Reagan and the Middle East
Edward Mortimer
New York Ronald Reagan must be the first President of the United States who can claim a foreign policy success on the day of his inauguration. For despite Jimmy Carter's evident belief that the hostages' release has vindicated his presidency, the timing suggests it was at least as much Reagan's achievement as his. With Carter in the White House, the hostages spent 444 days in captivity. The prospect of Reagan's arrival there concentrated the minds of their captors wonderfully. It was in the last weeks before the election that Iran's religious leaders began to show a serious interest in solving the crisis, and the lovable Ayatollah Khalkhali even urged publicly that the hostages be released in time to stop Reagan becoming President. That was either a tactical error or an astute piece of sabotage. The Iranian Parliament was not willing to endorse Carter so blatantly, while the American electorate was outraged at such a crude attempt to influence it. Yet once again it was in the last week or two of the lame-duck administration that the speed of negotiations picked up, and by the end both sides were scrambling desperately to have the boys home for Inauguration Day. Representatives of US banks 'expressed Surprise at how forthcoming the Iranians had become at the 11th hour', according to Monday's New York Times.
That is not to say that if Reagan had actually been President he would have got the hostages out quicker, or even that he would necessarily have done anything different from what Carter did. Very sensibly, he has never revealed what his ideas for solving the crisis were. Perhaps he would have taken a tougher line from the beginning, issuing an ultimatum and threatening either specific military action or a general state of war, That might have worked, for the threats that Carter did utter seem to have been enough to prevent any hostages being put on trial. But it also might easily not have worked, in the frenetic atmosphere of Iran's 'Second Revolution', as the weeks following the seizure of the hostages are known. And if the threats had been carried out, the effects could have been disastrous: the hostages probably killed, Iran or part of it appealing for Soviet help. the whole Middle East up in arms against American 'Imperialism'. Certainly the mere fact of Reagan being President could not have guaranteed a successful rescue attempt, since Reagan would have had the same logistic and human resources available to him that were used in the abortive Tabas raid.
But Reagan as candidate, and then as President-elect, threatening to 'do such things, he knew not what they were, but they should be the terrors of the earth', formed, with Carter, the perfect hard-soft duo. Nixon's 'madman theory of politics' came back into its own. Reagan's opponents depicted him as a wild man whose finger would always be close to the nuclear button.1-lis own denials notwithstanding, they thus succeeded in conveying to Iran that there was a dangerous man who could not be humiliated and ridiculed with impun ity like dear old Jimmy. No point in giving him a ready-made pretext to start hurling missiles around. As Reagan got nearer the White House, this picture may have softened somewhat. But by the end, even his promise to start on the issue 'with a clean slate' if the hostages were still there when he took office became quite effective: the negotiations had got so complex by then, and Iran was so close to recovering its frozen assets, that the Iranian negotiators clearly baulked at the thought of having to start all over again.
So now Reagan can start 'with a clean slate' in the Middle East, in the sense that his administration does not have to work out its policies there in the shadow of an immediate crisis. In another sense, however, his slate is far from clean. During his campaign he chalked on it, clumsy but clearly legible characters, a series of policy pronouncements which amount to a commitment to reverse the trend of recent US Middle East policy.
The existing policies, according to Reagan, have been criminally soft and have tended to weaken America's allies in the area, creating opportunities for Soviet infiltration. The allies in question are the old pillars of the Nixon doctrine in the Middle East: Israel and Iran. Iran has gone now (thanks to American weakness, Reagan thinks), but he still hoped 'that people of some sense and moderation there would take over' and thinks 'there was a legitimate reason for us being allied with Iran to begin with and that reason still exists'. (The US News and World Report, 19 January 1981.) Meanwhile, the US should try to establish its own military presence in the region to deter Soviet aggression —and perhaps for other purposes, Al Haig, in his confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke of intervention `to protect our oil' (sic) if substantial amounts of oil supplies were cut off. Other Reagan advisers are pushing a plan to get Egypt to allow the US to take over Israeli bases in Sinai when Israel vacates them next year under the terms of the peace treaty. (President Sadat is not thought to be enthusiastic.) Generally, the emphasis is on overawing the inhabitants of the Middle East with a display of American military might, while any attempt to win them over by pretending that America understands or sympathises with their aspirations is to be abandoned. In this policy Israel, it seems, has a key part to play. This was spelled out in an article which appeared over Reagan's signature in the Jewish Press in December 1979: 'If administration policies should serve to weaken Israel either through building the basis for a radical Palestinian state on her borders or through providing her with insufficient military assistance, the tasks of Kremlin planners dealing with the Near East would be enormously eased and a determined barrier to Soviet expansion in the region would have been withdrawn. .Specific Arab states such as Egypt — friendly to us at a particular moment — may well be able and prepared to take a front-line position in defence of Western security interests. To the extent that one or more can participate, so much the better, but such secondary links cannot substitute for a strong Israel in the over-turbulent Near East'.
Reagan has bought this doctrine from the increasingly influential right-wing Zionist lobby in the American academic community, whose platforms are the monthly Commentary and the weekly New Republic. Many of his foreign policy advisers are drawn from this group (several actually have Israeli nationality), and this, as well as eagerness for Jewish votes, must explain his strongly pro-Israeli positions on the Palestinian problem, the future of Jerusalem, and the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Reagan has also promised not to let himself be influenced by the 'Arabists' of the State Department, the most prominent of whom — Harold Saunders, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, a former Kissinger aide — retired abruptly from the Foreign Service last Thursday, not having been offered a job by Mr Haig.
In spite of this, many people doubt if Reagan will alter Middle East policies as much as all that. Even before taking office he is said to have been vigorously lobbied by a group of friends and advisers, some of whom have business connections with Saudi Arabia, seeking to convince him that a policy of 100 per cent support for Israel is unrealistic, given the importance of America's interests in the Arab world. The new Secretary of State has no particular Zionist connections, although he has won Zionist approval by proclaiming his desire for 'a world structured on Christian-Judaeo values' (sic). Harold Saunders's post remains unattributed, and there are rumours that it may after all go to a career diplomat with some knowledge of the Arab world, rather than to one of the pro-Israeli academics who are known to covet it, Finally, Henry Kissinger himself — no friend of the Palestinians but hardly an unconditional pro-Israeli either — has been trotting round the Middle East behaving as if he were a special presidential envoy, without explicit disavowal.
The impending Israeli election provides Reagan with a good excuse to do nothing on the Arab-Israel front for at least the next six months. That should give Arab leaders a chance to explain to him that a successful anti-Soviet strategy in the Middle East will have to take some account of local aspirations, and cannot be based on all-out support for Israel's present frontiers and policies.
Previous page
