What is the US trying to do?

Via Friday-Lunch-Club

Rami Khouri:

"...One of the important lessons that Obama and his team should have learned by now is that the United States fights these battles with one hand tied behind its back. The US is severely handicapped by a significant lack of credibility that is a direct consequence of its own foreign policy incompetence in the Middle East in the past several decades, especially the past decade. Most people and political movements, and a few governments, in the Middle East neither respect nor fear the US. More and more of them routinely defy the US, or actively resist it when it suits their purposes. At one point the US found itself facing defiance and pushback simultaneously from Arabs, Israelis, Turks and Iranians, all of whom for their own reasons refused to comply with certain American requests, suggestions, threats or demands. The US has a massive military machine that it can use at will in the region, especially via remote controlled drones and missiles; but it has a seriously degraded and limited ability to accomplish any clear goals using old-fashioned diplomacy, soft power, and engagement with the locals across sectors like economics, security, diplomacy, civil society, education and science and technology.

So the priority for the US in the first instance, Obama may have calculated, was to restore its full toolbox of diplomatic and political tools and options, so that it has real capabilities and impact when addressing substantive issues. It may be that its brisk, high-level and sustained work on mediating Arab-Israeli peace-making is designed not to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict in the short run, but to restore the perception of the US in the region as a credible, even-handed mediator and political actor. It may be that all we have witnessed in the past 20 months has aimed primarily to revive the role and capability of the US as a serious diplomatic actor, after it had allowed itself to lapse into irrelevance or impotence. In that respect, it is succeeding. We shall soon see if its procedural advances will be followed up soon by substantive advances."

Posted by G, Z, or B at 10:35 AM

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