[api] Bruce Kuniholm on Middle East geopolitics
Russil Wvong
Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece", by
Duke University historian Bruce Kuniholm. I thought it was excellent,
so I did a search to find what else Kuniholm has written, and came
across the following article.
9/11, the Great Game, and the Vision Thing:
The Need for (and Elements of) a More Comprehensive Bush Doctrine
Bruce Kuniholm
The Journal of American History, September 2002
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/89.2/kuniholm.html
Subscribers only, but there's a cached Google copy here:
http://tinyurl.com/7pb0
I thought the historical section was particularly good:
A brief history of regional geopolitics may help put this sea
change in perspective and offer some instructive cautionary
observations to U.S. officials. In the nineteenth century, the
expansion of British sea power in the Indian Ocean and Persian
Gulf and the expansion of Russian troops into the Transcaucasus
and Central Asia eventuated in a struggle for power across a
region that stretched from the Balkans to Afghanistan. Each great
power--driven by the dictates of empire, motivated by fears of
dangers both imagined and real, or trying to "contain" a rival by
defensive action--sought to serve its perceived interests and
clashed with the other.
In the twentieth century, the players in this great game of
imperial rivalry, as it came to be called, were transformed: In
1917 the Soviet empire replaced the Russian Empire; and after
World War II the United States, guided by rationales outlined in a
series of presidential doctrines, gradually replaced a declining
British Empire and, thanks to a policy most popularly articulated
by George F. Kennan, assumed Britain's role of containing Soviet
expansion in the region.
Over time, the great game of advancing and protecting great power
interests, which initially involved trade but which increasingly
revolved around oil, resulted in modi vivendi resting on the
implicit assumptions that there should be an equilibrium of forces
in the region and that the vital interests of both powers would
not be threatened. When observed, such arrangements maintained the
balance of power in the region. If they were deficient in
addressing the needs of the region's emerging nationalist forces,
they mitigated tensions between the great powers, whose post-World
War II nuclear arsenals magnified the risks of brinkmanship at the
international level.
The emerging nations in the buffer zone that separated the
imperial powers, which were subject to whatever understandings the
great powers chose to reach, meanwhile did what they could to
survive. Between World War I and World War II, for example, since
the threat to them came from outside the region, they allied among
themselves against threats from without. The Balkan Pact of 1934
between Greece, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Turkey and the Sa'adabad
Pact of 1937 between Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan
constituted attempts to escape from traditional rivalries to which
these emerging states were being subjected. The alternatives to
forming alliances with each other were playing one power off
against the other, balancing one against the other, or looking to
third powers (for example, Germany between the wars) for
assistance. After World War II, as their survival was threatened
by the relative disparity between Soviet and British power, Iran
and Turkey turned to the United States for assistance.
In 1947, as Britain contemplated withdrawing from its empire,
including Burma, India, and Palestine, both the decision of the
British Foreign Office to cease supporting Greece and Turkey and
the Soviet threat to Iran and Turkey led President Harry S. Truman
to enunciate the Truman Doctrine. In doing so, he made the first
in a series of postwar U.S. commitments to contain the Soviet
threat and maintain the balance of power in a region that the
United States had previously regarded as within the British
Empire's sphere of influence. That Joseph Stalin did not expand
his sphere of influence in the Near East as he did in Europe and
the Far East following World War II does not mean, as some
revisionists would suggest, that U.S. concerns were
overdrawn. Firm U.S. policies put Stalin on notice that expansion
to the south could be carried out only at the risk of
confrontation. In the end, he was not prepared to take that risk
(nor was any Soviet government until the invasion of Afghanistan
in 1979).
In the early 1950s, as Britain continued to contemplate withdrawal
from the region--this time from Suez--Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles encouraged development of a broader regional defense
arrangement in the Middle East's "northern tier" states. Following
Britain's departure and the debacle over Suez, President Dwight
D. Eisenhower in 1957 promulgated the Eisenhower Doctrine to serve
notice that the United States would defend the Middle East against
a perceived Soviet threat. The Eisenhower Doctrine extended the
containment policy from the northern tier states to the Middle
East in general; it was institutionalized in both the Baghdad Pact
and, following the 1958 revolution in Iraq and that country's
withdrawal from the pact, the Central Treaty Organization
(CENTO). However one criticizes the Eisenhower Doctrine and the
concept of the northern tier, and however fashionable it is to
discuss the ease with which the Kremlin leapfrogged over it, the
lack of contiguity between the Soviet Union and the Arab world and
the barrier between them formalized in CENTO posed serious
logistical impediments to Soviet intervention in subsequent Middle
East crises, particularly those involving Arabs and Israelis. 9
U.S. problems in the Middle East under the Eisenhower Doctrine
were minor relative to those presented by the 1968 British
decision to leave (by 1971) the area "east of Suez," including the
Persian Gulf, which had been within Britain's sphere of influence
for over a century. Britain's impending departure from the gulf
created what was perceived as a power vacuum at a time when the
Soviet Union was becoming much more active in the region. Global
commitments and the war in Vietnam, however, precluded a
U.S. effort to fill the vacuum and resulted instead in the
application of the Nixon Doctrine (initially, the Guam Doctrine,
by which the United States relied on regional states to assume
primary responsibility for their own defense). In accordance with
President Richard M. Nixon's endorsement in 1970 of what became
the "twin-pillar" policy, the United States sought to ensure
stability in the gulf through cooperation with Iran, which
American officials recognized as the region's predominant power,
and Saudi Arabia.
Inept application of the Nixon Doctrine to the Middle East
eventually created problems that were as serious as those it was
intended to resolve. The failure of the United States to abide by
the rules of the great game in Iran may well have encouraged the
Soviets to break them in Afghanistan, where the Soviets had to
learn, as the Americans did in Iran, the limits of their capacity
to dominate the region. The Iranian revolution, which undermined
the premise of the Nixon Doctrine, with the subsequent hostage
crisis, the burning of the American embassy in Pakistan, and the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979—all made clear that the
twin-pillar policy was in ruins and U.S. policy along the northern
tier in disarray. The response of President Jimmy Carter in 1980
was the Carter Doctrine, under which the president publicly
emphasized the vital U.S. stake in the Persian Gulf and, in a
departure from the Nixon Doctrine, assumed ultimate responsibility
for regional defense. The Carter administration subsequently began
construction of a security framework for the Persian Gulf and
Southwest Asia, complete with improved regional defense
capabilities and facilities that would be accessible to the Rapid
Deployment Force (subsequently the Central Command).
After the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine, the foremost
challenge to U.S. interests came from the Soviet Union's
occupation of Afghanistan and from two regional states seeking
hegemony in the Persian Gulf: revolutionary Iran and, especially,
Iraq, from which Saddam Hussein launched wars against Iran (1980)
and Kuwait (1990). The Reagan administration, meanwhile, had
consolidated the security framework begun under President Carter,
supporting what the former assistant for national security affairs
Zbigniew Brzezinski referred to as "regional influentials." Turkey
and Pakistan received improved assistance packages, and the United
States continued to develop a close relationship with Saudi
Arabia, which initially became a reluctant beneficiary of the
Reagan "corollary" to the Carter Doctrine (the United States would
not permit Saudi Arabia "to be an Iran"). With Saudi and Pakistani
assistance, U.S. support for Afghan resistance to the Soviet
occupation resulted, by the late 1980s, in the withdrawal of
Soviet troops and contributed to the subsequent collapse of the
Soviet Union (not to mention the subsequent influence of Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan in Afghanistan, which, in turn, contributed to
the subsequent rise of the Taliban).
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the impending
transformation of the Soviet Union made it possible for the Bush
administration to enlist Soviet cooperation and coordinate a
multinational military coalition that, thanks to the security
framework set up by previous administrations, deterred Saddam from
intimidating Saudi Arabia and eventually expelled him from
Kuwait. Saddam's defiance of the conditions of the cease-fire, his
persecution of Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish minorities, and his
ongoing secret chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs
resulted in a continuing embargo on Iraq's oil, restrictions on
his military activities, and, for a time, United Nations (UN)
inspections of Iraqi weapons sites. Under President Bill Clinton,
the United States continued to pursue a dual containment policy
directed, not toward the Soviet Union, but rather toward Iran and
Iraq, the two regional states bent on hegemony in the gulf. Due to
an erosion of coalition solidarity, this policy was only partially
effective. Developments in Iran that accompanied the election of
President Muhammad Khatami in 1997 offered some reason for hope,
but Saddam eventually reconstituted the core of his army,
reimposed his authoritarian control over the country, expelled the
UN inspectors (in 1998), and continued his efforts to develop
weapons of mass destruction.
Russil Wvong
Vancouver, Canada
www.geocities.com/rwvong