Why Will Obama Succeed with Iran?

The Islamist menace in Iraq gives the issue of war and peace, which welcomed the accession of Barack Obama, an acutely worrying urgency and questions the meaning of this very promising democratic presidency.

The American president’s complete failure with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the attention reserved for the future balance of the Asia-Pacific had relegated the Middle East to second rank in priority. The blundering that came about with the Syrian “red line”—the use of chemical weaponry against civilians—emphasized views of American powerlessness in the region, while the Ukrainian crisis again highlighted transatlantic issues in a way that was both sudden and regrettable.

Today, the progress of the Islamist state in Baghdad makes the spectrum of dismemberment and instability in the regional powder keg very palpable, where strategic and denominational front lines overlap. The two principal actors are Iran and Saudi Arabia, added to which is Israel, its influence in Washington intensifying the absurdity of the situation. The Saudi ally is in total contradiction with American interests; on the contrary, the Iranian enemy is in sync, Saudi Arabia and Israel momentarily meeting regarding their anti-Iranian obsession; Saudi Arabia fears a Persian sphere of influence, and Israel is worrying about nuclear arms, of which it wants to be the exclusive regional possessor. The American president’s challenge is to untie this Gordian knot and overturn an order of things that has not served the interests of the United States since the American-Saudi Alliance was sealed in 1945 and the Israeli-American ties were strengthened in favor of the Camp David peace in 1977.

Obama’s humiliating failure, when he pointed the finger at Israeli colonization in Palestine, caused all hope of reorganizing American policy in the Middle East to be lost, since the alliance between Israel and the United States, known to be unconditional, compromises a larger resolution of regional tensions, as the Saudi plan proposed as an example in 2002. The mere negotiation of the Iranian nuclear program, on which the efforts of President Obama are focused, is not a sufficient alternative for bringing about an American strategy that isn’t fragmented or contradictory.

The United States lacks consistency; supporting Iraq is favorable to the Syrian regime and to Iran, whose influence America is fighting, but with which it shares an interest in what the Iraqi Sunni minority spared in order to favor stability in the country against the Islamic state jihadis and others, supported by Saudi and Qatari allies, who are fighting the Shiite influence in the region. The tangle is inextricable.

Broadly speaking, at a time when we mark the centenary of the war in 1914, it is the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 and the division of Ottoman territories in the Near and Middle East that must be kept in mind in order to understand the current disorder, and the possibility of a blow-out of Iraq. Faced with this eventuality, the United States is powerless. It’s only with Iran, whose invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush inadvertently favored the strategic situation, that the United States can contain the centripetal forces in Iraq against the jihadi menace — particularly as the Kurds want to be free and as Syria is no longer guaranteed to remain within the borders laid down at end of World War I.

Barack Obama wanted to get America out of the usual Washingtonian alternative, between the everyday neoconservatives on one hand and the liberal idealists on the other, that ends in a harmful interventionism, often for contrary reasons. Obama well understood how much this alternative costs American leadership. Moderation and realism without renouncing the main principles of international cooperation are the basis of his ideas.

Since he isn’t able to draw an effective policy from this he is perceived as indecisive, clumsy or distant on burning issues, and preferring to focus on Asia-Pacific — where regional hatred stands in the way of the American plan. His efforts regarding Iran mark a spectacular rupture. It’s there, maybe more so than in Asia, that he will leave his mark. Europe has an interest in him succeeding.