Middle East Strategy at Harvard

The MESH roundtable on the theme of “The First 100 Days” continues. MESH members have been asked these questions: What priorities should the next administration set for immediate attention in the Middle East? What should it put (or leave) on the back burner? Is there anything a new president should do or say right out of the gate? And if a president asked you to peer into your crystal ball and predict the next Middle East crisis likely to sideswipe him, what would your prediction be? MESH members’ answers are appearing in installments throughout the week. (Read the whole series here.) Today’s responses come from Gal Luft, Jacqueline Newmyer, and Stephen Peter Rosen.

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Gal Luft :: During the first term of the next president, some 68 million new cars will roll onto America’s roads. In China, the world’s fastest growing auto market, sales of new cars will surpass those in the United States as early as 2015, and in India millions of $3,000 Tata Nano cars will soon begin to flood the bustling streets of Calcutta and Mumbai. Most of these cars will have a street life of roughly 15 years and (barring action by those countries’ leadership) almost all of them will be able to run on nothing but petroleum, locking our future to OPEC and its whims for decades to come. In the words of the International Energy Agency: “We are ending up with 95 percent of the world relying for its economic well being on decisions made by five or six countries in the Middle East.”

Avoiding such an outcome should be a top priority for the next administration. Unfortunately, despite the broad agreement by both presidential candidates on the urgent need to reduce petroleum dependence, they both focus on solutions that are politically contentious (like domestic drilling and increasing mandatory fuel efficiency standards) and that are by and large tactical rather than strategic. The reality is that neither efforts to expand petroleum supply nor those to crimp petroleum demand will be enough to materially address America’s strategic vulnerability. Such solutions do not address the roots of our energy vulnerability: oil’s monopoly in the global transportation sector—almost all of the world’s cars, trucks, ships and planes can run on nothing but petroleum—and the stranglehold of OPEC over the consuming nations’ economies.

This cartel, which owns 78 percent of global reserves, produces today about as much oil as it did thirty years, despite the fact that the global economy and non-OPEC production have doubled over the same period. Policies that perpetuate the petroleum standard, doing nothing to address the lack of transportation fuel choice, would therefore guarantee a worsening future dependence on the oil cartel as the relative share of non-OPEC oil reserves and production further shrinks.

The new president should therefore declare a strategic goal to break the petroleum standard and replace it with an Open Fuel Standard. This would require that every automobile sold in the United States (and, by extension, throughout the world, since no automaker would give up on the U.S. market) must be able to run on non-petroleum fuels in addition to gasoline. Flexible fuel cars (which cost automakers $100 extra to make and can run on any combination of alcohol and gasoline), electric cars and plug-in hybrids cars (which enable us to use made-in-America electricity) are only some of the solutions at hand. Only through competition at the pump (and the socket) can we drive down the price of oil, reduce its strategic value and curb the transfer of wealth from oil importing countries to OPEC. To bring those solutions to the marketplace in mass would require some presidential signatures, and like everything in life there is some cost involved. But christening more aircraft carriers than would otherwise be needed isn’t cheap either.

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Jacqueline Newmyer :: The next president’s foreign policy should be attentive to the ways in which the balance of global economic and military power has tilted toward Asia. To the extent that the Bush administration has been preoccupied with Central Asia and the Middle East since 9/11, an eastward shift in the U.S.’s foreign policy focus may be warranted. That said, the new administration should keep three points in mind as it crafts a Middle East agenda:

1. As the United States draws down its forces in Iraq (while renewing attention to Afghanistan), other external powers with strategic interests in the region are likely to perceive a vacuum to fill. For instance, China can be expected to continue to expand its ties in the Middle East by means of investments and agreements in Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The United States may want to try to prevent any other single outside power from exercising undo influence. Options would include allowing India to develop better relations with Iran; encouraging Indian, Korean, and Japanese development of Iraq; and maintaining naval and air forces in the region.
2. The U.S.-India nuclear agreement is likely to have follow-on effects in the Gulf, where India has traditionally had strong ties. New Delhi will have incentives to transfer technology received from the United States. If American know-how is going to spread, it would be best for Washington to try to shape that process and build capital that might prove useful in the event of a future Middle East conflagration or crisis.
3. Whether John McCain or Barack Obama prevails, the United States will be led by a president with a compelling biography and personal appeal. Such a commander in chief creates a potential competitive advantage in executive diplomacy for the United States, relative to China and other Asian powers, in a region with a tradition of charismatic leadership and around the world. At least at the beginning of the first 100 days, the new occupant of the White House will project an image of U.S. strength, based on a record of self-sacrifice and resolve or a demonstration of the American electorate’s liberal tolerance and openness. Both kinds of strength have their uses in outreach to strategic interlocutors. After a campaign that seems poised to revolve around domestic issues, President McCain or Obama would do well to exploit this advantage by visiting allies with interests in the Middle East early in his term.

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Stephen Peter Rosen :: There are a number of ways in which we can think about the president’s agenda during his first 100 days. My suggestions reflect the belief that the new president will have essentially no staff in place, precious little knowledge of the ongoing work of the permanent bureaucracy, and not enough time to have developed a long term strategy. As a result, an agenda for the first 100 days should address an urgent problem in the international environment, and should make use of the president’s political capital at home in order to undertake necessary but difficult initiatives.

Most issues in the Middle East are not amenable to bold initiatives. The Arab-Israeli problem is not a problem, but a more or less permanent condition. Managing Iran will call for the slow and quiet development of American and allied military capabilities in the region, and new nuclear guarantees. Iraq and Afghanistan are problems for the long haul, both militarily and economically. Limiting the growth of Chinese influence in the region is a basic strategic goal, which presidential diplomacy can assist, as Jacqueline Newmyer points out.

But the destabilization of Pakistan could occur quickly and might already be underway before the new president is sworn in. There is a generation of Pakistani Army officers who came of professional age in the 1990s, who remember the United States walking away from Afghanistan and abandoning Pakistan. They are reported to be more Islamist than their elders. The frontier province in the north of Pakistan is the current home of Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda is safe there from the Pakistani Army. No Pakistani officer, old or young, was willing to fire on Pakistani civilians in the rioting earlier this year. The expectation, valid for 60 years, that the Pakistani Army will be able to hold the country together, is no longer supportable.

The American president-elect should begin private discussions with India, Israel, and China about what those countries would do in the event of a civil war in Pakistan that splits the Pakistani Army. This discussion would focus on how to contain the effects of the war within Pakistan, and how to ensure control of Pakistani nuclear weapons. The president-elect must not only ask the American military to present their contingency plans for such an event, but become deeply involved in shaping them. Homeland security must prepare for Pakistani nuclear weapons that are suddenly not under verifiable control. History, recent and old, confirms that absent a process that educates both political leaders and military officers about their often conflicting perspectives and needs, military plans will fail.

This is a problem which can benefit from timely preparation, in the days before and during the first 100 days of the next president.