Seldom in recent years has the Congress, particularly the Senate, given the sustained consideration to an issue of foreign policy that it gave to the Saudi arms sale. Yet what is striking about the debate engendered by the sale was the inconsequence of much of it when measured against this nation’s compelling interests in the Persian Gulf.
Almost throughout the debate the focus remained on issues of secondary significance. This was no accident. In presenting their case for the arms sale, administration officials were evidently intent on structuring a dialogue that avoided as much as possible the critical issues of policy. And not without reason, since these issues would have raised difficult and embarrassing questions.
Since the administration had no desire to engage in serious give and take over the deeper implications of the arms sale, its emphasis from the outset was on the relationship between the arms sale and Israel’s security. On this chosen ground, the battle was bound to be won in the end. For the President could always promise, as he repeatedly did, that Israel would continue to enjoy qualitative superiority in arms over the Arab states. No matter that in the process of retaining such superiority Israel would either sink financially or become even more dependent than today on the United States, What mattered was that Reagan had given his word and that to question his promise was to impugn the integrity of a very popular President.
Nor was the Begin government ever disposed to a serious test of strength with the Reagan administration over the arms sale. Indeed, during his September visit to this country, the Israeli Prime Minister not only was uncharacteristically moderate in his opposition to the impending arms sale but indicated that he considered the “new” strategic relationship promised Israel to be much more important than either the proposed sale or, it seemed, the policy underlying it.
Nevertheless, the Reagan administration insisted on focusing attention on the efforts of Jerusalem to block the sale. The Israeli Prime Minister was depicted as being at his most intransigent. The President warned against the danger of a foreign country dictating U.S. foreign policy. With the administration’s evident approval, the Saudis’ chief lobbyist in Washington, Fred Dutton, characterized the struggle over the arms sale as one between Begin and Reagan. Richard Nixon echoed the characterization.
Contrary to a widespread impression, this focus on Israel was at least as much a matter of choice as of necessity. The administration was not unhappy to have the debate framed largely in terms of the threat allegedly held out by the arms to Israel’s security. Nor was it unhappy to see the debate centered on the issue of preserving the integrity of the policy-making process against the efforts of Israel and its American supporters to compromise this integrity. The administration calculated that if the debate could be kept largely on these grounds the sale would ultimately be approved by the Senate.
At the same time, it must be noted that if this calculation proved sound, it was in part because most opponents of the arms package acquiesced in the tactic of avoiding the real issues it raised. Diverse as it was in its reasons for fighting the sale, the opposition gave little indication that it had much more desire than the administration to confront these issues. Most of the opponents remained quite as reluctant as the administration to support a basic shift of policy in the Gulf. This being so, the reasons for opposing the sale were confined, on the whole, either to the threat held out to Israel’s security or to the danger that the arms might one day fall into hostile hands.
These reasons were surely significant. When taken together they did form serious and substantial grounds for opposing a policy of supplying Saudi Arabia with the most advanced weapons systems we have. Still, taken by themselves, they did not go to the heart of the matter. For they did not directly address the central issues of policy the Saudi arms package ought to have raised.
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At this late date, there can scarcely be any uncertainty over the interest that must subordinate all other considerations in the formulation and implementation of American policy in the Middle East. To insure Western access to the oil of the Gulf remains no less today than in the recent past our paramount concern. Assured access—which must be defined not only in physical terms but ultimately in terms of acceptable levels of production and price as well—is the yardstick against which virtually any and every policy move must be measured and judged. This vital interest, on the preservation of which the American global position directly depends, provides the one true litmus test of policy.
The Saudi arms sale should have been judged primarily in terms of this interest. If the sale would further this interest, there was no sufficient reason to oppose it—and this despite other unfortunate, even deplorable, effects it might have. It does, after all, sometimes happen that certain national interests may have to be sacrificed or at least compromised for the sake of yet other interests. In the present case, it might have been argued that although the arms intended for Saudi Arabia represented an added threat to Israel’s security, the liability thus created for an ally was more than balanced by the benefit resulting to America’s vital interest in the Gulf. This was in fact the core of the administration’s case, though it never had the candor and the courage to admit it. Instead, the argument was advanced that arming a committed foe of Israel with the most advanced weapons systems represented no significant additional threat to Israel—indeed, that it was even good for Israel. In this form, the argument was merely disingenuous.
To say this, however, is not necessarily to condemn the administration’s determination to push through the sale. It is only to condemn it for lack of candor, a venial sin in politics. If the arms package does indeed significantly further the American interest in preserving access to the oil of the Gulf, then it should be supported despite the adverse effects it may have on Israel’s security. It is a hard world. Painful choices must sometimes be made. The question is whether this was such an occasion.
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In making its case for the sale, the administration began by explaining why it was asking Congress to approve an arms package in 1981 that its predecessors had promised not to undertake in 1978. On this earlier date the Carter administration had assured the Congress that it would not go beyond the sale of F-15 jets to Saudi Arabia. Having begun to betray that promise almost as soon as it had been made, the Carter administration nourished expectations in Riyadh.’ Still, on this score at least, the new Reagan administration manifested no disapproval of the handiwork of its predecessors. On the contrary, it soon showed that it was more than eager not only to satisfy earlier Saudi expectations but to create some of its own.
The defense for giving the Saudis in 1981 what Congress had been promised in 1978 would be denied them was disarmingly simple. Circumstances had changed in the intervening years. This was the principal justification for permitting Riyadh to buy the F-15 add-ons, the aerial tankers, the Sidewinder and Harpoon missiles, and of course the AWACS. The revolution in Iran, the Soviet attack on Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq war, and all of the experienced as well as the feared consequences of these events were invoked in defense of the sale.
To this broad ground the administration added the following propositions which, given their constant reiteration, soon took on an almost ritualistic quality. The sale would help the Saudis defend themselves, particularly from regional threats. It would lay the groundwork for greater U.S.-Saudi defense cooperation. In this regard, the sale would enhance the effectiveness of our own military capabilities to employ U.S. forces in the Gulf. The AWACS would provide us with an early-warning network. Also, by providing an extensive logistic base and support infrastructure, we would lay the basis for facilitating deployment of U.S. air forces to the region in time of need, if so requested. Finally, the sale would not only highlight our commitment to Saudi security and provide a foundation for greater U.S.Saudi cooperation, but would contribute to restoring the image of U.S. power and the value of our friendship in the area. This in turn would offer the best guarantee against Soviet threats to the region and against radical efforts to undermine the peace process.
Such was the administration’s formal case for the arms sale. But it had a less formal and rather more revealing case as well which, though never quite explicitly stated, was made clear enough over time. The Saudis, the informal argument ran, are now the linchpin of American policy in the region of the Gulf; even more, there is now no real alternative to them. This being so, we must keep them satisfied at almost all costs. Within very considerable latitude, they must be given what they want and feel they must have.
These propositions do not exhaust the informal case. Taken by themselves they are plainly vulnerable to the charges that the Saudi regime cannot defend itself against the varied threats to its existence, that the stability of the regime cannot be relied on, and that even if it does somehow manage to continue in power it will not necessarily define its interests in a manner compatible with our own. Against these charges the informal case asserts: that Saudi Arabia will be able to defend itself against most external threats provided the regime receives sufficient American arms along with some direct American support and assistance; that the present regime is basically stable and can be expected to survive for the indefinite future; and that Riyadh is basically friendly to the U.S. and, accordingly, defines its interests in a manner essentially compatible with American interests (not only in the immediate region of the Gulf but also in the greater region of the Middle East as well).
Finally, the administration’s informal case rested on the consequences of rejecting the sale. In the end, it was these—ever more ominous as the debate went on—that came to represent the hard core and most effective part of the case for supporting the arms package. There were, first of all, the regional consequences of rejection. A rejection would humiliate the Saudi regime and gravely jeopardize its standing in the Arab world. The result could only serve to damage our interests in the Gulf. At best, the Saudis might be expected to turn to Western Europe for arms and protection. Alternatively, they were seen embracing their radical Arab brothers (“engaging in regional politics,” as the State Department bureaucracy euphemistically put the matter). At worst, they might seek a rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Looming over these frightening prospects was the threat that a disappointed Saudi Arabia would resort to the oil weapon. In the wake of a refusal to sell them the weapons they wanted, they might raise prices while decreasing their production and thus tightening the oil market.
But even these anticipated grave consequences of rejecting the arms package were said to be overshadowed by a yet greater danger. Congressional refusal to sanction the sale would place in serious question the authority and effectiveness of the President in foreign policy. It would send the message that, on critical decisions dealing with the Middle East, even an otherwise strong administration could be prevented from acting in the nation’s interests by our Zionist client—and its supporters in this country. The result would not only be to challenge the President’s control of foreign policy but to question the very integrity of the foreign-policy process.
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The first thing that must be said about the administration’s case is that it lays bare as never before the central importance of Saudi Arabia today for America’s Middle East policy. If there was any doubt before September about the significance Washington attaches to its relationship with Riyadh, there can be none today. By word and by deed the Reagan administration has now shown what only yesterday it was at considerable pains to deny—that it has made Saudi Arabia the centerpiece of its policy in the Persian Gulf and, beyond, in the Middle East.
That Saudi Arabia should be the focus of American concern is, in itself, scarcely surprising. Access to the oil of the Gulf is for all practical purposes today synonymous with access to Saudi oil. It is not the singular concentration as such on Riyadh that must occasion attention but the extent to which this nation’s policy is now held in thralldom to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis had made the arms package a “litmus test” of our intentions. This being the case, there was no alternative but to go forward with the sale. The Saudis had indicated that they would entertain no modifications of the terms on which the sale was made. This being the case, the administration found fighting with constituencies at home preferable to undertaking further negotiation with the recipients of the arms. The Saudis had insisted that they would enter into no public commitments restricting the uses to which the arms could be put. This being the case, the Reagan administration was forced to give assurances to Congress that Riyadh would not deign to give to the United States.
The effect of all this was to convey the impression that the party holding much the stronger position was not the seller of the arms but the buyer. Certainly, in proclaiming that the heavens would fall if the arms sale were not approved, the administration almost seemed determined on going out of its way to confirm this impression.
Have we now been exposed, then, to the real meaning of the much touted “strategic consensus” of Secretary of State Alexander Haig? It would seem so. When critically examined in the light of these recent events the strategic consensus turns out to be little more than the packaging given to a one-pillar policy in the Middle East. With the Iranian pillar gone and the Egyptian pillar now rather shaky, we have been reduced to the last and, by almost any reckoning, the weakest pillar of all. Once the administration’s case for the arms sale is seen in this light, its otherwise baffling arguments and claims become understandable.
Yet they do not thereby become more acceptable. Indeed, the administration’s case takes on a semblance of plausibility only if the assumption is granted that we have no real freedom of strategic initiative or, what amounts to the same, no independent and effective power to dispose of in the region of the Gulf. If this were so, we would have no alternative but to place our reliance on the Saudi connection and to accede to Saudi wishes, however reasonable or unreasonable they might be. Although the administration will not directly own up to it, that assumption comes very close to defining its own innermost conviction. In subscribing to it, the administration has preserved the continuity of American policy. Today as yesterday, a policy essentially passive in the use of American power must be expected to rely on whatever surrogate it can, and to find in this surrogate qualities that give such reliance at least a semblance of plausibility.
Even if this policy of impotence continues to hold sway, however, there is still no excuse for the persisting illusions about its all too likely results. Although the Shah’s Iran ultimately came to grief, we can only look back with longing when we compare it with our chosen surrogate of today. Whereas in the case of Iran there was something on which for a time we could rely, in the case of Saudi Arabia there is virtually nothing to sustain us.
A proverbial house of cards, vulnerable to a dozen different kinds of serious threats, Riyadh disposes of little save a financial power that, despite the awe it inspires in many quarters in the West, cannot be expected to sustain the Saudi regime against the first serious external or internal challenge. The prospects for internal upheaval in the several years ahead must be counted as quite strong, if the preponderance of experts on the Gulf is to be believed.
Understandably, the administration prefers to believe that the Saudi regime possesses a formula denied to others for immunizing itself against the forces of change sweeping over the Arab world and that have already brought about the downfall of the Shah and the assassination of Sadat. American policy has bet very nearly its all on the continuity of the present government in Riyadh. Should that government be overthrown, the advantages presumably served by the arms sale would be transformed overnight into serious liabilities. Given the policy to which it is now so firmly committed, the administration has no alternative but to believe that Saudi Arabia will be an island of stability in the years to come.
Let us suppose that, despite the mounting signs to the contrary, this belief—or hope—is not dashed. Would this vindicate the administration’s case for the arms sale as well as the general policy underlying the sale? The answer evidently depends on whether the Saudi regime can be counted on to use the weapons only in ways and for purposes that we approve. But the entire debate over the arms sale demonstrated, if it demonstrated anything, that we have no reliable way of insuring the uses to which the arms will eventually be put. The administration could give no solid assurance, else it would have done so. The assurances it did finally give were entirely of its own devising. As such, they scarcely bound the Saudis who remained supremely detached from and disdainful of the exercise. Even if they did bind Riyadh, they would remain virtually worthless in view of their vague and obscure character. The haphazard product of a handful of amateur drafters who found in them the rationalization for finally supporting the arms sale, those assurances resemble, in the words of one critic, a bowl of mush. Perhaps the metaphor of goulash is more apt, since one can find in them what one wants to find.
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In the last analysis, it is not the assurances Reagan gave to wavering Senators that will prove important. It is whether he and his associates can be counted on effectively to constrain and discipline the Saudis in using the weapons the administration has sold them. If there had not been pervasive doubt over the administration’s intention and capability of doing so, there would have been no need to exact detailed assurances. The doubt so widely entertained is eloquent testimony to the way the Saudi-American relationship is perceived today even by those who, in the end, supported the arms sale. Clearly, that relationship is not perceived as one in which Washington holds the upper hand. Among the many lessons the debate conveyed was that we now see our relationship with the Saudis as a relationship between equals.
It may be argued that there was no need to exact any assurances from Riyadh, given the Saudis’ record. In the course of the debate, administration spokesmen made much of Saudi moderation and cooperativeness. Approval of the arms sale would presumably insure that these characteristics of Saudi policy would continue to prevail, whereas disapproval would risk a change. When the Saudis were not held out as our friends, they were at least seen as sharing a congruence of interests with us. Again, refusal of the arms would imperil the friendship and create serious conflicts of interest between the two countries.
In terms of substance, these arguments will not bear critical scrutiny. In the great price rises of the 1970’s, the Saudis were in the vanguard. Since 1977, they have consistently opposed the peace process. They have created what obstacles they could to our search for bases in the Gulf. In yet other ways, they have opposed us. Why, then, the continued insistence on their moderation and cooperativeness? Is it merely a wishful fantasy or does it reflect a deep fear of what they are capable of doing to our interests if once so disposed?
Certainly, fear must provide a major motivation for a description of Saudi policy that bears almost no correspondence to reality. This is supported by the lurid estimates of disaster if once the Saudis are disappointed or their will is crossed. Thus the absurdly benign picture drawn of Saudi behavior is but the mirror image of the fears we entertain of our powerful friend. After a decade in which the Saudis have filled us with terror over what they might do to us if we do not accede to their wishes, we no longer even seem to be aware of the syndrome into which we have settled.
In the arms-sale debate, administration officials invoked the many and terrible prospects awaiting us on the morrow of rejecting the arms for Riyadh, and the opposition, by its silence, indicated that it too was mindful of these prospects. Whereas, according to the administration, all manner of options were open to the Saudis in the event we disappointed them, virtually no choices were open to us. The Saudis might well go elsewhere—to the Western European states, to their radical Arab brothers, even perhaps to the Soviet Union—but where could we go to compensate for the terrible setback we would experience in the Gulf? The message could not have been clearer, and it tells us a great deal about the way in which Washington now conceives of the Saudi-American relationship.
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Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the debate was the willingness of the administration to make the sale so critical a test of its foreign policy. To a detached observer, at issue was whether or not the government of the world’s premier state would sell certain arms to a small and weak desert kingdom that happens to possess the world’s largest proven reserves of petroleum. Not all arms by any means, only certain arms. One would have thought this a matter the century’s greatest power could take in stride, whatever the particular outcome. Instead, we were led to believe that Senate refusal to sanction the sale could only have disastrous consequences. Why this insistence upon calamity if the administration did not have its way?
It is not enough to respond by declaring, as the administration did with such ultimately dramatic effect, that the President’s authority and effectiveness in foreign policy were at stake in the outcome. In some measure, they were in the end. But if they were, it was largely because the administration was willing—even intent—on making this so. The question persists: why was it so willing? Why did it finally insist on structuring the case in this apocalyptic manner? Was the bleak picture painted of defeat little more than a last-ditch expedient to compensate both for the obvious mismanagement of the arms sale before Congress and for a case so intrinsically weak and unpersuasive that only a special presidential appeal and desperate tactics could carry it? Or did the insistence that the world would very nearly stand or fall on the outcome of the Senate vote express the true sentiments of this administration?
No doubt, a part of the answer must be found in each of these conjectures. The administration did badly mismanage the arms sale only to find out very late the difficult position it was in. Still, the tactics it employed to overcome its disadvantage surely carried their own risk. Had the Senate turned back the sale, the effect of these tactics would have been to extend the damage done to the administration’s Middle East policy. Even employed in behalf of a successful test of strength, they were not without risk, since they emphasized the lack of appeal the arms sale and the arguments urged on its behalf had for Congress (and, beyond the legislature, to the public as well) .
If the President and his principal advisers were nevertheless willing to employ the chief executive’s ultimate means of persuasion, this can only be explained by their conviction that they were playing for crucial stakes. The arms sale had without doubt become the administration’s great test in foreign policy, though not primarily for the reasons the administration’s brief would have us believe. It is not because the sale lays a reliable groundwork for greater U.S.-Saudi defense cooperation, or because it significantly enhances our own military capabilities to deploy forces in the Gulf, or yet because it contributes to the restoration of American power and credibility in the Gulf that the AWACS came to represent a do-or-die effort for the administration. Each of these alleged benefits remains unsubstantiated. Indeed, it was precisely because the arguments put forth to support them were so transparently thin—and, on occasion, even absurd—that the administration had to resort to its frantic last-minute appeal. In both the open and executive sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, administration officials were asked time and again if there were additional and compelling reasons for the sale of which the Congress was not aware. In no instance did the administration respond to this question. Its declared position, we can only conclude, was its true position.
The stakes that hung in the balance in the arms sale were, then, surely crucial to the administration, but they were not the stakes the administration would have us believe. We are presently engaged, as we have been for some time, in a policy of economic and political appeasement of Saudi Arabia. A rejection of the arms package threatened that policy. It did so, moreover, at a time when the leverage Riyadh exercises over Washington has never appeared greater. It has never appeared greater if only for the reason that the Reagan administration seems more responsive than were its predecessors to what some have facetiously termed the “balance of payments” between the two countries. The arms sale is a significant part, though only a part, of that balance. Upon its passage depended the prospects of continuing, and much larger, arms sales. And beyond the sale of arms there are the enormous contracts of American firms in Saudi Arabia. Finally, there is the financial succor the Saudis may give us in the form of investment in treasury securities.
Even if we put aside the control Riyadh exercises over the price of oil, the other economic interests at stake in the Saudi connection are therefore seen to be very considerable. Persuaded as it undoubtedly is that these various interests constitute in their totality an important national interest, the administration can accede to Saudi demands with a good conscience. After all, it is facilitating the return of a part of what Saudi Arabia has extracted from us. This is merely good business.
Unfortunately, the leverage in this business is exercised largely by one side It is the Saudi government that considers itself at liberty to go where it pleases to spend its oil largesse. Washington’s position is quite different. Anxious to persuade the Saudis to “buy American,” it is constrained to secure economic favors with political concessions. The resulting pattern is one of appeasement, whatever the state of conscience of its practitioners.
Appeasement is nearly always marked by self-deception. To believe that it is undertaken for reasons other than fear and a sense of impotence is part of its pathology. For the appeaser, the will to believe is substituted for the will to act. Thus the illusions generated by appeasement will persist in the face of a reality that by any normal reckoning ought to dispel them. For almost a decade we have seen this curious process at work in the Western response to challenge in the Middle East. In the administration’s case for the Saudi arms sale we see but the latest manifestation of this need to take refuge in illusions that Middle East realities are likely to dash as cruelly as they have dashed the illusions of the past decade.
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Of these illusions, none is more persistent and pervasive than the belief that there is some way by which we may secure our interests in the Persian Gulf while avoiding the visible and substantial assertion of American power in the region. This is, in fact, the grand illusion from which nearly all others may be derived. It is at the root of Secretary Haig’s “strategic consensus,” that appealing incantation which is supposed to deliver us from the various evils threatening our interest in the Gulf. It accounts for the administration’s tortured case in defense of the arms sale. Above all, it explains the insistence upon finding in a resolution of the Palestinian problem the means of our salvation from present peril.
At the outset of the Reagan administration, there were intimations that at least the latter persuasion had fallen into disfavor and that the recognition had taken hold that a solution to our problems in the Gulf had to be found in the Gulf. These early signs have all but disappeared today. If anything, the signs multiply that this administration is fast becoming quite as persuaded as was its predecessor that there is an intimate link between “progress” on the Palestinian issue and the improvement of our position in the Gulf.
Indeed, the day may soon come when the present administration will outdo even its predecessors in drawing an altogether familiar equation. For a policy that has now placed very nearly all its bets on Saudi Arabia, there is little alternative but to respond to Riyadh’s promptings on the urgency of settling the Palestinian problem. Whether or not these promptings are sincere does not really matter. What does matter is that given the Saudi regime’s sense of vulnerability with respect to its radical Arab brothers, Riyadh must be seen as championing the Palestinian cause. In turn, Washington must follow in the Saudi train. The result is that the strategic consensus of Secretary Haig is becoming the instrument of and justification for growing pressures on Israel and a growing American readiness to deal with the PLO.
There is no apparent reason to expect that the present Middle East policy of the Reagan administration will succeed. Even if it does manage to wring concessions from Israel on the Palestinian issue, it is vain to believe that this will significantly improve the American position in the Gulf. Far from doing so, the result may instead be to weaken this position further. For the Saudis, and others, will appreciate the reasons for the turnabout in policy. Rather than restoring American power and credibility, the shift may only strengthen the impression that we are an unreliable ally.
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In sum, the great dilemma of American policy in the Gulf cannot be resolved by clever schemes. The administration’s position in the arms-sale debate indicates that this lesson is still far from being learned. It believes, or appears to believe, that there is a third way—a middle way—to secure our interests in the Gulf and that we can, in time, sneak in a military presence that will be largely subsidized by the Saudis. But this too will almost certainly prove a vain belief. There is no reliable middle way. In the present context, our options have been reduced to a stark two. We may term them the Saudi option and the American option.
The Saudi option is, in essence, no more than the policy of the past decade: the reliance on a surrogate to protect our interests, in the hope that it can and will do so. The policy has already led to disaster in the case of Iran. Considering the strengths and weaknesses of our present surrogate, it may be expected to lead to disaster again.
The American option rests upon the realization that the only reliable way of assuring access to the oil of the Gulf is through a substantial military presence there of our own. Ideally, the presence—aerial and ground—should be in Saudi Arabia itself. Indeed, much military opinion has it that this is not an ideal counsel but the necessary prescription if the security of Saudi oil fields and installations is to be assured. Against this necessity, we are constantly reminded that Riyadh will not and cannot grant American bases. At the same time, it is generally conceded today, in contrast to yesterday, that neither can we stand by in the event Saudi Arabia is attacked by an external force or is threatened by internal upheaval. The declarations of two Presidents now commit this nation to meeting these contingencies. Yet there appears to be no reliable way of meeting them, given the circumstances.
Clearly, the Saudi government will not grant American bases of its own free will. Whether it might do so in response to serious pressures from Washington is not clear, since no such pressures have ever been tried. One must despair that they, ever will be applied by an America that becomes ever more accustomed to playing the role of supplicant to the rulers of Arabia.