U.S. Middle East public diplomacy a destabilizing factor

Mojtaba Barghandan, dailysabah.com

Image from article, with caption: U.S. President Donald Trump (L) shakes hands with CENTCOM Commander Joseph Votel (R) as he arrives on stage to speak following a visit to U.S. Central Command and Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, Feb. 6, 2017.

Each U.S. administration relies almost solely on its military, which in turn makes Washington's public diplomacy a destab[i]lizing factor

Solutions to today's unconventional conflicts are gloomy and obscure. A handful of statesmen and governments tend to employ various soft power instruments in an attempt to find solutions whereas others throw monkey wrenches into the process.

Based on some existing definitions, public diplomacy [JB emphasis] is the principal substitute for the use of force or underhanded means in statecraft, a means to apply comprehensive national power to the peaceful adjustment of differences between states. At the same time, it may be coercive, supported by the threat to apply punitive measures or to use force, but it is overtly nonviolent. Being overtly nonviolent may not necessitate it to be covertly violent since its primary tools are international dialogue and negotiation. On the other hand, there is this idea that public diplomacy is ideally operated and employed if each of its hard and soft forms work as complements to each other.

The public diplomacy of the superpowers in the region include everything from disseminating war and tensions to arms races, known as arms diplomacy, through imposition of some nonfactual, misleading and specious anti-states cases – the cases that proved to be fully lacking real merit or are solvable only by diplomatic negotiations. However, there is this belief in these super powers' diplomacy approach that what to achieve matters a lot, rather than what public diplomacy does. Taking these definitions – the chain of developments since the eve of the 21st century – in particular, U.S. President Donald Trump's latest polices, into consideration, where does U.S. public diplomacy stand with respect to the Middle East?

The evidence indicates that with the new phase of a complicated relationships in international relations and global politics that arose out of 9/11 and its developments, later with the Arab Spring, and newly and then the Syrian civil war, public diplomacy as a support function for major policy initiatives seems not to be the cure-all anymore. Likewise, it is underused, misused or even ignored on various occasions in the sense that it has been used to balance out other actors' influences in certain issue or regions. With regret, this feature has also been applicable in defining the role of public diplomacy to some extent in the nature of the major regional states' relations.

As in the case of the Middle East, public diplomacy is employed to balance out major rivals and/or some major regional powers' growing influence. This is done only for the purpose of creating political partnerships and betraying alliances with some Arab regimes in the Gulf to form significant security strategies through providing these regimes with the latest military technologies as leverage and weight to exert more pressure on the major effective regional states.

These characteristics apply to U.S. Middle East public diplomacy. For instances, considering the U.S.'s global war on terrorism that has entitled very extensive military intervention in Afghanistan, invasion and de facto occupation of Iraq and later on with its policies on Syria, the role of public diplomacy was secondary to urgent military operations. This may be the proof to the argument that to expect lasting accomplishments from U.S. public diplomacy is too high a standard.

In the name of what?

The U.S. applies its public diplomacy through spending billions of dollars to win the hearts and minds of governments and non-state actors affiliated to it that are practically dependent, or even concerning the internal affairs of some regional states, under the name of support for human rights or similar issues, letting these states continue their self-destructive path. Thus, U.S. public diplomacy and diplomatic initiatives have been the least effective or not effective at all in serving for peace and stability in the region. Its public diplomacy followed the content of delusion, which is impossibility, implausibility or fully based on acute awareness of pushing the Middle East to the edge of chaos and apocalypse with no chance for return.There is no or less complementary relation between the two major elements of U.S. public diplomacy that emerged mostly in the forms of military operations, occupation and imposing sanctions. Thus, its public diplomacy is utterly forsaken while its military, or hard power, is overwhelmed by strategic or tactical puzzles in the region.

Officials in the U.S. are trying to find a new foothold in the region under the umbrella of public diplomacy and diplomatic initiatives since Trump came to power, but it seems for the time being that the U.S. faced the peril of its own military alliances in the region doubled by the threats and repercussions of Russia's deep-running influence in the region.

As the example of incompatibility and ignorance of diplomatic norms and literature, unlike the initiatives exhibited in the form of the Astana peace talks, Iran's serious intentions to find a diplomatic solution to the controversial nuclear agreement or even the recent example of North Korean Olympic diplomacy with South Korea, U.S. diplomacy has been implausible, in one way driven by a budget of billions of dollars through creating arms races in the region and sending its weaponry to big markets in Arab countries. In another way, it strengthened by covert and overt threats against the fulfillment of several peace initiatives in the Middle East. Having been driven by delusions of grandeur, U.S. public diplomacy is by no means a substitute vision of greatness, but rather a means to deceptively persuade some dependent states to follow its path in the region.

Diplomacy under former President Barack Obama, in particular since the Arab Spring began in 2010, has been following the same path. Although, Obama has been called the "soft power president," U.S. diplomacy, particularly concerning the Middle East during his time in office, proved not only the least effective, but also illustrated it delusion.All these special features in U.S. public diplomacy and diplomatic approaches have caused every U.S. administrations to become poised to rely almost solely on its nimble military to intervene along with a fake vision of greatness while it has never been adequately prepared to face conflicts or to confront and react to diplomatic initiatives proposed and initiated for regional peace and stability. This makes U.S. public diplomacy a destabilizing factor, which might lead the U.S. to become less proactive both rhetorically and militarily in the years to come.

Researcher, Iranian Middle East political and security analyst