Russian democracy in the 1990s made a more authoritarian government under Vladimir Putin attractive to many Russians. People tend to follow winners, and between the wars the democratic-capitalist countries looked weak and in retreat compared with the apparently vigorous fascist regimes and with Stalin’s Soviet Union.

It took a second world war and another military victory by the Allied democracies (plus the Soviet Union) to reverse the trend again. The United States imposed democracy by force and through prolonged occupations in West Germany, Italy, Japan, Austria, and South Korea. With the victory of the democracies and the discrediting of fascism—chiefly on the battlefield—many other countries followed suit. Greece and Turkey both moved in a democratic direction, as did Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. Some of the new nations born as Europe shed its colonies also experimented with democratic government, the most prominent example being India. By 1950, the number of democracies had grown to between twenty and thirty, and they governed close to 40 percent of the world’s population.

Was this the victory of an idea or the victory of arms? Was it the product of an inevitable human evolution or, as Samuel P. Huntington later observed, of “historically discrete events”?[3] We would prefer to believe the former, but evidence suggests the latter, for it turned out that even the great wave of democracy following World War II was not irreversible. Another “reverse wave” hit from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador, South Korea, the Philippines, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece all fell back under authoritarian rule. In Africa, Nigeria was the most prominent of the newly decolonized nations where democracy failed. By 1975, more than three-dozen governments around the world had been installed by military coups.[4] Few spoke of democracy’s inevitability in the 1970s or even in the early 1980s. As late as 1984, Huntington himself believed that “the limits of democratic development in the world” had been reached, noting the “unreceptivity to democracy of several major cultural traditions,” as well as “the substantial power of antidemocratic governments (particularly the Soviet Union).”[5]

But then, unexpectedly, came the “third wave.” From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, the number of democracies in the world rose to an astonishing 120, representing well over half the world’s population. What explained the prolonged success of democratization over the last quarter of the twentieth century? It could not have been merely the steady rise of the global economy and the general yearning for freedom, autonomy, and recognition. Neither economic growth nor human yearnings had prevented the democratic reversals of the 1960s and early 1970s. Until the third wave, many nations around the world careened back and forth between democracy and authoritarianism in a cyclical, almost predictable manner. What was most notable about the third wave was that this cyclical alternation between democracy and autocracy was interrupted. Nations moved into a democratic phase and stayed there. But why?

The International Climate Improves

The answer is related to the configuration of power and ideas in the world. The international climate from the mid-1970s onward was simply more hospitable to democracies and more challenging to autocratic governments than had been the case in past eras. In his study, Huntington emphasized the change, following the Second Vatican Council, in the Catholic Church’s doctrine regarding order and revolution, which tended to weaken the legitimacy of authoritarian governments in Catholic countries. The growing success and attractiveness of the European Community (EC), meanwhile, had an impact on the internal policies of nations such as Portugal, Greece, and Spain, which sought the economic benefits of membership in the EC and therefore felt pressure to conform to its democratic norms. These norms increasingly became international norms. But they did not appear out of nowhere or as the result of some natural evolution of the human species. As Huntington noted, “The pervasiveness of democratic norms rested in large part on the commitment to those norms of the most powerful country in the world.[6]

The United States, in fact, played a critical role in making the explosion of democracy possible. This was not because U.S. policy makers consistently promoted democracy around the world. They did not. At various times throughout the Cold War, U.S. policy often supported dictatorships as part of the battle against communism or simply out of indifference. It even permitted or was complicit in the overthrow of democratic regimes deemed unreliable—those of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. At times, U.S. foreign policy was almost hostile to democracy. President Richard Nixon regarded it as “not necessarily the best form of government for people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”[7] 

Nor, when the United States did support democracy, was it purely out of fealty to principle. Often it was for strategic reasons. Officials in President Ronald Reagan’s administration came to believe that democratic governments might actually be better than autocracies at fending off communist insurgencies, for instance. And often it was popular local demands that compelled the United States to make a choice that it would otherwise have preferred to avoid, between supporting an unpopular and possibly faltering dictatorship and “getting on the side of the people.” Reagan would have preferred to support the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s had he not been confronted by the moral challenge of Filipino “people power.” Rarely if ever did the United States seek a change of regime primarily out of devotion to democratic principles.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, the general inclination of the United States did begin to shift toward a more critical view of dictatorship. The U.S. Congress, led by human-rights advocates, began to condition or cut off U.S. aid to authoritarian allies, which weakened their hold on power. In the Helsinki Accords of 1975, a reference to human-rights issues drew greater attention to the cause of dissidents and other opponents of dictatorship in the Eastern bloc. President Jimmy Carter focused attention on the human-rights abuses of the Soviet Union as well as of right-wing governments in Latin America and elsewhere. The U.S. government’s international information services, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, put greater emphasis on democracy and human rights in their programming. The Reagan administration, after first trying to roll back Carter’s human-rights agenda, eventually embraced it and made the promotion of democracy part of its stated (if not always its actual) policy. Even during this period, U.S. policy was far from consistent. Many allied dictatorships, especially in the Middle East, were not only tolerated but actively supported with U.S. economic and military aid. But the net effect of the shift in U.S. policy, joined with the efforts of Europe, was significant.

The third wave began in 1974 in Portugal, where the Carnation Revolution put an end to a half-century of dictatorship. As Larry Diamond notes, this revolution did not just happen. The United States and the European democracies played a key role, making a “heavy investment . . . in support of the democratic parties.”[8] Over the next decade and a half, the United States used a variety of tools, including direct military intervention, to aid democratic transitions and prevent the undermining of existing fragile democracies all across the globe. In 1978, Carter threatened military action in the Dominican Republic when long-serving president Joaquín Balaguer refused to give up power after losing an election. In 1983, Reagan’s invasion of Grenada restored a democratic government after a military coup. In 1986, the United States threatened military action to prevent Marcos from forcibly annulling an election that he had lost. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush invaded Panama to help install democracy after military strongman Manuel Noriega had annulled his nation’s elections. 

Throughout this period, too, the United States used its influence to block military coups in Honduras, Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru, and South Korea. Elsewhere it urged presidents not to try staying in office beyond constitutional limits. Huntington estimated that over the course of about a decade and a half, U.S. support had been “critical to democratization in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, and the Philippines” and was “a contributing factor to democratization in Portugal, Chile, Poland, Korea, Bolivia, and Taiwan.”[9]

Many developments both global and local helped to produce the democratizing trend of the late 1970s and the 1980s, and there might have been a democratic wave even if the United States had not been so influential. The question is whether the wave would have been as large and as lasting. The stable zones of democracy in Europe and Japan proved to be powerful magnets. The liberal free-market and free-trade system increasingly outperformed the stagnating economies of the socialist bloc, especially at the dawn of the information revolution. The greater activism of the United States, together with that of other successful democracies, helped to build a broad, if not universal, consensus that was more sympathetic to democratic forms of government and less sympathetic to authoritarian forms.

Diamond and others have noted how important it was that these “global democratic norms” came to be “reflected in regional and international institutions and agreements as never before.”[10] Those norms had an impact on the internal political processes of countries, making it harder for authoritarians to weather political and economic storms and easier for democratic movements to gain legitimacy. But “norms” are transient as well. In the 1930s, the trendsetting nations were fascist dictatorships. In the 1950s and 1960s, variants of socialism were in vogue. But from the 1970s until recently, the United States and a handful of other democratic powers set the fashion trend. They pushed—some might even say imposed—democratic principles and embedded them in international institutions and agreements.

Equally important was the role that the United States played in preventing backsliding away from democracy where it had barely taken root. Perhaps the most significant U.S. contribution was simply to prevent military coups against fledgling democratic governments. In a sense, the United States was interfering in what might have been a natural cycle, preventing nations that ordinarily would have been “due” for an authoritarian phase from following the usual pattern. It was not that the United States was exporting democracy everywhere. More often, it played the role of “catcher in the rye”—preventing young democracies from falling off the cliff—in places such as the Philippines, Colombia, and Panama. This helped to give the third wave unprecedented breadth and durability.

Finally, there was the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it the fall of Central and Eastern Europe’s communist regimes and their replacement by democracies. What role the United States played in hastening the Soviet downfall may be in dispute, but surely it played some part, both by containing the Soviet empire militarily and by outperforming it economically and technologically. And at the heart of the struggle were the peoples of the former Warsaw Pact countries themselves. They had long yearned to achieve the liberation of their respective nations from the Soviet Union, which also meant liberation from communism. These peoples wanted to join the rest of Europe, which offered an economic and social model that was even more attractive than that of the United States. 

That Central and East Europeans uniformly chose democratic forms of government, however, was not simply the fruit of aspirations for freedom or comfort. It also reflected the desires of these peoples to place themselves under the U.S. security umbrella. The strategic, the economic, the political, and the ideological were thus inseparable. Those nations that wanted to be part of NATO, and later of the European Union, knew that they would stand no chance of admission without democratic credentials. These democratic transitions, which turned the third wave into a democratic tsunami, need not have occurred had the world been configured differently. That a democratic, united, and prosperous Western Europe was even there to exert a powerful magnetic pull on its eastern neighbors was due to U.S. actions after World War II.

The Lost Future of 1848

Contrast the fate of democratic movements in the late twentieth century with that of the liberal revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. Beginning in France, the “Springtime of the Peoples,” as it was known, included liberal reformers and constitutionalists, nationalists, and representatives of the rising middle class as well as radical workers and socialists. In a matter of weeks, they toppled kings and princes and shook thrones in France, Poland, Austria, and Romania, as well as the Italian peninsula and the German principalities. In the end, however, the liberal movements failed, partly because they lacked cohesion, but also because the autocratic powers forcibly crushed them. The Prussian army helped to defeat liberal movements in the German lands, while the Russian czar sent his troops into Romania and Hungary. Tens of thousands of protesters were killed in the streets of Europe. The sword proved mightier than the pen.

It mattered that the more liberal powers, Britain and France, adopted a neutral posture throughout the liberal ferment, even though France’s own revolution had sparked and inspired the pan-European movement. The British monarchy and aristocracy were afraid of radicalism at home. Both France and Britain were more concerned with preserving peace among the great powers than with providing assistance to fellow liberals. The preservation of the European balance among the five great powers benefited the forces of counterrevolution everywhere, and the Springtime of the Peoples was suppressed.[11] As a result, for several decades the forces of reaction in Europe were strengthened against the forces of liberalism.

Scholars have speculated about how differently Europe and the world might have evolved had the liberal revolutions of 1848 succeeded: How might German history have unfolded had national unification been achieved under a liberal parliamentary system rather than under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck? The “Iron Chancellor” unified the nation not through elections and debates, but through military victories won by the great power of the conservative Prussian army under the Hohenzollern dynasty. As the historian A.J.P. Taylor observed, history reached a turning point in 1848, but Germany “failed to turn.”[12] Might Germans have learned a different lesson from the one that Bismarck taught—namely, that “the great questions of the age are not decided by speeches and majority decisions . . . but by blood and iron”?[13] Yet the international system of the day was not configured in such a way as to encourage liberal and democratic change. The European balance of power in the mid-nineteenth century did not favor democracy, and so it is not surprising that democracy failed to triumph anywhere.[14] 

We can also speculate about how differently today’s world might have evolved without the U.S. role in shaping an international environment favorable to democracy, and how it might evolve should the United States find itself no longer strong enough to play that role. Democratic transitions are not inevitable, even where the conditions may be ripe. Nations may enter a transition zone—economically, socially, and politically—where the probability of moving in a democratic direction increases or decreases. But foreign influences, usually exerted by the reigning great powers, often determine which direction change takes. Strong authoritarian powers willing to support conservative forces against liberal movements can undo what might otherwise have been a “natural” evolution to democracy, just as powerful democratic nations can help liberal forces that, left to their own devices, might otherwise fail. 

In the 1980s as in the 1840s, liberal movements arose for their own reasons in different countries, but their success or failure was influenced by the balance of power at the international level. In the era of U.S. predominance, the balance was generally favorable to democracy, which helps to explain why the liberal revolutions of that later era succeeded. Had the United States not been so powerful, there would have been fewer transitions to democracy, and those that occurred might have been short-lived. It might have meant a shallower and more easily reversed third wave.[15] 

Democracy, Autocracy, and Power

What about today? With the democratic superpower curtailing its global influence, regional powers are setting the tone in their respective regions. Not surprisingly, dictatorships are more common in the environs of Russia, along the borders of China (North Korea, Burma, and Thailand), and in the Middle East, where long dictatorial traditions have so far mostly withstood the challenge of popular uprisings.

But even in regions where democracies remain strong, authoritarians have been able to make a determined stand while their democratic neighbors passively stand by. Thus Hungary’s leaders, in the heart of an indifferent Europe, proclaim their love of illiberalism and crack down on press and political freedoms while the rest of the European Union, supposedly a club for democracies only, looks away. In South America, democracy is engaged in a contest with dictatorship, but an indifferent Brazil looks on, thinking only of trade and of North American imperialism. Meanwhile in Central America, next door to an indifferent Mexico, democracy collapses under the weight of drugs and crime and the resurgence of the caudillos. Yet it may be unfair to blame regional powers for not doing what they have never done. Insofar as the shift in the geopolitical equation has affected the fate of democracies worldwide, it is probably the change in the democratic superpower’s behavior that bears most of the responsibility.

If that superpower does not change its course, we are likely to see democracy around the world rolled back further. There is nothing inevitable about democracy. The liberal world order we have been living in these past decades was not bequeathed by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It is not the endpoint of human progress.

There are those who would prefer a world order different from the liberal one. Until now, however, they have not been able to have their way, but not because their ideas of governance are impossible to enact. Who is to say that Putinism in Russia or China’s particular brand of authoritarianism will not survive as far into the future as European democracy, which, after all, is less than a century old on most of the continent? Autocracy in Russia and China has certainly been around longer than any Western democracy. Indeed, it is autocracy, not democracy, that has been the norm in human history—only in recent decades have the democracies, led by the United States, had the power to shape the world.

Skeptics of U.S. “democracy promotion” have long argued that many of the places where the democratic experiment has been tried over the past few decades are not a natural fit for that form of government, and that the United States has tried to plant democracy in some very infertile soils. Given that democratic governments have taken deep root in widely varying circumstances, from impoverished India to “Confucian” East Asia to Islamic Indonesia, we ought to have some modesty about asserting where the soil is right or not right for democracy. Yet it should be clear that the prospects for democracy have been much better under the protection of a liberal world order, supported and defended by a democratic superpower or by a collection of democratic great powers. Today, as always, democracy is a fragile flower. It requires constant support, constant tending, and the plucking of weeds and fencing-off of the jungle that threaten it both from within and without. In the absence of such efforts, the jungle and the weeds may sooner or later come back to reclaim the land.

[1] Quoted in Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 17.

[2] Quoted in John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 573.

[3] Huntington, Third Wave, 40.

[4] Huntington, Third Wave, 21.

[5] Samuel P. Huntington, “Will More Countries Become Democratic?” Political Science Quarterly 99 (Summer 1984): 193–218; quoted in Larry Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (New York: Times Books, 2008), 10.

[6] Huntington, Third Wave, 47.

[7] Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 196.

[8] Diamond, Spirit of Democracy, 5.

[9] Huntington, Third Wave, 98.

[10] Diamond, Spirit of Democracy, 13.

[11] Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 409.

[12] A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of German History Since 1815 (London: Routledge, 2001; orig. publ. 1945), 71.

[13] Rapport, 1848, 401–402.

[14] As Huntington paraphrased the findings of Jonathan Sunshine: “External influences in Europe before 1830 were fundamentally antidemocratic and hence held up democratization. Between 1830 and 1930 . . . the external environment was neutral . . . hence democratization proceeded in different countries more or less at the pace set by economic and social development.” Huntington, Third Wave, 86.

[15] As Huntington observed, “The absence of the United States from the process would have meant fewer and later transitions to democracy.” Huntington, Third Wave, 98.

Downloads

• Is Democracy in Decline? The Weight of Geopolitics

Great power competition has returned. Or rather, it has reminded us that it was always lurking in the background. This is not a minor development in international affairs, but it need not mean the end of the world order as we know it.  

The real impact of the return of great power competition will depend on how the United States responds to these changes. America needs to recognize its central role in maintaining the present liberal international order and muster the will to use its still formidable power and influence to support that order against its inevitable challengers.

Competition in international affairs is natural. Great powers by their very nature seek regional dominance and spheres of influence. They do so in the first instance because influence over others is what defines a great power. They are, as a rule, countries imbued with national pride and imperial ambition. But, living in a Hobbesian world of other great powers, they are also nervous about their security and seek defense-in-depth through the establishment of buffer states on their periphery. 

Historically, great power wars often begin as arguments over buffer states where spheres of influence intersect—the Balkans before World War I, for instance, where the ambitions of Russia and Austria-Hungary clashed. But today’s great powers are rising in a very different international environment, largely because of the unique role the United States has played since the end of the Second World War. The United States has been not simply a regional power, but rather a regional power in every strategic region. It has served as the maintainer of regional balances in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The result has been that, in marked contrast to past eras, today’s great powers do not face fundamental threats to their physical security. 

So, for example, Russia objectively has never enjoyed greater security in its history than it has since 1989. In the 20^th century, Russia was invaded twice by Germany, and in the aftermath of the second war could plausibly claim to fear another invasion unless adequately protected. (France, after all, had the same fear.)  In the 19^th century, Russia was invaded by Napoleon, and before that Catherine the Great is supposed to have uttered that quintessentially Russian observation, “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.” Today that is not true. Russia faces no threat of invasion from the West.  Who would launch such an invasion? Germany, Estonia, Ukraine? If Russia faces threats, they are from the south, in the form of militant Islamists, or from the east, in the form of a billion Chinese standing across the border from an empty Siberia. But for the first time in Russia’s long history, it does not face a strategic threat on its western flank. 

Much the same can be said of China, which enjoys far greater security than it has at any time in the last three centuries. The American role in East Asia protects it from invasion by its historic adversary, Japan, while none of the other great powers around China’s periphery have the strength or desire now or in the foreseeable future to launch an attack on Chinese territory. 

Therefore, neither Chinese nor Russians can claim that a sphere of influence is necessary for their defense. They may feel it necessary for their sense of pride. They may feel it is necessary as a way of restoring their wounded honor. They may seek an expanded sphere of influence to fulfill their ambition to become more formidable powers on the international stage. And they may have concerns that free, nations on their periphery may pass the liberal infection onto their own populaces and thus undermine their autocratic power. 

The question for the United States, and its allies in Asia and Europe, is whether we should tolerate a return to sphere of influence behavior among regional powers that are not seeking security but are in search of status, powers that are acting less out of fear than out of ambition. This question, in the end, is not about idealism, our commitment to a “rules-based” international order, or our principled opposition to territorial aggression. Yes, there are important principles at stake: neighbors shouldn’t invade their neighbors to seize their territory. But before we get to issues of principle, we need to understand how such behavior affects the world in terms of basic stability 

On that score, the historical record is very clear. To return to a world of spheres of influence—the world that existed prior to the era of American predominance—is to return to the great power conflicts of past centuries. Revisionist great powers are never satisfied. Their sphere of influence is never quite large enough to satisfy their pride or their expanding need for security. The “satiated” power that Bismarck spoke of is rare—even his Germany, in the end, could not be satiated. Of course, rising great powers always express some historical grievance. Every people, except perhaps for the fortunate Americans, have reason for resentment at ancient injustices, nurse grudges against old adversaries, seek to return to a glorious past that was stolen from them by military or political defeat. The world’s supply of grievances is inexhaustible.

These grievances, however, are rarely solved by minor border changes. Japan, the aggrieved “have-not” nation of the 1930s, did not satisfy itself by swallowing Manchuria in 1931. Germany, the aggrieved victim of Versailles, did not satisfy itself by bringing the Germans of the Sudetenland back into the fold. And, of course, Russia’s historical sphere of influence does not end in Ukraine. It begins in Ukraine.  It extends to the Balts, to the Balkans, and to heart of Central Europe. 

The tragic irony is that, in the process of carving out these spheres of influence, the ambitious rising powers invariably create the very threats they use to justify their actions. Japan did exactly that in the 30s. In the 1920s, following the Washington Naval Treaty, Japan was a relatively secure country that through a combination of ambition and paranoia launched itself on a quest for an expanded sphere of influence, thus inspiring the great power enmity that the Japanese had originally feared. One sees a similar dynamic in Russia’s behavior today. No one in the West was thinking about containing Russia until Russia made itself into a power that needed to be contained.

If history is any lesson, such behavior only ends when other great powers decide they have had enough. We know those moments as major power wars. 

The best and easiest time to stop such a dynamic is at the beginning. If the United States wants to maintain a benevolent world order, it must not permit spheres of influence to serve as a pretext for aggression. The United States needs to make clear now—before things get out of hand—that this is not a world order that it will accept. 

And we need to be clear what that response entails. Great powers of course compete across multiple spheres—economic, ideological, and political, as well as military. Competition in most spheres is necessary and even healthy. Within the liberal order, China can compete economically and successfully with the United States; Russia can thrive in the international economic order uphold by the liberal powers, even if it is not itself liberal. 

But security competition is different. It is specifically because Russia could not compete with the West ideologically or economically that Putin resorted to military means. In so doing, he attacked the underlying security and stability at the core of the liberal order. The security situation undergirds everything—without it nothing else functions. Democracy and prosperity cannot flourish without security. 

It remains true today as it has since the Second World War that only the United States has the capacity and the unique geographical advantages to provide this security. There is no stable balance of power in Europe or Asia without the United States. And while we can talk about soft power and smart power, they have been and always will be of limited value when confronting raw military power. Despite all of the loose talk of American decline, it is in the military realm where U.S. advantages remain clearest. Even in other great power’s backyards, the United States retains the capacity, along with its powerful allies, to deter challenges to the security order. But without a U.S. willingness to use military power to establish balance in far-flung regions of the world, the system will buckle under the unrestrained military competition of regional powers. 

This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at a joint meeting of Congress. His address sparked an intense debate among U.S. and Israeli lawmakers over the protocol issues raised by the invitation to speak, which came from the Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives without consultation with the Obama White House, as well as the substance of the address — a broadside against Obama’s Iran policy — and its timing during the final days of a closely contested Israeli election.

Brookings scholars weighed in on the debate, through blog posts, op-eds and the media. These include:

Fellow Natan Sachs explained why Netanyahu’s speech was so controversial.  "Israelis, by and large, don't like it when their prime minister quarrels with the United States," Sachs told Vox. "For most voters, especially in the core base on the right and I think center right, here's Bibi doing something that opposition leaders cannot do: speak the way he does with his English and this reception from Americans.” Also read Sachs' blog post on the electoral implications of the speech as well as his Haaretz op-ed with recommendations for Israeli and American strategy toward the Iran nuclear talks.

Tamara Cofman Wittes, director of the Center for Middle East Policy (CMEP) at Brookings, appeared on Charlie Rose following the speech, and said, “I think the speech was very effective, as a speech, particularly at the end when Netanyahu was really playing to his domestic audience and political base more than anyone…I think that’s probably the video clip the Likud will be playing in  ads as the campaign winds down.”

Nonresident Senior Fellow Shibley Telhami looked at poll results examined U.S. public opinion related to Netanyahu’s speech. "Among Democrats, those holding favorable views of the Israeli prime minister declined from 25 percent in November to 16 percent in February, and among Independents from 21 percent to 14 percent. Correspondingly, unfavorable views increased from 22 to 26 percent among Democrats, and from 14 to 21 percent among Independents," he wrote in Foreign Policy.

A New York Times editorial examining Netanyahu's speech discussed American public opinion on the Iran nuclear deal, and cited Telhami’s poll results “show[ing] that a clear majority of Americans — including 61 percent of Republicans and 66 percent of Democrats — favor an agreement.” Telhami also organized and moderated the annual Sadat Forum earlier this week, featuring a discussion on the Iranian nuclear issue and the Netanyahu speech with Brookings Distinguished Fellow Ambassador Thomas Pickering, former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Jessica Matthews, and CMEP Senior Fellow Suzanne Maloney.

According to Ambassador Martin Indyk, who has served as director of the Foreign Policy program and was just named Brookings Executive Vice President, Netanyahu remained against any agreement. “He was pretty clear about his opposition to the deal,” Indyk told Foreign Policy. “I believe he wants to sink it, not modify it.”

Prior to the speech, Robert Einhorn, senior fellow in the Center for 21st Century Intelligence and Security and the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Initiative, wrote an op-ed published in the International New York Times discussing Netanyahu’s angle on the Iran talks. After Netanyahu’s speech, Einhorn appeared on Christiane Amanpour and argued that the deal was “not an ideal deal, but it’s a good deal, and one that’s better than any realistic alternative.” Einhorn, who formerly participated in the negotiations with Iran as a senior State Department official, was quoted in coverage of the speech published in the Washington Post and Politico, among others.

In an op-ed on U.S. News and World Report, Maloney argued that when it comes to a deal with Iran, “The ever-present illusion of a more perfect deal is not worth risking an imperfect, but minimally sufficient, bargain.”

With the prospect of a nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 looking increasingly likely and with the caveat that, “as always, Iran’s future behavior is hard to predict because its motives going into the nuclear negotiations are unclear and its decision-making is always opaque,” Senior Fellow Kenneth M. Pollack examined the possible scenarios and offered his thoughts on whether a nuclear deal would likely make Iran more or less aggressive — or neither. 

Bruce Riedel, senior fellow and director of the Brookings Intelligence Project, wrote about Netanyahu’s address in contrast to Saudi Arabia’s diplomacy. “As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plays center stage at the Congress this week to slam the Iran deal-in-the-making, the Saudis are playing a more subtle game,” Riedel wrote. “Iran is priority number one. It's more than just the nuclear issue.” The pot was also quoted in a Bloomberg News analysis of Gulf reaction to the state of play on Iran.

Last week, William Galston, who holds Brookings' Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies, wrote about the implications of Netanyahu’s speech, warning that “[t]he last thing he should want is a negative reception in the United States that fuels Israeli swing voters’ doubts about his capacity to manage Israel’s most important relationship.” And in his Washington Post column last week, Senior Fellow Robert Kagan argued that “there is no doubt that the precedent being set is a bad one” and regretted that “bringing a foreign leader before Congress to challenge a U.S. president’s policies…will be just another weapon in our bitter partisan struggle.”

And finally, for anyone wanting to see what our scholars were tweeting during Netanyahu’s speech, and reaction afterward, here’s a round-up.

For several years, President Obama has operated under a set of assumptions about the Middle East: First, there could be no return of U.S. ground troops in sizeable numbers to the region; and second, the United States had no interests in the region great enough to justify such a renewed commitment. The crises in the Middle East could be kept localized. The core elements of the world order would not be affected, and America’s own interests would not be directly threatened.

These assumptions could have been right, but instead they have proven to be wrong. The combined crises of Syria, Iraq, and the threat posed by the Islamic State (or ISIS) have not been contained. ISIS itself has proven both durable and capable, as the attacks in Paris showed. The Syrian conflict—with the resulting refugee flows—is destabilizing Lebanon and Jordan; it has put added pressure on Turkey’s already tenuous democracy; and it has exacerbated the acute conflict between Sunni and Shiite across the region. The multi-sided war in the Middle East has now ceased to be a strictly Middle Eastern problem. It has become a European problem, as well. The crisis on the periphery, in short, has now spilled over into the core.

Does this not call for a reassessment of the policies that have so far been tried in Syria and Iraq? Have not events in the Middle East, and now in Europe, reached the point where significant interests are at stake, thereby requiring a more substantial response by the United States?

Read Robert Kagan's more in-depth article on the subject in the Wall Street Journal.

Event Information

John Quincy Adams famously said that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” A diplomat, secretary of state, as well as the sixth president, Adams is often described as a “realist,” and as the founder of American foreign policy realism. But did his own policy choices square with that doctrine of restraint? Recently, President Obama has described his own views in explicitly realist terms; Hillary Clinton is widely viewed as a more ardent believer in the active use of American power; and the Republican candidates seem more eager to build walls than to engage the outside world.

On April 11, the Brookings Project on International Order and Strategy (IOS) hosted a discussion between Brookings Senior Fellow Robert Kagan and James Traub, columnist and contributor at foreignpolicy.com, lecturer of foreign policy at New York University, and now the author of the new book, “John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit” (Basic Books, 2016). Kagan and Traub debated whether Adams was a foreign policy realist and whether his approach to foreign policy can still inform the policy choices facing the United States today. Brookings Fellow Thomas Wright, director of IOS, moderated the discussion.

Audio

• Was John Quincy Adams a realist? A debate

Transcript

• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160411_john_quincy_adams_transcript

The world order that was created in the aftermath of World War II has produced immense benefits for peoples across the planet. The past 70 years have seen an unprecedented growth in prosperity, lifting billions out of poverty. Democratic government, once rare, has spread to over 100 nations around the world, on every continent, for people of all races and religions. And, although the period has been marked by war and suffering as well, peace among the great powers has been preserved. There has been no recurrence of the two devastating world wars of the first half of the 20th century.

Today, however, that liberal order is being challenged by a variety of forces—by powerful authoritarian governments and anti-liberal fundamentalist movements, as well as by long-term shifts in the global economy and changes in the physical environment. The questions we face are whether this liberal world order is worth defending, and whether it is capable of surviving the present challenges. We believe the answer to both questions is an emphatic “yes.”

To say that a “liberal” world order is worth defending is, of course, a declaration on behalf of a certain set of principles—a belief that the rights of the individual are primary, that it is the responsibility of governments to protect those rights and that democratic government, in particular, offers the best chance for human dignity, justice and freedom. This is not a universally held view. The leaders of some nations and more than a few people around the world disagree on this hierarchy of values.

There is, and always has been, a division about how nations should be governed, and about the differences in and between democratic and autocratic forms, the role of religion and the connections to economic structures. While recognizing that these differences exist and that every structure has its failings, the authors of this report are confident in their conviction that the liberal world order offers the best hope for meeting human aspirations, both material and spiritual, and for calling forth the very best in people across the world.

To strengthen and preserve this order, however, will require a renewal of American leadership in the international system. The present world order has been forged by many hands and peoples, but the role of the United States in both shaping and defending it has been critical. American military power, the dynamism of the U.S. economy, and the great number of close alliances and friendships that the United States enjoys with other powers and peoples have provided the critical architecture in which this liberal world order has flourished. A weakening of America’s commitment or its capabilities, or both, would invariably lead to its collapse.

But in recent years, many have come to doubt America’s ability to continue playing this role. Only seven years ago, pundits were talking of a “post-American world” with a declining United States and a remarkable “rise of the rest”. These days, however, that prognosis appears to have been at least premature. The United States has substantially recovered from the Great Recession, while the once-heralded “rise of the rest” has stalled.

A new foundation for an effective U.S. foreign policy for a new international environment needs to be established, but it should be recognized that the United States is not omnipotent and faces limitations in what it can do. The emphasis must be on taking advantages of American comparative advantages in certain key areas, doing what the United States does best, and in a way that reflects what those around the world want and need from America.

To this end, this paper focuses on four baskets of policies—Strengthening and Adapting the Liberal Economic Order; Strengthening the International Security Order; Taking Advantage of the Energy Revolution; and Playing to America’s Strengths in Education, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

A key task for American political leaders and policy advocates will be to demonstrate and explain how the pieces fit together: how trade enhances security; how military power undergirds prosperity; and how providing access to American education strengthens the forces dedicated to a more open and freer world. By looking at the whole picture, the importance of the individual strands of policy will be clearer and therefore easier to sell.

Downloads

• Strengthening the liberal world order

Event Information

On May 5, the Brookings Project on International Order and Strategy (IOS) hosted a discussion on America’s global role and the release of the newest edition of Pew Research Center’s series, “America’s Place in the World.” This survey explores American views of U.S. foreign policy today and the role of U.S. leadership abroad. The study also looks at which national security threats concern Americans the most.

Carroll Doherty, director of political research at Pew Research Center, opened the discussion by explaining the survey’s findings. Senior Fellow Robert Kagan, author of “The World America Made” (Vintage Books, 2013), talked about the implications of the survey for U.S. support of the international order. Derek Chollet, former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs and author of the forthcoming book “The Long Game” (Public Affairs, 2016), offered insight into how these findings fit with President Obama’s worldview. Laure Mandeville, U.S. bureau chief for Le Figaro, contributed an international perspective on American politics and U.S. power abroad.

Margaret Brennan, CBS foreign affairs correspondent, moderated the discussion. Senior Fellow Thomas Wright, director of IOS, provided brief opening remarks.

After the program, the speakers took questions from the audience.

Video

• Introduction
• Speakers

Audio

• America’s place in the world

Transcript

• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• Americas Place in the World 2016 Pew Presentation
• 20160505_americas_place_transcript

Event Information

A conversation with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker

Video

• Economic opportunities and the liberal international order