 I want to talk to you today about a question of grand strategy. So American strategists and students of foreign policy over the last 75 years have consistently identified three geographical regions as of first rate importance for American national interests. And those are Western Europe, East Asia, including Japan, and the Persian Gulf region. And if you think about that history, sort of post-war, post-1945 history, from an American perspective, foreign policy outcomes in the first two regions have gone more or less okay. Things have worked out in those two regions. But in the last 25 years in the Middle East, foreign policy outcomes have gone from more or less acceptable to downright awful. The last 25 years have not been good in terms of the U.S. experience in the Middle East. And so there's some soul searching going on in Washington, D.C. and in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts of whether the United States should be in the region at all. Whether the United States should instead say, thank you very much, we've had enough, and we're pulling in. You're on your own to our allies and partners in the region. If there's another military war, we want no part of it. And I think that that motivation is very understandable. It's a question not only for the United States, but also its allies, which of course includes the United Kingdom. Despite the chief irritant in the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom being President Donald Trump, and believe me he is an irritant on both sides of the Atlantic, maybe more my side than on yours. I'm not going to say much about President Trump or his administration today, in part because my language tends to get increasingly vulgar as I go on over time. But mostly because I want to think about this question from a much more analytic perspective, a nonpartisan perspective, or at least a less partisan perspective, to think about what is the right strategy from a U.S. or from a Western perspective, if you wish, about how to engage with the Middle East. And so let's think about the last 25 years. So I said, okay, take you back to 1993, that was 25 years ago. That was kind of the start of a 10-year history of more or less continuous conflict, mostly low level, but serious military conflict with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. So that wasn't exactly the desired outcome from a U.S. perspective. That period also contained the oil for food economic sanctions on Iraq, which led to the greatest scandal in the history of the United Nations. And so that was a failure of policy, not just involving the United States, but involving others as well. Then came the attacks of September 11th in 2001, which are very serious unto themselves, but also created a psychological shock to the United States, where collectively as a country, it wanted to lash out. And that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, arguably the biggest blunder, U.S. blunder in the region. And that war was a fiasco, I think, pretty much from all sides, but certainly the American one, it didn't go as planned. And there have been other things since then, right? So after the Arab Spring in 2011, you have the question of Libya's involvement. America supported the intervention by the United Kingdom and France to intervene militarily as well. And it's hard to look back at the history of what's happened in Libya since 2011 and call that a wing from a policy perspective. The country is in chaos and still incredibly violent and generally poor outcomes. And then there's the Syrian Civil War, where the U.S. and the West more generally has had a hard time deciding whether it wants to intervene or not and if to intervene how to do so. And that's led to an ongoing war filled with casualties and immigrants and all of the consequences leading from that. And then there's ISIS. And the state rose in this period and not only conducted violence in its own local theater of operations, but then inspired and conducted attacks here in Europe and in North America as well. So that's a long litany of what you might call policy failures. And so the desire, I think, is very understandable for why policymakers are saying, okay, we need a change in strategy. We need to think differently about this and why the United States just got out of the region whole scale. So I want to be precise... Oh, I'll do that in a second. I want to be precise about what I mean by withdrawal and by the Middle East. So I'll do that in a moment, but just to give you a little bit of context of where I'm coming from, the analysis that I'm going to share with you today, it's part of sort of a standalone research project, but it's also a chapter in a book manuscript that I'm working on now. So it's going to be chapter four, I hope, of a book that's forthcoming. And that book really looks at the question of how does the United States and its allies engage with the global oil system and how should they engage? And that's a big question in the sense that it involves a military dimension, an economic dimension, and an environmental dimension. But today I'm going to focus mostly just on the military side of that, but understand that it's kind of part of a larger project. And so if we go back to this longer history of kind of Anglo-American engagement in the Middle East, great powers have had an interest in this region for a long time, but especially once oil became the kind of preeminent strategic commodity of the 20th century. It was demonstrated in both of the world wars, especially the second one, that militaries depend on oil and the fuels that are generated from it. So securing a supply of oil was utterly essential, and that led for a while Britain to extend kind of Pax Britannica to the Middle East and shape outcomes directly in countries that we now call Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, later Libya and others. But then of course over a period of decades, starting even before World War II, Britain withdrew. And it took quite a long time for that process to unfold, leaving finally in 1971. But gradually the United States stepped in to take over the role that Britain had left. Not always quite so explicitly, not always willingly, not always right away, but that's more or less the process of what happened. There was a recurring pattern of behavior, a pattern that I'll call oil for security deals. And this doesn't affect every country in the region, but it affects a lot of the ones, especially in the area right around the Persian Gulf. Now the details of oil for security deals, they vary depending on the oil producing territory, what I'll call Petro states, they vary from place to place. Of course all of these places have their own domestic politics, so they're a little bit different in each way. In essence, an oil for security deal is something like a patron state, I always want to say patron saint, but that's not the right term at all, because certainly these are not saintly states, but a patron like the United States or formerly Britain that offers military protection to a Petro state, and in exchange it gets some economic benefits from that patron saint. And sometimes the economic benefits are oil imports, straight up direct oil imports, in fact that was kind of more common in the past. Now things have changed a little bit, so that the global oil system tends to be much more integrated, and in say the US Saudi Arabia relationship, which would be definitely an oil for security relationship, it's not the case that all of the Saudi oil goes to America, in fact the United States consumes relatively small amounts of Saudi oil, but it does get a lot of economic benefits from Saudi Arabia, including weapons purchases in the billions each year, and in other forms of business, so oil services companies like Halliburton, that Dick Cheney was the CEO of at one point, these are the kinds of American businesses, Boeing, Raytheon, other defense contractors that are benefiting from this relationship. It's also the case that Saudi Arabia provides a certain amount of policy cooperation at the behest of the United States, so in key moments sometimes the Saudis will release extra oil from the global oil market because they were asked to do so by US administrations. It doesn't happen every time, the Saudis don't always do exactly what the United States wants, but there is this kind of fundamental oil for security arrangement. Okay, so as I said times have changed, and in part probably the largest piece of that is the 2003 Iraq War, which is a fiasco and have made Americans really question whether they ought to be doing this kind of military intervention in the Middle East at all. But it's not just that, there's also evidence that the US military presence in the Middle East generates a certain amount of resentment that terrorists can feed off. Al Qaeda uses the American presence in the Persian Gulf as a recruiting tool, as a source of grievance, and that's a motivation maybe to pull back and take that grievance away. And then in the last 10 years there's also been changes in the oil side of the equation where fracking has become a much bigger deal in the United States, and so while that actually hasn't changed the fundamentals of the oil market all that much, it's changed the psychology in the United States quite a bit. There's a whole other question about, well, if we're producing a lot of oil here in the United States, what do we really need the Saudis for? What do we really need to be involved in the Persian Gulf? And so there's a lot of discussion and several books written about how this has got a geopolitical implications of the fracking technology. And so there's a question here about what are the benefits to the United States of being involved in the Persian Gulf? And so I wanted to look at that question quite dispassionately in an analytic framework. And so if you want kind of the nutshell of the argument that I'm going to give you, I'm going to tell you that the idea here of retrenchment of withdrawal is maybe not the wisest strategy for the United States, and that's unconventional in some sense, but the idea of these oil for security deals for all their problems for all the sort of negative consequences that they sometimes bear, they have an effect that is reducing interstate conflict for the Petro States that have them as compared to whether they, if they didn't have them, sort of the counter-faction. And so if we remove those oil for security deals, it stands to reason that interstate conflict in the region will increase. And what's more, we have some experience of that when oil for security deals are rejected and have been removed in the past, that's led to a sharp increase in interstate conflict. And now the cases that we have historically are also tied up in some other factors, particularly domestic revolutions in the countries that did this, right? So Iraq, Iran, Libya, those are three countries that used to have oil for security deals in the past. They were monarchies, they had good relations with the Anglo-American powers. And then there was a domestic revolution in each one of those countries where the new regime came in and said we don't want any of that, we're rejecting the relationship with the United States. But it was also revolutionary, and revolutionary states tend to get into conflicts even without all of that baggage. And so it's a little bit hard to tease out what's really causing the effect. But even if we ignore this part of it, it's still the case that oil for security deals tend to suppress conflict overall. And so the implication from this, I think, is that the U.S. should not retrench from the Middle East. And I'm going to define that kind of more specifically in a moment. But while I'm here, this little asterisk is to remind me to define what I mean by the Middle East. And so I think about it as the area stretching roughly from Morocco to Iran. And the important part of that is that Afghanistan is a whole separate question. And in fact, you might get a very different answer from me about whether the United States should withdraw from Afghanistan. But this is a different, so that's a whole other petal of fish. I'm happy to talk about it if you're interested, but that's not what I'm going to discuss right now. Okay, so just to give a little bit more motivation about why there is sort of different motivations for disengaging with the Middle East. One kind of rationale has been offered by a professor here at King's College, Leif Leonard, who wrote this book called Blood Oil. It's a really fascinating book. If you haven't already read it, I recommend it. And he makes the case that, look, the oil that we buy is often coming from autocratic countries that is the equivalent of stolen goods. The oil is taken away from the people that live in those countries. And so the United States and Europe shouldn't be buying that oil, particularly from really noxious autocratic regimes like Equatorial Guinea, which is essentially a kleptocracy, where the top people in that country are basically stealing from the rest of the country. I'm quite sympathetic to the argument, but it's basically a moral and commercial argument about what our relationship should be in terms of what kinds of oil we would buy. I think it has political implications that Leif hasn't fully wrestled with, and I think it's worth engaging. But I'm going to focus my attention more specifically on a more specific set of literature that comes mostly from American realists. So in the school of thought of realism, people like Charles Glazer and Rose Kalanick, who wrote this book, Crude Strategy, and that book specifically asked the question, should the United States pull out of the Persian Gulf? And their answer leans towards yes. It comes with a lot of caveats, but basically it's yes. There are others like Barry Pozen, Steve Walt and John Meersheimer in favor of something called offshore balancing, which is slightly different, but basically a close cousin of restraint. And they're all sort of thinking about how can the U.S. pull back from the rest of the world. And it turns out that these types of arguments, which I'm going to lump under the title of restraint, or restrainters, they tend to conflate two different ideas. When you think about restraint, just on a kind of common sense language term, it really contains two different ideas. One is about self-discipline, that the United States should do less interventions like, say, invading Iraq on a faulty pretext. And I'm all in favor of that. So greater self-discipline, less intervention, kind of a higher threshold for what it takes to militarily intervene, that would be a very wise approach. But that's different from what I'll call retrenchment, which is to say we're going to pull back and end our commitments, end the United States commitments to defend countries like Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or others. And that's a whole different argument, and that's really what I'm going to take up here and argue against that. And so specifically, what does that actually mean for the Middle East? I think the realistic version of this, some people have a more extreme argument about what we should do to retrench. But the realistic version is to say, OK, we're going to end military protection for any country in the region with two exceptions. Israel, because the US has a domestic constituency that wants to continue to have a relationship with Israel, not going to get into the question of whether that's a good idea or not. It's just simply a reality of US politics. And the second exception is Saudi Arabia, because even the most advocates who are keen to leave the Middle East would say, Saudi Arabia, if it's invaded by an external power, is such an important player in the global oil system that it needs to be protected by the United States. But all the others, Kuwait, Qatar, whoever, if you get invaded, you're on your own. And that would be a major change in US policy. And that also involves, of course, ending the bases that are there. So the US has something like 600 overseas bases, many of which are in the Persian Gulf region, end all of those, close them up, and pull out all of the troops from Persian Gulf. So I think underlying this kind of the rationale for doing this is an implied hypothesis about what is the state of the world if we do this. The implied hypothesis is that disengaging would not lead to more conflict in the Middle East that the United States needs to care about. And if you think about that, break that down into two parts. There is a question of would there be more conflict if the US left? And the second question is, would this be bad for the United States or for the West more broadly? So here, I'm going to take a fairly kind of hard-nosed American perspective of what is the problem for the United States if we adopt this strategy. And that's not because I'm uninterested in the humanitarian aspects of this. I'm actually quite interested in it. But I want to say, okay, we'll meet this argument on its own ground. And to say, okay, those who are advocating for this are looking out for American interests only. Let's talk first, if you will. And so let's think about whether this is a good strategy for the United States. Okay, on the first question, why should we expect these oil for security deals to have kind of any sort of peace-inducing effect? And I think there are three reasons ultimately that we would expect that. One is a kind of protective deterrence effect. If the United States has said, I am going to protect your country, it is much less likely that your neighbor decides, hey, I'm going to attack your country because they're going to think, wow, if I do that, I have to face Uncle Sam, too. And that's the deterrence philosophy that should have prevented the Iraq invasion of Kuwait. It didn't, of course, so it's not a perfect mechanism. But in general, countries that have this relationship with the United States are less likely to be attacked, statistically speaking. Second reason is that if you, the Petter State, decide, hey, I want to do some attacking, it might be that the United States says, we don't want that. It's in America's interest not to have wars in the Persian Gulf, not to rock the boat, not to destabilize the global oil system, the global energy markets generally. And so the United States and before it, Britain, tended to play a diplomatic role in suppressing conflict and trying to resolve things peacefully or at least through diplomatic fora rather than through the use of military force. And so an example of this, unfortunately, came up even last year when Saudi Arabia ratcheted up its hostility with neighboring Qatar and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Bless his heart, I'm not a big fan of Rex Tillerson. But in this one case, he might get real credit in that he got on the phone and said to the Saudis, we are aware of your invasion plans to Qatar, you should not do that. That is not what we have. We have a U.S. base and we are ordering you or at least we are asking you not to do that. Now, of course, I don't know what the details of that conversation are. They're classified, but that's what's been reported in the press. I would say historically we know those types of conversations have occurred in the past with the British doing it in the 1950s and the U.S. doing it more recently. The third reason, third mechanism why we should expect these kinds of deals to reduce conflict is that it smooths the conflict, more potential conflicts with the patron itself. So it turns out that other Petro-States like Libya have gotten into a lot of conflicts with the United States. But when there's an oil for security deal, it's more likely that America sees what its partner is doing in a less hostile way. It's less likely to see that as a problem. So, for instance, unfortunately, the Saudis recently decided to invade Yemen, or at least militarily intervene in Yemen. And I don't think the United States was all that keen on it, but it said, all right, we will live with us and unfortunately we will also sell you weapons to do it. But imagine if it was Iran invading Yemen, or go back to 1990, Iraq invading Kuwait. Then it's a whole different story. Then the United States perceives that as a hostile actor that needs to be countered rather than kind of ignored and allowed to do what it's doing. So for those three reasons, we might expect these kinds of relationships to reduce interstate conflict. So just to be really clear about which countries I'm actually talking about, I probably should have done this a little bit earlier, but these are the countries that have significant oil production in the Middle East, and all of them at one time or another have been offered oil for security deals. Those in the first column here have accepted those oil for security deals, and they are continuing to be present even today. They also happen to be, I could have put these in two categories, of high oil per capita versus moderate amounts of oil per capita. And the ones that have a whole lot of oil tend to accept this deal. Libya is the one exception in that category, and then we have three more exceptions in the kind of moderate oil per capita categories that historically at some point those countries have said, enough, we're not interested in this deal anymore. We're going to start chanting death to America or what have you. And so there's a rejection of those deals. Just to, you know, how does this actually work historically in practice? These deals don't come about in a single moment. They tend to grow over time. But if you wanted to pick one single moment in the, say, the U.S.-Saudi relationship, you might pick this one, which is 1945, a meeting on the USS Quincy between the then President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Saudi King. It got deeper in 1951 where there was a mutual defense assistance agreement signed between the ambassadors of the two countries. And then in 1962 Crown Prince Faisal, later King Faisal, came to Washington, D.C. President Kennedy reassured him that Saudi Arabia could depend on the friendship and cooperation of the United States. And ultimately, of course, this gets realized in very tangible military form in 1990 where you have Operation Desert Storm to protect Saudi Arabia and then Desert Shield. Sorry, Desert Shield, then Desert Storm. So what does this actually mean in terms of interstate conflict? And I'm not going to drag you through the statistical analysis, but just to give you the kind of punchy results. If you look at these, I don't know how well you can see these at the back, but there's some data points about how much conflict any pair of countries has on a given year. And the conflicts we're talking about are conflicts that have at least one fatality, one casualty involved in them. And this sort of weeds out some of the lower level conflicts. Unfortunately, conflict between any given pair of states is pretty rare, and so it's unlikely on any given year. And the average for all states in the Middle East and North Africa region is this first column. But the second column, the second data point, is the rate of conflict for states that have oil for security deals. And it's much, much lower. And so that's probably the most important inference that we can make, is to say, look, this rate of conflict over the last 70 years has been much, much lower. This third data point gives you what happens when the countries reject those deals, and the rate of conflict goes way up. And then the last one is sort of all the other states in the region, meaning states that don't have a whole lot of oil. And so this is another way of thinking about that same data, if you will. But in this sense, it's over time. So the x-axis here is time. And the solid black line at the bottom are states that have accepted their oil for security deals and continued them on through the decades. They have very low levels of conflict over the whole history, whereas the gray line are states that had an oil for security deal up until this dashed vertical line. And in that year of separation, you see a big bump, a big increase in the rate of conflict. And so that's part of the evidence that we would take to see what happens when this is removed. Okay. So I'm going to talk for maybe five more minutes, maybe three more minutes, and then be done. But I spent most of my time on this first question of whether there is going to be more conflict. And I think the answer is going to be yes. If the United States withdraws, we should expect to see a higher rate of interstate conflict than if it continues to do what it's doing now, maybe with fewer military interventions, but preserving the alliances. The second question is, is this going to be bad for the United States? And again, I'm focusing narrowly on the U.S. interest. And from a social science perspective, this is a much harder question to answer because there's a smaller body of evidence to draw upon, and it involves a little bit more speculation. But I think very significant risks exist. If we say, all right, there's just going to be more conflict. We're going to let the Middle East burn. Is that really going to be okay and not affect the United States? Well, one concern I would have about that is increased nuclear proliferation, where Iran already has an active nuclear program. They say it's not for weapons, but it is unquestionably a nuclear program of some kind. And one could imagine if the United States withdraws, it says we are not going to protect most of the states in this region. Many of those states are going to think, well, now we need our own nuclear program. That's one way of preserving our security in this heightened tension environment. The Saudis might say, okay, well Iran's got a nuclear program. We are less confident in the U.S. security guarantee than we were previously. So now we'll do the same. And there is historical precedent for this. This is exactly what happened in South Korea and exactly what happened in Taiwan in the 1970s when they were unsure about U.S. security guarantees. The U.S. started to make noise about saying, well, we're not so sure that we want to be guaranteeing your security anymore. Then South Korea said, great, we're going to develop a nuclear bomb. And Taiwan said, okay, we're going to develop a nuclear bomb. And the way that that situation was resolved was by the U.S. saying, no, no, no, just kidding, we will actually come. We will defend you. You don't need to develop your own nuclear weapon. And so we could expect Saudi Arabia to start to move in that direction. And if Iran's doing it and Saudis are doing it, then you start to have a domino effect where other countries in the region then also have an incentive to do it as well. Egypt, maybe Iraq, et cetera. So that's a real concern. Second concern I have about this is that if you have more conflict in the region, especially because the United States is withdrawn, you can expect the formation of an anti-U.S. block of countries. And that might happen even without any increase in conflict, but more conflict could exacerbate that tendency. And so take, for instance, the hostilities between Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Qatar has a military base, a big U.S. military base now. If the U.S. says, we're closing that base, we're taking all of our troops, and we're not going to guarantee you anything in the future, then Qataris are not stupid, right? They say, okay, we know that we can't win a one-on-one war with the Saudis. So what do we do? Maybe we turn to Iran to help defend us. And any conflict between Saudi Arabia and Qatar becomes a proxy conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. And that's an outcome that I don't think is in U.S. interests, even if you are completely hard-nosed about the casualties involved and the conflict involved, because just think about the natural gas market. Iran and Qatar, collectively, are the number two and number three holders of world oil reserves. Number one, by the way, is Russia. So if you have Iran, Qatar, and maybe making common cause with Russia, you have a natural gas oligopoly. That's not going to be in the interests of the United States. And so anyway, that kind of proxy conflict resolves itself. Even if the Saudis win, I'm not sure it's going to be in U.S. interests. And the last thing I think we would worry about with just increased conflict is tanker wars. So what we saw in the 80s, in the wars between Iran and Iraq, was that once the war got going, they started to attack each other's source of revenue, which is to take out the other's oil exports. And fortunately, or unfortunately, in that war, what was demonstrated was that crude oil super tankers are remarkably resilient to attacks. They can actually be hit by missiles and keep on going. Fortunately, crude oil is not volatile. Despite what you see in Hollywood movies, crude oil does not explode on contact. And super tankers are massive, and so they are hard to take down. None of that is true. Well, the massive part is true. All the rest of it is not true about liquid natural gas tankers. So this kind of tanker is incredibly volatile. If it gets hit by a missile, it's the equivalent of a bomb going off. And if one of these was attacked in, say, the neck of the Strait of Hormuz, which is the single most important choke point in the entire global oil system, that's the kind of thing that would block up traffic and cause massive jitters on energy markets worldwide. So that's not likely to be in US interest either. So for all those reasons, I think we can say that increased conflict in the Persian Gulf region is not in US interest, and we can expect an increase in that kind of conflict if the US withdraws. And so my suggested strategy for the United States is to say, yes, more discipline. Yes, a higher threshold for what military intervention, lower for military intervention, meaning fewer interventions. But no to letting go of these alliances. Preserve the alliances, keep the alliances because they are, for all their problems, actually helping advance both US interest and the cause of peace in the region. So I'll stop there, and I'm happy to take any question you have. Thank you so much. It's a wonderfully attentive audience.