U.S. Policy in the Middle East, With Steven A. Cook

Jim Lindsay:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is U.S. policy in the Middle East.

With me to discuss America's past, present and future policy in the Middle East, is Steven Cook. Steven is the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies, here at the Council. He's also a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine. Steven is the author of the new book, The End of Ambition: America's Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East. Steven, thank you for coming back on The President's Inbox and congratulations on the publication of your new book.

Steven Cook:
Many thanks, Jim. It's a great pleasure to be back on The President's Inbox and I owe you a debt of gratitude because you were a reader of my manuscript and you offered many, many excellent criticisms and comments that have made the book a better manuscript.

Jim Lindsay:
Well, thank you for those kind words, Steven. I enjoyed reading the manuscript, but before we dive into what you argue in The End of Ambition, I'd like to tell our listeners how they can obtain a free copy of The End of Ambition. To do so, they should go to cfr.org/giveaway. Let me repeat that, cfr.org/giveaway. There they can read the terms and conditions for the giveaway and register an entry. The registration for the giveaway will remain open until June 17. After that, we will select ten names at random to receive a free copy of The End of Ambition. Anyone listening to this, if you don't have a pen handy to write down this information, don't worry. We have posted a link to the giveaway in the show notes for The President's Inbox on cfr.org.

With those logistics out of the way, Steven, let's talk about U.S. policy in the Middle East. And let me begin with your title. Titles are supposed to convey the argument of the book. What do you mean by, The End of Ambition?

Steven Cook:
Well, thanks, Jim. Indeed. The title is an attempt to capture the overarching theme of the book. And my goal in tracing the arc of American foreign policy in the region since 1945, is to demonstrate a period when the United States was actually quite successful. There were moral costs and setbacks throughout that period, in the post-World War II period and throughout the Cold War. And then I trace three decades of failure in the region. And what I found in doing the research was, that the failures had everything to do with an American ambition to transform the Middle East, and the successes had everything to do with the United States seeking to prevent bad things from happening to core American interest in the region. So The End of Ambition essentially is my overall policy prescription. Let's dispense with the idealism. Let's dispense with the idea of making the world the way we want it to be, in favor of the world as it is and understanding what's important to us and in essence, preventing bad things from happening to the things that are important to the United States in the region.

Jim Lindsay:
So Steven, let's unpack that because there's an awful lot there.

Steven Cook:
Sure is.

Jim Lindsay:
Let's begin with your claim that there was a period, got to tell me how long that period lasted, where U.S. policy was successful, how so?

Steven Cook:
Well, between 1945 and 1991, by measures of what U.S. policymakers wanted to do in the Middle East, the United States was successful. Now, this evolved over time. I think people believe that the United States was always as actively invested in the Middle East, as it has been in recent decades, and that's not the case. For years during the post-World War II period, Middle East was sort of a backwater for U.S. policy. The British were very much there, especially in the Persian Gulf. The United States was focused on building a coalition to contain Soviet power in the region, but it really was something fundamentally different from what we see now. Beginning though in the 1970s, with the British withdrawal east of Suez, as they say, essentially a withdrawal from the Persian Gulf region, the United States became more actively involved in ensuring the free flow of energy resources out of the region, helping to prevent threats to Israeli security and preventing challenges to the American exercise of power in the region, that would threaten either the free flow of energy resources or the Israeli security.

And that over the course of the 1970s into the 1980s, and then into the early 1990s, became a focus of American foreign policy. And again, the United States confronted setbacks. The October 1973 war between Egypt and Syria and Israel, is a place where America's core interest in helping to thwart challenges to Israeli security and its interest in preventing disruption of energy resources collided. And it was the one time where the oil did not flow. There was the Iranian Revolution which was a setback. The United States had made Iran, essentially its policeman of the Gulf. But overall-

Jim Lindsay:
That was when the shah was in charge of Iran?

Steven Cook:
...When the shah was in charge of Iran, the United States pursued a policy to build up Iranian power, to help ensure the free flow of energy resources out of the Persian Gulf. And again, despite those setbacks and a significant amount of moral costs, the oil flowed, except for a very short period of time, Israel was secure and America remained a dominant power in the region.

Jim Lindsay:
So those are your three goals that you think U.S. policy, in that era, should be judged by?

Steven Cook:
Yeah. That is essentially what policymakers said that they were trying to do during that era, and then things tended to shift after 1991.

Jim Lindsay:
Before we talk about the shift though, I want to actually draw you out a bit more, Steven.

Steven Cook:
Sure.

Jim Lindsay:
On a quick aside you made about moral costs. Because obviously other people looking at U.S. policy from 1945 to 1990 or so, might be quite critical of U.S. policy. Arguing that the United States worked with autocratic regimes that harmed their public and did not in any way align with American principles or values. How do you respond to that?

Steven Cook:
I respond by saying that's a hundred percent true. But policymakers never identified human rights and democracy, and freedom of press, and the principles by which we like to live as a core American interest in the region. What they were willing to invest in, defend, sacrifice for, was the flow of energy from the region, helping to ensure Israel's security and American primacy. And yeah, there were moral costs associated with aligning with regional autocrats who had terrible human rights records, whose values don't align with those by which we like to believe we live here in the United States. But that's a separate issue I think, from whether the United States secured or advanced its interests in the Middle East during this period. Those were things that I think American presidents often talked about, American values, but our conduct over that period would suggest that we were more interested in those interests and those were the things which we shaped our policy and devoted resources to.

Jim Lindsay:
So why, Steven, when we get to the early 1990s, do we see this shift in which the Middle East suddenly becomes both more prominent on the American foreign policy agenda, but also as I take it from what you're arguing, the nature of American goals changed?

Steven Cook:
Yeah. 1991 is really a very, very interesting moment for the Middle East. Over the course of the late 1990 and the early 1991, the United States marshals a huge international force to confront Saddam Hussein, who in August of 1990 had invaded Kuwait and declared it the nineteenth province of Iraq. And beginning in January of 1991, the United States undertook operation Desert Storm, to push the Iraqis out of Kuwait and reestablish Kuwaiti sovereignty. The United States and its allies were successful in that endeavor, which reinforced American dominance of the region.

And then almost exactly ten months after the war against Iraq ended, the Soviet Union finally collapsed. On December 26th, 1991, the hammer and sickle was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, and suddenly the United States was the lone superpower, with a tremendous amount of diplomatic, financial and military power. And very soon thereafter, particularly after President Clinton was elected, began a process in which, for lack of a better term, the United States sought to remake the world. The United States extended NATO. It supported economic shock therapy in the former communist countries and sought to enlarge democracy.

The Middle East seemed like one of those regions of the world that needed the most American help, and the Clinton administration embarked on a peace process, which was intended to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians, which is a good thing. But they also believed that once peace was established, that the rationale for the big police states, those authoritarian states in which the United States had been cooperating with, would fall away and more just open and democratic societies would emerge in the Arab world. This was an elegant way of thinking of things, but it really betrayed an almost naive view of why there were authoritarian political systems in these Arab countries.

But there was this sort of robust idea that the United States can leverage its own power to transform the region. President Clinton himself said, "I want to pull these countries into the twenty-first century." And peace was the way in which he sought to do that. Obviously he failed in that effort. There was no peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and the authoritarian political systems of the region remained.

And then you have the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, and that encouraged or enabled, a lot of ideas that had been percolating throughout the 1990s about transforming the region. Primary among those is that regime change in Iraq would be beneficial to the region. And in addition to that, that idea that had been lingering throughout the 1990s, had been a source of debate between advocates of regime change and the Clinton administration, that suddenly seemed possible. But in addition to that, in the immediate post 9/11 environment, American policymakers latched onto the idea that democracy would be an antidote to terrorism. That if the United States could forge democratic political systems in the Middle East, mostly young men would be able to process their grievances through democratic institutions rather than taking up arms against their own countries and the United States. But that idea was based on a bunch of half ideas and misreadings of history. And in retrospect, there's very little evidence of democracy as being an antidote to terrorism.

Jim Lindsay:
Well, Steven, let me ask you about that. Is your argument that the Bush administration ordered the U.S. invasion of Iraq because it wanted to bring democracy to Iraq and hence to the region? Because my recollection was that their argument was mostly that you wanted to take Saddam Hussein out of the equation because he was a threat. So it was more responding to a specific threat than the promise that armed regime change was going to bring about democratic revolutions. That seemed to me to have been tacked on later on?

Steven Cook:
Not exactly tacked on later on.

Jim Lindsay:
Blossomed later on, if you want to put it that way.

Steven Cook:
Okay, blossomed later on. And I think I should be clear that the post 9/11 impulse to promote democratic change in the region, was something that was parallel but distinctly separate from the invasion of Iraq. But I will remind you, Jim, that the code name for the invasion of Iraq was Operation Iraqi Freedom. And that, I think, was something that was done on purpose. And in fact, in deliberations ahead of the invasion, people like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had advocated for just finding another Iraqi dictator after overthrowing Saddam. But the president, President George W. Bush, made the argument that it wouldn't be wise, it would be untoward, it would be unseemly for the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein just to replace him with another Iraqi general or a dictator. So, the part and parcel of regime change in Iraq was also creating a more democratic Iraq.

The idea was essentially flipping the Clinton administration's approach on its head. The Clinton administration believed that peace would lead to democratic governance or more democratic governance in the region, the Bush team believed, or at least President Bush believed, that reform would lead to peace in the region. But it turned out that Iraq was neither a threat to world peace because it did not have weapons of mass destruction. And that, of course, the blossoming of this idea that Iraq would be democratic, these ideas in reality had nothing to do with the situation on the ground in Iraq. And we failed in our efforts to transform Iraqi society, and we failed in our efforts to transform political systems around the region for whatever we invested in the freedom agenda, that was in parallel to the invasion of Iraq, the return on the investment was zero.

Jim Lindsay:
Steven, I want to be clear I understand your argument here. Is your argument that the American effort to transform Iraq, and other Middle Eastern countries, in the direction of democracy, was doomed to failure from the start or that it failed because we made a series of mistakes along the way, and if we had had a smarter policy, let's say, for the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, for example, like not pursuing a wholesale disbanding of the Iraqi military, the story may have played out differently?

Steven Cook:
If you transport me back to me in 2005, I would've said the latter. I would've said it was a number of policy mistakes that sent this project off the rail. But I think that in hindsight, and the way I look at it now and what I talk about in the book, is that political change is up to Iraqis, it's up to Egyptians, it's up to Palestinians. The United States doesn't have the resources or the insight or knowledge, to engage in an international social engineering project from half a world away. And that we should understand the world as it is, not necessarily how we would like it to be, and that if countries undergo transitions to democracy, certainly the United States should be there to help them. But to try to forge democratic change in the region was something that, I think, the United States didn't understand what it was up against, and didn't really understand the political, economic and cultural obstacles to that goal.

Jim Lindsay:
Let's talk a little bit about what was called at the time, the Arab Spring. You were actually there at ground zero in Tahrir Square, when revolutions swept Egypt. Obviously a lot of American policymakers at the time and the Obama administration, even outside of it, thought that this was a genuine inflection point in the Middle East that a new era had opened up, hence the reference to the Arab Spring. Why did it fail, Steven? I know you've written about this in a prior book, False Dawn. To what extent was democracy in the Arab Spring destined to fail, and how much of it was the result of choices the United States made or didn't make?

Steven Cook:
Thanks for mentioning my previous book, Jim. Before I answer your question directly, there's something very, very interesting to me that seems to happen to policymakers at these extraordinary moments in world history. I remember reading the book that George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft wrote together, and you can't find two more-

Jim Lindsay:
A World Transformed, wasn't it titled?

Steven Cook:
...A World Transformed. Two more sober statesmen than George HW Bush and Brent Scowcroft, who looked at the world in a realist way and certainly were not intending to transform the world, but nevertheless, as the Soviet Union crumbled before them and the East Bloc ended, both of them, it crept into the book, it talked about the possibilities and the prospects for this global change and the emergence of democracy. Barack Obama had a very similar kind of worldview. One of his former staffers once said to me, "He was a realist, but he felt bad about it." And when he went to Cairo, in June of 2009, and gave his big speech to the Muslim world, he didn't say we're going to transform the region. He said, "Hey, if democracy emerges in this part of the world, count on us to be there to help you." But when the Arab uprisings actually happened, President Obama gave a speech at the State Department in May of 2011, and he gave a speech that could have been given by George W. Bush, who at that time, was seen as the American president who led the charge to transform the region.

Jim Lindsay:
The Freedom Agenda as it was called.

Steven Cook:
The Freedom Agenda as it was called. And President Obama essentially put the United States, after dialing back the American effort to promote democracy in the region. After the Arab uprisings, he dialed it up and he put the United States back in the democracy promotion business. And as I write in my book, False Dawn, and then go over once again in this new book, The End of Ambition, what the United States was unprepared for was the fact that there were, in the countries where there were uprisings, there were defenders of the old regime and institutions, rules, laws, decrees, that helped the defenders of those old regimes gain the upper hand over would-be revolutionaries, because they had few resources, certainly didn't have the guns, were unlikely to succeed in this environment.

And that is a principle reason why the uprisings in places like Egypt failed. Even in Tunisia, one country that was considered to be a success. In July 2021, the elected president engaged in, what's essentially a palace coup, and now is a dictator as bad as the dictator that was overthrown in 2011. This is not to suggest that people in the Arab world can't live in democracies, that there can't be democracy in Arab world. But the odds were stacked against would-be revolutionaries because they didn't have the resources, they didn't have control over institutions and they didn't have the guns.

Jim Lindsay:
People don't write their histories on blank pages, I think is a way to look at it.

Steven Cook:
Thanks, boss. Great way of looking at it.

Jim Lindsay:
So Steven, a lot of people have looked at U.S. policy toward the Middle East over the last three decades, and I think as you survey a lot of those writings, one of the clear policy recommendations that comes out of it, is that the United States should either withdraw from the region or retrench from the region. Is that where you come down?

Steven Cook:
No, I don't. I think the withdrawal and retrenchment arguments are too radical a solution for the problems that the United States confronts in the region. I think, this may sound wishy-washy, but it's not. A middle distance between the withdrawal retrenchment arguments and the transformative, active, overinvestment in the region, is what's called for. I think over the course of the last three decades, the United States lost sight of what was important to it in the region, and therefore everything and anything became important to it. And I think those who were calling for retrenchment or withdrawal, are responding to the series of events that led to American failures in the region.

And the United States can be constructive again, if we take a page from our own history, I'm not suggesting that history is a recipe for the future, but if we just understood, one, what was important to us. We had a clear eye about what was important to us. If we understood the world as it is, not the way in which we would like it to be, and we devoted the appropriate resources to achieving our goals there, we'd be much better off than either the overinvestment of previous thirty years or the underinvestment that retrenchers, and withdrawers, and others would like to pursue.

Jim Lindsay:
Well, let me ask you about that precise point, Steven. Why do you think underinvestment, if it can be phrased that way, would be bad? What do you see happening through underinvestment that would be injurious to U.S. national interest? Because again, as you know, a lot of people would argue that in essence, we should withdraw precisely because what happens over there doesn't necessarily affect us. Even on issues like oil supplies, people would argue that that's really now China's problem because China's a major oil importer. We, the United States, are now the world's largest oil producer. So help me understand why the argument to withdraw or substantially downsize U.S. involement in the Middle East is wrong? Will produce, in your view, outcomes we'll regret.

Steven Cook:
I'm not opposed to downsizing the American presence in the region. For resourcing, if that's a verb, the American presence in a region, geared towards what's important to us, and you point out one of them, which is to ensure the free flow of energy resources from the region. But before I do that, I want to step back and I want to talk a little bit about retrenchment. And we've seen something like this before and it hasn't worked.

In the early 1970s, the Middle East version of the Nixon Doctrine was called Twin Pillars. The United States invested a lot in Iranian power. Under the shah, Iran would be U.S. policemen in the Gulf. The other pillar of the Twin Pillars was Saudi Arabia. We built up internal security for The House of Saud, given Saudi Arabia's importance to global oil markets, so the United States wouldn't have to be in the Middle East. And of course, the Iranian Revolution happened, and it undermined one of the policemen. And there were significant threats to Saudi security in the late 1970s. And then of course, with Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was a significant threat.

Being away from the region doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to gain some sort of security or that our interests won't be negatively affected. I think those who say, Hey, we can be offshore. The Chinese share our interest in the free flow of energy resources and freedom of navigation, I think they have a point. I can see the point that in the abstract, the United States and the Chinese have a confluence of interest, but it's not exactly working out that way. I don't believe that the Chinese want to replace the United States in the region, but the Chinese have not been shy about undercutting American policy in the region, whether it's regarding Iran, it has been manifestly unhelpful in dealing with the Houthi threat to the freedom of navigation and the free flow of energy resources through the Red Sea.

Jim Lindsay:
Well, Chinese policy seems to be aimed at maximizing benefits to China in cost to the United States.

Steven Cook:
Well, exactly. And I think that when it comes to oil, the United States, even though it is the world's largest producer of oil now, has an abiding interest in the stability of a global energy market. And that's why right-sizing the American approach to the region, that it's focused on things like preventing threats to the free flow of energy resources, I think is an important thing to do, without the ambitious effort to transform the societies that produce that oil. The other thing I think that it's important to keep in mind, is that as the United States talks about withdrawing, retrenching from, pivoting away from the region, our traditional partners in the region hedge with our adversaries. They hedge with the Russians, they hedge with the Chinese. That is a significant problem for the United States as it confronts global challenges, but also challenges within the region itself.

So I think that there are knock-on effects to our withdrawals from the region. For years, the Saudis had said to the United States, "Don't withdraw from the region, don't withdraw from the region. You're just inviting malevolent behavior from actors like Iran." And in fact, now the United States is seeing and understanding that signals that the Iranians got from our, not just our debate about withdrawing from the region, but are inaction in response to their own efforts to create chaos in the region, have emboldened Iran and its proxies in the region. The best example of that is when the Iranians attacked Saudi oil facilities in the summer of 2019 and the United States didn't respond. This has only emboldened Iranian adventurism around the region.

Jim Lindsay:
So Steven, what do you want U.S. policy to focus on, going forward? And I asked that against the backdrop of October 7, where we had this horrific attack by Hamas on Israel. The Israelis have struck back with great force. This has raised a lot of criticism about Israel's conduct of the war, that is obviously creating a domestic fallout here in the United States. A majority of Americans believe that Israel has gone too far in its attacks, that it hasn't done enough to protect civilian lives. So how does that all net out for you as you try to write a policy prescription for the United States?

Steven Cook:
Yeah, it's hard, but what I've done in the book is to lay out something I call prudential conservatism. In terms of thinking about, how can we prudently exercise our power? How can we conserve our power and achieve our goals in the region? And what I lay out is there's six basic things the United States should be doing in the region, four of which are, I think, pretty familiar to most people and to innovations. And the four that are familiar is continuing what I call in the book, the prime directive, helping to prevent or preventing threats to the free flow of energy resources out of the region, even given the fact that the United States is the largest producer of oil in the world.

The second one is continuing to help prevent threats to Israeli security, but recognizing that the politics of Israel is changing in the United States. Something that I write quite a bit about. I think that there's a better way to go about helping the Israelis than our ten-year memorandums of understanding, in which they get between $3.5 to $5 billion of military assistance. And Israel is a advanced industrial country with a GDP per capita that exceeds those of some of our NATO allies. Yet those NATO allies don't get the generosity of the American taxpayer dollar to underwrite their security, the Israelis are perfectly capable.

But if we do want to continue to, and I think it's a wise thing for the United States to want to continue to help prevent threats to Israeli security, those things can be done through agreements and treaties: commercial treaties about technology sharing, like we've done with some of the Israeli defensive systems that they themselves have developed, that the United States has invested in. This is a much better way to go because it tends to, one, recognize the reality that the Israelis can stand on their own. It doesn't create a dependency, and it relieves the United States of its complicity in one of those moral costs that we talked about at the top of the show.

Jim Lindsay:
And so what would your other four priorities be, Steven?

Steven Cook:
Non-proliferation, counterterrorism, climate adaptability, and the big issue in which everyone in Washington is talking about, which is great power of competition. And we need to fashion our policies in order to meet the challenges of great power of competition. And one of the things that we can do, is right-sizing our approach to the region.

Jim Lindsay:
Steven, I am tempted to ask you to delve into each and every one of those topics, but in the interest of time, I'm not. I'm simply going to tell our listeners that they should pick up a copy of The End of Ambition, to learn more about the argument you lay out there about a U.S. foreign policy for the Middle East going forward and simply say, thank you for contributing to the public debate.

Steven Cook:
Well, thanks for having me, Jim. I very much hope people get an opportunity to read the book. I'm happy for people to get in touch and tell me what they think, good or bad. It's just a thrill to know that people have read it.

Jim Lindsay:
You have very thick skin.

Steven Cook:
Well, it's a thrill to know that people have read it and have actually thought about it.

Jim Lindsay:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Steven Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies here at the Council, and the author of the brand new book, The End of Ambition: America's Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East. Steven, again, thank you very much.

Steven Cook:
Thanks very much for having me on, Jim. And thanks to all the listeners of The President's Inbox.

Jim Lindsay:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave us your review. We love the feedback. You can email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, the Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.