Middle East reality defies US Middle East policy

YORAM ETTINGER

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From left: U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, U.S. President Joe Biden, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and Israeli National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi gather in Tel Aviv to discuss the war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Oct. 18, 2023. Credit: Avi Ohayon/GPO.

For the last 45 years, the United States has attempted to pacify Iran’s anti-U.S. ayatollahs, via dramatic financial and diplomatic gestures, to advance the cause of human rights and democracy in Iran and to promote peaceful coexistence between Iran and its Sunni Arab neighbors. In fact, this diplomatic effort has downplayed the centrality of the ayatollahs’ ideology and their track record, assuming that “money talks.” The United States expected dramatic financial and diplomatic gestures to induce the ayatollahs to abandon their 1,400-year-old fanatical vision and become a constructive member of the global community.

However, as expected, Iran’s ayatollahs would not allow financial and diplomatic temptation to transcend their violent, imperialistic ideology. Moreover, they have leveraged the lavish U.S. gestures, intensifying domestic oppression and persecution and boosting their determination to humiliate and defeat “the Great American Satan,” expanding anti-U.S. global terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and the proliferation of advanced weaponry, increasingly in Latin America, from Chile to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Furthermore, the U.S. eagerness to conclude another agreement with the anti-U.S. Iran, the courting of the anti-U.S. Muslim Brotherhood (the largest Sunni terror organization) and delisting the anti-U.S. Houthis as a terrorist organization, while pressuring the pro-U.S. Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Egypt, has pushed these countries closer to China and Russia, militarily and commercially.

In 2024, the U.S. State Department promotes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River, contending that it would peacefully coexist with Israel.

However, all pro-U.S. Arab regimes have systematically limited their support of the proposed Palestinian state to an embracing talk, while displaying a lukewarm-to-negative walk.

Furthermore, the State Department has downplayed the Palestinian track record and ideology, basing its policy on subjective and speculative future scenarios and diplomatic Palestinian statements. But the pro-U.S. Arab regimes have focused on the subversive and terroristic intra-Arab Palestinian track record in Egypt (1950s), Syria (1960s), Jordan (1968-70), Lebanon (1970-1982) and Kuwait (1990). These pro-U.S. Arab regimes recognize the despotic, corrupt and terroristic nature of the Palestinian leadership, and its global track record (e.g., collaboration with Nazi Germany, the Soviet Bloc, Iran’s Ayatollahs, North Korea and Venezuela and training international terrorists).

These Arab regimes have concluded that such a rogue track record would shape the nature of the proposed Palestinian state, which would further destabilize the region, providing Iran, Russia and China with an expanded foothold in the Middle East.

Unlike the State Department, they are aware that a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River would doom the pro-U.S. Hashemite regime east of the river, transforming Jordan into major platform of Islamic terrorism, threatening every pro-U.S., oil-producing Arab regime, which would yield a bonanza to Iran, Russia and China and a major blow to global trade and the U.S. economy and national security.

In 2011, Secretary of State Antony Blinken (then National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden) and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (then director of State Department Policy Planning) played a key role in the U.S.-led NATO military offensive against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, aiming to halt severe violations of human rights.

As expected, the U.S. initiative yielded volcanic turbulence in Libya which has traumatized the region since 2011, fueling Islamic terrorism in Europe, Egypt, North and Central Africa and throughout the Middle East, transforming Libya—the soft underbelly of Europe—into a blustery platform of global Islamic terrorism, drug trafficking, egregious violations of human rights and a series of civil wars with the participation of Turkey, Qatar, Italy, Russia, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and France.

Led by noble intentions, the State Department has systematically attempted to subordinate 1,400 years of tempestuous, violently intolerant and upredictable inter-Muslim and inter-Arab relations to Western values such as “peaceful coexistence,” democracy and human rights. This ideal of the creation of an alternative, new Middle East has been underscored by Foggy Bottom’s reference to the ongoing turbulence on the Arab Street as “The Arab Spring,” rather than “The Arab Tsunami,” which is still raging from Northwest Africa to Iran (e.g., 10 million refugees since 2011; 11 million Muslims killed since 1948, of which 35,000—0.3%—were related to the Arab-Israel wars).

Blinken and Sullivan might consider the following advice from professor P. J. Vatikiotis, who was a leading Middle East historian at the School of Oriental and African studies, University of London (“Arab and Regional Politics in the Middle East“):

“For the foreseeable future, inter-Arab differences and conflicts will continue…. This is a feature of the area that will remain more or less a constant. The question of American options is one that must first of all be resolved on the basis of this fundamental reality: Inter-Arab relations cannot be placed on a spectrum of linear development, moving from hell to paradise or vice versa. Rather, their course is partly cyclical, partly jerkily spiral, and always resting occasionally at some grey area…. Arrangements are still made with rulers and regimes open to sedition and coups. This condition in itself renders relations between Arab states, as well as between them and external powers, especially difficult….”

Originally published by The Ettinger Report.

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YORAM ETTINGER – Yoram Ettinger is a former ambassador and head of Second Thought: A U.S.-Israel Initiative.

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