Realism, Unipolarity, and Morality
Stephen Walt thinks that he has finally understood Obama’s approach to foreign policy. He thinks that Obama is a “buck-passer”, a technical word in realism that refers to great powers that pass the buck to other powers instead of a balancing a rising power. Walt notes with approval, Obama’s recognition of the fact that – as an immediate consequence of unipolarity – the US faces no significant threats at all. Obama has thus calculated that the United States has no real interests in Syria: what happens there is mostly irrelevant as far as the US is concerned.
This is not exactly buck-passing. A buck-passer faces a real threat, but due to the Prisoners’ Dilemma of collective action, leaves it to other powers to check it. The canonical example being the appeasement of Hitler. Every European power was under a direct threat of being conquered by the German war machine. The alarming rapidity of the German military buildup in 1933-39, prompted all the great powers to remilitarize and avoid confronting Hitler. The Soviet Union and the Western powers passed the buck to each other until finally Great Britain took a stand in 1939.
The United States faces no such threat in Syria. It does, however, have a national security interest in containing the rise of Islamist militants. Obama forbid Turkey from providing heavy weapons to moderate rebels, and outsourced the supply of weapons to the oil monarchies. I mean this in a very precise sense: the CIA is still managing the upstream – the supply – end of the operation, it is the downstream – the distribution – that has been handled by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Flush with arms, the Islamist rebel groups like al-Nusra have become the strongest fighting force in the rebellion. This is a direct outcome of Obama’s policy. This is not exactly a major debacle, nothing that cannot be handled by the White House’s drone program. The White House opposed the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA, in ruling out a no-fly zone and supplying heavy weapons to prudently chosen rebel groups. This is squarely on Obama’s shoulders.
Supplying the rebels with heavy weapons and imposing a no-fly zone would’ve cost the US nothing in blood and less in treasure than the hundreds of millions of dollars it has already promised in humanitarian aid. Had this policy been implemented when I recommended, Assad would be ancient history by now and the US would have people it could work with in Syria. Moreover, the Islamists would’ve been much weaker, as would Hezbollah and Iran. Perhaps fifty thousand lives would’ve been saved but that is irrelevant to a realist. Why the White House opposed it is still unclear to me.
In Bahrain, the Fifth Fleet could’ve simply informed the Saudis that it will not permit Saudi troops to cross the King Fahd causeway into Bahrain through waters under its protection. Instead of twisting the monarch’s arms to accommodate the protestors, the United States was busy apologizing to Saudi Arabia, which was mad about Secretary of State Clinton’s vocal support for protestors at Pearl Square. In this case, the dilemma was that while a move towards a Shi’ite democracy on Iran’s doorstep could undermine the Islamic regime, it would at the same time threaten Saudi Arabia: the eastern province opposite Bahrain contains both the majority of Saudi Arabia’s oil and Shi’ite. Obama’s policy was in this sense over determined by the consensus in the business sector.
This is myopia. A constitutional monarchy with a parliament in Bahrain under US protection would provide leverage against the Saudi royals. When US interests diverge from the Saudis’ – as they assuredly will – the US will have an extra bargaining chip. It will also strengthen the more moderate and modern sectors of Gulf society. Perhaps revive the Kuwaiti parliament, and other moves towards reform and representation. Supporting the monarchies against the intelligentsia strengthens the salafi scribes. For now, the Saudi royal family controls the scribes. In a succession struggle – or any situation where the absolute control of the royals is undermined – they could become kingmakers, or worse, threaten to take over. It is not in the long-term interest of the United States to have the scribes as the only potentially independent center of power in Saudi Arabia.
The ‘oil for protection’ arrangement whereby US protects the Saudi royal family, and the Kingdom maintains excess capacity to moderate the price of oil has been in place since the upheavals of 1979. In exchange for protection, the Saudis agreed to both price oil in dollars and to recycle their petrodollars through the United States. It is in the interest of the Saudis to keep the price of oil high enough to earn sizable profits, but not so high as to encourage investment in alternative energy sources. Periodically, Saudi Arabia has faced considerable pressure from the price hawks within OPEC to push prices higher than its interest dictates. American military protection has strengthened Saudi willingness to resist the hawks.
The onset of the Iran-Iraq war in September 1980 removed 4 million barrels a day (mbd) and drove the price of oil to $42 a barrel, its highest level ever. The Saudis were allied to Iraq and fearing Iranian retaliation against their oil fields, asked for American military protection. The US sent AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia and set up a joint Saudi-American naval task force to guard oil tankers in the Gulf. The Saudis returned the favor by increasing their oil production from 9.7 mbd to 10.3 mbd. Since those days, the Saudis have tried to maintain 2 mbd of excess capacity. This comes in handy for the boss: when the US decided to invade Iraq in 1990 and 2003, the oil monarchies easily replaced the 3-4 mbd that went offline.
This arrangement will be undermined by the coming collapse in the price of crude later this decade. A Citi GPS report expects Brent to “stabilize below $90, perhaps falling well below these levels at times and as a result the current $90 floor price for Brent looks likely to become a ceiling price by the end of this decade.” Additional capacity coming online in Iraq, Canada, and the United States alone would shave off tens of dollars a barrel; far below the “break-even price” for the Saudi state which is already at $80, and expected to grow into triple digits. A fiscal crisis in the oil monarchies is already baked into the numbers. Along with the threats inherent in the upcoming inter-generational succession struggle in Saudi Arabia, the central assumption underpinning US policy in the Persian Gulf is looking increasingly fragile.
Neorealism sees unipolarity as the vacuous, trivial case where there is no systemic pressure. This misses the immediate implication that in a unipolar system the foreign policy of the unipole is the dominant variable in world politics. One expects the unipole to pursue a grand-strategy aimed at preventing the emergence of a competitor. Given the distribution of war potential on the globe, this amounts to a strategy aimed at preventing the emergence of a regional hegemon at the two extremities of Eurasia. As a corollary, the United States will exclude any great power or regional hegemon from acquiring control of the energy resources of west Asia. Furthermore, a centered realist would expect the US to maintain its naval primacy and keep the world’s sea-lanes under its protection. Realism has no further implications about US foreign policy.
In a unipolar world, the foreign policy of the unipole constitutes the system level of world politics. What one needs to talk about, therefore, is the political economy of US policy. The invariants of US policy emanate not from raison d’état but from Ferguson’s investment theory of party competition. In reality, the United States runs a ‘protection racket’ in the interests of the ‘masters of the universe’.
Protecting brutal clients against the threat of democracy is an American specialty: Saddam, Suharto, Sandinista, the al-Saud, and the Shah, just to name a few starting with S. This is surprising because as Walt himself demonstrated in The Origins of Alliances, clients are neither reliable nor very useful. In a bipolar system, there is systemic pressure: Soviet military and financial support for Egypt and Syria forced the US to increase its patronage to the Saudis, who were – just like today – leading the counter-revolution against Nasserism. Walt’s result holds a fortiori in a unipolar world. In any case, as the weaker power in a bipolar regional security complex, the House of Saud needs US protection more than the United States needs Saudi excess capacity.
A friend of mine and a regular reader of this blog wondered if I have any moral feelings about this business. I was taken aback. The moral dimension – and the magnitude of the crimes – is so obvious that I stopped ranting about it a long time ago. As a prudent first principle of analytical thinking, it is necessary to distinguish between the positive – i.e., what exists – from the normative – i.e., what ought to be. This is part of the reason why you haven’t read much outrage on these pages. Another is that we are so far indeed from “what ought to be” that it seems almost absurd to mention it.
The bodies have been piling up high everywhere – Chile, Panama, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Sudan, Rwanda, Congo, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen – for a very long time indeed. Compared to the long list of crimes the complicity in the butchery in Syria is a minor affair for the United States. Since 1990, even the fig leaf of the cold war is gone. US support for brutal regimes continues unabated: not in the pursuit of strategic interests so much as in the interest of those who matter.
The United States has cornered the market for security. It has the luxury of being in a position to square its ‘interests’ with its ‘values’, except that ‘values’ are pure rhetoric which have no bearing on US policy. They are meant to hoodwink Americans amid much self-congratulation about the ‘greatest nation on earth’. US ‘interests’ emanate from tightly-knit sectors of wealth and power, in the spirit of the founding fathers who thought that ‘those who own the country ought to rule it’.