Whether it is the Arab epicentres in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan and Egypt, the Persian domain or the Asian segment that encompasses Afghanistan and Pakistan, Washington’s foreign policy testaments have rarely been tested so severely ever before. A burning hatred against US diplomacy is slowly reinforcing with strength and vigour. The violent protests across the capitals and major cities of the Islamic world pose a fresh set of challenges for the State Department, Pentagon and the American intelligence community. These negative sentiments are compellingly difficult to ignore and equally complex to cope with.
Tactically, the State Department’s official line on the protests continues to be that these were actually against “the anti-Islamic inflammatory video, not the US as such”. Yet, the heaving up of anti-American sentiments among the Muslims of the world when the US Presidential elections are just a few weeks away, measurably queers the pitch for American policy-makers to resort to any quick fix solutions.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first reactions to the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, at the hands of the Benghazi rebels to whom the US establishment gave weapons and money, summed up Washington’s dilemma and discomfiture. The Republican Presidential aspirant, Mitt Romney, predictably lashed out at President Barack Obama for sending ‘mixed signals to the world’ by his hints of conveying ‘sympathy with the killers’. And then, almost with a haunting degree of trepidation amid clouds of uncertainty, he fervently hoped that the Arab Spring with its potential for incremental terror ‘may not actually become the US winter’. In a similar vein, the conservative sections of US media glibly reminded President Obama that he needs to recall the advice offered to him in the initial phases of Arab Spring by former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The now disgraced Egyptian leader in a telephonic chat on February 1, 2011, had bluntly told the US President: “You don’t understand this part of the world, you’re young.”
The supposed ethic for Arab Spring revolved spreading the message of representative democracy in countries like Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Syria, where singular dictators or political families were ruling the roost over decades, denying the aspirations of their people. But the political ethos and history of the Arab countries was not conducive to building up of the institutions of representative democracy that the US and the West sought to implant.
Under such circumstances, the September 14 attacks on US diplomatic missions, certain German embassies, international schools mentored by Western missions in the Arab world tended to accentuate the wide-ranging political and historical differences in perceptions between the US, the UN and certain Western capitals on the one hand, and the established and emergent Arab leaderships, on the other. Considering the level of disdain for Egypt’s new President, Mohammed Morsi, it comes as no surprise that large sections of Arab intellectuals and apolitical social leaders felt that instead of representative democracy, the US and the West were imposing ‘selective democracy’, hoping to hoist leaders of their choice to positions of power.
In a recent interview, President Morsi said that “it is up to the US to repair relations with the Arab world and to revitalise its alliance with Egypt, a cornerstone of stability in the region”. Underlining another sensitive divide between Washington and the Arab community, he warned that “if the US is asking Egypt to honour its treaty with Israel, it should also live up to its own Camp David commitment to Palestinian self-rule”. Given his ideological ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ background, he more than substantively proves to his detractors and followers alike that he is going to be easy meat for none, where his stewardship of Egypt or leadership of the Arab world are concerned.
The continuing anarchy in Syria adds to Washington’s worries and reinforces the UN’s vulnerability factor in respect to the Arab world. With the distinct possibility of Syrian and Iraqi insurgents coming to a common platform, a new strategic threat to US interests could be in the making, on the lines of a more pronounced yet largely covert linkage between Iran and Syria.
In the Persian realm, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recent public exchanges have angered Israelis and Americans alike. His basic ‘diplomatic mission’ seemed to be to convey Iran’s confidence in its own future. Notwithstanding the threat of the US and Israeli aerial offensive targeting Tehran’s nuclear installations, he sought to project an impress that Iran had the will and capacity to counter these threats.
In taking such a confrontationist stance, President Ahmadinejad seems to have taken a cue from Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong’s philosophy of statecraft. In an interview with American journalist Anna Louise Strong in the 1940s, the Chinese leader had famously said: “The atomic bomb is a paper tiger which American reactionaries use to frighten people. It is the people who decide the outcome of a war, not one or two new weapons.”
Emmdiem@hotmail.com
Menon is a former additional secy, Cabinet Secretariat
