Tentative Optimism Starts To Be Justified in Mideast

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In the gradual, relatively orderly withdrawal of the United States from global positions it has rightly judged over-exposed, new regional balances of power, or at least correlations of forces, have been forming. This is really what has been afoot in recent years — not, as some claim, some American “pivot to Asia,” as if the United States were merely shifting its weight from one foot to another.

And this trend is, within limits, sensible policy. The United States has had almost its entire conventional ground-based military capacity tied up for a decade in the Afghan and Iraq conflicts. These certainly have dealt a heavy blow to Islamic terrorists (albeit not apparently a mortal one), and have disposed of some odious regimes; but it is unlikely that they have yielded or will generate an adequate return on the investment of lives and resources the United States made there.

Let no one suggest, however, that the American military did not prove its point. It smashed its declared principal enemies — the Taliban, Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, and al-Qaeda — maintained a strong presence at the ends of the earth, and withdrew when that was the wisest course; not because the United States was evicted or ineffectual, as the Russians were in Afghanistan.

The Chinese are careening about the Far Pacific in the traditional manner of newly important countries — as during the Wilhelmine period in post-Bismarck Germany — announcing chunks of the Pacific to be “Chinese lakes,” and demanding a doffing of the local headgear from Vietnamese, Filipinos and even the Indonesians and Japanese, not to mention the Taiwanese. The Chinese have squandered their former influence in Burma, agitated India, provoked rearmament in Japan (which still has as large, and a more sophisticated, economy than China), while ostentatiously failing to leash their semi-domesticated attack dog, North Korea.

The Chinese policy of massive investment abroad, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, is believed by many to portend vast accretions of influence and security in strategic resources for China. What is more likely is that China will overplay its hand, irritate the countries that are recipients of its investments, and endure suddenly increased local taxes and royalties once Chinese investors have paid to facilitate the accessibility of the resources in question. Capital unsupported by unchallengeable military force never really produces a shift of sovereignty, and China will not be able to assert such a position overseas.

The countries that ring China can, if necessary, resist Chinese hegemony, with or without the collaboration of Russia. That latter country now has the status of gangster-state — an international gadfly that still somehow aspires to the status it had when Russia had twice the population it retains, militarily occupied central Europe up to 100 miles from the Rhine, and was an equivalent military power to the United States. All in all, it is a very unseemly third act after the sometimes considerable grandeur of the Romanovs and the deranged but formidable zeal of Soviet Communism.

Russia poses no threat to Western Europe, which whatever its problems, has more than 10 times the economy of Russia, generally serious political institutions, and a perfectly adequate indigenous military deterrence in the form of British and French missile-firing submarines and Europe’s conventional armies.

The only strategically important region that has seemed to be fluid and unstable, and potentially a source of great danger, is the Middle East. And here is where the recent ineffectuality of U.S. policy seemed to be creating a vacuum.

But there have been here, too, a number of events that justify tentative optimism.

Barack Obama’s trip to the Middle East last month was occasion for American abandonment of the fraudulent alarm over Israeli settlements: With commendable subtlety, given the extent of the change he presaged, the U.S. President contradicted the Palestinian humbug that a roll-back of Israeli settlements is the key to progress, and said that the two real keys are Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli security. For its part, Israel has demonstrated in Gaza and Sinai that it will uproot its settlers and relocate them as part of a durable peace agreement (and not just another land-for-peace scam such as Oslo).

Israeli settlements take up just 5% of the West Bank, but adjoining highways and defence installations expand that figure to 40%. This latter figure can be rolled back (though a total resurrection of the 1967 borders was never on anyway). In past negotiations, the settlements were the only card Israel had to play to bring the Palestinians to a serious discussion, and to encourage them to concede the legitimacy of Israel as a predominantly Jewish state.

The British sold the same real estate to the Jews and the Palestinians in 1917, and there has never been any other solution than to divide the territory between the two. The sooner the Arabs accept half a loaf and admit that the right of return is to a nascent Palestine, and not to swamp Israel with a deluge of hate-filled Araby, the sooner something useful will happen.

There also are signs that the Iranian theocrats are going slow on their nuclear program, at least until they dispose of the unfeasible Mahmoud Ahmedinejad; and that Obama may actually be considering forceful measures because Iran is affronting his other-worldly affection for the impossible dream of nuclear disarmament.

Last week, Israel began pumping natural gas from its Mediterranean undersea wells at Tamar, which will eliminate most of Israel’s balance-of-payments deficit and sharply raise tax revenues as well. Israel is proposing to market its natural gas to Europe with a pipeline to Greece via Cyprus. This has caused Turkey to utter dire threats against both Greece and Cyprus — which, in turn, has had the welcome effect of inciting the Russians to come snorting out of the undergrowth as the protector of southern Europe against the Abominable (Turkish) Porte, as if the Congress of Berlin of 1878 merely had been adjourned for the last 135 years.

If a Palestinian state can be established, Israel is officially acknowledged by the Arabs, Iran is deprived of its Syrian conduit to Hezbollah and Hamas and deterred from assuming its nuclear potential, there will be little need for outside intervention in the region, much to the benefit of the whole world.

National Post
cbletters@gmail.com


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