From the Potomac to the Euphrates

This article first appeared here on ForeignPolicy.com on September 13, 2018. Almost two decades ago, I went to dinner at a restaurant called Peking in the Zamalek neighborhood of Cairo to celebrate the Chinese New Year. During what I vaguely remember being a raucous dinner, the crowd at the restaurant was asked to hush because a special guest had arrived. It was China’s ambassador to Egypt, who took the floor with a young Chinese woman—his translator—who effortlessly turned Mandarin into flawless classical Arabic. My dinner companions, a mix of American grad students, Egyptians, and Egyptian-Americans, were blown away at the translator’s skills. After all, few Americans could accomplish a similar feat. We then resumed celebrating the Year of the Rabbit. Looking back, the young Chinese woman’s beautiful Arabic symbolized Beijing’s long term investment in building China’s regional role. The country’s leaders at the time understood that at some point they would want a greater voice in the region. Back in the late 1990s, this idea seemed plausible, but well over the horizon. When China came up in conversation, Egyptian officials would often declare, “China is not a replacement for the United States.” Then they would wait two long beats and with add with a smirk, “Yet.” Have we now arrived at that moment? On July 10, China’s President Xi Jinping opened the Eighth Ministerial Meeting of the China-Arab Cooperation Forum with a lengthy and rousing speech about collaboration, cooperation, and “win-win” solutions for Beijing and the Arab world. A few weeks later he flew to Abu Dhabi for a three day state visit to the United Arab Emirates, the first by a Chinese leaders in almost three decades, and signed a raft of mostly economic agreements. The conference and Xi’s trip come at a time when there is a lot of interest in the Middle East and beyond in President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative—an amorphous plan to put China at the center of global governance and in the process reverse the flow of goods, services, and ideas that have made the West paramount over the last few centuries. If you are an economic determinist, the Chinese have indeed become players in the Middle East. But broaden the scope of analysis and Chinese’s grand plans haven’t moved much beyond the beautiful-Arabic stage. No doubt China’s economic state-craft is real and has the potential to be profoundly consequential for the Middle East. In his July speech before about 300 attendees —including at least one Arab head of state and a handful of Middle Eastern foreign ministers—in Beijing, Xi committed $20 billion worth of loans to the region, an additional almost 90 million in aid to Syria, Yemen, Jordan, and Lebanon for reconstruction and care for displaced people, and another billion dollars to the Arab world toward building “social stability.” This comes on top of major Chinese investment in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, where about 60 percent of China’s exports are re-exported to Africa, the Middle East, and  Europe. China has also targeted non-Arab Turkey and Saudi Arabia as central pieces to the Belt and Road that will provide access to the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf, respectively. There has been some backlash to the Chinese in Southeast Asia and Africa about a ‘new colonialism,’ but less so in the Arab world and certainly not among officials there. In the early and mid-2000s, Egyptian diplomats would get misty eyed when talking about China. This wasn’t surprising. The Chinese Communist Party had solved a riddle that had proven beyond the apparatchiks of Egypt’s National Democratic Party—how to generate long term economic growth without upending social cohesion and maintaining the power of the party. More recently, a senior official from a Gulf country noted that Washington’s political polarization made it an unreliable and even risky partner in the Arab world’s quest for economic development and declared, “If you sat where we sit, you too would base your economic future on partnership with China.” The Chinese can bring a lot of resources to bear for what they call “win-win” cooperation in the Middle East. The new ports, airports, logistics “hubs,” and economic zones that are being planned or are under construction stand to benefit these countries (unless they are saddled with huge debt like a number of Beijing’s client states in Africa) while China gets to enjoy the benefits of new infrastructure and the copious energy resources of the region that will facilitate its continued development. Yet to infer, as a fair of amount of reporting and analysis suggests, that China’s financial investment in the Middle East means that Beijing will become a geo-strategic player in the region may be getting out ahead of even the Chinese. Of course, there is historical precedent for this evolution: The British occupation of Egypt came about in part to collect Khedive Ismail’s debts to European banks. Still, the Chinese seem more interested in opportunistic mercantilism than becoming a problem solver and provider of regional security. A close look at Xi’s July speech or China’s 2016 policy statement on the Middle East reveals a detailed discussion of economic statecraft, but the barest minimum of boilerplate on politics, diplomacy, and security in the region. Reflecting these official statements, the Chinese foray into these areas has been tepid, at best.  They’ve declared their support for a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; have resisted American efforts to cut off Iran’s oil exports, which, given how much energy Beijing imports from Tehran, is to be expected; and declared their opposition to extremism and terrorism. There is a certain logic that given China’s dependence on Middle Eastern hydrocarbons, it will have to get involved in the security and politics of the region. All that said, what have the Chinese actually done?  They hosted relatively low-level delegations of Palestinians and Israelis in Beijing in 2017, reiterating their support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders and East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state—a starting point that is doomed to fail. Beijing set up a naval base in Djibouti—strategically located at Bab el Mandeb where the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden—and their warships have made port calls in parts of the Middle East.  Maybe these activities presage a more active role in the future, but at the moment, it isn’t even clear that the Chinese have the military resources for a sustained presence in the region.  Beijing’s answer to fighting extremism seems to be rounding up ethnic Uighurs into re-education camps, an issue on which Middle Eastern governments have remained silent. No one in the Middle East expects the Chinese to be a provider of security, that is what the United States does and the Chinese are all too happy to benefit from it.  As Washington has demonstrated less appetite to get involved militarily in the region, Middle Eastern countries have looked to Moscow or taken it upon themselves to secure their interest in Syria and Yemen. Contrary to the often breathless commentary about China as a rising power in the Arab world, Beijing’s minimalist approach to the dramas and traumas of the Middle East in favor of economics issues is shrewd in terms of China’s broader ambitions. A day after the United States launched 59 cruise missiles at Syria, while Presidents Trump and Xi were enjoying chocolate cake at Mar a Largo, I called a friend in Beijing to get a sense of the Chinese reaction. He laughed and told me that no one in the Chinese capital was impressed with the American display of 1980s-era technology. “Besides,” he said, “anything that keeps the United States bogged down in the crises of the Middle East is good for China. It’s less resources Washington can spend on the South China Sea.” That makes sense—and it’s time the rest of the world realizes it.

This article was originally published here on ForeignPolicy.com on August 31, 2018. The first big battles between the U.S. military and the Wehrmacht during World War II were not actually in Europe. Between Nov. 8 and Nov. 10, 1942, the United States and allied forces landed in Algeria and Morocco. After defeating Vichy French forces, the armies proceeded east to Tunisia to take on the German forces in that country. Why North Africa? Allied military planners had determined that an invasion of France in 1942 was doomed to fail, so plans were made to attack Germany from—as Winston Churchill reportedly remarked—the “soft belly of the Mediterranean.” It was from Tunisia that the invasion of Italy and the long, bloody march to Berlin began. Perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin is a student of history, or maybe he likes maps, but whatever his hobby, he seems to understand geography quite well. The character of Moscow’s influence differs greatly from the old Soviet days when it was collecting client states (except for Russia’s ongoing deployment of force in Syria). But it has been effective—or effective enough—in drawing important allies away from the United States while presenting Russia as a competent, nonideological partner that shares interests with the regional players. Therein lies the central logic to Russia’s Middle East-Europe strategy: establish influence at Washington’s expense, weakening the U.S. position in the region, and in the process apply pressure on Europe via its weak underbelly—in this case to the south and southeast of the European Union. Draw a line on a map from Moscow to Damascus and from the Syrian capital to Erbil in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Everyone knows what happened in Syria: The Russians entered the conflict there to save an ally and have helped him prosecute a war that has produced millions of refugees, many of whom have made their way to Europe and left others banging on its gates. The effects on European politics have been profound, galvanizing a populist, nativist, and pro-Russian right at the expense of Europe’s postwar liberal consensus. While Syria is a well-known story, only a few in Washington seem to have noticed that since 2017, Russia has reportedly invested $4 billion in the Kurdish oil and gas sector. From Erbil extends the line of Russian influence and power to the east from Iraqi Kurdistan to Iran. That Moscow-Damascus-Erbil-Tehran line represents an important axis of Russian influence. But other Russia-dominated geographic lines are even more relevant for Europe. One line starts in the Russian capital and proceeds due south to the Turkish capital, Ankara. Moscow has not exactly turned Turkey, but the combination of Syria, where Putin is the powerbroker; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s worldview; and the still changing nature of international politics after the Cold War, has made a Turkey-Russia partnership of sorts possible. The Turks are scheduled to receive Russia’s advanced S-400 air defense system in July 2019, Turkey’s volume of trade with Russia is bigger than with the United States, and Erdogan recently identified Moscow—along with Beijing and Tehran—as an alternative to Washington. All of this has stoked (mostly overblown) fears within the Washington policy community about “losing Turkey,” but for the Europeans who are connected to Ankara through the flow of goods and services and who regard Anatolia as a buffer between them and Moscow, burgeoning Turkey-Russia ties are a problem. Start again, but this time cross the Mediterranean and stop at Cairo, make a sharp left and extend the line to Benghazi. That is the third axis. The Russians, with their uncompromising position regarding the threat of Islamism, offer high-tech weaponry—and a no-questions-asked policy on human rights—and for Egypt’s leaders that’s an appealing alternative to the United States. Egypt has been a critical component of the existing regional political order, which has favored the exercise of U.S. power in the Middle East for at least three decades. Rather than reversing Henry Kissinger’s 1970s-era Westward flip of the Egyptians, Moscow has pushed and pulled in places where Americans and Egyptians have been at loggerheads. This can’t make European leaders very comfortable. About 10 percent of world trade—much of it going to and from Europe—passes through the Suez Canal. Egypt’s ties to Russia also raise the prospect that for the first time in a long time, U.S. and European navies may not be able to operate totally unimpeded in the Eastern Mediterranean. Libya is the most intriguing and revealing of all of Moscow’s plays in the region. It is unclear how deeply involved they are in the eastern part of the country, but the Russians are certainly aligned with the Egyptians and Emiratis in opposition to any political settlement that includes an Islamist component to a new government in Tripoli. The would-be Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar has met with Russian officials several times, and in 2017 Putin (not coincidentally) deployed a small Russian force to an air base in western Egypt about 60 miles from the Libyan border. Publicly, the Russians have counseled compromise among Libyan political forces, but the Europeans suspect that Moscow supports Haftar. Libya might seem a stretch for Putin, who, it is often said, has limited resources to expend on foreign policy. Why bother? Well, underneath eastern Libya is one of the world’s largest reserves of light, sweet crude oil and the fifth-largest reserves of natural gas in Africa. The bulk of Libya’s oil and gas exports go to Europe. It would be strategically remiss of Putin not to become involved in Libya, a place from which Russia can potentially influence energy supplies to Europe. It seems to be a pretty good bet that this has crossed the Russian president’s mind. Only last year, Russia experts were dismissing the country’s intervention in Syria, its information campaign in Europe, and the annexation of Crimea as little more than a nuisance. It should be clear by now, however, that Moscow’s return to the Middle East beyond Syria is about something much bigger—just take a look at the map.

This article was originally published here in The Washington Post on August 17, 2018. In July, a deal to release an American minister jailed in Turkey came apart because, a White House official told The Washington Post, Turkey was changing the agreement and “upping the ante.” A few weeks later, President Trump tweeted that he had doubled tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Turkey, punctuating his thought with: “Our relations with Turkey are not good at this time!” Magdalena Kirchner, an analyst at Conias Risk Intelligence, told Newsweek that this would stop both sides from seeking “consensus for the sake of the alliance.” In March, writing for Foreign Policy in response to outrage after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened American forces in Syria, former Bush administration officials James F. Jeffrey and Michael Singh soberly declared, “Turkey is a regional geographic and economic giant that stands as a buffer between Europe and the Middle East, and between the Middle East and Russia.” Writing for The Post, the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Bryza argued that “the White House has decided to give up on Turkey as an ally.” American officials have often insisted on seeing Turkey, a NATO ally since 1952, as a close partner, which is why the recent fallout seems so shocking. Don’t these two countries share interests and values? Not really. When you strip away all the happy talk, it’s clear the two nations aren’t really, and have never been, that close. This is a relationship doomed to antipathy. Alliances are never perfect, of course, and there have been moments over the past seven decades that justify Turkey’s image as a close partner of the United States: President Turgut Ozal shut down pipelines carrying Iraqi oil through Turkey during the run-up to the Gulf War, at great cost to the Turkish economy, for instance. A decade later, the Turkish government was among the first to condemn the 9/11 terrorist attacks and quickly committed troops to Afghanistan. Turkey became an important and valued component of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in that country. By that time, American officials had become accustomed to seeing Turkey as a partner, like their closest allies in Europe and East Asia. The country’s failure to live up to this role reveals more about our own desperation for Turkey to be something it isn’t, and about Cold War strategies, than about Turkish shortcomings. Except for Turkey’s 1974 incursion in Cyprus, which led Congress to punish Ankara with an arms embargo, conflicts and problems in the bilateral relationship could be swept aside for decades because of the overarching threat Moscow posed to both nations. In 1978, a year and a half after his inauguration, President Jimmy Carter and Congress lifted the embargo out of fear that a rift with NATO would imperil the West’s position in the eastern Mediterranean: Turkey was a physical and strategic buffer between the Soviet Union and the rest of Europe. In the decades since the Cold War ended, problems between the United States and Turkey have piled up, but Washington and Ankara no longer share a threat that mitigates these differences. After the Persian Gulf War, which Turkey supported, it grew exasperated at sanctions on Iraq that, it believed, hindered its own economy. So it began turning a blind eye to Iraqi oil exports crossing its border. When Turkey pledged to aid the mission in Afghanistan, its troops didn’t engage in combat. Turks opposed the later Iraq War on principle, which was their right, but also repeatedly threatened to undermine the stability of northern Iraq, the one region of the country that welcomed the American occupation, because it housed a separatist movement that advocated for Turkey’s oppressed Kurds. Elsewhere in the Middle East, Turkey became a champion of Hamas, supporting the organization diplomatically in its periodic conflicts with Israel and welcoming its operatives in Istanbul. In Syria, Ankara enabled extremists who used Turkish territory as a rear area in the fight against the Assad regime. And the Turkish government has stirred up unrest at Jerusalem’s holy sites. When it comes to Iran, the Turkish government (along with Brazil) negotiated a separate nuclear agreement with Tehran that ran at cross purposes to Washington’s; intentionally blew the cover on an Israeli intelligence operation in Istanbul gathering information on Iran’s nuclear program; and opposed the Obama administration’s effort to impose new U.N. sanctions on Tehran, then helped the Iranians evade those sanctions. Turkey’s incursions into northern Syria have complicated the fight against the Islamic State, for a time drawing Washington’s Syrian Kurdish allies away from the front line to face the Turks and their allies. In 2016, Erdogan threatened to allow tens of thousands of refugees to enter Europe, apparently because of suspended talks on Turkey’s European Union membership. “You did not keep your word,” he said in a speech in Istanbul. The threat, repeated months later by Turkey’s interior minister, stoked fears in Europe and the United States that such a move — intended or otherwise — would help further empower populist, nationalist and racist political forces already roiling the politics and potentially the stability of the E.U., a core strategic interest of the United States. In long-running disputes over small islands, the Turkish military has sought to intimidate Greece through repeated, needlessly provocative violations of Greek airspace. The danger from Moscow no longer justifies overlooking these significant differences in priorities. In fact, the Turkish government is buying an air defense system from the Russians that could provide Moscow with information about the American F-35 fighter jet, the newest high-tech plane in the U.S. arsenal, which Turkey also plans to fly. Under these circumstances, lamenting the end of our partnership with Turkey seems absurd. To be fair, from the Turkish perspective, the United States is not much of an ally, either. A staggering number of Turks believe that Washington was complicit in the attempted 2016 coup d’etat. One poll conducted online in 2016 by a Turkish newspaper found that almost 7 in 10 Turks blamed the CIA. This patently false idea (which Erdogan and other officials have nurtured) along with Trump’s tweet makes Erdogan’s latest accusation that the United States is attempting an economic coup all the more plausible to the Turkish public. Meanwhile, Washington’s Syrian Kurdish allies are directly linked to a Turkish Kurdish terrorist organization, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, that has carried out a violent campaign against Turkey since the mid-1980s. So it’s easy to understand why U.S. approval ratings in Turkey hover between the low and high teens. The speed with which relations deteriorated after the deal to free the clergyman imploded highlights a relationship marked by frustration and mistrust, not common aims. It is no wonder the Turks seldom, if ever, defend their relationship with Washington. They believe America seeks to do them harm. In an address to Turkey’s parliament in 2009, President Barack Obama said: “The United States and Turkey have not always agreed on every issue, and that’s to be expected — no two nations do. But we have stood together through many challenges over the last 60 years.” Even with the hopeful gloss, that’s closer to reality than the standard characterization of the two nations as close partners. With the current tensions, expect the debate over who “lost Turkey,” and calls to protect the alliance, to grow louder. But it is hard to really lose an ally when it was not much of one to begin with.