by Vali Nasr
What is true, what must be openly discussed, is that it was largely in response to our dependence on the Middle East for oil and our concern for Israel’s security that we became so focused on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the specter of al-Qaeda, and the rise of a nuclear Iran as a threat. The 9/11 attacks lent new urgency to our worries in these areas, but the roots of concern run deeper, and the lingering fear continues to preoccupy us even after the killing of bin Laden, the visible weakening of al-Qaeda, and the Arab world’s tentative turn to democracy.
The Obama administration may talk of pivoting to Asia—and, by implication, washing our hands of the Middle East—but that goal will likely run up against the reality of challenges that oil, Israel, and terrorism and the host of issues tied to them will put before us. Moving on from the Middle East was an aspiration divorced from hard facts facing American foreign policy. Continued worry over terrorism is still a consuming concern that belies our proclaimed desire to deploy our resources elsewhere in the world.
Let us consider oil, our most obvious reason for being in the Middle East. By the end of the First World War, Great Britain had one overriding interest in the Middle East, and that was oil. The Royal Navy’s switch from coal to oil made the precious liquid a strategic commodity of the first rank. Moreover, the British government stood to benefit from the taxes that British oil companies would pay into London’s exchequer.2
Americans inherited this concern for oil along with management of the region when the British moment in the Middle East ended with the Suez Crisis in 1956. During the Cold War, America jealously guarded the Persian Gulf against Soviet designs. But in time, America also came to worry about Arab threats to cut off oil. One such disruption in 1973, led by Saudi Arabia to punish America for its support of Israel, wreaked havoc on the American economy. Before long, the price of oil had quadrupled as oil-producing countries banded together as OPEC to get a better deal for their precious export.3
The “oil shock” of the 1970s jolted America into action. Since then, we have coddled dictators, built military bases, gone to war, and generally kept deepening our engagement in the Middle East—all to secure oil. The costs of this strategy have been anti-Americanism, war, and terrorism. The columnist and author Thomas Friedman, a longtime observer of the region, thinks that our problems in the Middle East would go away if we ended our dependence on oil—if we kicked the habit and “went green.” For some time now, he has rallied the American Left to embrace alternative energies as the remedy to our Middle East headaches—“go green and end the green menace,” one might call this. Every time someone asks Saudi oil minister Ali Al-Naimi about green energy making oil obsolete, he simply laughs and says, “It’s not going to happen.” Getting off oil is a far-fetched, long-run answer to an immediate strategic problem.
The Right’s solution is to find more oil at home, a sentiment most clearly captured by the battle cry “Drill, baby, drill!” And this might well work. According to a 2011 report from the Congressional Research Service, the sum of all fossil-fuel reserves plus technically recoverable but undiscovered oil and natural gas in the United States and Canada nearly equals the sum of such resources found in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, and Qatar put together.4 If you add Mexico, then North America’s total exceeds that of these Middle Eastern oil and gas producers. The past decade has seen the rapid expansion of oil and natural gas production via methods such as slant drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in U.S. shale deposits, including the Bakken Formation beneath North Dakota and Montana and the Marcellus Formation that extends from a corner of Tennessee in the south as far north as western New York State and as far east as New Jersey. Buoyed by such finds (some say the most significant since the discovery of the vast East Texas Oil Field in 1930), America could be on the road to becoming energy self-sufficient. By as soon as 2020, the United States could be the world’s leading producer of oil and natural gas. There is also a great deal more oil and gas stored in Canada’s Alberta tar sands and the outer continental shelf than anyone had realized—the problem is that the environmental costs of getting to it are as yet not fully known.
Still, besting Saudi Arabia or Qatar in oil and gas production will not change America’s strategic conundrum. Energy self-sufficiency is a solution to an imaginary problem. Today we depend on the Middle East for only about 30 percent of our imported oil. The rest of our imported oil—and note that we are depending somewhat less on these sources as places such as North Dakota are now shipping the prized light, sweet crude5—comes from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Africa. We take only a tenth of the Middle East’s petroleum exports; most go to Asia. Abu Dhabi’s oil, for instance, is locked down by long-term contracts with Japan and South Korea. And yet despite this, we cannot escape the strategic headaches caused by Middle Eastern oil.
The reason is that the oil market is fungible—a shortage or a high price in one corner means higher prices everywhere else. If the Asian states lose their Middle East supply, their demand for oil will not go away—it will simply push prices higher. But that is not a problem that will be solved solely by drilling or fracking our way to greater oil and gas independence. Nor can we think that oil-supply problems suffered by our allies and major trading partners will somehow leave our own economy unaffected. As such, we may cut our imports of Middle East oil further, but we must still keep viewing stability in the Middle East as a vital American interest. Protecting that interest will become more difficult as complicated changes continue to cascade across the region.
How complicated? Consider the fact that the administration’s decision to escalate pressure on Iran to compel its compliance on the nuclear issue in early 2012 had an immediate blowback in the form of higher oil prices—at the inconvenient moment when the U.S. economy was starting to show signs of growth after years of sluggishness and depressed labor and housing markets.
The oil-producing countries ranged around the Persian Gulf have also become more dependent on their petrodollars, just as they have become weaker and vulnerable to political tumult. They need our greenbacks probably worse than we need their oil. Opulence is not power; to the contrary, it has cut these regimes from their traditional moorings. Behind the gilded veneer of wealth and power are hollow political structures and teetering institutions that increasingly lean far too heavily on American military might.
In late 1973, as the Arab oil embargo following the Yom Kippur War was causing great pain in the West, America warned King Faisal of Saudi Arabia that if he did not lift the embargo, America would invade his country to resume the flow of oil. The king replied, “If you do that, we will set the oil fields on fire. We came from the desert and will return to the desert.” That may have been a slightly credible threat then; it is a wholly incredible threat now.
Gone are the days when Saudi royals could handle the nomadic life of mounted desert tribesmen. The Saudi rulers need stable oil markets even more than we do. Their lavish urban lifestyles depend on oil, as does whatever shaky degree of control they have over their restless people. Forty-five percent of the kingdom’s GDP goes to supporting the royal family with its battalions of princes (60,000 by last count). In 2004 Saudi Arabia needed oil to sell at $20 a barrel to support its entitlement programs and defense spending. To keep the Arab Spring out (and also pay for massive defense spending), the Saudi monarchy promised its population $60 billion in subsidies—it now needs oil to sell for at least $80 a barrel to meet its obligations. That number is expected to go up to $325 a barrel by 2030.
On par with oil, and perhaps even more important to America’s involvement in the Middle East, is Israel’s security. Israel is not entirely a foreign policy concern for the United States. If that were true, we would have hardly sided with a small state with no natural resources or market to speak of, and would have long ago thrown in our lot with the far larger and resource-rich Arab world.
In reality, Israel is an American domestic political issue. Many Americans care deeply about Israe
l for religious and cultural reasons—Israel receives broad support from evangelical Christians, a community that is far larger than the American Jewish one. We do not have vital strategic interests in the Jordan Valley, but the need to behave as if we do has put us in an unenviable position in the midst of the Arab-Israeli dispute.
The United States will continue to support Israel, and that will weigh on Arab public opinion, fueling anti-Americanism and making it difficult for America to realize many of its goals in the region. It is therefore in America’s interest that the Arab-Israeli dispute be resolved. Then America’s support for Israel would not be at odds with the desire for stronger ties between the United States and the Arab and Muslim worlds. But how to do it? Whereas the Bush administration tried to solve the problem by changing the Arab world, it is more realistic to actually push for a real peace deal.
But we have failed to do so. The Arabs too have failed—either to defeat Israel or persuade it to make peace. With turmoil swirling all around the Middle East, there is now even more reason to sue for peace. America once had the luxury of standing between its Arab and Israeli allies because the region was locked in a predictable status quo. In today’s fluid environment America cannot count on being able to continue as before or rest assured that trying to do so would not in fact fuel instability and imperil its allies. Resolving the Arab-Israeli dispute is perhaps the single most important thing America can do to contribute to regional stability and thereby help the Arab world find its way to peace and security. That would douse the flames of anti-Americanism. But this is unlikely. The Arab-Israeli Gordian knot will not be easily untangled; the corrosive impact of this reality will keep America in the Middle East for far longer than it hopes.
Oil, Israel, and terrorism will remain the mantra of our Middle East policy regardless of what other cause we embrace there or how much we say we are done with the region. The hard fact about the Middle East is that this trifecta is interconnected. We cannot pick and choose which part we want to deal with. If neither us nor our vital allies bought oil from the Middle East, so we could claim to have no more direct or nearly direct dependence on oil, the Middle East could move into someone else’s orbit, probably China’s or Russia’s, which would erode our standing in the world and disturb the global balance. Or the Middle East could collapse into economic misery. Social scientists like to talk about “the oil curse”—when countries have lots of oil to sell and hence lots of money sluicing around to fund misgovernment and corruption—and yet not being able to sell their oil would be even worse. That outcome would not produce a peaceful and stable Middle East we can forget about. On the contrary, we would then face a far unrulier region dominated by conflict and extremism. That would make life harder for Israel as well as Europe, which not only sits next to the Middle East but has many people of Middle Eastern origin within its borders. If our allies suffered from Middle Eastern problems, we would hurt too. The sham of a “hands off the Middle East” policy would swiftly become apparent, and we’d be back in the region in no time.
The way to think about the Middle East is not to discount our dependence on it, but to take proper stock of why we have been so deeply engaged with it. There is more: now is the time to plan, to be prepared for addressing our vital interests in a drastically more complex and fragile environment. America’s challenge is to achieve sustained, smart engagement. Exit is not an option, and whatever President Obama may believe, “leading from behind” our allies won’t do.
The Middle East is going through a difficult phase—and that is saying something, considering that, in recent memory, the region has not had it easy. The Arab Spring has set loose long-simmering frustrations over political repression, economic stagnation, and cultural and religious expression. For the first time in a long time, there is real politics in the Arab world, and the street truly matters. There is also real conflict, and the potential for much more of it. The peoples of the Middle East have given themselves a fresh chance to tackle many problems, and that is a good thing. In the long run, it could help the region a great deal. But there is a danger that, given the current combustible mix of poor economies, Islamism, ethnosectarian score settling, and intensifying national rivalries, the region could end up much worse off, and that mix does not augur well for American interests or Israel’s security. Never before has America encountered so much change and uncertainty in so many countries all at once in the Middle East.
The fundamental circumstances affecting the broader Middle East are worrisome, but not necessarily fatal. The region has too many people and too few resources.6 The Middle East is running out of water, low on food and electricity, and increasingly unable to address citizens’ demands for basic public services and infrastructure. The population, moreover, skews very young, so all these problems will only get worse as large generational cohorts come of age and seek better life prospects. Jobs are already scarce, which is one reason why there is growing poverty and political agitation across the region. But down the road, across the region, there will not be enough water, food, or electricity either.
Pakistan is generally considered a South Asian country but can be seen as part of the broader Middle East as well. In its travails we can glimpse the shape of things to come. Electricity shortages are already a staple of Pakistani daily life. A combination of corruption, mismanagement, and the sheer number of users places crushing demands on the country’s outdated power grid. Power outages lasting more than twenty hours a day in sweltering summer heat are common.7 Global climate change is melting the Himalayan glaciers, which in the short run means flooding in the Indus Valley that destroys homes, displaces people, and wrecks farmland.8 After the deluge looms a time of severe droughts and food shortages. All this in a country of 180 million—the world’s fourth most populous, and expected to be home to 325 million by 2050.9 And Pakistan is not alone.
Yemen, too, is running out of water. Iraq is short of electricity, and Egypt is short of both electricity and food: its 83 million people rely on imports to eke out their diets, and high food prices were among the reasons crowds poured into Tahrir Square to pull down the Mubarak regime. Protests in Syria came on the heels of the worst drought in generations.10 By 2030, there will in all likelihood be many more Yemenis, Iraqis, and Egyptians than there are today, just as there will be more Pakistanis. If food shortages helped spark the Arab Spring, we can only dare to imagine what water and electricity shortages added on top of them will do.
On the brighter side, a more youthful population could also be an engine for growth. Look at China or Vietnam, whose economic booms owe much to each country’s large supply of young workers. The cheap and ample labor they supplied gave China a competitive edge that fueled double-digit economic growth, plenty of jobs at the bottom of society, and even more wealth at the top. The economic analyst Ruchir Sharma writes that cheap labor willing to move to industrial centers is necessary for rapid growth.11 Since 1978, that has been China’s elixir of growth, which in peak years soared to stratospheric rates of 13 percent and higher.12 Now it can also be the Arab world’s.
Today, China’s labor advantage is not what it once was; manufacturers are looking for other parts of the world where young labor is abundant. The Arab world could be a good candidate. If jobs were to flow west from China, unemployment in the Arab world could decline, and with steady growth at least some Arab countries could find their way to the club of middle-income countries. Tunisia, Jordan, and Morocco are all good candidates.
Although development may not depend that much on what political scientists call “regime type” (dictatorship versus democracy), it does depend on stability. We know that economies will not prosper amid the kinds of conflicts that now haunt the Arab world. We can expect a series of Arab states to fail, generating crises that could tax our resources and demand our attention for years to come. And we are in danger of adding Iran to the tally. We can already see the potential for a belt of failed states containing hundreds of millions of people and stretching from P
akistan and Afghanistan through Iran and on to Iraq, Syria, and even Egypt. We may be able to deal with one at a time, but a confluence of crises could put to the test our ability to manage our interests in the region.
This may be the worst imaginable outcome, but even if only part of it comes to pass it could burden us with untold costs. Imagine the myriad problems that such a result would have in store for us: there will be wars and humanitarian crises to attend to as well as terrorism, piracy, drug trafficking, and other illicit activities to fight. We would be doing this fighting in high mountains and low deserts, cities, towns, and villages from Libya to Pakistan, from the air, on the ground, and on the seas. Our European allies would be supportive, China and Russia may lend us a hand, but what would be missing is real allies in the region. None of the main players in the region will be up to task; in fact they will be the source of much of the trouble.
Egypt may still be in search of stability, and even if it has found it we may no longer see it as a reliable ally—we may find little in common with what is likely to be an Islamist-dominated and prickly, nationalistic state. Egypt, indeed, may become a source of many problems, both deliberate (Cairo could stir up anti-Americanism) and inadvertent (famine could stalk the banks of the Nile as Egypt collapses into a fragile state).
Then there is Saudi Arabia. So much in the Middle East rides on the country’s stability, including prospects for a steady oil supply and reasonable energy prices. You don’t have to look too closely to realize that betting on Saudi Arabia’s continued stability is a risky proposition. What are the odds that a thoroughly undemocratic and fabulously wealthy state built on unquestioning loyalty to a ruling family, backed by lavish entitlement programs and puritanical faith, will chug along unscathed as whirlwinds of change swirl around it? Maybe the Saudis will buck history and bend its rules at every turn—but is that likely? The more the region around Saudi Arabia falls into chaos, the less the kingdom will be willing or able to act as the pillar of American policy. It was not until 1965, when King Faisal brought a semblance of fiscal responsibility to state finances, that America actually thought Saudi Arabia could survive as a country. The past fifty years have lulled us into a false sense of comfort about Saudi Arabia’s exceptional stability. But we should know better than to bet that the country’s luck will continue indefinitely. We should definitely know better than to bet our regional policy on it, especially now in this period of profound change across the region.
