Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2021, pp. 56-57
Waging Peace
SOON AFTER IT BEGAN on July 28, a Quincy Institute virtual panel on the Middle East meandered into a debate on the merits and harms of intervention. The catalyst for discussion was “No Clean Hands: The Interventions of Middle Eastern Powers, 2010-2020,” a recent paper jointly authored by Matthew Petti, a reporter for the institute’s Responsible Statecraft journal, and its executive vice-president Trita Parsi.
“Americans love a heroes and villains story,” said Petti, “especially when it comes to the Middle East.” A dearth of empirical data within public debates about Middle Eastern interventions drove him to write the report, which notes that “five of the six most interventionist powers in the Middle East are armed by the United States—and also enjoy significant political support from Washington.” In the last decade, continued Petti, the “lion’s share of interventions were done by U.S. allies and partners.”
However, Petti emphasized that “No Clean Hands” is true to its title. The data-driven report argues against the common “argument that regional instability is primarily caused by a single ‘malign actor’” like Iran or the United States. Rather, write Petti and Parsi, the data show that “regional instability appears to drive interventions more often than interventions cause instability.”
Ultimately, argued Petti, the United States should strive to seriously reduce its interventions, including those carried out through proxies like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or Israel. Diplomatic options like conditioning aid offer more practical alternatives than sanctions or military force, the reporter said. Since most of the interventions in the region emerge from America’s allies, “we have a lot more leverage than if the instability was coming from our enemies.”
Disagreement arrived in the form of guest panelist Shadi Hamid, a writer at The Atlantic and a self-styled “interventionist.” Hamid swiftly pushed back against Petti and Parsi’s characterization of conditional aid as an alternative to intervention, which he argued requires the U.S. to “take a step towards the Middle East” and engage further with it rather than pull back.
Additionally, Hamid stated his belief in the overall moral value of intervention, especially with regards to “atrocities,” which he said the United States has a “moral imperative” to prevent through engagement with its allies and enemies.
Parsi emphasized that diplomacy is more akin to “doing no harm” than “letting things be.”
“Doing no harm does not mean continuing to sell all these weapons to all these countries,’” said Parsi. “It’s not some laissez faire approach of letting it be as it is—it’s not supporting the status quo.”
Tufts University professor Monica Duffy Toft agreed with the paper’s conclusion that “there are no heroes” when it comes to intervention in the Middle East, but took time to “quibble” with the framing of “No Clean Hands.” Its focus on the decade after the Arab Spring is rather narrow, she argued, and lacks an emphasis on the “great power” politics that she views as critical to understanding instability in the Middle East.
Overall, however, Toft accepted the paper’s analysis of America’s role in the region’s interventions. “The United States systematically and systemically overestimates its influence” in the Middle East, she opined.
Petti concurred, and remarked that in American foreign policy, “it’s considered a kind of default setting that some countries get blank checks while others get unending hostility….We have no problem having moral clarity about our enemies but we get bogged down in nuance when it comes to our friends.”
“I agree that certain interventions are worse than other ones,” Petti concluded. “But this is the point of the paper—just like we can call out evil when our enemies do it, we should be able to say that what our friends are doing is really bad.”
—Max Saltman
