Rami G. Khouri

In an important opinion article published earlier this week in The Wall Street Journal, Henry Kissinger provided a fascinating window into the foreign policy mindset of American officialdom that he has so consistently mirrored for nearly half a century. His article, titled “A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse,” concisely captures two things that the world should grasp about American foreign policy – especially in the Middle East, where the United States has been actively engaged in warfare for over a quarter of a century, as its relations and interests frayed.

Rather than offering any path out of anywhere, Kissinger inadvertently clarifies the American role in the path that has brought the Middle East to this point of turbulence, violence and occasional state contraction or collapse.

I see several main problems in Kissinger’s text – and in the official American mindset in Washington that it reflects.

The first is the tendency to see Middle Easterners largely in terms of religious or ethnic groups, such as Sunnis, Shiites, Maronites, Alawites and Kurds, waging existential battles for control of territory, resources or power. The Middle East, in the Kissinger worldview, is an urban wasteland defined by armed gangs.

Nonstate actors and ethno-sectarian nationalisms have emerged as important actors of political contestation in the Middle East in the past 15 years, to be sure. However, our region is defined by much more than feuding Houthis, Alawites, Shiites, Kurds, Sunnis or groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Mahdi Army and others. Even sovereign and powerful states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran are defined in this mindset as Sunni or Shiite powers, rather than the sovereign and powerful states of Saudi Arabia and Iran, with varied populations.

The second problem in that Kissinger’s view of the Middle East seems to have no place for – or is simply blind to – the nearly half a billion individual men and women, mostly Muslims, who live in the region and shape its societies and states. They have done so for millennia, in fact, and these people all seek the same thing that Kissinger presumably seeks for Americans: a stable, decent society where citizens can live in peace and enjoy opportunities to develop their full human talents.

In the eye of those who only view the Middle East as defined by warring gangs, sects and ethnicities, no real human beings enter the picture. The Kissingerian Middle East lacks humans and their rights, because the Middle East he sees is somewhere between a professorial strategic analysis exercise for graduate students and a war game played on a board with dice.

My third problem is with the consistent American official view of Iran as a dangerous and untrustworthy brute that has “jihadist and imperialist designs” across the region. Even after the U.S. negotiated an important nuclear agreement with Iran, this view still sees Iran using allies such as Syria, Hezbollah, Iraq and the Houthis of Yemen to encircle the Sunni bloc of states comprising Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the smaller Gulf states.

Kissinger regards these as two “rigid and apocalyptic blocs” that are facing off against and threatening each other. This exaggerated and dramatized view cannot be taken seriously, other than by those hundreds of policymakers and policy-influencers in Washington who believe this intellectual wildness.

My fourth and biggest criticism of this way of seeing U.S. policy challenges in the Middle East is that it ascribes to Washington only noble and peace loving motives, while totally – I mean totally – ignoring any of the consequences of U.S. policies in the region in the past six decades, or since the CIA helped to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh’s regime in Iran.

It serves no good to ignore how American and other foreign powers’ policies in the region contributed to the underlying problems that shattered the superficial calm – other than occasional Arab-Israeli wars – that has defined our region from World War II to the Arab uprisings of 2011 and afterward.

Such problems include how the U.S, the Soviet Union and now Russia, and assorted smaller powers long supported Arab authoritarian and brutal regimes, contributing to prolonging the Arab-Israeli conflict. They have also waged wars that unsettled the entire region (the 2003 Iraq war, for example), or set the example of ignoring international law and ethics while expecting others to respect those laws (drone assassinations, for example).

The U.S. and other foreign powers, including Iran and Russia today, have all contributed their share to the “collapse” that Kissinger wants to help us escape. We did not become a landscape of gangs all by ourselves, even if some major regional Arab powers willfully and recklessly waged war or turned themselves into ugly police states.

His sensible observations were swamped by gross political distortions and omissions, which were all the more dangerous and tragic because they are widely shared in policymaking circles in Washington. I fear that more wrong or incomplete analyses will only help exacerbate the violence and chaos we are all facing. What a terrible waste of a fine mind, and a great power.