What could the United States and its allies have done? Well, it is undeniable that we could do more than we have so far. We could have worked with our allies to impose a no-fly zone over the country, to establish humanitarian corridors for the dislocated, to make regions of the country off-limits to the fighting, and to arm select rebel groups. We could have put more pressure on the Russians to abandon their criminal support of Bashar al-Assad -- and let's be clear, if Assad and his cronies are ever brought up on human rights violations, their Russian sponsors and enablers ought to also be held accountable. We could have worked more aggressively with regional leaders to support their militaries taking a more active role in the crisis. Indeed, by the standards of past U.S. responses to similar crises, the reality is we could hardly have done less.
Iran too will come up as an issue in the president's discussions. He will again offer himself and his resolve as the principal U.S. deliverable. But the reality of the situation is illustrated well by the lead story in Monday's Washington Post suggesting that the U.S. sanctions regime -- robust as it no doubt is -- has yet to have the desired effect of dissuading the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon. This is a classic dog-bites-man story. No one who has studied sanctions believed that they would have much effect. Sanctions almost never do.
Much has been made of this administration's "light footprint" approach to counterterrorism. What has received less attention is its simultaneous "light footprint" approach to every other aspect of its involvement in the Middle East. Maybe this is sensible. Certainly, as we reflect on this week's 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we can see that overreaction and too much intervention certainly carries with it great risks and high price. But, we are also learning of a great hidden cost associated with fiascos like our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We overreact to our overreactions. We conclude that the only alternative to too much is too little.
The problem of course, is that doing too little to address problems -- focusing on photo ops rather than the real strategic spadework needed to put a lid on the region's unrest, on building new alliances and new partnerships and on mustering the resources necessary to support them -- invites the kind of calamities that require much more costly interventions or dangerous outcomes later on. Appeasement was the natural response to the horrors of World War I. It was also a fatal error.
I am not saying America needs to single-handedly intervene to clean up the problems of the Middle East. We have proven the hard way that we can't and we shouldn't. Rather, we need to figure out how we can act more effectively in concert with others. This requires a strategic vision of a new set of alliances and mechanisms designed to deal with the kind of problems the Middle East is sending our way. It actually requires that we realize that the Israel-Palestine issue is not only not central to U.S. concerns in the region, it is a dangerous distraction.
If the president really wanted to advance the cause of peace in the Middle East, he would be better off traveling to Berlin, Paris, Brussels, and London to work on remaking a more effective alliance with America's European partners there who are essential to any lasting solution, to Moscow to explain to the Russians that he will no longer coddle them if they will so recklessly endanger regional and international stability, to Beijing to find a way to deepen U.S. working relations with China, and to the moderate countries of the Middle East to encourage the formation of a more effective partnership to find regional solutions for regional problems. Obama would also do the heavy lifting on Capitol Hill and with American voters to find more money for real aid programs today to avoid costlier interventions tomorrow. These efforts will no doubt be frustrating, time-consuming, and take place behind the scenes -- and, it must be acknowledged, some limited progress is already being made on some of these fronts. But more must be done. Time is running out on some of these problems, and it is hard not to wonder if, with regard to Syria and Iran, at least, we will all too soon reap the whirlwind.
In other words, not only is the president an inadequate deliverable for the problems faced by Israel and the Palestinians, he is delivering that inadequate deliverable to deal with the wrong problem at the wrong time in the wrong way. It is time, as many in high places on the Obama team well know, for strategy to supplant optics in America's national security strategy and diplomacy.
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