Introduction

The next two years will see the Washington policy community, along with a host of politicians aspiring to become the next President, lay out a series of recommendations pertaining to the challenges facing the U.S. vis-à-vis Iraq , Iran and Israel-Palestine. The majority of these proposals will be hampered from the outset because they will be siloed in their approach (an inevitable consequence of “conventional” thinking coupled with a perceived need to develop policy for an inside the beltway audience) and will avoid taking controversial stances.

A siloed approach to U.S. foreign policy that does not tackle the most difficult challenges is destined to fail as it will inevitably lead to the same types of mistakes made by U.S. governments in years past. Adhering to strictly drawn parameters around foreign policy dialogue is a hallmark of failure and it is past time that the U.S. foreign policy community looks at a broad, and growing, range of critical challenges in a holistic, interconnected and comprehensive way.

Near East and Africa

The majority of these challenges can be found within the arc of territory that runs from Istanbul in the northwest to Sudan and Somalia in the southwest and New Delhi in the east, as well as Africa .  

We strongly believe that the only sustainable solutions to these crises lie within a methodology that recognizes the interconnected nature of these challenges; the reality is that the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pakistani-Indian dispute over Kashmir, the Israeli-Arab conflict over Palestinian independence and water and land resources, the escalating conflict with Iran, the escalating conflicts in the Horn of Africa and in Sudan, and Turkey and Iran’s tensions with an Iraqi Kurdistan are all interconnected -- not merely geographically, but also economically, politically, and even demographically. Doing the easy and obvious thing – say, for example, invading Iraq – almost never produces the desired outcome.  Instead, any effort to solve any of these narrow issues in isolation from the others merely creates new challenges elsewhere.

A focus on solving these interlinked crises via a comprehensive agreement or set of agreements should be the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy in the coming months and years. Our vision of a Near East and Africa Security Framework can be pursued through multiple parallel, but interrelated tracks and will require an unprecedented multilateral approach by the United States .  We will need to work more closely with key partners outside and inside the region.

Of course, for this to take place, we will first need to rediscover how these conflict areas are all related.  It has been conventional wisdom throughout the world, except in Washington , that the on-going Israeli conflicts with its Arab neighbors and the failure to create a Palestinian state have fuelled anti-American flames throughout the region.  Less well known is how instability in Pakistan , partly as a result of the unresolved dispute with India over Kashmir, has fueled a puritanical version of Sunni Islam that has destabilized both Pakistan and Afghanistan , or provided a safe haven for al-Qaeda.  The connections are sometimes gross and sometimes subtle.  But they are there and need to be dealt with as part of an effort to move U.S. policy beyond simplistic “war on terror” tactics that frame complex interlinked issues as “you are with us or against us.”

An attempt at creating a comprehensive framework that recognizes that there are far more shared interests within the region itself and with its external neighbors could create a truly unique partnership modeled more on the US-European relationship than on past colonial methodologies. 

We recognize that significant political capital is needed to simply acknowledge such an interconnected region and a much more significant diplomatic structure will be needed to secure a sweeping set of interrelated agreements. Nevertheless we believe that all the countries in the arc would benefit from a change in the status quo and would give up something to gain real security.