US President Barack Obama will Thursday seek to sketch a plausible policy response to the sudden, complex and often contradictory demands thrown up by an “Arab Spring” of popular revolt.
In a major speech, Obama will seek to quell domestic criticism and uncertainty in the Middle East and North Africa about the exact nature of US policy. Obama sees “an opportunity to sort of step back and assess what we’ve all witnessed, the historic change we’ve seen,” spokesman Jay Carney said.
“He’ll talk specifically about ways that we can best support that positive change while focusing on our core principles: nonviolence, support for human rights and support for political and economic reform.” Carney said that the speech would make “news” and promised some “specific new ideas” about new US policy towards the region. What Obama will not do, it appears, is use the speech to relaunch his stalled drive for Israeli-Palestinian peace — even though Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Tuesday called the struggle the “core” regional issue.
Though Obama hopes to focus on Arab uprisings, simply restating failed approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could undercut his message, causing some analysts to question the timing of the speech. “The metric by which many in the Arab world will continue to view the US is what we do on the Arab-Israeli conflict,” said Steven Cook, of the Council on Foreign Relations. “There really doesn’t seem to me to be a tremendous opportunity here to strike out on a different course that’s going to be productive.”
From the first murmurings of discontent in Tunisia to the revolt that toppled Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, the crackdowns in Syria and Bahrain, and the full-scale war in Libya, Obama has struggled to frame a coherent US message. The breathtaking speed, historical scope and complexity of change sweeping the region caught Washington, like the leaders it challenged, unawares.
“I would give the US a B-plus in how they have handled the Arab Spring — they have stayed out of it,” said Rami Khouri, a newspaper columnist and academic at the American University of Beirut. “But (US policy) has been hesitant, it has been erratic, it has been inconsistent.” If the US response was contradictory and complicated it only mirrored the unpredictable revolts cascading across the Arab world.
Uprisings against US-allied leaders like Mubarak and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, a key anti-terror ally, exposed a Faustian pact with leaders who oppressed their people but delivered decades of stability.