The Middle East has a way of confounding American leaders and undermining legacies. Just eight days before Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israel, national security adviser Jake Sullivan noted with satisfaction that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” Two weeks before the fall of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak in the early days of the Arab Spring, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared, “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable.” Perhaps most infamously, on New Year’s Eve in 1977, President Jimmy Carter called the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s dictatorship in Iran an “island of stability.” Nine days later, the first small rally in the Iranian Revolution took place. The rallies didn’t stay small for long.
Apparently, the lesson must be relearned at regular intervals. The Middle East never stays quiet. Yet the illusion that it can leads American presidents along misguided, even dangerous paths. At the start of President Biden’s tenure, Gaza had been quiet. The Middle East as a whole had been (relatively) quiet. But its problems were festering.
Successive U.S. administrations have longed to pivot to Asia. They have viewed the Middle East as a distraction, a mess to be contained so that the adults in the room can focus on things that matter more. President Barack Obama was known to privately joke, “All I need in the Middle East is a few smart autocrats.” He also wondered out loud why everyone couldn’t just “be like the Scandinavians.”
Scandinavians, of course, don’t live under repressive regimes, backed and armed with billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. economic and military aid. The question of why the Middle East is so dysfunctional, despite considerable American attention and investment, is a complicated one, immortalized in the titular prompt of Bernard Lewis’s “What Went Wrong?”
In the early, heady days of the Arab Spring, things finally seemed to be going right. For decades, something known as “linkage theory” — which asserts that the Arab-Israeli conflict must be resolved for the region to progress on other fronts — had dominated discussions about the Middle East. The promise of the Arab uprisings seemed to confirm the absurdity of focusing on Israel’s role. Protesters might have cared about Israel, but they cared more about their own governments, and apparently they could topple them, with or without regional peace.
Back then, I, too, thought Israel didn’t matter much. But I was wrong.
Today, Israel stands at the center of a region the United States helped form. The decision to elevate Israel’s security interests above almost everything else, however well-intentioned, has distorted American policy. Even though it is the region’s only established democracy, Israel is a staunch opponent of democracy in the rest of the Middle East.
The reason for this is simple enough: Arab populations tend to be doggedly anti-Israel. If they were to vote, they would elect leaders who reflected their sentiments. Elected governments that were independent, strong and proud — not American client states, in other words — would have to take a stronger position in support of Palestinian rights and statehood. Compare this with the Middle East’s current situation. Despite the death toll and sheer destruction in Gaza, Arab regimes have restricted public dissent. They have tried their best to keep things quiet — there’s that word again. For Israel, this is a virtue.
That Israel prefers autocrats over democrats has been a source of tension with the United States. Most of the more than 20 senior George W. Bush and Obama administration officials I interviewed for my book “The Problem of Democracy” recounted Israeli officials’ irritation whenever the United States would flirt with taking a more forthright pro-democracy stance in the region. Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security adviser under Bush, described the tenor of disagreement during the time of Bush’s so-called Freedom Agenda, from 2003 to 2005: “It was mockery behind our backs. They’d say, ‘You don’t understand at all. You know nothing about Arabs.’ … Because their argument was, ‘You will see who wins. The bad guys are gonna win. The Islamists are going to win victory after victory if you open these systems up.’”
A senior member of the Obama White House, referring to Egyptian Gen. Abdel Fatah El-Sisi’s coup against a democratically elected Islamist government in 2013, said “the strongest lobbying I got for going easier on Sisi was from Israel.”
If you privilege Israel’s dominance in the region above other considerations, then the price — the indefinite subjugation of hundreds of millions of Arabs — might be worth it. If you’re an Israeli, after the horrors of Oct. 7, it might even be a trivial consideration. For most of us, however, a moral and strategic reckoning is overdue.
The promise of authoritarian stability is false. Authoritarian regimes only seem stable — until they’re not. They are fierce but brittle, and that brittleness becomes obvious only after the fact. Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, captures this dynamic well when he says, “The longer a democratic regime survives, the less likely it will collapse. … The longer an autocracy survives, the more likely it will collapse.”
Like administrations before it, Biden’s conflates quiet with stability. While stability suggests consistency and predictability, quiet is what it sounds like before a storm. After the storm passes, it will be up to anyone who cares about the Middle East — and the many who don’t — to resist the temptation to repeat old mistakes. If the status quo seems untenable, it’s probably because it is.
