The Middle East: Changing from External Arbiter to Regional Player

Abstract

Relative to other regions of the world, the Middle East attracts a disproportionately large part of America’s foreign policy attention, presenting successive presidents with some of their most enduring challenges. Rarely, if ever, do new presidents inherit a clean slate for launching new policy initiatives in this region, and the options facing President Barack Obama from the start of his administration were no exception to this general rule. More than ever since January 2009, pursuing the interests of the United States in the Middle East – above all, confronting the rise of Iran as a dominant regional power and its illicit nuclear activities, securing the Persian Gulf region as a major source of America’s and the world’s energy and protecting Israel as a key international ally while trying to broker a resolution to the Israeli– Palestinian conflict – has been complicated by the continuing presence of US forces in Iraq and the interrelated nature of sub-state and intra-state relations within the region. Relations between the United States and Israel have already begun to adjust to a new post-Bush era, in which the first steps undertaken by the Obama administration have been neither successful nor warmly received by the Israeli public.1 Changes both within the United States (above all the advent of the new pro-Israeli and pro-peace lobby J-Street, which takes a different stance from AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and in the rightleaning configurations of Israeli politics make longer-term prognoses of where this relationship will go particularly hard to make so early in the Obama presidency. Yet we can be confident that it will not remain a static relationship, despite the stresses already encountered in forging any kind of bilateral consensus over how to re-engage the peace process and, in turn, to normalize Israel’s relations with the rest of the region. However, US relations with Israel always take a different form from US relations with the Arab and Muslim states of the Middle East. In assessing the challenges and changes the Obama administration faces in this region, the focus in this chapter is principally on the dynamics of the broader Arab and