Secretary Kerry and the Middle East

The Middle East has been the one region outside of Western Europe that American foreign policy and secretaries of state have been involved with since the Eisenhower administration. Sure, other regions have occupied the attention of Washington for an administration or even a decade or two: South East Asia from 1954 to 1975; Latin America and the Caribbean in the Kennedy administration, early Johnson administration and then again Central America during the Carter and Reagan administrations; Southern Africa from 1976 to 1989; and the Balkans in the 1990s. Now the Korean peninsula is a region of concern. But continuously throughout this period the Middle East has been of importance: as an arena for containment of the Soviet Union through regional alliances in the Eisenhower administration; mediating the Arab-Israeli conflict to reconcile contradictory national interests in the region from the Nixon administration through end of the second Bush administration; spreading democracy in the Bush administration and Obama administration. 

The situation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is such that peace is not available in the near term. The Palestinians are divided between Hamas and Fatah, and so Fatah functions under the restraining influence of Hamas and cannot drastically modify its positions until Hamas is neutralized. This can be done either through defeat or merger. But merger or a national unity government is likely to be at the expense of any moderate tendencies in Fatah. In Israel the Center-Left is too weak to form a government without input from parties that are ideologically opposed to the two-state solution. Thus, we are left with the two parties to the conflict being dominated by political parties that are ideologically opposed to the two-state solution--or at least on terms that the other side can accept. This leaves Secretary of State John Kerry with solving the civil war in Syria as his main chance to make a mark in the region.

What Moscow Wants in Syria

There is a general consensus among Russian watchers that in many ways the Putin regime is a watered-down version of the Soviet regime. Here is Nikita Khrushchev's gread-granddaughter making just such a comparison about the show trials in Putin's Russia and those in the Soviet era of her ancestor. It allows for elections, but the electronic media that ordinary people use to evaluate the candidates and parties remain firmly in the hands of the ruling party. The regime is basically staffed by the siluviki --those from an intelligence services or Soviet Communist Party background during the Soviet era. But what about Russian foreign policy?

During the Soviet period the Soviet Union was one large ideological empire with three different levels. First, was the core--the old Russian Empire minus Finland and Poland and the Baltic States rechristened the Soviet Union in 1922. In 1939-40 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939 the Soviet Union reabsorbed the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) and part of eastern Finland and eastern Poland. Second, in 1944-45 as a result of the victory over Nazi Germany the Soviet Union reabsorbed the Baltic States (lost in 1941) and took over what eventually became the Warsaw Pact: Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. The third level consisted of all of those overseas ideological allies that were deemed to be Communist or merely socialist or even just anti-Western.