After reports this week that Iranian aircraft had bombed ISIS targets in Iraq, US Secretary of State John Kerry denied there was any military coordination between Washington and Tehran.
He then remarked, “I think it’s self-evident that if Iran is taking on ISIS in some particular place and it’s confined to taking on ISIS and it has an impact … the net effect is positive.”
The statement highlighted an odd characteristic of the Obama administration in the Middle East: it has trouble interpreting political or military actions in the region as part of power games affecting America.
Yet Barack Obama came into office claiming to be a political “realist.” His compass, he promised, would be the pursuit of American interests in the world, which is why he refused to implicate the United States in the Syrian conflict.
As he told George Stephanopoulos in September of last year: [W]hat I’ve also said is that the United States can’t get in the middle of somebody else’s civil war. We’re not gonna put troops on the ground. We can’t enforce, militarily, a settlement there.”
In other words, the president, with a cold eye, would do nothing about the horrific carnage in Syria because US national interests did not mandate ending “somebody else’s civil war.”
However, the realist in Obama has mostly been kept under wraps when it comes to playing power relationships in the Middle East. The essence of realism is to grasp how to use power in order to advance one’s goals.
The famous realist political scientist Hans Morgenthau famously wrote in his classic text Politics Among Nations that “international politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power.”
From day one, Iran and Russia viewed the Syrian conflict precisely in those terms. Iran did the same in Iraq, after ISIS overran Mosul and extended its control nearly to Baghdad.
Yet Obama, the declared realist, has systematically failed to do so, and today in Iraq and Syria his administration has shown little consideration for how the conflict in both countries might affect power relations between the United States and Iran, or the United States and Russia.
That perhaps explains why Kerry was so keen to stress the positive in the Iranian air attacks against ISIS, while ignoring what it might mean for American interests in Iraq. How will Washington fare in Iraq if these interests hit up against those of Iran, which has a very different agenda?
The Obama Administration believes that the only way to defeat ISIS is to ensure that the Iraqi political system is more inclusive of Sunnis, so that the Sunni community has a stake in collaborating with the government against the extremists.
Washington has sought to encourage Iraqi unity by pushing the Kurds to settle their dispute with Baghdad over oil revenues. It has also examined ways of directly arming a Sunni militia as well as the Kurdish Peshmerga, so they can become effective fighting forces against ISIS.
Not surprisingly, the Iranian-backed government in Baghdad balked at this. No Iraqi Shiite, and certainly not Iran, wants to see the formation of an independently-armed Sunni force that may overturn the balance of power in Iraq — one encouraged by Iran and that has led to Sunni marginalization.
Iran will never allow its allies in the Iraqi government to sign off on a plan that diminishes its power. America’s options are either to go along with Baghdad, or to ignore its protests and arm the Sunnis and Kurds.
Yet the latter seems unlikely since Obama’s approach has been to build consensus, not generate discord, and the president is not about to alienate the Iraqi government when both are fighting ISIS.
If Iran gets its way, no one should be surprised. After all, Obama recently sent a reassuring letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. According to The Wall Street Journal, the president told the Iranian leader that American military operations inside Syria would not target President Bashar al-Assad or his security forces.
The Iranians surely interpreted the gesture as US recognition of Iranian interests in Syria, so why should they regard America as any less forthcoming in Iraq?
Far from being a realist playing the power game on several game boards simultaneously, Obama has adopted a one-issue approach in the Middle East. Now the headline is defeating terrorism and ISIS — with all else banished from sight.
That is why the White House has so bull-headedly refused to contribute to Assad’s removal from power. What Obama won’t consider is that as long as Assad stays in office sectarian animosity in Syria will remain high, ensuring that ISIS and other extremist groups thrive.
Obama’s minimalism has not only provoked angry reactions in the region, notably in Turkey, it has also generated much uneasiness at the Pentagon. The brass can see that by failing to address the Syrian problem in a decisive way today, Obama is only ensuring the situation becomes worse tomorrow. This could, eventually, have negative consequences for the military.
Give Obama credit. He has dressed up his poor excuse for an Iraqi and Syrian policy in the more respectable robes of realism. Like much the president has done, he has allowed image to displace dismal substance.
But America’s regional foes have Obama’s number and know he’s a lightweight. When will a true realist stand up and declare that this king has no clothes?
Michael Young is opinion editor of The Daily Star newspaper. He tweets @BeirutCalling
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