Speaking in a virtual panel last Thursday, two influential scholars of international relations expressed skepticism of the alleged rise of "great power competition" as a new paradigm for U.S. foreign policy.
The scholars, Stephen Walt of the Harvard Kennedy School and Barry Posen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also argued that Washington has put itself at a strategic disadvantage with its military overextension and virtually unconditional support for often-troublesome allies in the Middle East.
“We have special relationships with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and maybe Jordan, and these countries can pretty much do whatever they want with unconditional American backing,” said Walt. “Meanwhile we pretend that we're never going to talk to Iran, which means that the former take us for granted, and that we have no influence with the latter.”
Both Walt and Posen, well-established leaders of the "realist school" in international relations, were speaking before a forum sponsored by the Washington-based Middle East Institute. Despite the framing of this discussion — "The Middle East in an Era of Great Power Competition" — both Walt and Posen appeared to reject the notion that U.S. foreign policy has moved decisively towards a framework of great power competition.
“If you look at where the Trump administration is, we still have troops in NATO deterring Russia, we have troops in the Middle East despite all of Donald Trump's statements that he doesn't want to do nation-building, and we still have troops in Afghanistan,” said Walt. “So there's certainly been changing style, but the overall thrust of American foreign policy has actually changed rather less than many people believe.”
The scholars also concurred that Russia and China are unlikely to aggressively pursue hegemony in the Middle East. Even with its proclaimed victory in Syria, Walt noted, Russia is still playing a basically defensive game in the Middle East and on the world stage, rather than significantly increasing its influence. China, on the other hand, could reasonably be expected to seek greater power in the region, but so far has not.
“China has been willing to have a rather detached relationship towards the Middle East, quite possibly because they realize that its strategic importance may actually be going down, and because they've watched the American experience there for the past 20 plus years and they've seen this as an enormous quagmire where the United States has actually weakened its overall position,” Walt said. “You can argue that Beijing is playing a very sensible game here, which is to let the United States continue to expend resources in the Middle East for no good purpose while it stays out.”
The real strength of Russia and China’s approaches towards the Middle East, Walt said, is their willingness to have healthy diplomatic relations with all nations in the region, in contrast to the American adherence to unconditional alliances and seemingly permanent enmities.
“Russia and China talk to everybody — they talk to the Iranians, they talk to the Israelis, they talk to the Saudis, they talk to the Egyptians, and that’s how a country maximizes its influence.” Walt explained. “We do the exact opposite — we talk to some countries and back them to the hilt, and don't talk to the others.”
Posen and Walt concurred that the American military presence in the Middle East greatly outmatches the region’s importance, and that it ought to be promptly reduced. The scholars differed, however, on what a smart approach to the region would require of the United States — both agreed that the primary U.S. interest in the Middle East lies in preventing the rise of a hegemonic power there, but Posen emphasized that this was an extremely unlikely prospect even without U.S. involvement to prevent it.
“There is no obvious candidate for military hegemony in the region,” Posen explained. “Two of the principal powers in the Arab world were Iraq and Syria, which are basically gone as military powers. Egypt is preoccupied with an insurgency, and Iran hasn't modernized its conventional forces in a decade-and-a-half. My very strong inclination is to not just pull our military power out of the region, but to say to most of the client states, ‘other than your self-inflicted wounds you are pretty secure, at this point you manage your internals, we are gone.’”
Posen further explained that the reasons for the Middle East’s strategic importance to the United States, and to the world at large, were rapidly diminishing.
“The one thing that made this part of the world interesting is oil, and oil is not only not scarce, it's a poison,” said Posen. “Over the next 20 years or so, all industrial societies should be trying to wean themselves off this poison, so it should not be the job of the American military to subsidize a low price for poison that comes from the Middle East.”
Still, neither scholar expressed much hope that the U.S. would adopt such an approach in the near future, regardless of the outcome of this year’s presidential election. Referring to the Trump administration’s approach as one of “illiberal hegemony,” Posen predicted that a potential Biden administration’s foreign policy would differ in style, but not significantly in substance.
“The mood music is going to change,” Posen said. “I'm sure in a Biden administration, they will try to restore whatever they think our position in the Middle East is — they'll go back to using some more liberal tools while they also keep using the martial tools as well.”
Still, both recognized that the present global crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity for major powers to re-evaluate world order: to embrace great power competition, or to seek out a more cooperative approach to shared challenges.
“If I were a statesman with power, I would be looking to ask ‘is this maybe the last moment we have to think about order, and do we want an order that is simply low-grade perpetual great power competition, or do we want to think about whether there is some more cooperative way to manage things?'” Posen suggested. “If that exists, it's not because we're going to make it out of the U.N. or some other international institution — it’s because sometimes, even great powers have managed to cooperate to organize vital security questions.”
Event details and full video of the discussion are available from the Middle East Institute.
![Following a largely preordained election, Vladimir Putin was sworn in last week for another six-year term as president of Russia. Putin’s victory has, of course, been met with accusations of fraud and political interference, factors that help explain his 87.3% vote share. If this continuation of Putin’s 24-year-long hold on power makes one thing clear, it’s that he and his regime will not be going anywhere for the foreseeable future. But, as his war in Ukraine continues with no clear end in sight, what is less clear is how Washington plans to deal with this reality. Experts say Washington needs to start projecting a long-term strategy toward Russia and its war in Ukraine, wielding its political leverage to apply pressure on Putin and push for more diplomacy aimed at ending the conflict. Only by looking beyond short-term solutions can Washington realistically move the needle in Ukraine. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, the U.S. has focused on getting aid to Ukraine to help it win back all of its pre-2014 territory, a goal complicated by Kyiv’s systemic shortages of munitions and manpower. But that response neglects a more strategic approach to the war, according to Andrew Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who spoke in a recent panel hosted by Carnegie. “There is a vortex of emergency planning that people have been, unfortunately, sucked into for the better part of two years since the intelligence first arrived in the fall of 2021,” Weiss said. “And so the urgent crowds out the strategic.” Historian Stephen Kotkin, for his part, says preserving Ukraine’s sovereignty is critical. However, the apparent focus on regaining territory, pushed by the U.S., is misguided. “Wars are never about regaining territory. It's about the capacity to fight and the will to fight. And if Russia has the capacity to fight and Ukraine takes back territory, Russia won't stop fighting,” Kotkin said in a podcast on the Wall Street Journal. And it appears Russia does have the capacity. The number of troops and weapons at Russia’s disposal far exceeds Ukraine’s, and Russian leaders spend twice as much on defense as their Ukrainian counterparts. Ukraine will need a continuous supply of aid from the West to continue to match up to Russia. And while aid to Ukraine is important, Kotkin says, so is a clear plan for determining the preferred outcome of the war. The U.S. may be better served by using the significant political leverage it has over Russia to shape a long-term outcome in its favor. George Beebe of the Quincy Institute, which publishes Responsible Statecraft, says that Russia’s primary concerns and interests do not end with Ukraine. Moscow is fundamentally concerned about the NATO alliance and the threat it may pose to Russian internal stability. Negotiations and dialogue about the bounds and limits of NATO and Russia’s powers, therefore, are critical to the broader conflict. This is a process that is not possible without the U.S. and Europe. “That means by definition, we have some leverage,” Beebe says. To this point, Kotkin says the strength of the U.S. and its allies lies in their political influence — where they are much more powerful than Russia — rather than on the battlefield. Leveraging this influence will be a necessary tool in reaching an agreement that is favorable to the West’s interests, “one that protects the United States, protects its allies in Europe, that preserves an independent Ukraine, but also respects Russia's core security interests there.” In Kotkin’s view, this would mean pushing for an armistice that ends the fighting on the ground and preserves Ukrainian sovereignty, meaning not legally acknowledging Russia’s possession of the territory they have taken during the war. Then, negotiations can proceed. Beebe adds that a treaty on how conventional forces can be used in Europe will be important, one that establishes limits on where and how militaries can be deployed. “[Russia] need[s] some understanding with the West about what we're all going to agree to rule out in terms of interference in the other's domestic affairs,” Beebe said. Critical to these objectives is dialogue with Putin, which Beebe says Washington has not done enough to facilitate. U.S. officials have stated publicly that they do not plan to meet with Putin. The U.S. rejected Putin’s most statements of his willingness to negotiate, which he expressed in an interview with Tucker Carlson in February, citing skepticism that Putin has any genuine intentions of ending the war. “Despite Mr. Putin’s words, we have seen no actions to indicate he is interested in ending this war. If he was, he would pull back his forces and stop his ceaseless attacks on Ukraine,” a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council said in response. But neither side has been open to serious communication. Biden and Putin haven’t met to engage in meaningful talks about the war since it began, their last meeting taking place before the war began in the summer of 2021 in Geneva. Weiss says the U.S. should make it clear that those lines of communication are open. “Any strategy that involves diplomatic outreach also has to be sort of undergirded by serious resolve and a sense that we're not we're not going anywhere,” Weiss said. An end to the war will be critical to long-term global stability. Russia will remain a significant player on the world stage, Beebe explains, considering it is the world’s largest nuclear power and a leading energy producer. It is therefore ultimately in the U.S. and Europe’s interests to reach a relationship “that combines competitive and cooperative elements, and where we find a way to manage our differences and make sure that they don't spiral into very dangerous military confrontation,” he says. As two major global superpowers, the U.S. and Russia need to find a way to share the world. Only genuine, long-term planning can ensure that Washington will be able to shape that future in its best interests.](https://responsiblestatecraft.org/media-library/following-a-largely-preordained-election-vladimir-putin-was-sworn-in-last-week-for-another-six-year-term-as-president-of-russia.jpg?id=34283894&width=1245&height=700&quality=90&coordinates=0%2C77%2C0%2C77)
