Is the United
States Exhausting Itself in the Middle East?
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
History may or may not repeat
itself. But its lessons endure. The deepening
involvement of the United States in the Middle
East invites an examination of historical patterns
that repeat. In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries the Ottoman Turks exhausted themselves
in Central Europe while Europeans on the Atlantic
seaboard went on to discover America and capture
the Asian trade. Does the analogy hold for the
involvement of the United States in the Middle
East in the first half of the twenty-first century?
Let us first look at the Turkish experience. It
was the year 1529. The Ottoman forces under Suleiman
the Magnificent laid siege to the Hapsburg capital
of Vienna. Winter set in early that year and snowfall
was heavy. To avoid getting trapped deep in mid-winter
deep in enemy territory, Suleiman called off the
siege and the Ottoman armies retreated towards
Belgrade.
Over the next hundred and fifty years, the Ottomans
were heavily engaged in Central Europe, fighting
no less than six major wars and scores of minor
ones. Indeed, one may summarize the military history
of Central Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries as the Turks advancing up from Istanbul
and the Austrians stopping them short of Vienna.
This pattern continued until the second siege
of Vienna in 1683 when the ill-fated and ill-planned
advance on the Hapsburg capital by Grand Vizier
Mustafa Pasha was smashed by a contingent of Polish
troops. While the thrust of Ottoman power was
towards Europe, there was continuous warfare with
Safavid Iran to the east for control of Iraq and
Azerbaijan, with the Russians for control of the
Caucasus and with the navies of Venice, Portugal,
Spain and the Vatican for control of the seas.
The battle of Lepanto (1571) effectively contained
Ottoman naval power in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The bloody conflicts with Safavid Persia ended
only after 1639. Warfare with Russia to the north
and the Hapsburgs to the west continued, on and
off, well into the twentieth century. .
The continued warfare required the Ottomans to
expand and maintain a large army placing an enormous
burden on the treasury. During the same period,
shiploads of silver, looted by the Spanish from
the Aztecs in Mexico (1519-1540), arrived in Europe
and gradually traveled eastward from Spain, France
and Austria into the Ottoman Empire. Silver was
the basis for the currencies of Europe, and the
infusion of such large quantities of the metal
debauched their currencies. Inflation went up.
The Ottomans were forced to devalue their currency.
This only made matters worse for the army. The
amount of cash required for defense became excruciatingly
painful. Discipline in the army suffered as the
soldiers, unable to feed their families, resorted
to occasional extortion.
While the Turks were so preoccupied with Central
Europe, Europeans on the Atlantic seaboard were
rewriting history. Columbus discovered America
in 1492. Vasco de Gama sailed around the tip of
Africa and journeyed to India in 1496. The Spaniards
enslaved the Aztecs, Incas and Mayas, looted their
gold and imposed an empire on the New World. The
Portuguese destroyed the Indian Ocean trade which
was until that time controlled by the Muslims
and set up colonies all along the rim of the Indian
Ocean. Traditional trade routes between Asia and
Europe which had passed through the Middle East
were cut. The Islamic world which had bottled
up Europe until the fifteenth century was itself
circumscribed and cornered. New world powers emerged
riding on the wealth of the Americas and on trade
with the littoral states of the Indian Ocean.
First it was Spain. Then, it was the turn of the
Dutch. And finally England became the mistress
of the world supplanting both the Spanish and
the Dutch.
In historical hindsight, the great battles between
the Turks and the Habsburgs come across as border
skirmishes on the global stage. While the Turks
were exhausting themselves in Central Europe,
the Europeans were making a bold gambit to conquer
and rule the world.
Some historians hold the first siege of Vienna
in 1529 and the second siege in 1683 as the high
points of Ottoman power. In fact, the decay of
the empire started with the Ottoman thrust into
Austria and was complete with the defeat of the
Turkish armies in 1683.
Move the clock forward some three centuries plus.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, the
United States became the sole global superpower.
Currently, it is heavily engaged in the Middle
East. More than a half a dozen American military
bases dot the Persian Gulf region. Some 150,000
troops are on active duty in Iraq. The cost of
the war exceeds 200 billion dollars. The American
involvement shows no sign of abating. Instead,
there is a possibility that it may expand even
further.
There are three strategic interests at stake in
the Middle East. First, it is control of oil resources.
Second, it is defense of the dollar. Third, it
is support for Israel. The first two are interrelated.
The third is a reflection of American internal
politics.
Control of oil resources is driven not just by
the profits of giant oil companies and the love
of gas guzzling SUVs. Larger issues are at stake.
To understand the genesis of these issues one
should go back to the end of World War II when
the United States emerged as the only major industrial
power unscathed from the ravages of war. The US
also became the principal creditor of the world.
The US dollar, tied to a fixed gold conversion
rate for government-to-government transactions,
was the de facto international currency.
However, there was insufficient gold in the world
to finance expanding world trade plus the reconstruction
of Western Europe and Japan. The dollar needed
to be backed up by something else of value. And
that something else was black gold, namely oil.
The Bretton Woods agreement of 1945 established
the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund and solidified the position of the dollar,
backed up by oil reserves, as the currency of
exchange.
It was for this reason that President Roosevelt
made a hasty detour immediately after the Yalta
Conference of 1945 to meet King ibn Saud of Arabia
in Suez. The strategic move was to secure the
oil of the Middle East before someone else made
a dash for it. The Americans guaranteed the protection
of the Saudi monarchy in return for access to
Saudi oil. The Saudi-American relationship has
remained a cornerstone of American foreign policy
in the Middle East since the end of World War
II. The United States cannot tolerate a serious
threat to the Saudis. That would be unacceptable
to the vital interests of the United States.
Whatever remained of the convertibility of the
dollar to gold was removed by President Nixon
in 1971. It was an effective way of devaluing
the dollar. Immediately, the price of gold shot
up from $40 an ounce to $400 an ounce. The dollar
value of real assets in the United States floated
upwards. For instance, a three-bedroom house in
Los Angeles that cost twenty thousand dollars
in 1961 costs more than four hundred thousand
dollars in the year 2006.
To complete the analogy of the United States in
the twenty-first century with the Ottomans in
the sixteenth century, the devaluation of the
Ottoman currency took place because of the influx
of Mexican silver into Europe and the extraordinary
expenditures on the Ottoman war machine. The devaluation
of the US dollar is taking place because of the
voracious appetite of the American consumer and
deficit financing in the Federal budget. The reasons
are different but the end result is the same.
Just as new powers emerged in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries while the Turks were preoccupied
with Central Europe, new world powers are emerging
today while the United States is focused on the
Middle East. The Chinese economy, growing by over
eight percent per year, is already the second
largest in the world and is projected to overtake
that of the United States within the next generation.
The Chinese manufacturing industries dominate
the world consumer markets. Whether you buy an
ihram for hajj in Mecca or pajamas in Indonesia,
you buy made-in-China products. Chinese cranes
sail under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco
even as California struggles with the Enron scandal.
Simultaneously, India, riding on a vast pool of
trained technical manpower, positions itself as
the workhorse of the twenty-first century and
the third economic giant after China and the US.
The rise of China and India in modern times is
comparable to the rise of Spain, Holland and England
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Just
as the Turks paid scant attention to the changing
power balance in the world in bygone centuries,
the United States has devoted insufficient resources
to countervail either the manufacturing capacity
of the Chinese or the Indian gambit to become
the technological services work horse of the world.
Add to this the enormous energy and raw material
resources of Russia and Brazil and you have before
you the strategic power map of the twenty-first
century.
The response of the United States to these emerging
challenges has been disjointed. The educational
infrastructure is in decline. Comparative scores
of American children in math and science keep
slipping. American industry is driven by a penchant
for short-term profits. Deficits run high while
savings and investments sag. The United States,
which was the creditor nation of the world at
the end of WW II, has become the largest debtor
nation on the globe owing hundreds of billions
to China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and India.
Slogans of democracy fail to evoke a positive
response in international affairs.
The question may be asked: Is the United States
exhausting itself in the Middle East? Is history
set to repeat itself?
The answers need not be negative. The United States
will remain the principal agriculture powerhouse
of the world for decades to come. It is blessed
with a continent size landmass and enormous natural
resources. Despite recent restrictions, it is
still the only country in the world that welcomes
tens of thousands of immigrants from around the
globe. It remains the favorite destination of
the educated elite of the world. For two hundred
years, its political and social systems have demonstrated
a remarkable resilience and have continually reinvented
themselves. Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln
are American icons not found elsewhere in the
world.
What is needed is a judicious disengagement from
the Middle East and a re-engagement with its own
educational and technological infrastructures.
Political engineering and the spread of democracy
may not be ideal goals for America as it steps
into a strategic competition with China and India.
Oil interests can be protected, and the dollar
defended, based on a strong, technologically dominant
economy. Let the nations of the Middle East evolve
their political and social systems on the basis
of their own historical experience. Given the
freedom to choose, they will opt for democratic,
civil societies on their own.
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