By Patricia H. Kushlis
How can the US deal effectively with the Middle East nearly twenty years after the end of the Cold War? What needs to be changed in America’s approach to this increasingly volatile area? Are US policies themselves helping to create, sustain and promote the region’s volatility?
These are questions veteran US Middle East correspondent Stephen Kinzer raises in his latest book, Reset – Iran, Turkey and America’s Future published by Henry Holt and Company earlier this year. This small book – just over 200 easily digestible pages by this experienced journalist and writer – draws on Kinzer’s extensive knowledge of the history of the region as well as - and in particular – the pivotal countries of Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel and America’s relations with them. It is a book that only someone who has had lengthy experience dealing with or, as in Kinzer’s case, covering and living in the region could write with authority, clarity and such seeming ease.
US policies frozen in time
He argues that although a sea-change occurred after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, America’s policies towards countries in the Middle East failed to shift accordingly. Rather they stayed frozen in time. Moreover, he points out, US policies were then and continue to be geared to Cold War-related alliances in the Middle East that no longer adequately serve US interests in the post-Cold War world.
In reality, Reset is not only about Iran, Turkey and the US, it is just as much about America’s troubled alliances with its two favored partners - Israel and Saudi Arabia. And this is the focus of the latter chapters of the book. These two troubled relationships, Kinzer argues, need to be recalculated and re-calibrated in the Cold War’s aftermath just as much as those with Turkey and Iran need to be rethought, reconstructed and ultimately strengthened. The latter, that is, if and when Iran is willing.
Kinzer is a master story teller. His comparison of Turkey’s development into a successful democracy – versus the stagnation of a poorly governed Iran ruled by a succession of repressive governments - except for two brief attempts at democracy and despite a populace that would choose democracy if it could - are insightful.
Turkey and Iran: Two neighbors with different political histories
He intertwines people and politics showing how political history that began during the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century provided the civic foundations upon which today’s democratic Turkish government rests.
In one of the most important chapters, Kinzer compares Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, with Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s shah. Both contemporaries, he points out were autocrats and secularists. Yet why did these these two neighboring countries turn out so differently?
Ataturk, he argues, set the stage for today’s modern Turkey. Smarter, more Europeanized and better educated than Pahlavi, he fathered no heir - or as Kinzer suggests - modern Turkey became his heir. As importantly, he rescued Turkey from dismemberment by the colonial powers in the aftermath of World War I. He and his men fought successfully against British and the French forces and from the conflict he built the Turkish nation-state. In the aftermath his rule was legitimized in Turkish eyes. He and Turkey were beholden to no foreign power.
In contrast, Pahlavi owed his position on the Peacock Throne to the Russians and British. He never acquired the popular legitimacy of Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey. Moreover, Pahlavi’s heir was his son, Mohammad Reza, not the Iranian people or nation. Kinzer’s recounting of these two remarkable men’s lives and their roles in shaping the future directions of their respective countries is fascinating and instructive in and of itself.
Israel and Saudi Arabia
Kinzer uses a similar historically-based story-telling approach to America’s relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia. His analysis and history tracks with much else I have read about these increasingly difficult partnerships – although certain details were new to me. Such as the back story behind President Truman’s support for Israeli independence against the advice of his Middle East and foreign affairs advisers and the extraordinary sum (at least $1.476 billion) the Bush family and its allied companies and institutions have received from Saudi rulers over the years. For the financial data, Kinzer quotes from Craig Unger’s book House of Bush, House of Saud published in 2004.
Kinzer’s prescriptions for rectifying the increasingly untenable situation and bringing peace to the Middle East are lengthy, complex and vary in degrees of difficulty. As he writes, they require a European Union willing to accept Turkish membership and the will and commitment of a strong US president to do not what is popular or politically expedient, but what is right.