With Term Waning, Barack Obama Aims to Stabilize Relations in Middle East By Aaron David Miller
“If Mr. Obama left office today he’d leave the relationships with America’s three most important partners worse than when he found them; and relations with one of Washington’s erstwhile adversaries – Iran — better.”
Life’s about learning, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young famously sang. And it may well be that in the last year of his presidency, Barack Obama is finally learning that imperfect partners in the Middle East are better than no partners at all, particularly for a president disinclined to invest in a large U.S. presence in the region.
None of this means that relations with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel will fundamentally improve before 2017 — too many divergent interests preclude that. But recent U.S. efforts suggest that Mr. Obama may at least want to stabilize them. With the Middle East a mess, he can’t afford to hand to his successor three relationships in crisis.
Mr. Obama’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia – his fourth since taking office (he’s visited Israel and Egypt only once) reflects the continued importance of the Kingdom in U.S. foreign policy, however strained the relationship has become. Declining dependence on Arab hydrocarbons, differences over Iran and Syria, and the famously missing 28 pages in the 2002 Congressional report that might contain damning information on official Saudi knowledge or role in 9/11 have injected tension into the relationship. Still, the president’s visit wasn’t a disaster and led to new areas of cooperation between the U.S. and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Mr. Obama is likely to hand over to his successor a U.S.-Saudi relationship that, while still fraught with significant divides, is functional and working to the advantage of both.
Relations between Washington and Cairo have been rocky ever since the fall of the Mubarak regime and military coup that removed the Muslim Brotherhood from power. At the time the U.S. temporarily suspended military assistance (since restored) and seems increasingly to have realized that trying to influence the country’s internal politics was only making matters worse without any results. Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry made a brief stop in Cairo, apparently to try to smooth over differences between the two on human rights. Mr. Kerry made it unmistakably clear Washington preferred stability over significant political change and wouldn’t push Egypt to do much on the latter. CONTINUE AT SITE
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