America Should Drop Its “Red Lines” and Be Honest About Strategic Interests
Editor’s note: This article from TLP contributor Steven A. Cook is an extension of the arguments put forth in his excellent new book, The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East. Put it on your summer reading list!
Over the last few months, President Joe Biden and his advisors have laid out so-called “red lines” for Israel’s planned—now underway—Rafah operation. First, the administration said it could not support an invasion if the Israelis did not have a credible plan to protect the million or so Palestinian civilians sheltering in Gaza’s southernmost city. When those plans were deemed inadequate, the White House indicated that attacking Hamas battalions in Rafah was itself a red line. Now that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is in Rafah, the Biden administration says the Israelis have not crossed any red lines even though a growing number of civilians have been killed in the Israeli operations so far.
Maybe that is accurate, but American red lines often turn out to be less red—and less of a line—than when they are boldly proclaimed.
President Barack Obama also had a red line. In August 2012, he declared, “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation,” implying an American military response to such an egregious violation of international norms and human decency. Yet when Bashar al-Assad called Obama’s bluff, the president balked at holding him accountable.
What gives? Nothing really.
It is true that affirmations of American values and principles are a regular feature of the rhetoric of U.S. foreign policy. It is also true that each nominee to lead the State Department since the turn of the century—except for Mike Pompeo—asserted that the country’s interests and values were inextricably linked. It is not true that U.S. foreign policy faithfully reflects the words of the country’s first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, “The interests of a nation when well understood will be found to coincide with their moral duties.” When it comes to the Middle East, the American approach can be best described as strategically tenable, but morally questionable.
No doubt, during the Cold War, the United States hammered away at the human rights violations of the countries in the Warsaw Pact and celebrated famous dissidents who logged time in the Soviet Union’s gulags. It was a moment in time and a place in the world where America’s values coincided with its strategic interest in weakening the Soviet Union. Yet, in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, as well the Middle East, Washington partnered with a legendary cast of human rights violators, unrepentant jailers of journalists, and prolific spillers of blood in the global struggle with Moscow.
The final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 did little to change this approach to the Global South, including the Middle East. More than three decades later, even though American presidents may mouth words about democratic principles and foreign policy, the United States still prioritizes interests over values.
But Biden’s warning to Israel about Rafah and the possibility of significant civilian carnage there raises an important question: Is there ever a moment when the morally questionable becomes too difficult to overlook, compelling American leaders to prioritize values over interests? It is hard to think of one.
Much to his credit, President Biden sought to change the pattern in American foreign policy that relegated values and principles that Americans hold dear secondary in America’s conduct around the world. As a candidate, he announced that if elected, the government of Egypt—a recipient of about $80 billion in American military assistance and a routine violator of human rights—would no longer enjoy America’s “blank check.” He also (in)famously declared Saudi leaders “pariahs.” Not long after Biden took the oath of office, he visited the State Department where he outlined his vision for a values-centered foreign policy.
It was not to be, however. His administration has done everything possible to ensure that military aid flows to Egypt, despite the findings of American diplomats that Egyptian leaders are responsible for:
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention…
When it comes to the government that Biden lashed for having “no redeeming value,” he has been seeking a security pact that would enjoin the United States to come to Saudi Arabia’s defense under a variety of as of yet not made public circumstances. According to the State Department’s Country Report on Human Rights and Practices, the Saudi record is, like Egypt’s, appalling.
Although the president promised morality-driven change to U.S.-Middle East policy, once he was in office, he reverted to a “normal” American approach to the region—one that places a premium on securing American interests with the help of mostly unsavory partners. Biden’s apparent hypocrisy could be traced to global and regional challenges as well as his own parochial politics. The challenge that China presents to an international order that favors American power has compelled the administration to overlook the shortcomings of its partners, including those in the Middle East. And when looking around the wreckage of the region after a decade or so of political turbulence and violence, Saudi Arabia is the last major Arab power standing and thus important to American grand strategy. Egypt—despite its leaders’ obvious disdain for the values that President Biden stands for—retains an important place in U.S. foreign policy because of the critical role the country plays in Israeli-Palestinian mediation. And when it comes to politics, Biden sought help from the Saudis when the late 2021-early 2022 run up in gasoline prices inflicted pain on American drivers who blamed this hardship squarely on the president.
On Israel, Biden’s position has been consistent with the contemporary history of American foreign policy in the Middle East. The “ironclad” commitment after the Hamas massacres of October 7 was an expression of both the president’s worldview and the reflection of a relationship that has become institutionalized over the last seven decades. Yet, in recent months something has changed (at least rhetorically).
The moonscape images coming from Gaza and the large numbers of dead civilians (even after the UN revised downward the number of women and children killed) seemed to make Biden uncomfortable with the strategically tenable, but arguably at times morally questionable aspects of American support for Israel. Establishing red lines in Rafah and pausing the shipment of some weaponry to Israel suggested that there was a point when moral considerations might trump the long-standing American interest in Israeli security.
For all the concern the administration has expressed about a Rafah operation, President Biden did not have red lines anyway as the IDF pummeled its way from northern Gaza to Rafah. Where were the red lines in Syria—separate from the one President Obama ignored—where the Syrian military with Russian and Iranian help has spilled far more blood than in Gaza? There was no red line in Egypt, where in 2013, security forces killed about 1,000 people over a single morning.
One of the features of U.S. policy in the Middle East is the yawning gap between the principles that guide American life and the conduct of the country abroad. This hypocrisy outrages many within the region and in the United States.
American officials often respond to this critique claiming that the world is messy, it is hard to be consistent, and that dealing with the likes of Hamas, the Assad regime, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its related proxies requires moral compromises.
They have a good point.
So instead of wrapping U.S. foreign policy in morality, American presidents should just make the case for defending U.S. interests. After all, there is no reason to invoke values if—based on the historical record—few believe it.
Steven A. Cook (@stevenacook) is the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of several books on the Middle East. His new book, The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East, is out now.
I fully agree it would be better if the US stopped making moral pronouncements and focused on its interests. I would also argue those interests include moral interests - like carrying out humanitarian interventions when feasible - as well as strategic ones. These moral interests are not rooted in universal values (I'm not sure there's any such thing), but in American values, the belief of American leaders that a particular atrocity is "not right," and that they can do something about it without undermining strategic interests.
The US can't save everyone, but putting its power behind moral causes in some cases and not others is better than only defending strategic interests. There are also cases where strategic and moral interests intersect. I would argue Gaza is one such place - the US has a strategic interest in weakening Iran via one of its proxies, and a moral interest in helping Israel destroy the barbarians of Hamas (also good for Palestinians in the long term). I would also argue that, all these years after Obama foolishly declined to enforce his red line, weakening Assad (both because of his cruelty and his alliance with Russia and Iran) is a strategic and moral interest of the US. It may never happen, but if an opportunity arises to help anti-Assad Syrians with defensive weapons, offensive weapons, and air and missile strikes, I want the US to take advantage of that opportunity.
The two red lines you suggested are not the same. The Obama administration knew that Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people, and it was idiotic posturing to claim a red line and then not follow through, but that’s what the progressives’ foreign policy is about - not to advance US interests, but to virtue signal to their domestic audience. Progressives could care less if the statute of the US is weakened, it is one of their goals. They simply do not like US power and feel like totalitarian powers doing awful things (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) must be due to the US, because other countries couldn’t possibly have agency, and only the US can do morally wrong things. Obama never intended to hold any totalitarian power to account, and he followed through by being weak on Assad, Russia, Iran, North Korea and China.
With regards to Rafah, the Biden administration knew there was not going to be massive civilian casualties in the operation, and in fact there aren’t. What they were doing is once again signaling to a domestic audience of progressive and far leftist shitbags. The progressives in Biden’s administration come from the Obama administration. They don’t care about the standing of the US, nor the survival of its allies. They still see US power as ‘bad’ the violence of totalitarian countries as some just response to the US, the only country with agency, allegedly. It’s “US Bad” foreign policy all over again. Israel, and Biden knows this, has done less civilian casualties than NATO, but it’s all about gifting his progressive wing what they really want - the survival of Hamas by any means, and some abuse for Israel.