The case for not caring about Iran's "regional influence". By Matthew Yglesias

The case for not caring about Iran's "regional influence"

The Middle East doesn't matter

Matthew Yglesias

3 hr ago

December 15, 2020. 

At Vox, I was mostly out of the foreign policy hot takes game and I’m not sure how far I want to lean back into it since mostly I find establishment thinking about national security to be so out to lunch that it’s hard to even engage with.

But since Biden will swiftly face a concrete choice about Iran policy, I wanted to throw my two cents in here.

If you read sensible centrist foreign policy hands’ takes on Joe Biden and Iran, you tend to get something like what veteran national security hand Michael McFaul says in this thread: we should abandon Trump’s failed “maximum pressure” strategy, re-enter the Iran Nuclear Deal, and then, in the context of the deal, devise new ways to contain Iranian influence in the region.

Michael McFaul 

@McFaul

3. Reenter the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA). Once done, devise and implement a new comprehensive  strategy for containing Iranian influence in the region and promoting democracy inside Iran.

December 5th 2020

186 Retweets2,440 Likes

If you want exposure to this sort of thing at greater than tweet length, I would recommend “Contain, Enforce, and Engage: An Integrated U.S. Strategy to Address Iran’s Nuclear and Regional Challenges” which was co-written several years ago by William Burns, Michèle Flournoy, Jarrett Blanc, Elisa Catalano Ewers, Ilan Goldenberg, Eli Levite, Elizabeth Rosenberg, and Karim Sadjadpour.

But there are lots of other reports like this floating around, because virtually everyone who works on national security issues in DC agrees that we should be trying to contain Iranian regional influence. There’s so little actual debate about national security in elite circles that none of these reports bother to explain why we should care about Iran as a regional issue.

And this is important because there is a genuine conflict of interest on the issue. The American people would like the American foreign policy community to resolve the Iranian nuclear program without starting a war. But Iran’s enemies in the region would love for the United States and Iran to start a war. Consequently, Israel and the Persian Gulf States were heavily opposed to the Obama administration’s nuclear diplomacy and worked actively to undermine it in American domestic politics. This annoyed the Obama White House, but they were sufficiently committed to regional containment of Iran that they could never quite call a spade a spade in terms of explaining what was going on politically. Worse, they acted to “reassure” the Gulf states by backing their brutal military adventure in Iraq.

There is virtually no chance that Biden will take my advice on this. But the best thing for him to do is to ignore McFaul’s pieties, and attempt to re-enter the JCPOA with Iran while saying loudly and clearly that he does not care at all about Iran’s regional influence. He wants verifiable Iranian nuclear disarmament and will not compromise on that goal, or pursue any other goal. The question of which authoritarian Middle Eastern regime is influential in which patches of Middle Eastern land is simply not of interest to the United States of America, and the president won’t be taking your calls on this subject.

There are no good guys in this region

If you try to voice skepticism of the merits of containing Iranian influence, you inevitably find yourself getting tagged as some kind of apologist for the considerable human rights abuses of the Iranian regime and its allies. Worse, some people have stared so long into the mad abyss of US policy in the Middle East that they come out on the other side as actual apologists for the considerable human rights abuses of the Iranian regime and its allies. So to be clear — both the Iranian regime and its various regional allies do a bunch of terrible things.

The issue with making this badness the basis for regional policy is that Iran’s adversaries are also really bad.

In Bahrain, the government crushed protests in 2011 after which they “carried out a systematic campaign of retribution, using lethal force to disperse protests, arresting thousands, and firing hundreds of public sector employees suspected of supporting the protesters’ democratic demands” and now “the authorities have demonstrated a zero-tolerance policy for any free and independent political thought, and they have imprisoned, exiled, or intimidated into silence anyone who criticizes the government.”

The Saudis teamed up with the United Arab Emirates to commit a long list of war crimes in Yemen.

The Syrian rebel groups do war crimes, too.

I don’t want to make a super-strong claim of moral equivalence here. If you want to argue that the Saudi/UAE axis is in some sense “better” than the Iran/Syria one you may be right.

But I do want to draw a contrast with something like the People’s Republic of China’s conflict with Taiwan or their crushing of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. Along with South Korea and Japan, there is a real cluster of solid, rights-respecting, democratic regimes in East Asia. There are real limits to what the United States can or should do to help them in real or imagined conflicts with China, but it’s a completely valid policy consideration.

The Gulf conflict just isn’t like that. No matter how much money the Gulf monarchies pump into American think tanks and consultancies, they can’t change the reality that the American alliance relationships there are not based on any deep consideration of values. They're an echo of old concerns about the control of natural resources that no longer apply if they ever did.

The oil weapon

The weird rules of debating US policy in the Middle East are that you’re not supposed to say our interest in the region is all about oil, but you’re also naive if you suggest we should not really care what happens in this distant part of the world — because it’s full of oil.

Now if you think back to the 1970s and 1980s there’s a real logic here, starting with the fact that the United States was importing a ton of oil from abroad.

But it’s not just that the United States was importing a lot of oil. Back then we were locked in a worldwide geopolitical struggle with the Soviet Union, and the Soviets were exporting a lot of oil.

Under those particular circumstances, an increase in the price of oil shifted the global balance of power away from the United States (which imported oil) toward the Soviet Union (which exported it). The worry that Soviet proxies gaining control of the Middle East would help Moscow dominate the global economy seems to me to have been not-crazy. Indeed, compared to other Cold War concerns like who would control Nicaragua (who cares?), it actually seems extremely sensible. Having a large share of Middle East oil controlled by a fragmented bloc of authoritarian states with little legitimacy and strong ties to the US defense establishment was very reasonable.

By the time we invaded Iraq in the 2000s, this logic was looking kind of frayed. With the Cold War over, the oil thing is just about money; there’s no actual rivalry.

You get this sort of hazy concern that some Bad Guy (first Saddam, then the Iranians) might control all of the oil and then refuse to sell it. But as my excellent Niskanen colleague, Jerry Taylor, wrote at the time this so-called “oil weapon” idea never really made much sense. Even at the peak of our dependence on oil imports, the Middle Eastern oil exporters were more dependent on the oil trade than we were. Using any such weapon would be suicidal.

Today, though, the whole idea is totally nonsensical. The United States exports nearly as much petroleum products as we import, so a spike in oil prices no longer worsens our terms of trade. What happens instead is that high prices are probably good for the states that produce a lot of oil and bad for the others. But there’s no systematic negative impact here — California, Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania collectively contain a lot of people and they see upside from high prices.

Today, meanwhile, we don’t have USSR-level competition with anyone. But to the extent that anything is close, it’s our rivalry with China. But China, unlike the USSR, is a major oil importer.

So the United States is not really exposed to an oil price shock but our main geopolitical rival is. There’s no longer anything to fear from Iranian regional domination. Nor is there any reason to believe that Iran would dominate the region even if we didn’t try to stop it.

Iran is not very threatening

Worrying about Iranian regional influence does not make a lot of sense. And it’s further perverse to worry about it because there’s little reason to believe Iran could dominate the region.

Iran’s GDP, for starters, is significantly lower than Saudi Arabia’s.

Middle Eastern countries by GDP

Iran does have a much larger population than Saudi Arabia, but by the same token, it is much poorer on a per person basis than rivals like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, or Bahrain.

One could even make the case that an explicit US step-back from the region leaving these countries to fend for themselves would be constructive. For starters, it would give them stronger incentives to cooperate. We’ve already seen shared antipathy to Iran reduce tensions between Israel and some of the Gulf states. A real need to work together on geopolitical issues — rather than work together on influence-peddling in DC — could further advance that cause.

And fundamentally the biggest weakness that states like Saudi and the UAE face is a lack of domestic political legitimacy. Facing the Iranian threat on their own wouldn’t turn them into democracies overnight. But if they had to build genuinely capable militaries (as opposed to buying advanced weapons systems mostly to curry favor with defense contractors), they might need to work on building more domestic political support for themselves.

But I want to be clear. While I think the odds are good that a US departure from the region would have a constructive impact, the real case for it is that it fundamentally doesn’t matter.

The Middle East doesn’t matter

The United States went to war with Iraq in 1991. We then maintained an on-again, off-again military conflict with Saddam Hussein for about 12 years that involved the construction of a larger, permanent American military presence in the Persian Gulf. Then we invaded Iraq and expanded our footprint in the region. Then we intervened in a destabilizing way in Libya, which, among other things, had the secondary consequence of encouraging Syrian opposition figures to believe that they might be able to tempt the United States into a decisive intervention if they went to war with the Syrian government.

Ultimately the United States did not get deeply involved in the Syrian Civil War, but we did help rebel forces to an extent and our allies did more. That wave of destabilization contributed to the rise of ISIS and a new round of American military intervention.

All this war has had a strange impact on the attention economy in DC. It’s much easier to find a think tank expert on the Middle East than one who specializes in Latin America, even though Latin American regional issues have a much more direct impact on the United States. Media outlets have bureaus in the Middle East and are prepared to cover events that happen there to a greater extent than events in the Philippines or East Africa.

But as Justin Logan of the Defense Priorities Project writes, this attention economy tends to distract from the reality that this is not a particularly important place: “The Middle East is a small, poor, weak region beset by an array of problems that mostly do not affect Americans—and that U.S. forces cannot fix. The best thing the U.S. can do is leave.” We are spending about $65–70 billion per year there outside the cost of various wars. That would be enough money to make housing assistance vouchers available to all eligible families and cut child poverty by a third.

If you look at the US-Iran relationship very narrowly, then continuing to squeeze them with sanctions even while sidling back into the JCPOA deal can look appealing. But if you look more comprehensively, our open-ended commitment to checking Iranian influence is actually very costly. JCPOA is useful both because it is a nonproliferation deal and also because it offers us an offramp from this costly approach that lets us say the US and Iran can coexist and Iran’s neighbors will have to work out their issues on their own.

Nonproliferation or conflict?

The reason the years-long debate over the Iran nuclear deal has been so maddening is that its skeptics fundamentally don’t want the United States to reach a nuclear deal with Iran.

And the reason for that is simple: an enduring non-proliferation deal would, almost by definition, need to be better for Iran than the absence of such a deal. After all, if the deal isn’t better than the absence of a deal then why would Iran agree to it? But if your concern with Iran is fundamentally about “regional influence” then you don’t want a diplomatic arrangement that’s good for Iran. You want sanctions that cripple Iran’s economy, and you want US non-proliferation fears to eventually spook us into doing airstrikes.

I think that if you are the government of Saudi Arabia or Israel that is an entirely reasonable calculus — a really solid nuclear deal would leave Iran more prosperous, and force you to address the myriad diplomatic and domestic issues that make it hard for you to cooperate in a robust way on regional security issues.

But if you are the government of the United States of America, things look different. We have global interests, including a global interest in nuclear nonproliferation. We have commercial interests in reopening trade with Iran. We also have a broad diplomatic interest in being seen as a country worth making deals with. Our harsh anti-Iranian posture annoys oil-importing allies in Europe and Asia. The clearest way to get a good deal with Iran on the proliferation issues is to be clear to them that we really do care about the proliferation issues and, if we can resolve those, are prepared to pack our bags and go. And the best thing we can do for our allies in the region is to be really clear with them that it’s their region, and if they want it to be stable and prosperous, then they need to work out their issues with each other and with Iran. It’s not our region, it’s not our problem, and it’s not something that we should take on.