Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East - Softcover

Cohen, Stephen P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312655444 ISBN 13: 9780312655440

Publisher: Picador, 2010

Synopsis

Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen traces U.S. policy in the region from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire to the present. A century ago, there emerged two dominant views regarding the uses of America's power: Woodrow Wilson urged America to promote national freedom and self-determination―in stark contrast to his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, who had advocated a vigorous foreign policy based on national self-interest.

In concise, pointed chapters, Cohen offers a lucid primer on the complexities of the region and an eye-opening commentary on how different Middle East Countries have struggled to define themselves in the face of America's stated idealism and its actual realpolitik.

About this title

About the Author

STEPHEN P. COHEN, the president of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development, has lectured at Yale and elsewhere. For over forty years, he has made 150 trips to the region, and attended the Madrid peace conference and other high-stakes meetings. He lives in New Jersey.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PROLOGUE: THE UNITED STATES IN THE MIDDLE EASTTHE UNITED STATES TAKES THE STAGE AS A WORLD POWER
When President Wilson went to Paris in 1919, the world was to discover an important limit of American presidential power. The separation of powers in the United States meant that congressional views on foreign policy could not be ignored in negotiations with the United States. If the party in control in Congress was not the party of the president, congressional leadership could prevent the president from implementing his foreign policy. This remains a very dif.cult lesson for many foreign leaders to learn and understand. After World War I, whether or not Wilson fully understood this congressional power, he certainly had not prepared the ground for the Republican leadership to follow his innovative direction at the Paris Peace Conference.
Wilson came to Paris much clearer on the philosophy he would carry to the conference than on the military facts on the ground or on the very explicit imperial demands of Britain and France. American idealism in foreign policy was well represented by Wilson’s declaration of the Fourteen Points, including the insistence on “open covenants openly arrived at,” rather than the secretive diplomacy in which France and Britain specialized. Wilson also spoke for the self-determination of small peoples under colonial control. Most of all, he stood for the idea of the League of Nations, which he saw as the path to open negotiations among the powers of the world and to collective security. Wilson’s most important advocacy for an American interest in foreign policy was the primacy he gave to open navigation of the world’s seas. He was less precise and less knowledgeable about the working ways of the great powers and of the life of the peoples of the now defunct Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. Sadly, his advisers were unable to fill in all the details. Moreover, Wilson had not built any substantial support for his approach to American policy among members of the majority Republican Party in Congress. Nor could he predict that his own physical vulnerability to ill health would stop him in his tracks. This combination of factors meant that Wilson went to Paris with exaggerated expectations of his ability to in.uence the other participants and departed with deflated outcomes and a new recognition that the United States did not yet have the necessary power or wealth, or the internal policy unity, to prevail over the entrenched intentions of the European powers.
While in Europe, Wilson expanded his public popularity, but that adulation could not make up for his limited in.uence with the key leaders he was about to face in negotiations. He was able to persuade them to form the League of Nations, but he could not win on the primary issue: the nature of peace with Germany. As to the future of the Ottoman Empire, he could not overcome the imperial plans of Britain and France. The best he could do on this issue was adopt an idea from Jan Smuts of South Africa: to replace direct imperial control with the institution of a mandate system. But even on the issue of mandates, Wilson could not be fully convincing, because his own American government would not accept a mandate over Armenia, even though the Christian Armenians had suffered terrible massacres. This upset the American people, but not enough to assume this new kind of overseas responsibility.
KING-CRANE COMMISSION
In the days before he left Paris, President Wilson hoped to convince friends in France and Britain that the future of Palestine and Syria could be decided by close consultation with the peoples involved. For this purpose he proposed a tripartite delegation of the United States, France, and Britain, which would go to the region to hear what the people there actually wanted for their future. The French refused to choose a delegation until the British fully withdrew from Damascus and recognized French rights over that territory. The British were not willing to form a delegation unless it was agreed that all considerations would begin from the point of who had military control over the areas to be discussed. Realizing that these British and French conditions were never going to be met, Wilson dispatched his delegation to the region on its own. This commission, which came to be known as the King-Crane Commission, is notable for the wide gap it showed between the perceptions within certain elements of American civil society and the policies of the U.S. government. For example, Henry Churchill King and Charles R. Crane found strong opposition to any French mandate in Syria, but the United States did not have the standing to cancel the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France, which gave France the upper hand on the future of that country. King, president of Oberlin College, was a Protestant theologian, and Crane was a wealthy Chicago businessman with strong Arabist commitments.
The two Americans ful.lled their responsibilities with careful attention and persistence. They interviewed the local people in Syria (including Palestine) and were determined to base their recommendations on what these indigenous residents desired. By the time they submitted their findings, President Wilson had departed from Paris, and their report sat on the shelf, too little and too late to have any impact on actual policy making.
Their King-Crane Commission Report demonstrates one set of attitudes that American civil society had maintained toward the Ottoman Empire. However, it does not grapple with the three factors that actually determined the disposition of these territories. First, the United States never endorsed the peace conference at Versailles. Second, the British and French had overpowering interests in the conference’s outcome, which were directly contrary to the desires of the indigenous Arab peoples, as reported by King and Crane. Third, Woodrow Wilson had already endorsed the Balfour Declaration, which pledged Britain to help establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. King and Crane had found near unanimous opposition to the Zionist idea among local Arabs.
King’s strong Protestant attachment to the Holy Land has continued to be a signi.cant element in American public attitudes toward the Middle East, and Crane’s business interests were able to express themselves through the support of an early U.S. search for oil in the Arabian Peninsula. However, the strategic interests of both the United States and its allies in the region would continue to dominate decision making, though that strategic perspective came to include strong support for the eventual Jewish state in the late forties, and since then, and strong emphasis on America’s interests in the oil resources of the region. Of.cial negotiations over these territories took place after the Paris Peace Conference had concluded, in San Remo, Italy, in 1922. U.S. BUSINESS PRECEDES ITS GOVERNMENT INTO OIL POWER IN THE ARAB/PERSIAN GULF Before World War I, the British had discovered oil in Persia (later to be called Iran) and staked their claim on it by creating the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which later became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. This oil became the basis for British Petroleum, BP. The United States did not compete with the British for control of Iranian oil, but American businesses insisted that their government demand equal treatment for oil purchase by U.S. companies intending to operate in the region. However, the Iranian government of the 1920s wanted U.S. business to play a wider role. Iran sought advice from the American private sector on its oil price negotiations with Britain and on ideas about oil profit sharing with the British. The Iranian government went further still by engaging American businessmen in the general planning of the Iranian economy. Thus a positive niche for American-Iranian business relations had been established since the 1920s. But this private-sector niche was sacrificed by the Eisenhower coup against the Iranian leader Mossadegh in 1953, which undermined the trust and replaced it with the deep suspicion that an American on Iranian soil was up to no good.
Within a few years, U.S. geologists uncovered Saudi Arabian oil, the great mother lode of all petroleum resources. American oil business interests pushed the United States to establish a consulate in Saudi Arabia and to enter negotiations with King Ibn Saud, which led to the creation of Aramco, the Arab-American oil company. A number of leading American oil interests banded together to gain access to the greatest oil resources in history. This agreement with Ibn Saud assured American oil giants of their leadership among all oil distributors.
In the preparations for World War II, the United States realized that it needed more oil than was being pumped in America. Roosevelt sent his trusted aide Harry Hopkins to reach an agreement for Saudi oil to sustain the Allies in their military effort throughout the war. The United States also established a major forward supply base in Egypt, for military equipment and other items needed for the war. In this way, Egypt and Saudi Arabia became two pillars of American national security, which they have remained ever since. With this in mind, President Franklin Roosevelt, though in.rm and in his last months of life, decided that his meetings in Yalta with Churchill and Stalin required him to begin planning for the postwar world. He stopped on his way home for meetings with key leaders of the Middle East and Africa. His yacht carried him to the Great Bitter Lake, in Egypt’s Sinai Desert, south of the Suez Canal, where he met with King Farouk of Egypt, King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, and Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. The critical meeting was with King Ibn Saud, and it was a complex and difficult one. The positive outcome was an understanding of the strategic partnership between the two nations. The United States would provide a security umbrella for Saudi Arabia against any non-American foreign in.uence, especially from the Soviet Union. In return, the Saudis assured the United...

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0312655444
• ISBN 13: 9780312655440
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304