Shifting Sands: Crafting U.S. Foreign Policy Amidst Competing Interests

>> Scott Atlas: Okay, we're gonna start the afternoon with Russell Berman. Russell is a senior fellow at Hoover. He is the Walter Haas professor in the humanities of Stanford University and a co chair of the working group on Islamism and the International Order. He's a member of the department of german studies and the department of comparative literature at Stanford, and he specializes in the politics and culture of Europe in the Middle east.

He has served on many capacities, both inside the university as well as in government. And so please welcome Russell Berman.

>> Russell Berman: Thanks, Scott, for inviting me. I've always enjoyed speaking to this group. Welcome to all of you to Stanford and to Hoover. I hope this has been a productive experience for you.

I am part time at Stanford as professor in the humanities, part time at Hoover, where I work on foreign policy, especially with regard to the Middle east, but not exclusively. I gather from the program that today is sort of your foreign policy day. So I want to make a few initial remarks about, about what's at stake before getting into the Middle east.

I'm assuming that you're not all here really as Middle east specialists, but as aspiring policy producers. And the Middle east is one area in which we, the United States, the foreign policy establishment, generates policy. So first of all, foreign policy, what is it? It's how states, not only the United States but any state, pursues its interests, its will, its goals.

In an international system, this implies two things. First of all, that there's more than one state in the world. That seems obvious, but it's important to underscore that the human condition is characterized by a multiplicity of nations, a multiplicity of states. We spend a lot of time in this century talking about global citizenship or universal concerns, and there certainly are some.

But to the extent that we're organized in a state system, there are competing interests and competing perspectives on those universals. The other implication of my definition of foreign policy is that, in fact, states have interests. States are not just there as smiley face symbols of their populations, but they pursue different agenda in the world.

I think it's arguable that there's an international, maybe global interest in limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons. I can imagine an argument against that, but let's assume that for a moment. But if you're a state with nuclear weapons, your perspective on that question is very different than if you're a state without them.

And if you're a state without them, your perspective is very different if your neighbor has them. Also, to the extent that all states are engaged in some kind of grappling with energy transformation. The dual use character of nuclear energy would enter into your calculation about your relationship to the development of nuclear technologies.

I say that only as an example of how foreign policy gets complicated. There may well be universals, but they're always fractured through national agenda. So today you've had your foreign policy day, or you're having it. You heard from Secretary Rice about global hotspots, and you heard from Fraskotkin about issues in the world order.

Those are high level perspectives. Now you also heard from Jendia Fraser about Africa, hearing me from me about the Middle East. I underscore this just to point out the obvious, that there's a difference between the, the two levels, between a level of grand strategy and a level of regional politics and foreign policy generation.

The production, the practice of foreign policy in the United States, but really, anywhere is going to be always struggling with the tension between those two levels. Whatever state you represent, whether it's the United States or I know that many of you from abroad. Your leadership has a global vision, but that global vision is projected onto a world of Africa, Middle East, Latin America, Europe, etcetera.

This tension between grand strategy and regional politics plays out in the academic world, sometimes between the field of ir, of international relations, on the one hand, versus area studies. Area studies, the study of the Middle east, the study of Africa. In my perspective, that focus on regions embedded in area studies programs has somehow often been marginalized in the academy in recent years.

This is about the diminishment of comparative politics in poli Sci departments. And I think that this is a problem for the pursuit of foreign policy. Because foreign policy is ultimately about specific other countries where it would be good for practitioners of foreign policy to know something about them.

That kind of knowledge is sometimes what denigrated in contrast to higher level grand strategic thinking, which is not to say that that grand strategy isn't necessary as well. What I'm talking about epistemologically is just really a tension between theory and practice that is inescapable, really, in whatever you do in foreign policy as well.

So if that's the epistemological framework for thinking about foreign policy, big picture, local pictures, both are important for foreign policy. What about the production of foreign policy? What about the day to day life of foreign policy practitioners? I'm an academic most of my life. Scott mentioned that I was able to spend some time in government.

I was in, I was a senior advisor in the policy planning staff in the State Department. Policy planning is an office that was established by George Hennan after the second world war to be a kind of internal think tank within the State Department. And I know that many other countries, not all countries, have, have parallel organizations in the practice of foreign policy.

Lots of the day to day labor is really about what do we do tomorrow? What happens when the assistant secretary of state visits Country X? And what do they say about y? And you got to figure out what the policy record has been and what the policy, where the policy is going.

There's very, very little time to think big, to think about what you want to do in the long term, where the long term can just be two or three years. That's the real life of people in foreign policy, a tension between what do you get done today? You're understaffed.

You've got questions. You have to answer the press conferences in a half an hour and what do we want to do in. Two or three years, where do we want to get to, and let alone where do we want to get to in ten years or 15 years.

In the United States this production of foreign policy ought to be a function of the presidential vision. Presidential vision should be carried by the secretary of state, and the rest of the bureaucracy is there to implement it. In reality, the president is busy with lots of different things.

Foreign policy is not necessarily the top of the agenda. The secretary of state is the cultural capital of our foreign policy delivery. The big prize for the leaders of other countries is to have a meeting with the secretary of state or state dinner at the White House. There's not enough time in the year to do that for all of the 200 countries in the world.

So there's a real resource challenge in the delivery of foreign policy. Some of the president's vision is carried out through the National Security Council. I think you will hear from HR McMaster, former national security advisor during the previous administration. In any case, my point is that you have a political vision by the leadership of the executive as to what foreign policy should be, but it has to be implemented by the bureaucracy.

We don't have to denigrate the bureaucracy. We don't have to denounce it as deep state, although I think that's often an accurate description. But the president can't pay attention to what the State Department does in the foreign policy relations to all of those 200 countries. So a lot of this is a machine that has been started and keeps going.

This is the work of foreign service officers. If you're interested in this world, you will wanna take the foreign Service exam and pursue that as a career. In the United States, a lot of foreign policy is also a function of the Congress. It's not just an executive branch activity.

The Congress has the power of the purse. That's one aspect of it. But the Congress, over the past decades has become ever more involved in foreign policy issues. So the president of either party, President Trump, President Biden, may have a vision that he wants to implement, but is going to have to get it by Senator Menendez in the Congress, who's going to say, well, I don't like that country because, etc, etc.

And he may have good reasons not to like that country. But this can get in the way of the delivery of foreign policy inside the State Department. Another aspect that you should be aware is that there are, there are organizational issues. There's a problem with the bureaucratic structure of the responsibility for different areas and for different functional areas.

Different areas would be, well, there's the offices responsible for Western Europe, but then there are the functional areas the offices that are focused on human rights or on democracy, etc, etc. So these different offices can sometimes be working at cross purposes. One of the criticisms that's often made of the State Department is that issues are stovepiped, that is, they're caught in a departmentalization.

Another criticism that is made is that the generation of statements, or documents, or texts of papers requires approval by multiple offices. And it takes forever for new papers, new statements, new policies to get through the State Department bureaucracy, that's called the clearance process, and it's nefarious. So let me move closer toward what the United States is doing in terms of foreign policy and the Middle east.

I'll just mark as a topic for discussion maybe the question of whether the United States even has a grand strategy at this. At this point there is a national security document that comes out for every administration. General McMaster authored the one from 2017, which is a very important and pivotal one, but that's really about national security, as opposed to an ambition for a grand strategy of the United States and the world.

There's a question as to whether there's a roadmap in place at this point, or whether there is not just an accumulation of specific policies that are being pursued. In addition to this question about grand strategy, there's the question that I flagged before about the extent to which we have real knowledge or sufficient knowledge of the different areas, the different countries of the world.

So those are two background problems. Now I come to the Middle East. The Middle East became important for the United States. The United States has long standing diplomatic relations to countries in the Middle East, to Morocco, to Oman, goes back to the beginning of the republic. But the Middle East only became important for the United States in World War II, or in the wake of World War II.

And the retreat of the British Empire from that region in the context of the competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The United States was worried about the Soviets becoming the power of influence in the course of the disappearance of the British. Add to this the question of oil as oil replaced coal as the go to source of energy.

The Middle east, of course, became more and more important, as did the geostrategic significance of the Suez Canal. So all of those are reasons why the United States should be concerned about, or became concerned about the United States, about the Middle east. This was concretized historically around the foreign policies of two presidents.

One is President Franklin Roosevelt, who famously met with King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia in 1945, forming the base of a partnership between Washington and Riyadh, which has sort of lasted until today. And one of the ironies of President Biden's foreign policy is that he may be the one who's bringing that relationship to Saudi Arabia to an end, or it has certainly complicated it in the context of the crown prince to be talked about.

The other aspect of us interest to the United States, of course, is Israel. And here there's an interesting story to be told, that it was President Truman who supported the foundation of Israel, famously against the State Department. The State department was not a supporter. Truman was able to rein in his State Department.

I think aside from the question. Question of Israel in the United States. That's an intriguing episode in terms of the scope of presidential power versus State Department bureaucracy. There are other examples as well. The United States really didn't become a real backer of Israel until after the 1967 war, until after 1970.

France was the main supporter of Israel in the interim. So that's the history. What about US interests in the Middle East in recent years? What have been the key issues, and do they still hold? One is, of course, in the wake of 9/11 counterterrorism. The United States was hurt brutally at 9/11.

Terrorism was an issue before that as well. That is what led the United States into Afghanistan, rightly or wrongly. And the United States is still involved in counterterrorist activities vis-a-vis ISIS in parts of Syria. So that story keeps on going. It's not as prominent as it once was, to be sure, Scott said, I read the I direct the working group on Islamism and the international order.

That's what the working group was called when Islamism was the key issue. We've renamed the working group now, more neutrally, to the Middle East, indicating that Islamism remains an issue. But it's not the primary focus of US foreign policy. So counterterrorism, another issue is WMDs, weapons of mass destruction.

That was obviously a motivator behind the Iraq war. Footnote, we can talk about the reliability or lack of such in the intelligence community in the United States. This is not the first time the IC got things wrong. But the WMDs is, of course, what has generated the pursuit of a nuclear deal, the JCPOA, with Iran.

This was the primary feature of the Obama era foreign policy. The Trump administration, famously, reversed that. The Biden administration has half-heartedly tried to reinstate it. I'm happy to talk about the ups and downs of that. In any case, there the issue is nuclear proliferation. If you think that nuclear war is terrible, I do.

And if you think that nuclear proliferation is something you probably want to resist, then it makes sense that you want to rein in Iranian ambitions for nuclear arms. The question is that's maybe not the only thing you're concerned about. You may be concerned about competition, regional competition. You may be concerned about the geostrategy of Iran with Russia and China.

You may be concerned about values, about women's rights, about human rights. And that would complicate your pursuit of an agreement with Iran. I'll be happy to talk about that complexity as well. In foreign policy, when we have interests, when we, any country has interests, you don't only have one interest.

It's not only nuclear proliferation, it's also pursuit of values. It's also pursuit of prosperity, it's also pursuit of security. And the world being what the world is, these are not always aligned on the same page. So you as the foreign policy practitioner, or you as the head of state have to decide which one you're going to prioritize and how you balance these different desiderata at the same time.

And it gets messy. It gets messy in that you may want something important from countries whom you really don't like for other reasons. That's the way the world is. Third rationale for involvement in the Middle East is great power competition. This was the key term in the 2017 national security strategy, the recognition that the United States is standing in an increasingly, I'm not sure we use this term, adversarial relationship to Russia and China, and this is then playing out in the Middle East.

There is an argument to say, well, why care about the Middle East? Oil doesn't matter anymore. The real issue is the western Pacific. The real issue is defending Taiwan and Japan and Korea against China. And that's not wrong. But I think it's short sighted to say, and therefore we pull back everywhere else and give China or Russia the keys to these other regions while we're sailing through the Taiwan Straits.

The world is big, and we have to be in different places at the same time. And this is particularly an issue for the United states as a large, powerful, wealthy country. In the meantime, Russia that had been largely expelled from the Middle east during the 1970s and 1980s, has returned in force into Syria, to some extent in Egypt and China established its first overseas base in Djibouti.

And then finally, fourth reason why we should be concerned about the Middle east is I've mentioned this already, the whole issue of values. The United States, by treaty and by statute, is committed to pursuing human rights. It's committed to structuring a foreign policy that addresses human rights in all of its the subcategories.

And you can think through what those subcategories might be. The United States is committed to democracy. The question is how much that commitment means that it should vigorously spread democracy, the way George W Bush promoted it, to overthrow tyrants around the world. Or whether it's something less, less intrusive, more respectful of other modes of governance.

The Biden administration has defined its foreign policy agenda, especially so far in terms of the democracy summits that it is held annually. When it held its first democracy summit, I believe the second one as well. It only invited approved democracies, and from the whole MENA region, Middle East, North Africa.

That means it only invited Israel and Iraq. I know the argument for Israel and Iraq, I think, is a stretch, nonetheless. But this means that we have a foreign policy shoe that doesn't fit the foot. It means that the key term of the foreign policy isn't working in a region that I think is problematic, if only from a pragmatic point of view.

There's the issue of pursuing human rights. The United States, again, by treaty and by statute, is committed to pursuing human rights. The question is, what is the nature of that pursuit? Do we subordinate all other goals to that? Do we name and shame the adversaries who are abusing human rights?

Or is it more worthwhile to try to work discreetly to get people out of torture chambers and, nonetheless, smile at the dictator? These are the kind of real world, pragmatic decisions that have to be made. It's really the question of values in foreign policy, as opposed to the other desiderata of security and prosperity.

The specific history of us foreign policy in the recent era, the wars, of course, the alleged war weariness on the part of the public, leading President Obama to talk about a pivot to Asia. Pivot to Asia was always meant to mean a pivot away from the Middle east, footnote of course, the Middle east is West Asia, we're talking about pivot to East Asia.

But as the United States advocates its pivoting away from the region, it's not surprising if countries in the region start taking the United States seriously, that it will pivot away. And this leads to the behavior, say, of Mohammed Bin Salman in reaching out to China. The paradox for us foreign policy thinking is that we may dislike Mohammed Bin Salman because of his human rights abuses and of course, the Khashoggi fear is the top of the list.

But the list is a long one, we may not like, but if we snub him, if we declare him a pariah with whom we will not speak, then he naturally goes to China. And China doesn't ask about human rights abuses. China doesn't ask about corruption either. So this puts pressure on the foreign policy practitioner to try to figure out how you pursue your goals, try to have some kind of values integrity, but not cede the world to your adversaries who have none of that integrity.

The United States has an interest, I believe, in trying to maintain stability, in pursuing those values and in countering great power rivals. Those are three different things that are going on at the same time. And some of the venues in which this puzzle is currently being posed include the following.

There's the ongoing tragedy of Syria, the Arab spring broke out there, as in many other countries in 2011, but the Assad regime was able to assert itself quite brutally against the population, causing an enormous export of refugees. That caused destabilization, in some of America's longstanding allies in Western Europe, this is the flow of refugees 2015 into Germany that I think about.

But, the per capita presence of refugees is much, much greater in countries in the region, in Jordan, in Turkey, in Lebanon. And there's very little prospect of those refugees returning, as long as the regime is in place. Changing the regime is really a mandate of a UN resolution, but it's not going to happen very soon.

Long story complex and in that mixed, of course, is ongoing ISIS activity in the country. Second point that is, I think, on the front burner for us foreign policy in the Middle East is the legacy of the Abraham Accords, efforts to establish relations between Israel and some of the, the Arab states in return for a refusal by the concession by the Netanyahu government, then not to annex the West bank.

That was the deciding point. More important, I think, is that there's a strategy of uniting the Sunni states with Israel in an anti Iran alliance. That's really what is being discussed right now, there was an interesting piece about this by Walter Russell Meade in the Wall Street Journal just yesterday or the day before.

I think that actually the most interesting thing that has happened in the Middle East of late was the decision, by Iran, to reopen diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. This was the rapprochement that was brokered by China, I guess now some months ago. The standard interpretations of this is that this is a further indication of the declining leadership of the United States in the region as China takes the diplomatic initiative.

So that turns it into a critique of the Biden administration. I don't think that's wrong, but I think it may miss the point. Another aspect of it is, well, this is an effort on the part of Riyadh of Saudi Arabia to limit the threat of missiles from the Houthis in Yemen onto Saudi facilities.

Also not wrong, but those are sort of standard opinions at this point. I'm going to venture a different hypothesis that goes a little further, and that would point to a more ambitious US foreign policy. And that is that the real zinger here is that the Iranian leadership was prepared to come to terms with what it has denigrated for years as the house of Saud with Saudi Arabia.

I interpret that as an indication that some people, some smart people in the leadership in Tehran understand that there's a big leadership transition that is going to take place very soon when Khamenei passes, that the government has lost the support of its very young population. The rhetoric of the Islamic revolution and the rhetoric of the Iraq war no longer mean anything to people who were born long after that, but who are concerned about their economic straits, and who are concerned about the restrictions on rights that they no longer are prepared to accept.

Therefore, I think in the context of the larger geostrategic shifts in Eurasia, the war in Ukraine, there'd be an opportunity for the United States to reach to Iran, to bring it back into a Western fold, to the foreign policy that it pursued before 1979, and have it in an Abraham accords that included Saudi Iran and Israel.

That'd be a big leap, I don't think, I'm not sure we have the diplomatic Kissingerian realism to pull that off at this point. But I do think we're at a historical moment where something like that would be possible. That's what I have to say, I'm happy to take some questions.