 Now, I'm pleased to introduce our evening speaker, Beth Doherty, manager professor of international relations and professor of political science at Beloit College. She received her MA and PhD in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia. Since joining the Beloit faculty in 1996, she has taught a broad range of international politics courses, including US foreign policy in the Middle East, the US war on terror, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the politics of mass killing, human rights and nationalism, and ethnic conflict. She has received both campus and national awards for innovative teaching. Her main research interests are transitional justice, fulking on the cases of Sierra Leone and Iraq, human rights and Iraqi politics. Her most recent publication is a historical dictionary of Iraq. So please welcome Dr. Doherty. Oh, thanks. Is it on? It's lost. OK. Oh, wait. There it is. OK. So I just want to thank everyone for coming out this evening. This is one of the harder topics that the Great Decisions book has ever thrown at me, because the regional disorder reading actually covers the entire region and then through in US foreign policy on the side. So I'm going to focus my talk tonight and look more at the US relationship with Saudi Arabia and with Iran. Just to start off, I just want to remind everybody what US objectives are in the Middle East, historically speaking. So first, of course, for a long time it was contain the power of the Soviet Union. Now that the Soviet Union is no longer with us, that is going to be to contain Russia. Ever since 1979 in the Islamic Revolution, containing the spread of Iran and radical Islamic fundamentalism has also been a key American interest. The US has pledged itself to support the free flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf. There is a choke point at the Strait of Hormuz, which I'll show you a map of this later. But this was the Carter Doctrine after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the United States specifically stated that it was committed to the free flow of oil out of the region. At this point, this isn't really so much about the United States and its energy needs because the US really does not get very much of its oil anymore from the Middle East, but this is more about our allies who do get a great deal of oil out of the region. The fourth major interest for the United States in the region of course is counterterrorism. That one was there under Carter and Reagan, but certainly after 9-11 has taken on even greater importance. And then lastly, the US has committed itself to the safety and security of the State of Israel. And so in the back of your mind, you should always be thinking when looking at American policy, is this specific policy fulfilling one of these objectives, or is it undermining the ability of the United States to achieve these objectives? And then I also want to add one caveat. There is a tendency both in the United States and the region to think that the United States actually has enormous power and influence and can mold events to the way that it wants. This is not the case. I've taught summer school in Turkey a number of times. My Turkish students found it very difficult to understand after the US invaded Iraq in 2003 and things started to go wrong. They thought there was a grand strategic plot that the US had behind why Iraq slid into civil war. No, there was incompetence involved. But that's not an answer people are used to. And in the United States, it's been difficult for people because the war in Syria, for example, where there were wrenching questions about whether or not the United States should intervene given the level of the killing there. But there were also very real questions about whether or not the United States had the ability to actually influence what was happening on the ground. And so while I'm going tonight to be very critical of American policy, I am not meaning to suggest that a different policymaking process in the United States would actually reorder the Middle East and bring it out of disorder. The United States simply does not have the tools to be able to do that in the region. One of the key factors behind the regional disorder in the Middle East is actually what this cartoon is getting at. And that is the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Virtually every conflict in the region has got a Saudi-Iranian rivalry aspect to it. The Saudis and the Iranians are on the opposite sides. Whether you're talking about Syria or Iraq or Lebanon or Bahrain or Yemen, the two of them are at odds with one another. Some of this is ideological and religious. The Iranians, of course, are the major Shia power. And the Saudis are the major Sunni power. But a lot of this just has to do with these are the two largest countries in the Persian Gulf. They face one another across that body of water. They are two of the largest oil-exporting countries in the world. And so it is not surprising that the two of them have found themselves jockeying for the position of regional hegemon. And of course, for the United States, there's no question about which side of that rivalry the United States is going to be on, because containing Revolutionary Iran is a chief American interest. Unfortunately, I think the US foreign policymaking process under the current administration has certainly not helped matters. And there are three larger critiques that I want to make about the administration's policy. The first one is that there is a lack of expertise in key places in the US policymaking hierarchy. And this is combined with the presence of hardliners, people that have very specific ideological positions that are well-known. So we have some very hardliners on Iran, like in Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State. And then some hardliners on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including the current ambassador to Israel. It's hard to know what Jared Kushner is position on this is, because he still has not released the peace plan that the United States has been promising since Trump came into office that it would have. But given the way the administration has acted towards Israel, it is reasonable to believe that you could classify many of those with policymaking power in the administration as being sort of hardliners. In some ways, they're even to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu, the once and perhaps future Israeli prime minister. So that's the first one, lack of expertise. The second one is ideology over evidence. Israel, a US policy towards Israel and Palestine is a good example of that. But the one I'm going to really look at is the US policy towards Iran. And in particular, the US decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, right, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. And then the third problem is unconditional support on the part of the administration for unworthy allies. And here, again, you could talk about Benjamin Netanyahu. You could talk about General Sissy in Egypt. But I want to focus on Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. And so those are the three basic things that I want to go through in my talk tonight. So first, on lack of expertise, there's a bunch of little subsections to this. I'll sort of start at the top with the president himself. Donald Trump didn't really have any foreign policy experience before he became president. His vice president was governor. And so also doesn't really have very much foreign policy experience. Unfortunately, the president is ill-informed about the region. He does not appear to be interested in learning very much more about it. Policies are being driven by personal ties that he or members of his family have with individual people in countries in the Middle East. And there is the very real possibility that some of this is being driven by business ties between Trump and foreign leaders in particular here talking about Saudi Arabia. Trump tends to make sort of offhand, off the cuff, poorly articulated comments and tweets. But they can have major strategic implications, right? So for example, this is the most recent after the Iranian or Houthi drone attack in Saudi Arabia. And Trump says, Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked. There's reason to believe we know the culprit. We are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack and under what terms we would proceed. This is really problematic, right? Because first, the administration is saying locked and loaded. In other words, we're ready to take military action. And then he steps back in the very next phrase. He says, well, we have to figure out who's responsible first. And we'll let the Saudis tell us whether or not we want to use military force. The US should not be outsourcing its foreign policy decisions like this to foreign countries, and especially not to Saudi Arabia, right? There's no reason why the president needed to put this tweet out. He has a secretary of state who could have issued a particular, you know, could have issued a press statement that would have been more precise and caused less uproar because immediately everybody was like, does this mean the United States is going to be attacking Iran? It creates uncertainty, and that is not a good thing in a region that is as unstable as the Middle East. This is perhaps the most damaging of all of the tweets that the president has set out that has to do with the Middle East. And this one was in December 19th of 2018. I'm sure many of you remember this. We have defeated ISIS in Syria. My only reason for being there during the Trump presidency. And after that, the president then said that the United States was going to withdraw its troops from Syria. The US had several thousand troops in Syria that were working with our Kurdish allies. Before Trump made this tweet, he had not informed anyone in the military that he was going to make this decision. He had not informed anyone in the foreign policy bureaucracy that he was planning to make this decision. Many people pointed out that he's also factually incorrect. The United States has not defeated ISIS in Syria. ISIS may no longer control territory in Syria and Iraq, but ISIS remains a very serious threat to US national security. ISIS was able to emerge out of the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq, at least in part because the United States took its eye off the ball in 2011, 2012. And al-Qaeda in Iraq was able to reconstitute itself and become ISIS. So the idea that ISIS is somehow defeated and that we can just walk away from Syria is a very shallow way of looking at the situation. And of course, almost immediately, the Pentagon had to go into overdrive to try to get the president to walk back this statement. And eventually, he did bring it back a little bit. And he said, OK, I'll set a deadline. And then, well, some of them can stay. It's still up in the air, but US policy should not be as murky as it is when you are making policy kind of on the fly. And the lack of coordination between what the president says and what the whole bureaucracy both in terms of the State Department and the Defense Department are doing is really quite problematic. By the way, at the time, right before he tweeted this out, he had been on a phone conversation with the leader of Turkey, President Erdogan. And he said to Erdogan that the United States was that Turkey could have Syria, the United States was leaving. And this was a direct contradiction to stated American policy. I don't have time to get into that whole mess, but leaving Syria to Turkey puts our Kurdish allies substantially at risk. It's one of the reasons why the US military did not want to remove its forces from Syria. So at this point, the United States still has about 1,000 forces on the ground, but they are stretched very thin. And there are some concerns that if Turkey did decide to move into Syria to create an enclave, that the United States would not be in a position to protect our Kurdish allies there. Another aspect of the lack of expertise is, and this is a combination of the administration and dysfunction in Congress. And that is that at the top levels of both the State Department and the Defense Department, you have large numbers of open jobs. So at the beginning of 2019, about half of the top-level jobs at the Department of State were empty. July of 2019, there were 19 top-level jobs at the Pentagon that did not have anybody in them. There were numerous complaints by foreign service watchers that under the previous Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, that the US diplomacy had really gotten hollowed out. There it came back again. Has been very much hollowed out. Just to give you an example of the kind of consequences that this can have, when the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered last year in Istanbul by the Saudi government, the United States did not have an ambassador in either Saudi Arabia or Turkey. So within the last several months, the administration has finally been able to get ambassadors confirmed to both Turkey and Saudi Arabia. But there was nearly a two-year period in both countries where we had a chargé d'affaires who was in charge. So not having an ambassador doesn't mean you don't have anyone on the ground. But a chargé does not have the same kind of authoritative voice that an ambassador does and is much easier for a host government to simply ignore. And it wasn't just Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The ambassadorship to Jordan is vacant. The ambassador position to Pakistan is vacant. The ambassadorship to Qatar right now is vacant. The Egyptian ambassadorship had gone empty for nearly two years as well, although, again, somebody has recently been confirmed in that. So that is extremely problematic. You just don't have the people and the expertise that you would ordinarily have in the US foreign policy making process available for this particular administration. Another difficulty is that the president tends to reject intelligence that he doesn't like, that doesn't fit in with his preconceived notions of the world. And then publicly denigrates them. And so this is the tweet from January when the US intelligence community had said that their best estimate was that Iran, in fact, was continuing to comply with the Iran nuclear deal. And Trump came out and called them passive, naive, wrong, and then suggested that they should go back to school. This does not create a good work environment in the intelligence community or in the foreign service, where I don't know if anyone reads the Washington polls. But there is a fairly regular resignation letters that have been being published by foreign service officers who say, I just can no longer continue to support the administration's policies. And then you have the turnover. So we have had four national security advisors in the first two years. We have an acting, or for a while, had an acting secretary of defense. And the current secretary of defense has been in the job only for a short period of time. There were about nine months where there was an acting person. Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, is now the longest serving member of the foreign policy team. And he has managed to accrue enormous power because John Bolton, his rival in the National Security Council, is gone. And because you have first an acting and now a brand new and very inexperienced secretary of defense. So policy is gonna be centralized in Pompeo's hands. So that would be my first real concern is that there is a lack of expertise in this administration that is harming the U.S.'s ability to make coherent foreign policy in a region like the Middle East, which is both critical for our security, but also, in turmoil, a great deal of the time. My second concern is this sort of ideology over evidence. The administration, and Mike Pompeo, is a well-known Iran hawk, like John Bolton was. John Bolton had wanted to bomb Iran for a long time. But Pompeo is definitely a hawk on this as well. And so that kind of pressure and the president's own predilections led them to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, this Iran nuclear deal. Oh, nope, that is the one that I wanted, yep. You probably can't read that, yeah, okay. The details actually are not important. So for the Iran nuclear deal. And the complaints that the administration had was that it was going to continue to allow Iran to work on its nuclear program, that the sanctions would be lifted and then they would just come off, whereas many of the aspects of the Joint Framework Agreement, there are sunset clauses. So Iran has to do something for 15 years or for 20 years or for 40 years. But that imbalance between sanctions go off and they're gone and the clauses that are on Iran are going to remain. Many people were unhappy about that. But the administration just simply withdrew from an agreement that the US Intelligence Community and the International Atomic Energy Agency believed was that the Iranians were in full compliance. The US had no agreement to put into its place. There are very few people who would argue that there are no flaws in the Iran nuclear deal. But one of the things that you could have done instead of simply withdrawing from the whole framework is attempt to engage the Iranians in further negotiations. That was the position that our European allies were taking. That was also the position of Russia. But now the United States has instead, all of the restrictions that are in that deal are only remaining in place because the Iranians are continuing to follow along with them. The US then decided on a policy of maximum pressure towards the Iranians. Mike Pompeo gave a list of, I think this is 12, demands of the Iranians. What did the Iranians need to do in order for the United States to lift the sanctions on it? And so among these things were to provide the International Atomic Energy Agency with unqualified access to all sites throughout the entire country. And its proliferation of ballistic missiles released all US citizens in support of Middle East terrorist groups, respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi government and have the Shia militias in Iraq go through a disarmament process. And their support for the Houthis in Yemen withdraw all of their forces from Iran and their support for the government in Afghanistan and all of their support for terrorism and stop its threatening behavior against all of its neighbors. This is not a negotiating this. This is a list of surrender terms. The Iranians cannot do this. And so then they have no incentive to try to sit down and talk to the United States because what the United States has said is required of them would be to roll back their entire foreign policy. And so the problem with a list of demands as extreme as this is that the likelihood that the other side is gonna respond favorably is virtually nil. So we threw away an agreement which appeared to be working, which needed some fixes, but there was support for further negotiations and instead because the administration has this very dark view of Iranian policy, they just simply walked away from this. This has also contributed to, so the US has not then put as part of this maximum pressure has put sanctions on to Iran again. And it's enforcing secondary sanctions. So these are sanctions on like European governments or businesses that might do business with Iran so the US isn't any part of that, but then we can prevent them from doing business with us. And so most of those companies can't afford those kinds of secondary sanctions so they're abiding by them. So I've got a couple of slides here to show that actually since the US withdrew from the agreement and reimposed sanctions, the Iranian economy actually has taken a pretty serious hit. Part of it is because Iran is finding it almost impossible to export any oil and its economy of course is heavily reliant on that. You can see the enormous drop off from March 2018 and that's the point at which US sanctions were put into place. These are the, so the United States had offered waivers to some of its allies who were heavily reliant on Iranian imports of Iranian oil. They said, okay, you have a waiver and you can go ahead and do that. So the top line is showing how much oil they were buying from Iran from May to October of 2018. The lighter colored line underneath of it, November of 2018 until spring of 2019. You can see the lines are much shorter and then you get to Taiwan, Greece and Italy, it's down to zero. Those lines have shrunk even further. Even China doesn't wanna import oil from Iran at the moment because it's concerned about the larger trade war. It's got going on with the United States. It doesn't wanna make things any worse than it already is. But what this has meant is that the Iranians gross domestic product has contracted enormously over the last year. The government's efforts to bring inflation down, which had been successful, inflation has now gone back up and it's headed towards 40 and 50%. This will put a lot of pressure on the Iranian population. The thinking of the administration is then this will force the Iranian population to put pressure on their government. This is a really unrealistic idea. It's very rare that you can use the pain and suffering of a civilian population to get their authoritarian government to change its policies. If anything, the fact that the economy is getting worse because of the fact that the US withdrew from the agreement and then put sanctions back in place has only strengthened the position of the hardliners in Iran. It has also had serious consequences for security and this is where we get back to our disorder narrative. So the Strait of Hormuz is the largest area, anywhere in the world, the more oil goes to the Strait of Hormuz than through any other waterway in the world. It's a very narrow, as you can see, between Iran and largely the United Arab Emirates and then Oman. So it's just a closer look to see. So you can see where the sea lanes are going in and out and there are a bunch of islands. Those are controlled by the Iranians, by the way, the islands that are on there. And so in an effort to try to, well, first of all, just to simply respond to the United States because it's tightened the screws on Iran and in an effort to try to cause pain for others in the hopes that they will then allow Iran to export oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians have become or have begun a campaign of harassment in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. They have gone after a number of tankers. There have been missiles that have been lobbed in the direction of Saudi Arabia, including by the Houthis, and I'll get back to that in a moment. And so this is just in the last several months. You've had tankers that have been sabotaged, Saudi oil facilities that have been attacked by drones, although none of the, there's not really been very much damage in terms of Saudi oil facilities until the September 14th drone attack, which is still, there's still argument about who is ultimately responsible for that. In June, the Houthis who are being backed by the Iranians against Saudi Arabia, the Houthis attacked an airport in Saudi Arabia. They've actually attacked it multiple times. They've actually done some damage. They've killed several people and there have been a number of people that have been wounded there. And then on June 20th, the Iranians shot down a US surveillance drone. Picture of said drone. The Iranians claimed that the drone had gone into their territorial waters and therefore that they were within their legal rights to shoot it down. The United States said no, the drone was in international waters. So this is an act of aggression on the part of the Iranians to shoot that down. I love this map because this shows, first of all, where some of the attacks have happened on the tankers. But I don't know if you can see, although like the orangey webby-like lines on this, every one of those lines represents a tanker path. One day's worth of traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. So we do not want to see this conflict escalate any further in the Straits of Hormuz. We don't wanna see those oil tankers not be able to get through. Because of all of these recent attacks, insurers are putting a war premium onto the insurance that all of these carriers have to have and that contributes to higher prices of oil. I mean ultimately that's what this is all about. If oil doesn't get out through the Straits of Hormuz, you restrict supply, prices are gonna go up and we're all gonna notice when we go to fill our tanks up at the gas station. So in the aftermath of the shoot down of the drone, we had a kind of a pendulum back and forth on the part of the administration. Again, foreign policy by tweet. So Trump started off by saying, Iran made a very big mistake. It looked like the United States was in fact going to carry out a military attack, but then Trump issued this tweet in which he said, we were ready to retaliate and then I asked how many civilians would die. And the answer came back 150 people and so I stopped it. That's not how policies made in the US government, right? When the military presents to the president a set of options for a military strikes, they're going to be very specific on that document about how much collateral damage is expected. Anytime the US military comes up with a list of targets where it might take military action, it's gonna run those through its lawyers because if you killed 150 civilians in a strike like this then you're walking dangerously close to a war crime, right? Which is why you would have the lawyers look at it first. Trump did call off the strike, which in the bigger picture, this is a good thing because we don't wanna see the US and the Iranians going to war with one another in the Straits of Hormuz. But as one person has mentioned, oftentimes in the Middle East, Trump gets that policy right, but does it in the worst possible way, right? So again, the policy making process is just a mess. That brings us, I mean, this then directly connects because the drone strike against the United States was sort of the peak of the concern to that point about the Straits of Hormuz. But then you had the war in Yemen that intervened last month. So you've had the Houthis who are fighting against Saudi Arabia. They've been lobbing missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia pretty consistently while the war has gone on. The Houthis military equipment has gotten more sophisticated. Their missiles have developed a longer range, meaning they can go further into Saudi Arabia. And on September 14th, there was what is believed to have been a missile and drone attack on one of the largest facilities in Saudi Arabia, which because of the damage meant Saudi oil production was literally cut in half in one day, and Saudi Arabia is one of the largest, if not the largest contributor to oil, the oil that is available on the international market. So these are the photographs that were released that show the damage that happened to the tankers and storage facilities, et cetera, at this Saudi facility. So again, then the question becomes, well now what's going to happen? The United States immediately blamed Iran for doing this. The Houthis claimed responsibility. It's still murky about, initially it was said the direction that the missile strikes had come in, it couldn't have come from the south, it couldn't have come from Yemen, it had to have come from Iran. Now there's some questions about whether or not that directional, whether that's the only direction the missiles and the drones had actually come from. And this is the point at which Trump said that the U.S. was gonna wait for the Saudis to tell us what to do in response to this latest provocation. It did have a big impact on the price of oil. It went up, it's gone down a little bit, but nonetheless, I mean there were consequences as a result of the attack against Saudi Arabia. One of the back issues here, which if you have questions I'd be happy to try to answer them, we don't really have time to get into the whole depth here. But it's important to recognize that the Saudi coalition, the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates are the major powers that have intervened in Yemen. The most recent report that the United Nations issues accused both countries of committing war crimes in Yemen and said that the United States and the United Kingdom were complicit because it was U.S. and British military equipment that they were using. Yemen is the world's greatest humanitarian disaster at the moment. The Saudis have pretty consistently not just bombed military targets. They have hit hospitals, they have hot prisons, they have hit schools, they have hit funerals, weddings, et cetera, et cetera. So there is a great deal of anger in Yemen against Saudi Arabia. And one of the chief concerns actually in Yemen is not so much how many people are dying as a direct result of the fighting, but it's how many people are dying because of their lack of access to food and to medical care. So the estimate actually is that it could be over 100,000 people are indirect casualties of this war. There are three million people in Yemen who are at risk of famine. And so with this, neither the Houthis nor the Saudis have clean hands in Yemen. One of the chief frustrations about Middle East politics is you don't or rarely have a white hat and a black hat. You always have people with bloody hands. It's just a question of who's more or less culpable of committing war crimes. And that brings us to my third point. So my ideology over Evan's point is simply the fact that the administration didn't like the deal because Obama had negotiated it and had an ideological fixation on Iran as the enemy meant that it ripped up an agreement that had been working and that created additional turmoil in the region and then helped touch off this rash of sabotage and drone attacks that have been going on this summer. And so then my third point is just this unconditional support for unworthy allies. And here I wanna focus on Mohammed bin Salman who is the Saudi crown prince. When he initially came into his position there was kind of a lot of hype around him. It's like he wants to modernize Saudi Arabia. He wants to overhaul the economy. He's going to let women drive, imagine, driving. He's young, he wants to provide entertainment for young people. He's gonna loosen up the kingdom, et cetera, et cetera. Well, Mohammed bin Salman has been responsible for some of the worst decisions that Saudi Arabia has made over the last few years. He's the chief architect of the war in Yemen. And so those kinds of humanitarian consequences that I was talking about can be laid directly at his door. In fact, there are some senior Saudi officials who quietly sort of left the country for extended vacations when this war first started because they didn't want any parts of taking the blame for this kind of reckless adventure that Mohammed bin Salman had started in Yemen. He, and of course the Saudis at this point are unable to get out. He is young, he is inexperienced, he is rash, he is vengeful, he is headstrong. Someone said he did a really impressive job of gaining power and has done a miserable job of using it. Under Mohammed bin Salman, you have seen, so yes, women have been allowed to drive, but the main women who are responsible for that, the activists who pushed for driving, have been arrested. Most of them have been tortured. Earlier this year, the Saudis executed 17 Shia, who they had accused of engaging in demonstrations. One of them was a minor at the time that they had been arrested. There was a student who had actually been admitted to a US college who was among those individuals that were executed. The international observers for those trials have said that there were gross miscarriages of justice, a lot of the testimony was coerced out of them through torture. The fact that the Saudis continued to execute anyone in the Shia population in Saudi Arabia that is critical of the government has meant that there continues to be very serious domestic tension in Saudi Arabia around its Shia population. He, in one of the more unbelievable stories, Mohammed bin Salman because Saudi Arabia and Iran are fighting over Lebanon, he had the Lebanese prime minister come to Saudi Arabia and they literally kidnapped him and forced him to resign. Lebanon refused to accept that resignation and there was a huge outpouring of support in Lebanon like give us back our prime minister, which the Saudis eventually had to do and when Harari returned to Lebanon he was treated as a returning hero at least for the initial return. That's the kind of reckless conduct that Mohammed bin Salman has been engaging in. But the thing that has really turned people against Mohammed bin Salman, especially in the United States, is his responsibility for the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi who was killed just a year ago and a day in Istanbul in the Saudi consulate. Congress has been, so this is a bipartisan issue in Congress. There are Republicans and Democrats who've been working together over the past year who have been trying to reign in the US commitment to Saudi Arabia because first, because they were very concerned about US policy in Yemen and its connection. I mean, every time the Saudis would hit an area and kill large numbers of civilians, that caused disquiet because the United States was refueling their aircraft, for example, the United States was selling the Saudis, the weapons that they were using in Yemen, et cetera, et cetera. So there was already a significant backlash growing amongst some Republicans and many Democrats against Mohammed bin Salman over Yemen. But the murder of Khashoggi has really galvanized people. So first, Congress tried to trigger a Magnitsky Act investigation, which is you're investigating something for human rights violations and if you find that the person or the organization has been in violation, then under US law sanctions can be imposed against them. The administration has said that there are a number of Saudis that it has put sanctions on so they're not allowed to come to the United States, but no one believes that those are the people who are actually responsible for the policy that led to the death of Jamal Khashoggi. In December of 2018, Congress voted to hold Mohammed bin Salman personally responsible for this act. In April, Congress called on the United States to end support for Saudi Arabia in Yemen. Trump used one of his very rare vetoes to prevent that from going through. In May of 2019, Congress tried again to block the arms deal that the administration had negotiated with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Even though at the time the administration was framing this as this is necessary to combat Iran, you still had a bipartisan group in Congress who was not willing to accept that, who were more concerned about the behavior of Saudi Arabia and so tried to block that arms deal. The administration had to use an emergency declaration to get around Congress because they were never gonna get the arms deal through in order to allow them to sell the material to Saudi Arabia. But not only has the administration not criticized Mohammed bin Salman for any of his human, many human rights violations and has not held him responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. It has also helped to rehabilitate Mohammed bin Salman on the world stage. So he had been sort of shunned in the initial aftermath of this, but at the most recent G7 meeting in the summer, I think this was in June, Trump shook his hand and then posed with him in the center of the picture of all of the leaders that were there. Mohammed bin Salman has been able to come to the United States to have meetings in the White House and then some of you may have seen, he was on 60 Minutes this past Sunday, where he said he would accept responsibility for Khashoggi's murder because of his position, but denied that he personally had anything to do with it. The US intelligence community believes it has very strong evidence to show that in fact he is the individual who ordered Khashoggi's murder. So the United States with respect to Saudi Arabia has at this point emptied as policies of any kind of ethical or moral dimension, even in terms just of the discourse, that it isn't even attempting to argue that the United States should think about human rights or democracy or freedom with respect to Saudi Arabia because the US wants to sell Saudi Arabia arms. That's the argument that the president has frequently offered here. But as someone pointed out, the United States has said literally, Mohammed bin Salman can get away with murder. So while it is concerned with reigning in Iran's irresponsible behavior in the Persian Gulf region, Mohammed bin Salman and Saudi Arabia are also engaging in many of the same behaviors that the US condemns when the Iranians do it. With respect to Mohammed bin Salman, he is the crown prince. This United States cannot interfere in the transition when his father passes, he is going to become the king. However, the United States did not have to rehabilitate Mohammed bin Salman. The administration could have taken a different kind of a line with him. But this has been very typical with many of the US allies. Again, Sisi in Egypt, who Trump most recently referred to as my dictator, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. These are individuals whose policies actually are reflecting badly on the United States, who are pursuing policies that aren't necessarily in the interests of the United States, but which the administration has just simply embraced them wholeheartedly and has not attempted to use American leverage to get any concessions out of them. If you wanted to rehabilitate Mohammed bin Salman because you believed that this was critical for the US position, the US could have attempted to extract a concession of some kind from Mohammed bin Salman to allow him to show up at the G7 and shake Trump's hand. But the US got nothing in return for taking this step. Unfortunately, for the Persian Gulf region and really the Middle East in the day, regional disorder is the order of the day. Equally, unfortunately, US policies are helping to fan the flames, not to try to quell that disorder. And again, I am not trying to argue that if the US pursued different policies in the Middle East, everything is gonna be beautiful and everything is gonna be perfect. I am suggesting that if the United States pursued different kinds of policies in the Middle East, first of all, that it would be more in line with its own values, but secondly, that it might be able around the edges to prevent some of these conflicts from escalating any further than they already are. You, Donald Trump himself does not appear to have a strategy when it comes to the Middle East, an overarching view of what the United States should do. He is not supported by a robust policymaking process. In other situations, when you've got really strong personalities with a lot of experience in top-level policymaking positions, they can really make up for whatever deficiencies a president may have. We don't have that robust policymaking process in place right now. Trump has surrounded himself with people, particularly now, that we no longer have like Jim Mattis or HR McMaster, where Pompeo has become the power center in the administration for foreign policy. He's surrounded himself with people who aren't capable of changing his views on what's going on in the Middle East. And there are real dangers attached with a policymaking process that centers around someone's personality, as opposed to centers around the process and the policy itself. Again, sometimes Trump's impulses in the Middle East have been correct. There have been many decisions where people have said, no, we think that is the right thing to do. Just you went about it in completely the wrong way, created additional complications that didn't need to be there. Over the last several years, U.S. policy in the region has been erratic, it has been contradictory, it has been muddy. We have lost any semblance, as I've said, of sort of moral and ethical leadership because of the alignment that it has now with the Saudi leadership. It's been very hard for our allies and our foes alike to predict U.S. actions. And they frequently find themselves baffled by what is happening in Washington. They're not sure who to ask either, especially in situations where we don't have a U.S. ambassador in one of these countries, they're just simply not certain what U.S. policy is about. And so I think I will just leave it there with U.S. policy making process leaves a great deal to be desired at the current moment. And then I would be happy to take people's questions. Oh yes, microphones, sorry. You can do it for fun. Well actually, if you want to know the answer to that question, this is how much I felt compelled to come here tonight. This is the opening night for the penguins hockey season. The game is going on even as we speak, right? I didn't even wear my jersey. So that's what that's, I watch a lot of sports. Old Devils. I feel sorry for the Devils more often than not. I was a big Marty Burdour fan. Oh, I didn't mean that. Sports. That's right. I respect anyone who feels strongly about their own team. I have a question. What do you see the reason for these unfilled positions? Is it the Democrats, you know, thwarting the administration, or is the administration putting unqualified people up for? So it's actually, it's a mix of several things. One actually gets back to the original transition for Trump into the presidency when Chris Christie was in charge of the transition. He was compiling lists of people who should go into these positions and then Christie got tossed to the side and all the work he did got tossed to the side with him. So they had to place and catch up there. Part of it is anybody who worked for the Obama administration and anyone who's criticized Trump publicly is not being considered for positions. Part of it is there's also amongst the Republican foreign policymaking establishment, a lot of never Trumpers, people who have refused to have anything to do with the administration. Part of it is that the administration has sent unqualified people and part of it certainly is dysfunction in Congress. Democrats holding things up, Congress just not getting around to holding the hearings. Like there have been a couple of cases where the administration has actually finally put forward an ambassadorial nomination and then Congress leaves for two weeks and it just sort of sits there. So I mean, there's a whole range of factors. Not all of them are in the administration's control, but a lot of them are. And part of it also, by the way, so when Rex Tillerson was Secretary of State, they put a hiring freeze on and the intention was in fact to shrink the U.S. Diplomatic Corps and then even after Tillerson left, many of those positions have not been, even though the hiring freeze has been lifted, those positions have not been filled. One, two, one comment. First of all, I know you talk about the vacancies, but it's always been said that elections have consequences. We elected the president by, you know, Electoral College and it has consequences. So all the flaws. Now, this may be crooked thinking or may not be, even without Bolton, how are you gonna convince me that we were not part of the drone attack on Saudi Arabia? Even the United States was part of the drone attack on Saudi Arabia? As I said, I might be crooked thinking, but tell me, convince me, because you even said we don't know for sure. I can go back 50 years to the Gulf of Tonkin. Two of them convinced me that we were not part of it, even without Bolton, who's a hawk. So the wreckage of the drones that struck in Saudi Arabia are Iranian origin missiles. They have the parts and the design that have come from Iran. So either they came from the Iranians or from a Shia militia in Iraq or from the Houthis, but the actual physical remnants that we have have come from Iran. It also really does not make any sense from a U.S. strategic standpoint to risk damaging Saudi Arabia's ability to pump oil. If you're concerned about the economy and the run-up to the election, the last thing you wanna do is drive the price of oil through the roof, and that potentially could have been the outcome of what happened here. That sort of conspiratorial thinking is very popular in the Middle East as well, and it's one of the real struggles that American diplomats have in the Middle East is the tendency of people to believe that the United States is ultimately responsible for everything that happens. But in this case, I actually would turn it back on you and say, you're gonna have to offer me some incredible reason to believe that the United States would be involved here because there is no evidence to support that. My brother-in-law is a retired career state department, primarily focused in North Africa for the bulk of his career. I sent him the program today and asked for a variety of questions. He gave me a list. You covered all of them, but one that he said we should discuss. He also observed that as a Lawrence graduate, we shouldn't trust anything that a polite person would say. Wow! We've got some serious us, them, why are we going on in this room? The question he said I should pose is whatever happened to the Arab Spring? Yes, well, that's a very sad question. So as it started in Tunisia, it was peaceful. It moves to Egypt and was still relatively peaceful, but as it moved elsewhere to Bahrain and to Syria, the regimes reacted with force and in the case of Syria with overwhelming force. The same kinds of factors that drove the Arab Spring, so lack of opportunities for young people, unemployment, stagnant economies, lack of any kind of political voice, those issues are all still there. And so just within the last week, the Egyptians actually arrested, I think about 2,000 people, in anticipation of a demonstration and then locked down to Rear Square so that nobody could get in there to demonstrate. The Iraqi security forces sadly killed several people in demonstrations in Iraq over the last couple of days. People are again out in the streets there because they don't have enough electricity, they don't have enough public services, they think their government is corrupt. All of the issues that drove the Arab Spring are still in place, but we had another layer of very violent responses that were able to overcome those. Yeah, and so I think there's tremendous disappointment on the ground in Egypt or in Iraq or some of these other places in Bahrain for sure about what has happened, but it is very difficult for a popular unarmed movement to bring about that kind of change if elements of the regime and the security forces are willing to use overwhelming. If you don't care how many people you kill, then you can suppress those kinds of movements. You've laid out a very impressive rationale of why our foreign policy is so dysfunctional. I'm wondering, is there any country in the West that does have a robust foreign policy that's a thoughtful process and may rely on something other than tweets? Well, not the UK. I will say, actually, France in the last, over the last several months, France has been very concerned about the fact that the US withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and Macron was maneuvering to try to get Trump and Rouhani, the Iranian president, on the phone with one another. And so, apparently, he had it. He had Trump in a room on a phone and they were trying to get Rouhani to come out and pick up the phone so that they could have a conversation and the Iranians refused to do this. Rouhani, I think, was probably concerned about what this would mean for his position at home. If the hardliners found out he was talking to Donald Trump, but France has certainly been attempting to try to contain some of the damage, try to save as much of the JCOAP that they can, but I don't really look very closely at other countries' foreign policies. So, you know, growing in Spain could be doing a really great job, but I don't have an answer for you for that. If you were a genie and they let you out of the bottle, what would you do about things in the Middle East? What are some of the policies that you'd institute? Yeah, well, I think part of the problem here is some of these problems, there are no good solutions to. And what we're looking at is a range of options from bad to worse. This was the situation in Syria for the Obama administration. On the one hand, you wanna say, the humanitarian situation in Syria was appalling. How can the US stand by and watch this kind of violence happen? But the lesson of Iraq seemed to be that the US wasn't capable of using military force to rebuild an entire society that, in fact, if the United States committed heavily into Syria, that it was setting itself up for a long-term presence and was not going to be able to bring about stability, right? But that's a very hard sell for people to say, well, we're just gonna have to stand here and watch Syria blow up. Iraq is another really good example of this. Now, many of Iraq's problems can go back to decisions that the US made in 2003 that have had lasting consequences. But the United States can't force the Iraqi government to be less corrupt. We can set out benchmarks for them. We can offer aid. We can offer technical assistance to try to say you really need to rein in the corruption. But ultimately the US cannot make the Iraqi government do that. One of the things that I did value about the Obama administration's foreign policy in the Middle East was that I did think it had an element of humility to it that they recognized that there were serious limits to American power in the Middle East. So I don't have, you know, if I was a genie and let me out of the bottom, my first wish would be to go back to 2002 and stop the invasion of Iraq. Because that has had really long lasting consequences. But there's no way to fix that. Is it possible to say anything about the people that are suffering in Palestine and the corruption that's in the government in Israel and we throw money at them like crazy and we'll let them do whatever they choose to do and say nothing and the administration has closed all the doors to having anything that's even slightly a peace agreement and the genocide that's going on in Palestine and we are part of that. And then we pass laws, we're gonna try to pass laws to make it illegal to say anything about what's going on or to put any kind of pressure on that government. Yeah, so the US policies towards the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Trump administration has broken with decades of US policy. So the United States policy has always been that settlements are illegal. Under international law, Israeli settlements, they are illegal. There's not really any controversy around that. Trump removed that from the US policy. Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, which again, that's supposed to be a final status issue. And then he recognized Israel's control over the Golan Heights, which has captured Syrian territory. And the principle under international law is you cannot keep territory that you capture by aggression. That's why the United States ejected Iraq from Kuwait in 1990. It's why people are angry about Crimea. And the United States didn't get any concessions from the Israelis for all of these policy changes that benefited Netanyahu and his reelection. Those are not concessions that I believe in the long run are beneficial for Israel because they make a two-state solution virtually impossible. And a one-state solution is, I mean, that's the death of the Zionist dream because of the demographic realities on the ground, a one-state solution between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is not going to be a Jewish state. And so the administration, it's not even just that it strengthened hardliners, it made those concessions for Netanyahu. And Netanyahu is in deep, deep trouble and may not even be able to, he may not even be able to survive the current corruption allegations against him. I mean, he's currently trying to form a government, but there are some pretty serious obstacles to that. And then the other part of that was, again, this is almost just gratuitous. The United States was the leading funder of the UN Relief and Works Organization, which provides for Palestinian refugees it pays for schooling, it pays for healthcare, it helps families that are completely impoverished. The United States cut all of its funding to that organization. So it's only gonna make people's lives more miserable without, I mean, the benefit of doing that is really difficult to see. And so we've strengthened the position of hardliners in Israel and we have made it more difficult for there to be any kind of negotiated solution. And at the same time, we have taken positions that are in clear violation of international law. The person to the right, where? The person to the right, where was he educated? Who are you? Yeah, the Arab. What about him? Where was he educated? Yeah, I think. London? I think so, yeah. I mean. I can't remember offhand where he went to school. It's like a lot of these foreign leaders, I mean, educated school economics. Right. Our own Ivy League schools. It doesn't necessarily, they'll make them for Western in any way. Bashar al-Assad was educated in the UK. And actually people thought that that might make him less dictatorial than his father, but that has completely turned out not to be the case. But to be honest, I can't, I don't know offhand where. Okay, yay internet. King's side university. So within Saudi Arabia. You stated earlier we're less dependent on oil. Yeah. But does our own government want us to think that? No, I mean, because the price of oil is at a certain, once the price of oil hit a certain level, it actually became economically feasible to do fracking, right, and oil sands and all the rest of that, because the problem is in Saudi Arabia it costs like a dollar to produce a barrel of oil, because it practically just oozes right out of the ground. In many other places it's significantly more expensive and fracking is significantly more expensive. So as long as the price of oil has maintained where it is, it gave everybody reason to bring harder to find oil sources onto the market. That meant the supply got larger. And at the same time, particularly in the United States and even more so in Europe, people were engaging in all kinds of driving more fuel efficient cars, buying more fuel efficient appliances, et cetera, et cetera. So no, the United States does not get, I mean, of Middle Eastern countries where the US imports oil, Saudi Arabia is the number one, but I think it's like 6% of overall US imports come from Saudi Arabia. I do believe Canada is our number one source of oil imports. Okay, thank you. This is getting back to the basics. The division in this area stems from Mohamed's, when he died and the Muslims went divided between the Sunnis and the Shias. I think one was a, I won't say because I don't remember one was a son-in-law and one was a particular first generation from Mohamed, I'm not sure. Could you tell me what do the religious clerics have to do? I mean, are there steps for them to solve this terrific division, warring division between the Shias and the Sunnis? Who is there anybody working in this? Well, at first, the Sunnis-Shia division is a convenient shorthand sometimes to sort of explain like who's on which side, but it's not clean, right? So Iran is a Shia country, right? The majority of Syria is not, right? Hamas, there are Sunnis, not Shia. It depends country to country how politicized that sectarian divide is, right? So in Iraq, for example, prior to 2003, the sectarian division had become more politicized, but it didn't have the same kind of currency it came to have afterwards. The other thing to remember is that there are also significant ethnic divisions on the grounds. So Sunnis-Shia doesn't explain like the Kurdish Arab conflict, it doesn't explain Arab Persian conflict. And then lastly, I would argue for Saudi Arabia and Iran, regardless of what their religious make-ups are, those two countries are poised to be rivals in the same way that France and Germany are destined to be rivals. It's the geopolitics of the situation. And now the Sunnis-Shia piece adds a significant amount of tension to that rivalry because both countries wanna be seen as the heads of the Islamic world. But I think that the origins of disorder in the region go far deeper than just simply the sectarian division divide. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Daherty, for a wonderful presentation. Very interesting. Come back next week and hear John Kasker, a retired U.S. diplomat who will talk about the state of the State Department and diplomacy. Thank you for coming.