Diplomacy & Crisis News

Le philosophe et sociologue Bruno Latour élabore, dans deux récents essais, une réponse politique autant qu'épistémologique à la crise environnementale contemporaine. Abandonnant les outils de la sociologie des sciences pour ceux d'une métaphysique d'ordre très général, le propos se veut allègre et « (...) / Écologie, Idées, Intellectuels, Religion, Spiritualité, Environnement - 2017/12

The U.S. president’s State of the Union speech emphasized populism and protectionism, not global affairs. It must be election season already.

Les massacres de masse ont ensanglanté le monde, à toutes les époques et en tout lieu. Mais tous non pas la même postérité. La sélection n'est pas seulement historique, elle est aussi géographique, politique et culturelle. / Afrique, Asie centrale, Caraïbes, Palestine, Rwanda, Colonialisme, Génocide, (...) / Afrique, Asie centrale, Caraïbes, Palestine, Rwanda, Colonialisme, Génocide, Seconde guerre mondiale 1939-1945, Amérique du Nord, Esclavage - 2008/12

Passée en un demi-siècle de six à vingt-cinq membres, l'Union européenne rencontre des difficultés à exprimer la communauté de destin qui la légitimerait. Les auteurs du préambule de la future Constitution se disent « persuadés que les peuples de l'Europe, tout en restant fiers de leur identité et de leur (...) / Europe, Intégration régionale, Culture, Histoire, Identité culturelle - 2003/08

The government says the state of emergency will facilitate rescue work. In Syria, its unclear whether the government will help or hurt aid efforts.

A landmark class-action lawsuit in South Africa could set a precedent for holding multinational corporations responsible for environmental damages.

Netanyahu’s latest reforms come straight from the autocrat’s playbook.

Can Moscow learn from its failures in Ukraine?

Turkey may have just experienced the most devastating natural disaster in its history. Ten provinces in the country’s southeast were flattened by powerful earthquakes in a matter of hours, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. Temperatures are freezing and survivors are in danger of freezing to death before rescuers can dig them out of the rubble.

The disaster is still unfolding. There is now a massive homelessness problem. Even in cases where houses were not destroyed, many will be uninhabitable due to structural damage. The sheer level of urban destruction is so vast that, in addition to losing their homes, inhabitants of the region are likely to have lost their jobs too.

While natural disasters such as earthquakes are unpredictable, the Turkish government should and could have been better prepared to avoid this worst-case scenario. In the coming days, citizens and opposition politicians are going to demand answers to three uncomfortable questions.

The first relates to the availability of emergency funds, specifically intended for earthquake relief. Following a deadly earthquake in 1999, the state imposed a permanent tax on all Turkish homeowners to contribute to a fund, so that the country would be financially prepared for the next destructive earthquake. Estimates suggest that the state has collected close to $40 billion. Where are these funds? In 2020, reporters asked President Recep Tayyip Erdogan this very question. He replied with a non-answer, remarking “We spent the [funds] on what was necessary. I really do not have the time to explain what the money was spent on.” Since 2012, public disclosure of government spending has been censored, thereby making it virtually impossible to determine how these funds were spent.

The second question relates to building regulations. Following the 1999 quake, the state imposed more stringent building regulations, specifically designed to ensure that buildings are as resistant to earthquakes as much as possible. The destruction of entire city blocks in towns like Hatay, Antakya, and Iskenderun strongly indicates that buildings were not up to code. Who is responsible? The government will be tempted to vilify individual contractors and builders, but not the party officials that run municipalities and thus issue building and zoning permits. In other words, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Erdogan will do everything it can to escape the embarrassment and blame. It will be interesting to see how they pull that off in light of the public infrastructure that has also sustained severe damage. Scores of municipal buildings and hospitals have collapsed.

The last question focuses on the government’s emergency response, or lack thereof. Admittedly, the magnitude of the earthquakes was so vast that any prepared government would struggle to mount a meaningful response. Yet citizens in the affected areas are complaining about the total lack of emergency services, prompting some to ask, “where is the state?” In the initial forty-eight hours, the government hesitated to deploy the Turkish military, which has significant resources such as personnel and heavy lifting equipment. This hesitation may have resulted in the loss of thousands of lives Moreover, the country’s premier emergency response agency (AFAD) is under increasing public scrutiny. The organization is accused of mounting an unacceptably slow response to a major national disaster.

Right now, Erdogan’s primary concern appears to be political optics Two days after the disaster, Erdogan declared a state of emergency for two months in the affected areas. The timing is awkward, to put it mildly: the emergency will end one week before the intended date of Turkey’s national elections. Coincidentally, a state of emergency will allow the government to control the media—specifically, control over negative reporting that might lay the blame for subsequent rebuilding and humanitarian challenges on the government.

Erdogan likely understands that this earthquake may be his greatest political challenge yet. In a fiery public appearance, instead of acknowledging the level of public trauma the country was facing, Erdogan warned that he would target individuals “spreading lies” about the national disaster.

With so much devastation and so much at stake politically, Erdogan could try to pump the brakes on holding the elections slated for May 14. Many of the public buildings where citizens usually vote have been damaged. Even if they are intact, citizens will be primarily concerned with rebuilding their livelihoods. The government may thus try to exploit the situation and forestall what was slated to be a close election by citing citizens’ inability to participate in the voting process.

Such a strategy could backfire rather badly. The earthquake has gained international attention. Should the government fail to address the needs of the people and then attempt to cancel elections, this could be too much for the Turkish population to bear. And their frustrations will be obvious to the international community that is working overtime to raise funds for the beleaguered people of Turkey.

What well-wishers may not quite understand is that Erdogan and the AKP have been in power for twenty years. And while the political elite may not be responsible for a natural disaster, the aftershocks are as much political as they are seismic.

Sinan Ciddi is a non-resident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s Turkey Program and Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP). He is also an Associate Professor of Security Studies at the Command and Staff College-Marine Corps University and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Image: Mustafa Kirazli/Shutterstock.com.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a Russian intelligence analyst. It is March 1, 2020. Your task is to determine why President Donald Trump authorized the Doha Agreement, a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Suppose you know the following facts:

1. Donald Trump is known to watch the television show Tucker Carlson Tonight.

2. Tucker Carlson has said that Afghanistan “is never going to become a civilized country.”

3. Donald Trump often echoes Tucker Carlson’s rhetoric about caring for Americans first.

Ergo, you conclude that Tucker Carlson is the intellectual architect of the Doha Agreement. You report that Carlson is “Trump’s Brain,” the grand strategist, the hidden hand in plain view.

Does this sound plausible? Carlson is not a policymaker, nor does he provide policy-relevant advice. Moreover, Trump had long advocated for a U.S. withdrawal himself. To attribute so much influence to a television host seems like an absurd leap in logic. And yet—over the past year, many political commentators have alleged that Alexander Dugin, a far-right Russian television personality, was the intellectual architect of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. His supposed influence on Putin and Russian elites has become a recurring theme in Western media coverage.

In the first half of 2022 alone, Dugin was mentioned in Foreign Affairs and featured in both The New York Times and The Washington Post. Smaller publications, like the left-leaning Jacobin, the center-right Bulwark, and the Jewish Tablet all ran similar stories. Even the YouTube-famous intellectual Jordan Peterson later claimed that Putin “collaborates in his thinking with a genuine philosopher, Alexander Dugin.” The assassination of Dugin’s daughter in August, allegedly by Ukrainian security forces, has since raised his profile even further.

What many commentators get wrong, besides overrating Dugin’s prominence, is the complex relationship between intellectuals and politics. They mistakenly assume that: 1) Patronage means proximity, 2) ideology equates to strategy, and 3) using a thinker’s favorite jargon means embracing his specific ideas. In reality, intellectuals peddling big ideas are rarely in the driver’s seat of politics—especially in autocracies without freedom of expression. Dugin is no exception.

Fallacy #1: Patronage Means Proximity

Before we get ahead of ourselves—who is Alexander Dugin? According to an influential Foreign Affairs article, he is “Putin’s Brain,” a “professor at Russia’s top university, Moscow State University, and the head of the national sociological organization Center for Conservative Studies” from 2008–2014. True enough, though he was only an adjunct, not a full professor, and his research center was national only in name. He was also abruptly fired from Moscow State after students protested his call to “Kill! Kill! Kill!” Ukrainians in the 2014 invasion of Donbas. Since then, he has worked as the editor of the pro-regime television channel, Tsargrad TV.

These posts strengthened Dugin’s reputation in the West as a philosopher and advisor to Putin. But a cursory look at his career reveals that he is just one of many pawns in Putin’s curated media ecosystem. The regime’s “political technologists” are known to impersonally employ thousands of media personalities like Dugin to shape public opinion. These personalities do not control their public profile, nor do their ideas necessarily even reflect official policy. The regime also sponsors extremists and pseudo-oppositionists to make itself look moderate in comparison.

Before his stint at Moscow State, Dugin had played some small television roles on Russia’s Channel One. Like everyone else, his profile waxed and waned depending on Putin’s needs. In the early 2000s, when Putin aligned with the United States in the Global War on Terror, ultra-nationalists like Dugin were given less airtime and pushed into the “opposition.” They were then somewhat rehabilitated after the Color Revolutions in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005) created a need for more nationalistic content. This was what increased Dugin’s notoriety. But there is no evidence that Dugin ever came in contact with Putin.

Indeed, Dugin has never claimed to have met Putin, nor has he spoken as though he has. In a rambling VKontakte post after his firing from Moscow State, Dugin wrote: “There are two identities to Putin - the patriotic, heroic (solar) and the one inclined toward liberalism and compromises of the West (lunar). Therefore it is impossible to rule out that the decision to dismiss me was taken by one half, obviously the lunar.” Such a man, who has played the role of an academic, opposition leader, talking head, and regime loyalist, seems much more like a court jester than an éminence grise. He too might profit from a window into Putin’s brain.

Fallacy #2: Ideology Equates to Strategy

Dugin’s current standing is often misinterpreted through his past intellectual achievements. In the 1990s, he found his first major patrons in Igor Rodionov (then head of the Russian General Staff Academy) and Leonid Ivashov (then head of defense cooperation with other post-Soviet states). Both generals supported the failed 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev to forestall the USSR’s dissolution. Rodionov invited Dugin to lecture at the General Staff Academy from 1992–95 to fill the post-Soviet ideological vacuum, while Ivashov secured funding for Dugin to turn his lectures into a best-selling monograph, The Foundations of Geopolitics (1997).

Commentators have characterized Foundations as a strategic blueprint for the Putin era. But I sincerely doubt, as one writer alleges in The Washington Post, that Putin has followed the book’s “counsel to the letter.” Dugin’s chief contention is that the Cold War was only one phase of an eternal and occult struggle between civilizations of “land,” i.e. Russia, and “sea,” i.e. the United States and its allies. Russia’s destiny, he argues, is to build a multipolar order by re-uniting post-Soviet “Eurasia.” The framing is unusual but offers no new strategic insights. Neither Putin nor the generals needed Dugin to convince them that the USSR’s dissolution was a disaster.

More importantly, the book contains little intelligible counsel. It is several hundred pages of intellectual history and philosophical exegesis. Here is a representative quote: “Geopolitics as it exists today is certainly a secular, ‘profane’ and secularised science. But perhaps, among all the other modern sciences, it has preserved in itself the greatest connection with tradition and with traditional sciences. René Guénon said that modern chemistry is the result of the desacralization of the traditional science of alchemy, and modern physics is the result of magic. Similarly, modern geopolitics [results from] sacred geography.” What is Putin to do with this?

Strategy is about connecting means to ends. It involves calculating risk, deciding on the most prudent sequence of actions, and adapting to a changing environment. Dugin is not interested in any of this. When he offers advice in Foundations, he often proposes extravagant ideas like partitioning northern China with Japan while supporting Chinese expansion into Southeast Asia “as geopolitical compensation.” He never reflects on whether Russia has the means—the military capability, state capacity, and economic resources—to achieve these maximalist ends.

To be fair, Dugin does make one seemingly prescient suggestion—he encourages “separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts” in the United States. Western observers have made much of this thought. Did Foundations influence Putin when he decided to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election? Likely not. Besides being an unoriginal idea (fomenting civil unrest was a well-known Soviet tactic), the quote is also vague and impossibly hard to find, appearing in a single throwaway line in a twenty-page section about “space in the West of Eurasia.” Other famous recommendations are presented in equal abstraction. They reflect the imagination of an ideologist—not a strategist.

Fallacy #3: Using a Thinker’s Favorite Jargon Means Embracing His Specific Ideas

Nonetheless, some observers suggest that the increasing references to “Eurasia” in Russian foreign policy initiatives point to the influence of Dugin’s overall vision. For instance, in May 2014, three months after the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan signed a treaty forming the Eurasian Economic Union, a customs union meant to reduce trade barriers across post-Soviet states. The organization replaced the Eurasian Economic Community, an ineffectual predecessor founded in 2000 during the height of Dugin’s intellectual profile.

The attempt to establish a connection between Dugin’s ideas and Eurasian integration is highly dubious, to say the least. One useful window into the foreign policy debate in Russia at the turn of the millennium is Dmitri Trenin’s 2003 book, End of Eurasia. Although Trenin cites Dugin as an influential theorist of “Eurasia,” he also refers to a dozen other geopolitical thinkers working with the idea. Indeed, U.S. statesman Zbigniew Brzezinski had also outlined a strategic concept of “Eurasia” in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, which was translated into Russian in 1999.

There is a red herring during this period as Dugin does enter the halls of power in 1999—at least nominally—becoming an advisor to the Speaker of the Duma (the lower legislative house) and the chair of the geopolitical section of the Duma’s Advisory Council on National Security. But Russian foreign policy lies primarily in the hands of the executive. And though Boris Yeltsin was ineffectual, his deputy Yevgeny Primakov (foreign minister, 1996–98; prime minister, 1998–99) had been trying to restore Russian foreign policy to its old direction for several years.

In fact, Primakov had been expounding a Eurasian outlook as early as 1992. Speaking to the Moscow Institute of International Relations, he said: “Russia is both Europe and Asia, and this geopolitical location continues to play a tremendous role in the formulation of its foreign policy. Its [interests] include China, India, and Japan, and not just the United States or Europe. They also include the Middle East and the ‘Third World.’ Without such geopolitical scope, Russia cannot continue to be a great power and to play the positive role it has been destined to play.”

Given that Soviet security officials had conducted multi-theater planning from Afghanistan to Poland throughout the Cold War, the reemergence of a “Eurasian” outlook in Russian security circles should be rather unsurprising. When books allege that Dugin’s ideological “Eurasianism began to creep into mainstream discourse” because “a new set of foreign policy guidelines issued in 2000 described Russia’s most important strength as its ‘geopolitical position as the largest Eurasian state,’” one might ask when such ideas were not part of mainstream discourse.

An Old and Dangerous Temptation

Alexander Dugin does not exercise exceptional political influence in Putin’s Russia. A cursory analysis of his career, his writing, and the ideas around him reveals that he is just one career courtier among thousands. He is no Rasputin, no silver bullet, but one piece in a much larger puzzle. In this respect, the extensive coverage of Dugin offers a general lesson. It is tempting to look to intellectuals to make sense of opaque autocracies. Their crisp ideas seem to cut through the fog of palace intrigue and false opinion. But the insight they offer is almost always illusory.

This is an old and dangerous temptation. Eighty years ago, in trying to explain the Second World War, U.S. media outlets identified the Nazi-affiliated intellectual Karl Haushofer as the architect of Hitler’s grand strategy. Commentators pointed to his alleged academic postings, his musings on world domination, and apparent echoes of his ideas as proof of his influence. But Haushofer never made it into Hitler’s inner circle. The entire line of analysis was misplaced. We now know that Hitler changed his behavior depending on the strategic environment that the Allies created.

What we really need to know today—and hopefully Western intelligence agencies already do—is what Putin’s policy process looks like. How does he take counsel? What will make him think twice? It is important to get these answers right. Only then can one begin to determine what concrete actions might change Russian behavior. Simply identifying Russia as a philosophical enemy does not get us closer to a coherent strategic vision. To respond forcefully and effectively to Putin’s invasion, we must not conflate exercises in intellectual history for strategic analysis.

Alex Hu is a student at Yale University. He can be reached at alex.hu@yale.edu.

Image: Fars Media Corporation/Wikimedia Commons.

Oddsmakers in New York and Las Vegas give Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida a roughly one in four chance of being elected the next president of the United States. Those odds are as good as anybody’s right now. There is growing interest in what a DeSantis presidency might look like. But what are the governor’s public policy priorities? Is there a DeSantis doctrine? I’ll suggest there is, and it seems to have three main components:

1. Politically - govern effectively and win elections.

2. Domestically - preserve traditional freedoms and push back against the woke-industrial complex.

3. Internationally - guard against America’s self-described adversaries overseas.

Politically, the appeal of DeSantis is straightforward: he wins. Not only that, he does so by a large margin, while governing effectively. The governor won re-election in November by a landslide. He defeated his opponent Charlie Crist by almost 20 points. DeSantis won counties and constituencies that are not supposed to vote Republican. Miami-Dade county, typically a Democratic Party stronghold, cast its ballots for the governor. So did Hispanic voters throughout the state. DeSantis has shown he can win over swing constituents. A state once considered purple is now—Democrats worry—lost to them. For conservatives, it’s a promising indicator of what might be accomplished on the national level.

Of course, Republicans will first have to decide whether they want to win elections, govern effectively, and exercise political power on behalf of a conservative agenda. If the answer is no, then Florida’s governor may not be the guy.

Also worth noting is the DeSantis style of governance. By all accounts, he has an appetite for information, combined with skepticism toward the notion that the experts are always right. He pores over data and listens to a range of opinions, then decides for himself. It was exactly this approach that led him to reject the conventional wisdom during the early weeks and months of the pandemic shutdown, and correctly so. Of course, this was viewed as madness by liberal critics at the time. Nevertheless, he persisted, and was vindicated in the end.

DeSantis also revealed a similar administrative proficiency in his response to Hurricane Ian last year. Florida has over 22 million people, and it is an unusually big, diverse state possessing an economy larger than most countries. Governing it successfully is no small task. Proven executive skills from outside of the Beltway will be of interest to American voters in the coming year.

In terms of his domestic policy outlook, perhaps the most striking aspect of the governor’s approach is his willingness to directly take on what might be called the woke-industrial complex. Most conservatives understand that the ideology of left-wing identity politics now serves as a kind of substitute religion for powerful socioeconomic interests in this country. This was not true in Ronald Reagan’s time, but it is now. For that reason, while Reagan was an excellent president, his approach cannot simply be photocopied to face the challenges of today. DeSantis made this point explicitly in a fascinating address to the National Conservativism conference in Miami last September.

As the governor suggested in that address, a baseline conservative American commitment within the economic realm is to free enterprise, individual liberty, and material opportunity for ordinary citizens. Hard work should be rewarded, and self-destructive socialistic schemes avoided. Obviously, DeSantis has no objection to a market economy. As he put it, “I’m not a central planner.” Both his words and his actions as governor indicate his determination to create and safeguard a friendly environment for business entrepreneurship whether big or small. Florida has flourished as a result. It is a point of pride.

Where DeSantis departs from strict libertarians—and this is where you should watch his speech for yourself, rather than relying on hostile journalistic misrepresentations—is in calling out what he correctly identifies as the danger of woke capitalists, and then doing something about it.

As Vivek Ramaswamy argued persuasively in his book Woke, Inc., one of the most disturbing trends in American life during recent years has been the fusion of left-wing identity politics with large chunks of corporate power. Some prominent multinational business, industrial, and financial leaders in this country seem to feel the need to constantly signal their liberal virtue by picking sides in the Left’s never-ending culture war against the rest of us. Moreover, in certain cases, these leaders exercise what amounts to a monopoly, notably in high technology. This is where DeSantis comes in. As he said in his September address: “Corporatism is not free enterprise….They are trying to enforce an orthodoxy on this country.”

The truth is a good many American businessmen, bankers, and industrialists quietly despise this trend toward left-wing identity politics within their own ranks.

Governor DeSantis believes, and evidently is willing to act on the belief, that woke corporate power is a serious threat to traditional American liberties. For example, when a large multinational corporation acts in loose coordination on some controversial public matter alongside a network of social justice activists, Democratic Party politicians, liberal-leaning journalists, politically correct academics, and sympathetic bureaucrats borrowed inside the administrative state, this is not a strictly private matter. It is even less so when that same corporation simultaneously expects subsidies and tax breaks off the public teat. With that in mind, DeSantis has fought and won a series of dustups over a long list of issues including illegal immigration, criminal policing, judicial activism, K through 12 education, Florida’s university system, and gender ideology. The pattern has been the following:

1. The woke-industrial complex demands deference on some controversial issue at the state level inside Florida.

2. DeSantis informs himself on the matter, picks his fights carefully, takes a strong position, and refuses to defer.

3. As it turns out, the majority of Floridians agree with DeSantis. He wins.

4. Rinse and repeat.

Needless to say, this pattern drives woke establishmentarians up the wall. Who does DeSantis think he is! Doesn’t he understand that left-liberal elites get to play referee, even as they lead one team on the field in this country’s two-party system?

Still, the governor persists in standing up to the woke-industrial complex—and winning. His recent successful fight with the College Board over the teaching of African-American history is only the latest example. Should students learn African-American history? Yes, without any doubt. Taxpayer support for aggressively left-wing ideologies foisted on our students under the guise of said history? No.

This is a dramatic victory for a sane, welcome approach to higher education, as opposed to the fanatical nonsense we’ve seen from progressives over the past several years. DeSantis has now proposed that university DEI bureaucracies within the state of Florida should be defunded, allowing them to “wither on the vine.” This is how to do it. He is demonstrating that we need not accept some sort of left-wing Brezhnev doctrine inside the United States when it comes to rolling back woke insanity. Conservatives all around the country have noticed.

In the next installment of this series, I examine the DeSantis doctrine internationally.

Colin Dueck is a Professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and a senior non-resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Image: Hunter Crenian/Shutterstock.com.

Last year was a tumultuous one for the relationship between the United States and its key security partners in the Gulf. Each side was disappointed by the other, and the resulting disagreements spilled out into the public instead of being quietly resolved behind closed doors. Diplomatic differences have resonated politically in all capitals, further limiting the ability of each side to be seen as offering concessions to the other. It’s not difficult to imagine these long-enduring partnerships falling away completely in the coming years through neglect, if not intent. And yet, the circumstances may finally be right to achieve a longstanding objective—designing a system of integrated Gulf defenses that protects mutual national security interests on a sustainable basis. Leaders need to recognize this and take advantage of the opportunity.

During periods like these, it is important to recall the national security interests that have long bound the United States and the Gulf. Those fundamental interests have not changed, and the primary question before policymakers is whether chosen policies serve to secure those interests or undermine them.

The United States has a vital interest in ensuring that no regional adversary has both the capacity and the will to attack the U.S. homeland, Americans abroad, or the key security partners Washington relies on for local intelligence, placement, access, and diplomatic support to advance this and other core interests. This drives U.S. efforts to combat terrorism in the region and to deter adversaries from seeking weapons of mass destruction and otherwise employing destabilizing military capabilities. Today, the Iranian regime checks all the boxes: it’s the world’s most prominent state sponsor of terrorism, it’s pursuing an inherently threatening nuclear program, and—alone among all of the governments in the world—it routinely gives advanced precision weaponry to nonstate actors and directs them to target civilians across borders. The United States and its Gulf partners share a vital national security interest in combating these malign behaviors and have thus worked toward those ends ever since the 1979 revolution allowed the Iranian regime to seize power.

The United States also has a vital interest in the global price of oil, for reasons that span security considerations (oil’s centrality to the functioning of our military), economic considerations (the impact of oil prices on growth and inflation), geopolitical considerations (our partners elsewhere who depend on oil sourced from the Gulf) and political considerations (the impact of gas prices at home and abroad). Despite campaign trail rhetoric about American “energy independence,” once in office, U.S. presidents in both parties discover, to their frustration, that they must care deeply about oil prices, especially when they get too high or too low.

It is also a stubborn fact that the market price of this global commodity remains disproportionately driven by actions taken in the Gulf, especially by Saudi Arabia. This reality is unlikely to change materially for decades to come, even under the most optimistic energy transition scenarios. Given this, the United States long ago decided that protecting the free flow of oil from the Gulf to locations determined by market demand—a historically atypical anti-mercantilist approach—would best protect that core interest. Today, again, the primary threat to this interest is Tehran, which openly threatens—and, indeed, has used—military force against both energy production facilities and the vessels that carry oil out of the Gulf. And, once more, this U.S. policy has aligned with the vital interests of its partners in the region.

While these interests remain constant, both the threats to them and the means to protect them change over time. Thus, U.S. and Gulf policies also need to shift, both in response to and in anticipation of these evolving threats.

The most important change in the regional threat assessment is Iran’s homegrown development of highly capable precision weaponry that can be used to strike targets at a distance with pinpoint accuracy. This is what allowed Tehran to strike Saudi energy infrastructure in 2019 and allowed its proxy to kill innocents at the Abu Dhabi airport in 2022. The inherent value of these weapons was clearly demonstrated when Russia requested Iranian assistance in Ukraine, a remarkable break from Russia’s proud tradition of military self-reliance and a complete reversal of the situation in Syria in 2015, when Russian air power came to the aid of Iranian-backed ground forces. Moreover, these weapons’ precision serves to lower the threshold for their use in the Gulf, as we have already witnessed, thus raising the risk of unintended escalation.

Our partners in the Gulf are also building their own military capabilities. In the past, the United States was required to provide the near entirety of the military forces needed to protect the free flow of energy from the Gulf. Today, and even more so in the years ahead, our local partners will be increasingly capable of sharing this burden. Even more significantly, given the nature of these new weapons systems and the realities imposed by the region’s geography, U.S. partners in the Gulf have begun to appreciate the benefit—indeed the necessity—of launching a more cooperative approach toward defensive measures. For far too long, intra-Gulf rivalries prevented such an approach. But today, there is a growing recognition that each nation cannot unilaterally secure its own airspace and maritime interests. Moreover, the expansion of relations following the Abraham Accords and the transfer of the U.S. military area of responsibility for Israel from U.S. European Command to U.S. Central Command is driving new opportunities for security cooperation within the Gulf and beyond.

Given these dynamics, the door is finally open to build a multilateral, fully integrated air and missile defense system, and to achieve far greater multilateral cooperation within the established maritime security structures. U.S. military planners have long recognized the potential utility of such steps in protecting the above-mentioned national security interests, but the circumstances have not allowed them to proceed. Now they are.

Encouraging initial steps are already being taken at the most senior levels, but there is a very long way to go before the journey is anywhere close to complete. The U.S. Fifth Fleet launched Task Force 59 to integrate unmanned systems over a year ago, and secret talks reportedly took place last March among military leaders from Israel, the United States, and key Arab countries. Little is said publicly on the subject, but USCENTCOM commander Gen. Michael Kurilla has indicated that this subject is a priority, and Fifth Fleet commander Vice Adm. Brad Cooper has set a goal of having 100 unmanned surface vessels in the Gulf by this summer, only one-fifth of which will be from the United States. President Joe Biden privately raised the issue of integrated defenses during his trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia in July 2022, and reports have since been published about plans for a future Red Sands Integrated Experimentation Center and hopes for a proposed Middle East Air Defense Alliance. Moreover, the year ended with the Deterring Enemy Forces and Enabling National Defenses Act, driven by a bipartisan, bicameral group of lawmakers, which will provide the necessary funding for such an endeavor.

Of course, none of this progress has been lost on Tehran, which has issued public threats of a “decisive response to the nearest and most accessible targets” should the Gulf agree to “a joint defense pact in the region by the U.S. with [the] participation and hidden management of Zionists.” Of course, such threats are exactly why the United States and its partners should build a system of fully integrated defenses in the Gulf. Getting there will require four fundamental policy decisions.

The first and most critical policy decision is for the United States to commit to a future in which it remains intimately bound to Gulf security. In previous decades, such commitments could be made privately or remain within the purview of military and security professionals. Today, however, the single most important factor in the region, driving decisions by partners and adversaries alike, is the widespread perception of America’s withdrawal from the Gulf. Therefore, the above-mentioned quiet diplomacy on integrated air, missile, and maritime security is now insufficient. A public case needs to be made for a new security relationship between the United States and its Gulf partners, and it must be designed to receive bipartisan support.

Of course, American domestic politics makes doing so a tall order in the wake of an unsatisfying war in Iraq, a failed war in Afghanistan, the enduring resonance of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the involvement of Middle East leaders in U.S. domestic politics, and the continuing public sniping and policy differences between the U.S. and Gulf leaders. Unless these dynamics are reversed, they threaten to eventually turn the region’s expectation of a U.S. withdrawal into a self-fulfilling prophecy. But reversing this perception is nevertheless needed to protect U.S. interests. This cannot be accomplished if American presidents threaten to turn our partners into “pariahs” or openly question whether the United States should protect the free flow of energy.

Leaders in the Gulf also have fundamental policy decisions to make. Thus, the second critical policy decision to be made is a mirror of the first: Gulf leaders must openly commit to a future in which the United States remains their primary—and, in certain aspects, their sole—security partner. This would require them to cease their oft-repeated threats to turn to China or Russia to fill perceived security voids. In some cases, this decision should be relatively straightforward—most obviously for Bahrain, the longtime host of U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters. For others, it remains an open question as to whether such a decision will be taken—especially for Saudi Arabia under its still relatively new leadership. Regional leaders will also need to recognize that such a commitment carries with it the need to ensure that American support remains bipartisan for decades to come. This is undercut every time decisions are made that are widely perceived to be advancing the interests of one American political party over another.

Third, Gulf leaders must make the decision to fully cooperate. If this was an easy task, it would have been accomplished long ago. Of course, the leaders of any state would naturally seek to avoid circumstances, if at all possible, in which they must rely on others to ensure their security. It is far preferable to jealously preserve complete freedom of action rather than allow one’s security to be dependent on any neighbor’s goodwill. Only after unilateral efforts to ensure security have proven inadequate do states typically consider cooperative mechanisms. And states that are in the midst of the heady process of building their own militaries or are led by individuals inexperienced in warfare are most prone to overestimate their own abilities to accomplish missions unilaterally, as we have seen in Yemen.

Compounding these generalities are the specific mistrusts and rivalries that have long kept the Gulf divided. There are many reasons why the Middle East doesn’t possess anything close to Europe’s interlocking matrix of multilateral cooperative mechanisms, and those realities won’t be blithely wished away. Only a few years ago, a much smaller subset of countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council went through years of an ill-conceived and largely ineffectual “Gulf Rift” that saw the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia break ties with Qatar. Given this history, maximalist approaches to security cooperation are doomed to fail. Instead, integrative efforts should initially focus only on a small subset of countries—Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—and only on a narrowly defined set of missions: air and maritime defenses.

And finally, a fourth fundamental policy decision must be made jointly by the United States and its Gulf partners. Working toward integrated defensive capabilities can be slow, dry, technocratic work that typically advances only incrementally and on generational timelines. If this work is left only to well-intentioned security experts, the risk remains high that perceptions will fall behind progress and reasons will be found to delay necessary additional program phases. When militaries look to work together, the typical pattern is first to work through the myriad of matters relating to questions of deconfliction; only after that is successful do the counties begin work to build cooperation. And then, once cooperative mechanisms have been established, governments can begin to consider questions of military integration. And finally, only after selected military capabilities have been integrated are governments interested in exploring the most sensitive subjects of building joint systems that are inherently interdependent.

But this project should begin, not end, with a clarion call for interdependence. Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the United States should declare up front that this is the goal. They will be intentionally designing a future together in which they’re each practically incapable of achieving comprehensive air and maritime security in the Gulf without the others. The military systems being established won’t work for any if they don’t work for all. In doing so, the Gulf states will “lock in” the United States as their security partner, which should remove any remaining concerns about the long-term sustainability of the American regional presence.

The Gulf governments have all found it useful to issue vision documents that clearly outline the intended objectives of their policies. In 2008, both Manama and Abu Dhabi published Economic Vision 2030 plans, and Riyadh issued Saudi Vision 2030 in 2016. These three countries, together with the United States, should together issue a joint “Vision 2040 for Integrated Gulf Security,” laying out an ambitious path ahead toward a fully interdependent system of air and missile defenses and far greater multilateral cooperation within the established maritime security structures. With such a joint vision guiding the way, there will be no more questions about America’s withdrawal and Gulf hedging, and U.S. and partner vital interests will be increasingly secure—on a much more sustainable basis.

Will Wechsler is the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs, and the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Combatting Terrorism.

Image: DVIDS.

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