“I don’t know if I’ll be able to solve the world’s problems, but at least I can list the world’s problems this evening,” said Richard Fontaine in his opening remarks at a lecture hosted by the University of Wyoming Global and Area Studies Program yesterday evening.
Fontaine is President of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a think tank that analyzes American foreign policy. He spoke to a gathering of community members and university students focusing on security issues in the Middle East; primarily Syria, Iraq and Iran.
“I started working on Middle East issues back in 1999, and at the time there was a running joke that doing Middle East policy was easy because you only had to learn the issues and the people once, and nothing ever changed,” said Fontaine.
“This sort of maxim,” Fontaine said, “has clearly been upended.”
With a civil war raging in Syria, nuclear non-proliferation talks proceeding with Iran and the instability of Iraq after the withdrawal of U.S. military, the Middle East is now the stage for the formation of definitive and transformational American foreign policy, remarked Fontaine.
Despite the emergence of a dynamic and transitional Middle East, U.S. foreign policy objectives have changed. Fontaine indicated the recent pivot of focus to Asia and nation building at home outlined by the Obama Administration.
“There’s something about the Middle East that continues to pull us back and require the attention of senior policy makers for a large percentage of their time,” Fontaine said.
This paradoxical relationship with the Middle East has the potential to cause the U.S. difficulties in attaining national goals of security and American interests abroad; particularly in the sphere of economic diversification in Gulf countries, Fontaine notes.
“Even with this new focus away from the Middle East, I don’t see American economic policy changing much in regards to importing oil and gas from the Gulf countries,” Fontaine said, responding to an audience member’s question.
Fontaine explained the problematic situation that be could set up by an export reliant Gulf Zone by acknowledging that if certain Middle Eastern countries do little to economically diversify now, the inevitable drop in oil prices would cause their economic stability to crumble. This would lead to an increase in violent conflict and demographic shift, two issues that already plague the Middle East.
Situations such as this, where a certain American interest conflicts with another, appear to be a commonality in the future of American foreign policy, he said.
Taking into account the problematic scene of events that are occurring in Iraq, Fontaine points out that the withdrawal of U.S. military personnel before the Iraqi security forces were prepared greatly destabilized the region. The withdrawal was one of the promises President Obama outlined to American citizens when he first ran for office however, indicating a strong national desire to pull out of the region.
“There have been a number of forces that have pushed Iraq in a direction of less stability rather than more,” Fontaine said. “I think there’s no way the United States is going back into Iraq militarily.”
A destabilized Iraq is a threat to American interests abroad and to the stability of the Middle East in general, yet the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country is one of the direct contributing factors to its destabilization, Fontaine said.
Not all security threats to the U.S. are borne out of a presence of American troops in the region, followed by a hasty withdrawal. In the case of the Syrian civil war, the contradictory issues that exist are of a more complicated matter.
“It’s been estimated that there are more foreign fighters fighting what they believe to be a “jihad” in Syria today than there were foreign fighters fighting what they believed to be a “jihad” in Afghanistan in the nineteen eighties,” said Fontaine.
From a humanitarian standpoint, the issues with this specific situation is that the United States will have trouble justifying the supply of arms to extremist rebels in order to topple a regime that has been dubbed “illegitimate,” Fontaine remarked.
Despite the pivotal events occurring in the Middle East which seem to entrench American foreign policy decisions, it is because of the complex and inherently contradictory nature of U.S. actions in the region that are motivating the shift in focus to Asia to a small extent, stated Fontaine.
“Far from being a region where nothing changes, today you see rapid, even revolutionary, political change that characterizes much of what is going on there. This makes the formation of U.S. policy toward that region very difficult,” said Fontaine.
