Should we be surprised by the wave of anti-US riots that has swept the Arab world in the last two weeks? Definitely not. The region continues to be a volcano ready to erupt at any moment, under any pretext. If it had not been about an inept movie about the prophet Muhammad – which would have continued to be completely ignored if it had not been for an inflammatory TV preacher in Egypt – some other incident one week or three months later would have drawn crowds to the streets.
There are just too many boiling frustrations about the present situation in all Arab countries; too much resentment about a miserable daily life and the inability of rulers to deliver significant improvement; too much anger at the US and western world because of alleged foreign conspiracies so convenient to blame for past and present, mostly home-made, miseries. The artificial stability of the past, secured by iron-fisted dictators, has now been replaced by endemic volatility.
So, uncertainty will remain the operating word for the Arab world for the foreseeable future. When you peel off the assumptions and hypotheses around which think tanks and diplomats base their analyses, the fact is that nobody knows where Mohamed Morsi, the President now asserting his power in Egypt, stands, and in what direction he wants to take a country at the core of the Arab world.
When the Egyptian president asks in his inauguration speech for the liberation of an Egyptian terrorist in jail in the US, when he says that he wants to “reconsider” the peace treaty with Israel and build a “strategic balance” with Iran, when he has just a tepid reaction after the invasion of the US diplomatic compound in Cairo, nobody can say whether he is acting out of conviction or to placate the Salafists breathing on his neck. The result is, however, pretty much the same. In that respect, one needs to think about the extraordinary remark made by President Obama in an interview with a Latin-American media organisation on September 13: “I don’t think that we would consider them [the Egyptian government] an ally, but we don’t consider them an enemy.” The State Department was later struggling to correct this “political gaffe” from the president, but this was just a candid admission of US perplexity towards the course of events in West Asia. But then, there is an obvious follow-up to the president’s remark: why, or until when, would the US continue to provide $2 billion a year to a government it does not perceive as a full ally.
What was interesting was the fact that as soon as he arrived this week in the US, Mohamed Morsi explained that the US was not an ally but a “friend” – a significant distinction if words have a meaning – and he also set some conditions for this friendship to be sustained. This illustrates the conundrum the US is now facing in the Arab world: it will take the next few years to sort out among the new regimes in the region who are the real allies or genuine friends, who are the potential adversaries, and who could be a friend or an ally if they were not under the pressure of extremist forces at home. In the meanwhile, the monarchies in the Gulf have grown more suspicious of the long-term sustainability of the US involvement in the region, and more doubtful about the solidity of Washington’s support in case of serious domestic uprisings. Nobody in the Gulf is ready to forget the way the Obama administration mismanaged the demise of the Mubarak regime.
Much has been written about the US loss of influence in the Arab world since the “Arab Spring”. In fact, if it were not for the concerns that Iranian nuclear ambitions generate in the region and the need for some security guarantees against Tehran, the decline of American ability to shape events would have been even more pronounced. There has been some speculation that the US could afford to become less engaged in West Asia in the future, given the boom in American shale gas production that would ensure energy self-sufficiency for the country in the coming years, and the pivot to Asia strategy of the Obama administration. This is just wishful thinking. Even if the US becomes less dependent on West Asian oil, a disruption of energy supply from this region would affect an already vulnerable global economy and thus affect US economic interests. There is also no underestimating the strategic importance of West Asia, with the region’s history being the source of crises that expand and reverberate way beyond its borders.
In this context, another brutal fact has to be taken into account: there is no substitute for maintaining whatever role and influence the US can keep in West Asia. From a strategic and geopolitical standpoint, Europe has no credibility and is quasi-irrelevant in that respect; and while the only possible alternative could be China – given the country’s dependence on oil imports – there is no prospect for the time being of Beijing sending warships to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, or even deploying the kind of forceful diplomacy the US displayed in previous times. So the very unsound US-Arab world relationship will continue in the period ahead, with its toxic mix of love and hate; of envy and rejection; of feelings of dependency and sometimes an inferiority complex on the one hand, and the assertion of traditional Islamic values against the depravity of Western ways on the other hand.
Whatever its claims of support for the rise of democracy in the Arab world, the US will have to manage this relationship while being in its most weakened position since it first got involved in the region. Washington is still unable to figure out a policy that would combine very stern language about what it expects from allies or “friends”; what the red line is between agreeing to disagree on some issues and taking antagonistic and inflammatory approaches; and how financial and economic assistance will relate to all of that in the future. Whoever wins the presidency next November will need much more than another Cairo speech to set things on a clearer, more stable and sustainable footing. And the impact of his success or failure will resonate way beyond the US-Arab world relationship.
The writer is president of Smadja & Smadja, a strategic advisory firm
