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US Approaches to Re-Shaping the MENA: Extending Free Trade to the Arab World |
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US policy towards the MENA region has evolved over the course of the last century from peripheral interests to focusing on the region more so than any other in its foreign policy. The Bush administration has overseen one of the most abrupt transitions in the lengthy course of Washington’s MENA policy, intensifying the ‘stick & carrot’ doctrine in its efforts to re-shape the region. Imad H. EL-Anis explores developments in the policy of promoting Free Trade to the MENA and how this could be of great benefit to the region. |
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The United States under the Bush Administration has signed more free trade agreements than under all previous administrations before it. While liberal economics and integrative foreign trade policies are not new within US government, the inclusion of the Arab world in such processes is. The MENA region has in fact been at the forefront of US free trade policy since 2001. This stems in part because of economic prospects within the region, especially in the Gulf economies, but also from the increased sense of urgency and importance associated with re-shaping the international relations of the region post 9/11. This overt aim should not be interpreted within the region as a threat but rather an opportunity that should be taken. |
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President Bush has worked to support ‘favourable’ conditions in the MENA but has often failed to pursue these approaches with sufficient conviction. |
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The MENA region has long been semi-isolated from the global economy and divided internally. The impetus of the United States towards economic integration through free trade can help bolster greater economic integration on the global as well as regional level and lead to greater economic activity. An assessment of how steadfast the US desire for free trade with MENA economies is should be the first point of this realisation.
United States Policy Toward the MENA Region
The United States’ relationship with, and policies towards, the Arab world have evolved over the past century in four main ways in an historical progression. In the first half of the twentieth century the United States had a marginalised although increasing interest in the MENA region. This interest was based largely on the Monroe Doctrine – discussed in greater detail below - and revolved around reducing European influence and competition in the region. However, the discovery of vast amounts of natural resources in the region and increasing American involvement in international politics during the first half of the last century began to bring the MENA region into the centre of U.S. strategic interests.
In the second historical period, which can be identified as the period spanning the end of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War, the United States assumed the role of a world super-power and committed itself to enduring integration with the rest of the world (Ambrose, E., 1997). Thus strategic imperatives began to drive U.S. foreign policy. With regards to the Middle East and to a lesser extent North Africa the United States faced two key strategic influences on its policy formulation in this period. In the first instance, increased Soviet activity in the region threatened both the doctrine of ‘Containment’ and U.S. access to the region’s resources. Second, de-colonisation and the withdrawal of European influence in the MENA posed the problem of managing the regional transition from dependant to independent states. The resulting embedded nature of U.S. policy formulation towards the Arab world would endure up until the end of the Cold War.
The period immediately following the end of the Cold War and spanning the last decade of the twentieth century constitutes the third historical period of U.S. policy towards the Arab world. The collapse of the Communist threat to the West led to a reduction in the strategic imperative of the MENA region. The 1990-1991 Persian Gulf Crisis and subsequent War was confessed to be a problem of ‘world peace’ that must be addressed by an international community enforcing utopian principles of self-determination, sovereignty and freedom. The U.S. backing of the Oslo Peace Process between the Israelis and Palestinians was a further extension of the emerging idealistic approach to the international relations of the MENA. However, the events of September 11 2001 served to highlight that the strategic importance of the MENA region and U.S. policy towards it were embedded by a globalising and increasingly interdependent world system.
The period following the terrorist attacks in 2001 to the present constitutes the final period of U.S. policy formulation with regards to the Arab world. It can be argued that this period is characterised by a policy hybridisation of strategic imperatives based on realist assumptions of the international relations of the region and liberal economic ideology. The manifestation of this type of policy formulation has taken two paths. The first is that of aggression and destructive regime change through violent means. The second is more subtle yet more effective and enduring – extending free trade and economic integration to the Arab world.
The Bush Doctrine and the Arab World
The terrorist attacks on the continental United States on September 11 2001 marked the first time since the war of 1812 that the United States’ mainland had been attacked by a foreign power – barring the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7 1941 which is exceptional as the American mainland was not under attack. The severity of the attacks and the psychological ramifications they brought with them cannot be underestimated. A President, who much like his predecessor had little interest in foreign policy when he took office, was thrust into a major international crisis that necessitated a major American response at the international level. When George W. Bush took office in 2000 he had given only one foreign policy address in the election campaign. This trend was followed for the first six months of his Administration, which overwhelmingly focused on domestic issues such as education reform, faith-based initiatives, energy sources and production, and tax relief. As a consequence Bush was criticised for not only his lack of interest in foreign affairs but also his seemingly dangerous lack of knowledge about the international realm. In comic humour, The Economist magazine in 2001 showed a picture of an American astronaut on the moon with the caption: “Mr. Bush goes to Europe” (The Economist, June 9 2001). In no region of the world was the Bush Administration’s lack of will and ability to engage felt more than in the MENA.
During the 2000 Presidential campaign Condoleezza Rice published a foreign policy manifesto which argued for a strict national interest standard for U.S. foreign policy (Ward, A., 2003). Rice criticised Clinton’s failure to distinguish between areas of vital U.S. interest and areas of trivial importance. She claimed that rather than concentrating on powers that had the ability to affect the global order, such as Russia and China, or on pivotal alliances such as in northeast Asia, the Clinton Administration had dissipated American credibility and military prowess on issues and regions of a peripheral nature (Rice, C., 2000). In this manifesto Rice only mentions the MENA region once. Further more, she argued against the pursuit of societal engineering on the vast scale envisioned in the doctrine of democratic enlargement. Rice’s suggestions were very much evident in the foreign policy of the first nine months of the Bush Administration. The main foreign policies pursued focused on the American withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the deployment of ballistic missiles defences and the challenging of the emerging Chinese pretensions to regional hegemony. With regards to the most pressing issue in the politics of the MENA region, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it was clear that Bush had regarded the conflict as beyond effective U.S. influence. The level of violence, distrust and political disagreement appeared to have unravelled previous advancements in the peace process and Washington had no desire to engage to the extent that Clinton had in 1999 - when the President made a spectacular last push for peace culminating in the Camp David summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat and hosted by Clinton (Stein, K., 2002).
The events of September 11 2001 provided the ‘hawks’ in the Administration, especially those that saw the re-shaping of the Arab world the best chance for securing American interests, with the opportunity to push their agenda at the highest tiers of government. Since 1945 the United States has had to interpret and react to threats and overtures of friendship emanating from the MENA region. Often these have not come from the Arab world as much as they have come from outside powers such as the Soviet Union. However, in the post-Cold War era the only threats perceived by the United States in the MENA have emanated from the Arab world. As a result of U.S. interpretation of Arab threats over the past decade or so Washington has formulated policy initiatives that revolve around either accommodation of Arab interests or imposition of American interests – the latter of which has been the more common of the two (Yaqub, S., 2002).
There are four conceivable ways in which Arab actors may respond to U.S. policies that fundamentally damage U.S. interests. The interpretation of these Arab reactions has undergone rigorous re-assessment since 9/11 and has resulted in the reinforcement of the U.S. tendency to disregard Arab critiques and to favour the imposition of American interests – mainly through economic and military rather than diplomatic means. The first Arab reaction is for Arab governments to establish a collective response such as embargoing oil shipments to the West, forging alliances with great power rivals of the United States or boycotting American products and services. However, in the twenty-first century these are not likely. The decline of Arab nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s – helped in no small part by the Israelis in 1967 – has resulted in a relatively high level of Arab division (Tibi, B., 1997). The result is the inability of Arab governments to forge universal foreign policies. The option of an oil embargo is also less likely to be used in the new century. Diversification of Western oil supplies coupled with the realisation that an embargo of oil on the west will hurt the Arab oil producers as much as the targets of the embargo has rendered this an unlikely and inefficient reaction (Bromley, S. 1998). Furthermore, the decline and fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s has left the Arab world with no great power rival of the United States to turn to. China poses as the most likely power that may rival the United States, however, it is not in any position to do so on a regional level let-alone the global level.
The second Arab response is for independent militant organisations to direct their activities at U.S. interests in the region and abroad. This has actually materialised and currently poses as the greatest threat to American interests in the Arab World and elsewhere. Regardless, terrorist acts rarely have a significant impact on American interests and are not capable acts of impacting the direction of U.S. policy on their own. In fact there seems to be some correlation between terrorist attacks and the hardening attitudes of American policy makers and their inclination to ignore Arab critiques. A third way in which Arab actors may respond to U.S. policy is for an Arab ‘rogue’ or revisionist state to acquire and use WMDs. Again, though, this possibility has the impact of encouraging the United States to take an aggressive and unilateral approach to any Arab state seen to be pursuing such weapons. At any rate there seems little possibility that an Arab regime is capable of developing WMDs (barring chemical weapons – which have been produced and used) and as has been shown in the case of Libya multilateral pressure and unilateral U.S. actions render the pursuit of WMD too costly an endeavour.
There remains a fourth conceivable reaction to American action in the Arab world that is perhaps more significant than the previous three. It is plausible and often seems likely that pro-U.S. regimes may be swept from power by mass popular movements – as revolutionary Iran demonstrated in 1979. While this is a possibility and has significant ramifications for U.S. interests it has been a possibility for several decades which has seldom materialised and as such has lost credibility as a likely reaction. The relative weakness of the potential Arab responses to U.S. foreign policy in the post Cold War and post 9/11 world has increased the Bush Administrations inclination to seek the unilateral imposition of her interests over diplomatic accommodation with the Arab world. This has allowed the Administration’s hawks to encourage the incorporation and dominance of strategic interests in Washington’s policies towards the Arab world.
In late 2001 and early 2002 the ‘hawks’ successfully exploited the suspicion that Iraq was directly involved with terrorist activities and that Saddam Hussein was still in pursuit of WMDs which he could and would in the near future supply to terrorist organisations such as Al-Qaeda. The immediate result of this influence was the insertion of a single provision at the end of a presidential guidance document to the U.S. government’s response to the attacks ordering the military to prepare for war with Iraq. The stage was set for a second war with Iraq in little over a decade. More significantly the stage was set for intense U.S. involvement in the MENA region that would be unlike any previous U.S. engagement there. The majority of debate on the Bush Doctrine has focused on the implications for go-it-alone unilateral strategies, an end to broader U.S. cooperation with other states and regions – even her closest allies – and the resurgence of American militarism. However, there remains a more structural implication for the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy – that of the level of U.S. engagement and the nature of this engagement.
Draining the Swamp
Military action such as that taken in Afghanistan in 2001 and the ongoing occupation there along with countless counter-terrorist activities taking place around the globe – not to mention the invasion, occupation and counter-insurgency in Iraq – is but one component of the campaign to defeat global terrorism. A second more subtle but more intense component is to address the structural and systemic causes of terrorism. In relation to the Arab world the Bush Administration has sought to answer the question of why the western Muslim world seems so much more prone to violence, instability and terrorism than anywhere else. Most answers to such a question focus on political or cultural explanations. The unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict is often cited as the root of all the region’s problems – most often by Arab governments and western academic scholars. Culturalists such as Bernard Lewis argue that cultural and historical resentments of colonialism and religious grievances are the root cause (Lewis, B., 1990).
If these are the roots of the Arab world’s disillusionment then there is little that can be done. The Arab-Israeli dispute is one of the world’s longest running conflicts and has proven practically impossible to resolve to date. Colonialism is a past phenomenon that cannot be changed. However, we can identify a third possible cause that is centred on economics. South America, East Asia and South Asia all have deep rooted ethnic and religious conflicts and colonial legacies; however, they are not as prone to instability and violence as the MENA region. The most evident difference between these regions is that the Arab world remains economically and politically divided and isolated both from the global economy and at the regional level while the rest of the world is increasingly integrated. Many in the Bush Administration have adopted this interpretation and have developed a policy framework that aims at resolving this situation by correcting a number of socio-political and economic imbalances (Lindsey, B., 2003).
The policy makers in the Bush Administration have highlighted the fact that economic growth in the Arab world, especially in the 1990s, has been disappointing, having barely kept up with the region's demographic growth. This poor performance of growth is especially disappointing at a time when the rest of the world - including the West, Asia, and the former Soviet Union - have all experienced at least a reasonable per capita economic growth. The MENA region has been the second slowest growing region in the world, ahead only of Latin America - where the number has been weighed down by poor performance in Brazil.
In a speech given at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on November 6 2003, President Bush outlined his Administration’s underlying approach to the MENA region. In this speech, Bush described the emergence of an approach that would foster and support the idealistic principles of democracy and economic freedom in order to assist the Arab world in realising its economic and social potential. The President somewhat boldly and importantly highlighted that:
Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.
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Alike past U.S. foreign policy towards the Arab world, President Bush has pushed forward an agenda that adopts strategic considerations at its core. He has also adopted the Clinton Doctrine of Democratic Enlargement through societal and political engineering as a means of securing American interests. However, unlike past U.S. policy towards the MENA region the foreign policy engineered by the Bush Administration is uncompromising in its desire to foster economic freedom in the MENA region. |
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The Whitehouse has come under constant pressure to justify its policies in the MENA, but the President and his administration has more often than not ‘stayed the course.’ |
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While the Clinton Administration developed a foreign policy approach that employed democratisation and liberalisation, it did so in a multilateral setting and in a hierarchical manner in which strategic concerns were primary. Bush on the other hand has proven willing to support liberal economic ideals on those whom it best serves the United States’ strategic interest to do so in a unilateral manner and with the one interest being synonymous with the other.
Negotiated and Potential Free Trade Agreements
The result of this approach of encouraging and supporting the spread of liberal economic ideology in the MENA region has been the conclusion of a number of bilateral agreements between the United States and Arab states. The first of these FTAs was concluded with Jordan (JUSFTA) in 2000 and came into force in 2001. The result has been a dramatic increase in trade levels between the two economies from US$389 million in 2000 to US$2071 million in 2006. Following the JUSFTA a US-Morocco FTA was signed on the 15th of June 2004. The result has been increased levels of trade which in 2006 totalled US$1396 million as opposed to just over one billion dollars in 2004. In September 2004, just three months after the signing of the FTA with Morocco, the United States signed an FTA with Bahrain. Again the result has been increased trade between the two economies from US$706 million in 2004 to US$1122 million in 2006. Importantly the majority of these increases in trade levels have come from rising exports to the US market. In November 2004 the US Trade Representative informed Congress that FTAs with Oman and the United Arab Emirates were about to begin. Negotiations for the Oman FTA were concluded in September 2005 and the agreement is due to take effect in the first quarter of 2007. Talks with the UAE have not been as successful and are yet to be concluded. It is expected that an agreement will be signed by April 2007.
In addition to these concluded FTAs the US has signed a number of robust Trade and Investment Framework Action Plans (TIFAPs) with the following Arab states: Algeria, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Yemen. These TIFAPs have been implemented to lay the foundation for complete FTAs.
Towards The US - Middle East Free Trade Agreement
The May 2003 proposal made by President Bush to establish an FTA between the United States and the MENA region by 2013 was based upon the implementation of graduated steps towards bilateral FTAs. With a number of these FTAs concluded and prospects of negotiations for a further seven high this initiative may be realised. The support of liberal economic ideology and policies in the form of FTAs in the MENA region by the United States has been seen as detrimental to the economies of the region by some. However, as the FTAs already concluded have shown economic benefits can be reaped from increased trade with the US market. With current US trade policy unlikely to change even with a change in Administration looming in 2008 MENA economies should follow the model set by the existing MENA-US FTAs. The completion of a US-MENA FTA will not only lead to greater exports from the region to the US market but also complement the implementation of the Greater Arab Free Trade Area agreement.
Bibliography
Ambrose, E., 1997, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, 8th Revised Edition, London: Penguin books Ltd.
The Economist, June 9 2001, U.S. Edition.
Ward, A., US Policy to the Middle East: Utopianism and Realism, IISS Strategic Comments, Vol. 0, Issue 1, January 2003.
Rice, C., Promoting the National Interest, in Foreign Affairs, January – February 2000.
Stein, K., The Bush Doctrine and Selective Engagement in the Middle East, in Middle East Review of International Affairs, Vol. 6, No., 2, June 2002.
Yaqub, S., U.S. Assessments of Arab Threats Since 1945, in The Impact of 9/11 on the Middle East, in Middle East Policy, Vol. 9, No. 4, December 2002.
Tibi, B., 1997, Arab Nationalism: Between Islam and the Nation-State, 3rd Edition, London: Macmillan.
Bromley, S., 1998, Oil and the Middle East: The End of US Hegemony? In the Middle East Report.
Lewis, B., 1990, The Roots of Muslim Rage.
Lindsey, B., The Trade Front Combating Terrorism With Open Markets, in Trade Policy Analysis, No. 24, August 5, 2003.
Freedom in Iraq and the Middle East, President George W. Bush, remarks at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, November 6 2003. Available online at http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rm/26019.htm |
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“Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”
George W. Bush, September 27 2001. |
