Strategic Blunder: The U.S. in the Middle East

This seminar is organised as part of the new MENA programme.

Despite its superpower status, when it comes to the Middle East, the U.S. has had no clear strategy for securing its interests for more than a decade. To be fair, it must be said that when President Joe Biden took office on January 20, 2021, he inherited an absolute foreign policy mess from former president Donald Trump. This talk will examine the impact of Washington’s disengagement from the Middle East and lack of vision for the region. Despite his best intentions, President Biden struggled to infuse strategic coherence into the U.S. approach to the Middle East. The disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan reinforced the perception that the U.S. was a superpower in decline that had no map for the region's future. Biden's decision -- which was both inevitable and necessary--to refocus U.S attention on restoring its relations with Western Europe, the E.U. and most of all NATO, helped to deepen the sense of U.S drift in the Middle East. But the most important arena of U.S blundering in the Middle East was its policy to Israel and Palestine. Here too Biden inherited a huge mess. Taking the path of least resistance, he embraced Trump "Abraham Accords" strategy (if we can call it that), thus signaling to Israeli leaders that they had no cause to worry that White House would push for a serious resumption of Palestinian-Israeli talks or take steps to stop Israel from its accelerating annexation of West Bank territories. All of this went up in smoke with Hamas' October 7 attack and subsequent massacre of Israel civilians, and Israel's ensuing onslaught into Gaza.

For a host of reasons--his own ideological commitments, pressure from the pro-Israeli lobby, Prime Minister Benjamin's Netanyahu's determination to & "destroy" Hamas--not to mention the absence of any compelling alternative Palestinian leadership-- the Biden White House could not muster the political will to intervene in the Gaza war and impose a ceasefire. Thus it has left in its wake a disaster that the next administration will inherit.

Speaker:

Daniel Brumberg is the Co-Founder and former Director of Democracy and Governance MA Program at Georgetown University and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Arab Center. He is also a co-creator of Georgetown University's In Your Shoes project, an interdisciplinary initiative that uses theater and performance to foster dialogue across the ideological divide. From 2008 through 2015 he served as a Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and as a Special Adviser at the United States Institute of Peace. In addition to his position at Georgetown, he has served as Visiting Professor at Sciences Po in Paris. Prior to coming to Georgetown University he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science at Emory University, a Visiting Fellow in the Middle East Program in the Jimmy Carter Center, and a Lecturer at the University of Chicago's Social Science Masters Program.

Scientific coordinator: Nadia Marzouki, Sciences Po - CERI