In September we will mark the 23rd annual memorial for the 9/11 attacks. It also will be 30 years since Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat signed the Oslo peace accords that included creation of a Palestinian state.
The accords have since gone dormant and our policies in the Middle East have reignited furious passions ‒ a reminder that the risks in war are no greater than the risks in peace.
For two generations, the United States has gambled in the far, oil-rich deserts where war and oppression have become the rule and the headline. We have waffled with Israel on the most sensitive flash points of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We have allowed the International Criminal Court to be smeared and threatened. Under Trump, we blessed the contested city of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and ended our long-running aid for Palestinian refugee camps. Under Biden we fret over the slaughter in Gaza and the West Bank.
As Israel’s grudging partner, we are a co-conspirator in a region where we continue to demonstrate our ignorance of the land, its cultures, its complex history. Small wonder that we are hated there yet.
Over the decades we have sent to that region nuclear capability. We have sold aircraft and arms and extended credit. We have offered industrial know-how and technical assistance and we have invited investment opportunities.
And all of this for nations that with the exception of Israel are so oil-rich that they could, if inclined, restart heavy pressure on the world petroleum market. (Israel has its own treasury here.)
This has been a high price to pay for our version of group therapy. And it’s an even higher price now, because the Palestine question remains unsettled in a region ripe with the potential for all-out war.
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In earlier years, we paid for gala desert receptions for our dignitaries while buying options on oil, although on an open market. We thought we were buying a new sphere of influence and shutting out the Russians.
We set loose domestic drillers and invaded Iraq to recover and protect its vast oil reserves. Against the global turn to cleaner fuel and alternative energy sources, Washington remains handicapped by repeated failures to engage and understand the Arab region.
The Middle East holds historic attraction for empire builders. American fits and twitches recall the British spasms as the footings of its desert empire began to collapse. The French, the Turks, and Russians also lost their shirts trying to control the region. We were at war there for 20 years at a cost of thousands of lives – Americans, innocents, insurgents – and, at last count, more than $5 trillion. And yet there is no end in sight to the bloodshed or to the hemorrhage of dollars, euros and rubles.
As America buys peace and power with U.S. Treasury borrowings and tax cuts for arms manufacturers, the national debt tops $30 trillion.
This is no fault of Trump’s Tillerson or Pompeo, or Biden’s Blinken. So long as presidents and the Congress want it this way, our few remaining diplomats try to hold things together. Even with our full and mortgaged pockets, it remains hard to bargain with the wily Arabs and their cousins across the Red Sea.
Does America want it this way at the price of inflation at home, the peace abroad falling away, our power growing illusory against the Russians and Chinese?
If you think this has nothing to do with the home front, visit a gas station, a
grocery store, a car lot, a farm export office.
Congress aside, Americans really haven’t come to grips with this question. The problems are too complicated, too fragmented, too rarely explained in full, clear and accurate terms.
Nor is the question often put with any frankness. It is far easier to be concerned with a president’s age, or where our cars are made, whether the fuel for them comes from oil or lithium. We should worry whether there will be any fuel at all. We head toward catastrophe, and a good part of the globe could burn away before the next anniversary of Nine-Eleven.
