In measured steps, President Barack Obama is taking big foreign policy risks that could literally change the world and America’s position in it — if navigated to safe harbor.
The first risk was Secretary of State John Kerry’s seemingly unrewarding entry into the Israel-Palestine hornet’s nest. The second was the reopening of conversation with Teheran after over three decades of open enmity. The third is the attempt slated for January 22, 2014 to convene talks on ending the Syrian wars.
Each is fraught with failure but early days do indicate that the two powers with fingers in every pie – the US and Iran – are ready for a more positive future than presaged by their past.
If continued, these steps will also help to bring internal peace and stability to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan because they could persuade Iran and Saudi Arabia to reduce their meddling.
The positives may be hard to see right now but tiny compromises for peace generate their own momentum, which trundles onwards to constructive outcomes. More so, when all sides to hostilities can no longer expect victory through military means.
Obama and Kerry have recognized interlinks among the perils emerging from the violent volatility in Lebanon, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Peace, security and stability in the entire stretch is a tapestry that cannot be made without all the threads being woven together. Each country has its own violent internal divides of tribe, religion and politics that seem unbridgeable. But each divide is made worse by Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Iran fuels ideological and religious extremism. Saudi Arabia is trying to defeat Iran’s Shiite Islam once and for all, after nearly 1400 years of enmity, by drawing Washington into the fray on its side.
The US is trying to keep Israel safe and the oil trade unhampered by alternating threats with carrots to bang heads together. At the same time, it is conclusively eliminating weapons of mass destruction, both chemical and nuclear, from the region. Progress is painfully slow but discernible.
Obama and Kerry are demonstrating considerable out of the box thinking by starting to nudge everyone towards recognition that no single country can hope to enjoy peace, security and prosperity without allowing similar enjoyments to others in the neighborhood.
They are changing the presumption that limited wars and coercion bring better results than sitting at the table for talks with enemies, however distasteful.
Despite extraordinary political pressures within the US, Obama is pressing his beliefs in cautiously calculated steps despite the risk of going down in history as a naïve appeaser rather than a bold peacemaker.
Rightly, the US is protecting and advancing its interests in each locale while preventing or destroying the rise of its enemies. Whether it scored more positives than negatives up to this point, including battle field successes, will not become clear for many years until historians have their say.
So far, the indications are that Obama and Kerry may be the best allies Israel has ever had, if its main goal is security, political acceptance and peace rather than territorial expansion through settlements.
Kerry’s Israel/Palestine initiative has come up against walls on both sides but it has spotlighted the fact that that Israel’s security does not depend only on Israeli power or its ability to squeeze a deal out of Palestinians.
It also requires less hostile behavior from Iran, which is the chief instigator, paymaster and arms supplier to Hamas, Hezbollah and Bashar al Assad’s regime in Syria. As a first step, changing Iran’s behavior requires definitively stymying its ambitions for nuclear weapons capability.
A start has been made to that. The preliminary agreement on Iran’s nuclear future, however fragile or unsatisfactory for the moment, has rolled the ball in the right direction.
A start has also been made to ring fence the hydra-headed civil wars in Syria. The wars have temporarily removed it as a threat to Israel but opened a window onto a worse menace – a potential takeover of significant segments of that country by extremist al Qaeda affiliates bent on establishing fundamental Sunni Islamic governance.
Now, senior diplomats including United Nations officials are suggesting that ways be found to include Iran and Saudi Arabia in next January’s Syrian peace talks.
This was unthinkable just two months ago before the abyss between Teheran and Washington was bridged by Obama’s phone call to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. It is conceivable now because of this week’s interim agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.
Washington’s ideological differences will disallow friendship so long as theocrats remain in power in Teheran. And Israel will continue to be menaced and cannot afford to be less than the region’s overwhelming military power. But the only way to avoid having to unleash that power is to follow the thaw started by Obama to its fruition or failure.