DIFFICULT BUT NECESSARY: A TRANSATLANTIC STRATEGY FOR THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST Paper prepared for the GMF conference, June 25th 2003, Washington DC. By Steven Everts, Senior Research Fellow Centre for European Reform
Introduction The US and Europe have to succeed in an exceptionally difficult undertaking. They have to meet not just a single or double challenge, but a triple one: A. They need to prove, to each other and the rest of the world, that the principal rationale of the USEuropean partnership is indeed no longer the bilateral relationship and the broader European agenda, but their ability to tackle, together, the growing problems of a troubled world. Terms such as ‘global partnership’ are easy to trot out at summits and conferences. But both elements – the partnership and the global bit – are fiendishly hard to put into practice. B. They need to forge such an alliance for action on the region, which has historically most divided them: the greater Middle East. The unspoken assumptions, the formative experiences, along with the interests and reflexes behind European and American policies on the greater Middle East are – for historical, political and other reasons – sharply different, and likely to remain so for years to come. If the problems of the Middle East were not so urgent, one would be inclined to say: let’s test-drive this global partnership elsewhere, in South East Asia or Africa. C. Europe and the US must forge this common strategy towards the challenges of the Middle East against a background of the worst transatlantic ‘bagarre extraordinaire’. As the BBC’s political correspondent Andrew Marr put it: the last few months have been the diplomatic equivalent of The Perfect Storm. Indeed, the fact that the handling of the Iraq crisis degenerated so rapidly into such a spectacular row, underlines the validity of points A and B. Moreover, the fact that leaders of both sides have chosen, quite unnecessarily, to personalise their differences, hinders the necessary efforts at restoring the overall health of US-European relations. The prospects for an effective transatlantic strategy on the Middle East are, accordingly, worse. The argument of this paper is that, notwithstanding these obstacles, a robust transatlantic strategy for the greater Middle East is both possible and necessary. Both sides will need to take risks; make concessions; rethink existing approaches; confront domestic constituencies; and most of all commit significant resources including political capital. And even then success is far from guaranteed. Nonetheless the risks and opportunities thrown up by the greater Middle East cry out for a comprehensive US-European strategy for political action. The scarlet thread running through the suggestions below is a vision of foreign policy as an agent of change, not as a tool to keep or manage the status quo.