Surfin’ UAE

In the words of a famed conservative activist, “When they go low, we go high.” ...

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In the words of a famed conservative activist, “When they go low, we go high.” That’s what we’re doing today on The Remnant by getting out of the muck of American domestic politics and having a conversation with veteran guest Kenneth Pollack on the intricacies of the Israel-UAE deal instead. What does this mean for the region, and what are the historical corollaries (Hint: It might be on your Remnant Bingo card)?

Show Notes:

–Foreign PolicyKen’s piece for

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  1. Avatar photo
    C C Writer

    So, when will we get actual Remnant Bingo (or as I would prefer to call them, Dingo) cards? Some of us would pay money for a bundle of them in the Dispatch swag store. I have been compiling a list of items that go on it. Will post or send on request.

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    Angie

    Thank you, I like Mr Pollack
    Foreign Policy ( And economics, which I also find boring...lol) are two areas I both know little about and have trouble grasping in the big picture...this helped a lot, and I learned a lot

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    Kevin Johnson

    This was great. Mr. Pollack is right to point out that there may be unintended consequences we should be alert for after the UAE agreement. I agree that it is too bad that a kind of U.S. step back was part of the impetus...but am glad you pushed back about how Israel’s steady hand against Iran, with renewed support from the U.S. once Obama left, made this possible. I personally think Pollack gives short shrift to how important this moment is in exposing the false narratives we have been fed about the Middle East for many years. Israel has been, and remains, ready and willing to negotiate peace, including returning lands gained in defensive wars, with any adversary. You can look up when and where they have done this successfully as well as when and where their offers to negotiate have been rejected. It has shown this while led by governments of the right, left, and center. Well intentioned Europeans and Americans have prolonged conflict by feeding fictions by Palestinian leaders (who lie over generations to their people) about the destruction (virtual or literal) of Israel. Many Arab leaders have done the same, often without even the good intentions; they cynically exploited Palestinian suffering for their own ends. Well, Jerusalem is now seen as what it is by the U.S. Most Arab governments now admit that Iran is the threat to the region, not Israel. More and more countries are accepting that pressure will not force Israel to capitulate to demands that would destroy it. Eventually one hopes Palestinians will get leaders ready to recognize reality and negotiate for an independent state. None of this solves the terrible situation for the Palestinians, but recognition of reality is one key to a resolution, and the UAE deal is an important contribution.

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    Victor Clairmont

    So the UAE deal is good short term and to be seen long term is mostly Mr. Pollacks contention?

    I am fine with that. If the US not following 40 years of policy to protect Middle East oil is forcing the gulf states to ally with Israel, that's acceptable. Maybe not ideal, but acceptable for now.

    Iran being the catalyst force in the region, scaring the devil out of it's neighboring countries, is moving them to make ties with a former foe that they wanted to wipe off the map some decades earlier.

    I am happy I heard this podcast today, when the Serbia/Kosovo summit also normalized negotiations with Israel. Seems a domino effect may be coming for other nations. Excellent. Even if it is out of necessity.

    Though one can say, for now, if you ally with Israel you are allied with us. Good points Mr. Porter brings forward.

    If the Middle East, through fear, hook, or crook, is divided between the Gulf States and Israel, and a solidifying of the actors into pro-west Israel and anti-west Iran, then by wealth alone the Pro-western will just outmatch Iran in time.

    And I think it is fair to point out, as we are a nation where 70% of all of our oil is in house now, we do not actually need Saudi Arabia's oil. The world economy yes. The US? No. We learned from the Carter administration with gas lines it's not good to be reliant on a foreign power that may turn hostile for something so fundamentally vital. Of course, we need to learn this again with rare earth metals from China but that's a different story.

    But the gulf states cannot seriously think that they would be protected forever especially with their flirtations with terrorism (looking at you Saudi Arabia and Wahabism). They should use their vast wealth to start funding their own military. Was also happy to hear again that the Middle East is not buddy buddy with Trump. But they do like him much more than Obama.

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      James Spiller

      Saudi spends about 8% of its GDP on the military, more than twice what the US does. The Saudi government is the chief enemy of AQ and roughly third equal with the UK for Iran (which has a weird British royalty conspiracy thing going on). The UAE also considerably outspends America as a portion of their GDP. They’re fighting Iran in Yemen pretty much by themselves (lots of diplomatic support from around the region, not a lot of boots on the ground support). What on earth would “start funding their own military” look like?

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    James Spiller

    A second quibble over moral equivalency; it seems to me that alliances to protect the global liberal order are not the same as alliances to destroy it. This isn’t the same for all of the parties to the alliance; Russian involvement in the Triple Entente was not as ideological as the Anglo French Entente Cordiale, and Austrian involvement with Germany was not driven by Austria sharing Germany’s view of the world. The Turks weren’t even sure which side of the war to join at the outset (Churchill both pushed them into the war on the other side and maximized Allied losses to them after doing so). But the Entente Cordiale’s opposition to Germany was the core of the two alliances.

    The French and British had worked hard to create a Pax Britannia that discouraged an excessively Hobbesian view of the world. They had overcome considerable history to side with a Muslim power that neither had affection against a marriageable royal family for in the Ottoman War. They hadn’t intervened when the Germans invaded Denmark in the First Schleswig War, and again in the Second, fighting to considerable profit. They didn’t intervene when they invaded Austria in the Austro-Prussian War, either, but the German habit of invading its neighbors was attention getting. The French did involve themselves in the Franco-Prussian War, but they militarized too late to avoid paying the Germans a ransom; the French payments of reparations to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War exceeded the supposedly excessive reparations paid by Germany to France after the Great War.

    The German belief that their less effete/ civilized approach to life meant that it was welfare maximizing for Germans to constantly invade their neighbors was not extinguished by the Great War. In both World Wars, a core problem was that the German leadership did not believe that their opponents would follow through on their alliances, certainly not in a sufficiently timely manner to prevent the entrenchment of German gains. There was a moment in 1905-06 when the German leadership was sufficiently intimidated by the unanimity of the western world in opposition to their militancy that they temporarily retreated and restricted their barbarism to the abuse of colonial subjects, but that testing of the limits was led Britain to secure a Russian commitment to taking the side of the liberal order if Germany were to oppose it.

    Jonah tweeted after the interview “What if World War One had never been fought?” and suggested that “WWII doesn’t happen without WWI.
    Bolshevik Revolution doesn’t happen.
    Generation of Europe’s best men don’t die.
    New Deal doesn’t happen.
    No Cold War, maybe no Israel. Prohibition? I dunno. Women’s suffrage? Yes but maybe later.
    WWI changes everything.”

    The question depends somewhat, though, on how the War is avoided. If Germany was contained diplomatically, as it was in 1906, it is possible that the German militarism that led them to invade in 1914 and to invade their neighbors *again* in 1939, despite having experienced the pain of the first loss, would simply have vanished. The world seems likely to have remained relatively Hobbesian, but perhaps some very articulate cultural movement would have redirected German energies towards peaceful ends, such that young men saw their best lives as being found in the glories of investment banking or theology.

    If, on the other hand, it had been decided that coalitions of the willing to protect the international order were harmful, a more likely form of “no World War One” seems more like a “No World War Two” based on Hitler mostly being content to run Central Europe and an international order that was similarly content. A peace in 1914 based on France and Britain letting the Russian government fall, though, doesn’t guarantee that there is no Bolshevik Revolution; the Germans toppled the Emperor Napoleon III and the French Second Empire before they toppled the Russian Czar, whose fundamental constitution had been a little less volatile than the French. By definition, “No World War” means that you don’t have the oceans of dead, and sometimes, as with the Cold War, leaving the Evil Empire at arms length allows it to finish itself off. But more often a principled opposition to intervention looks like Munich or worse. A “No World War I” that saw Germany eventually satiate itself and grow hungry again could easily have meant “no VE Day” for entirely the wrong reasons.

    If the UAE and Israel feel emboldened by their alliance to act against Iran, that seems just fine by me. Could it lead to escalation? Sure. Since the alternative to vigorous action against Iran seems to be letting the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism develop nuclear weapons and engage in genocide in Syria and the destruction of the protections against genocide in Iraq, I’m not sure that I see escalation as a bad thing.

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      Victor Clairmont

      I always find the what-if scenario's charming. Irrelevant obviously as we don't have time travel. But charming. Good for books and TV.

      You're last paragraph:

      "If the UAE and Israel feel emboldened by their alliance to act against Iran, that seems just fine by me. Could it lead to escalation? Sure. Since the alternative to vigorous action against Iran seems to be letting the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism develop nuclear weapons and engage in genocide in Syria and the destruction of the protections against genocide in Iraq, I’m not sure that I see escalation as a bad thing."

      Is completely in agreement with me. For now, it's good. Something bad may happen in the future? Well, of course something bad may happen. We may have a meteor wipe us out. But good foreign policy is making the building blocks that will allow conflict to be less damaging if at all it happens. And sometimes, if the status quo was not moving things forward, shaking things up does work, even if it was more so unintended consequences of the Obama administration.

      I doubt even Iran, with nuclear power, would be as interested in going to war with the gulf states if they are allied with Israel (which is allied with us to a degree) than if they were never a part of it.

      And the Khamenei won't live forever.

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    James Spiller

    I thought that this was an excellent podcast, although I think that the claim that Bush behaved in the exact same way as Berchtold is very unfair indeed to Bush, as is the claim that the Russians were persuaded by their alliance to urge the Serbians to be belligerent. The Austrians made a series of ten demands, including massive censorship, the destruction of the various nationalist societies, agreement to dismiss every military and civilian official the Austrians wanted (a list to be provided later), the firing and punishment of border professionals and such. The Serbians agreed to nine of them, including all of the above and more; Churchill described the document as “the most insolent document of its kind ever devised". Bush demanded that the Taliban extradite foreign nationals involved in terrorism and destroy the terrorist bases, a significantly smaller demand.
    Austria gave a 48 hour deadline and broke off relations within 24 hours. Both Russia and France pressured Serbia to comply in toto, although the Russian foreign minister also wrote to the Austrians asking them to extend their deadline. Britain tried to provide mediation, which the Austrians refused. The Serbian government agreed to most of the requests but not to giving over their courts to be run by Austria. While their degree of compliance shocked people, it was not enough to prevent their immediate invasion by Austria.

    Had the Taliban turned over Bin Laden, or turned over other serious AQ leaders and claimed that OBL had fled, and had made some decent shows of destroying AQ bases, it seems very unlikely indeed that there would have been the political will to invade Afghanistan in the US.

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    Amy Stapleton

    Great to hear something outside of the presidential campaigns or Covid-19. Whoever wins Remnant Bingo ought to be able to record their own “No you won’t, this is a podcast” for one of the solo episodes.

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    Adicesa14

    Wow! I really missed these ‘in the weeds’ conversations. All these interesting topics require some research. So, it is going to cost me because I will need to purchase some new books!

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    Tracie

    My favorite thought here is framing the Wahabi(sp?) takeover of Saudi Arabia by imagining what Israel would look like if it were run by the ultra-orthodox.

    Also, I had no idea how WWI started. (Think I took one, maybe two 100 level history classes in college.) I knew the Serbians shot Franz with the plumed hat, and that was it. The analogy of how the Austro-Hungarians invaded Serbia with how the US invaded Afghanistan makes it a little realer in my mind.

    Regarding the discussion based on alliances of mutual fear, such as Russia and Britain vs early 20th century Germany, and Israel and the UAE vs Iran, those are not the kinds of points I see made frequently in the general readership lefty press. I used to read The Guardian a lot, and it always frames the Palestinians as oppressed freedom fighters who all Arabs prioritize above all else. Feel like there's a resistance on the idealistic left to realpolitick.

    Get into trouble all the time with more leftish friends when I simply make statements about the state of reality, and it's perceived as some aspirational ideal I'm advocating, vs just a statement about the complexities of the way things are. A major thing I value about this site is the attention to that. Everyone has an opinion and a position, but if you need to deny reality to support it, you're advocating for stupidity.

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      Victor Clairmont

      It's a really underrated part of history. Without WWI, the world would be completely different.

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        Tracie

        Whenever I find a Jupiter pic on twitter I have to bring it to you. Here it is. Got nothin to do with WWI.

        https://twitter.com/AvatarDomy/status/1302745855657684992?s=20

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        Tracie

        When I hear "Austro-Hungarian Empire" I think of Vienna as portrayed in the movie Amadeus, from the 80s. I know nothing.

        Chat tomorrow. It's been a long week.

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    Butch Earl

    Another Remnant masterpiece! Thank you to Jonah and Ken Pollack!

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