Raise Stakes Via a Clinton Doctrine

As President Clinton mediated between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in Oslo, Congress continued to delay approving American financial commitments to Arabs and Israelis made in the Wye River agreements. The White House will not succeed in getting Americans to foot the bill for a final settlement between Israel and its Arab neighbors without articulating a vision for the Middle East that explains the strategic value of peace.

Partisan politics surely is a factor in the congressional delay in this year of political campaigns. But an important reason for the administration’s failure so far is the public perception that American mediation and aid to the region is a work of charity. This perception will not sustain what the U.S. will be called on to provide if it successfully mediates Middle East peace: significant economic aid, peacekeeping forces on the Golan Heights and strategic commitments to Israel to compensate for Israel’s withdrawal from Syrian territories. Only strategic interests, not charity, will persuade the public that these costs are worth paying.

The administration may have begun making its case to the public in the run-up for the Oslo summit. Speaking about the U.S. role in Arab-Israeli negotiations before the Israel Policy Forum, National Security Advisor Samuel R. Berger said the U.S. has “vital strategic interests at stake.” State Department spokesman James B. Foley reiterated that “peace in the Middle East is a vital U.S. interest.” Although the administration says it did not intend these statements as a new formulation, never before has the term “vital” been employed to refer to U.S. interests in Arab-Israeli peace.

Such a designation historically has been reserved for signaling U.S. willingness to go to war to protect its interests. In the Middle East, the United States had articulated the Truman Doctrine to signal its interests in Turkey and Greece to the Soviet Union, and the Carter Doctrine defined the oil-rich Persian Gulf region to be vitally important in the face of Soviet threats. The United States has viewed Arab-Israeli peacemaking as an American interest at least since the mid-1970s, but never as being of vital strategic value. Indeed, in recent years, the American role in the negotiations has been predicated on assisting the parties in reaching their peace agreements, not on asserting vital American interests in the negotiations. The U.S. also has sought to downplay any links between Arab-Israeli peace and vital oil interests in the gulf.

Whether or not the administration sees its recent formulation of American interests to be new, it has presented them too quietly to elicit public response or notice. The price Americans will be asked to pay requires a forceful articulation of these interests, generating a necessary public debate.

It has always been easier for American leaders to get support for fighting a war than for preventing one, for allocating funds to military causes than to political instruments. This has become even more true since the end of the Cold War. To its credit, the Clinton administration has understood the value of diplomacy and economic assistance as cost-effective instruments of foreign policy. It has fought an uphill battle on such issues as foreign aid and fulfilling U.S. commitments to the United Nations partly because it has been unable to persuade the public of the strategic benefits to the U.S.

In selling peace in a region that many Americans see as vitally important to the United States, the administration has to make the best case for defining peace as a strategic American interest. With the timetable of Arab-Israeli negotiations requiring some American commitment as early as February, there now must be a “Clinton Doctrine” for the Middle East.