A Mideast Test of Soviet Intentions

By Robert G. Hazo

"The United States and the Soviet Union pursuing the same interests in the Persian Gulf would not be a bad thing."

—White House Chief of Staff Howard Baker

What are the Russians up to in the Gulf? And as a result, what are we up to?

Despite a sequence of confusing statements by the administration (topped by President Reagan's assertion that "I don't see the danger of a war. I don't see how it could possibly start."), the second question is easier to answer than the first. One thing is clear regarding US intentions: We have not deepened our commitment in the Gulf to assure the right of passage for ships in international waterways. Clearly our current intent is to protect ships traveling to and from Kuwait, which is now the nearest seaport to Iraq.

Nor is our primary interest to see that no oil shortage develops. We do not risk the lives of our servicemen and women when countries like Japan and those of Western Europe, which would be more directly and seriously affected by an oil cutoff, decline to commit their armed forces to assure the flow of oil.

What we are doing is abandoning neutrality in the Iran-Iraq conflict to aid one of Iraq's principal supporters. That aid is not restricted to protecting outgoing oil shipments or munitions bound for Iraq via Kuwait.

Why take such a risky position? The American agreement to reflag Kuwaiti ships was in fact made months ago. It became front page news only after the erroneous Iraqi air attack on the USS Stark. After the Israeli sale of US arms to Iran became public last November, Kuwait asked both the US and the USSR to reflag 11 of its ships so as to protect them from attack in the Gulf. Recently, Kuwait asked China to participate in the reflagging. While the US reply was slow in coming, the Soviets responded rapidly. When the news reached Washington, the US made its offer to flag all 11 Kuwaiti ships. Kuwait had originally planned to assign five ships to the USSR and six to the US. However, it accepted the US offer to cover half of its total fleet of 22 ships. Because of Russia's prompt reaction to its call for help, Kuwait also felt obliged to lease several additional Soviet tankers. Kuwait has now gotten the protection it wanted, and it has also internationalized the Iran-Iraq war by bringing the two superpowers into the Gulf in a big way.

Logistics Complicate US Commitment

Seeking to preempt the Soviets, the Reagan administration may have moved before it fully thought out the commitment it had assumed. Second thoughts, and a Senate resolution urging caution—which passed overwhelmingly—forced the administration to conclude that security would not only require naval escort but also air cover. John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy, opined that to provide continuous air cover for the entire Gulf, and especially the dangerous northern end, would require six aircraft carriers. Rather than do that, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger indicated, the US might ask for basing rights in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It was genuinely ironic that Weinberger, of all administration officials, had to make this difficult suggestion, since he more than any other top administration official is aware that such a request would pose severe political problems for any Arab ruler. Within the Cabinet, Weinberger opposed the American intervention in Lebanon as well as the attack on Libya. Earlier, he did not endorse Secretary of State Alexander Haig's attempts to forge an anti-Soviet "strategic consensus" of Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, knowing that it would fail.

Given the cold war obsession of this administration, what it has done so far should come as no surprise. President Reagan has asserted, again and again, that no further Soviet expansion of power or influence will occur on his "watch."

Nor is Kuwait's action unusual, given its history as a tiny buffer state between Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and its close proximity to Iran. Since its incredible oil wealth was discovered, Kuwait frequently has looked for help to some foreign big brother, preferably far away.

Soviet Motivations

So why did the Soviet Union answer Kuwait's call so quickly? The Reagan administration might answer that the USSR is merely seeking to extend its influence into a strategic area. That was obviously President Reagan's assumption when he said that Persian Gulf sea lanes "would not be allowed to come under the control of the Soviet Union." However, Soviet aims are not so easily defined. Obviously the USSR wants a say in the future of the Middle East, and it usually seizes existing opportunities. In this case, however, an equally likely (and not mutually exclusive) explanation is that the USSR is concerned about the possibility of an Iranian breakthrough in the Iran-Iraq war, and it wants to help preclude an Iranian victory. The Russians did not utter a word of complaint when the US moved in and made the same offer to the Kuwaitis. If Russia wants primarily to see Iraq supplied, why should it complain if we also take the risks? The theory that Soviet intentions are constructive is also supported by reports that Russia has been leaning hard on Syria to loosen or break its ties with Iran. If so, its concerns mirror those of the Western powers, including the United States. US Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage attributed the US initiative for helping Kuwait to an American desire to prevent an Iranian victory over Iraq. An Iraqi defeat, he observed, "would lead to instability from Marrakesh to Bangladesh." Some knowledge analysts believe a military triumph by Iran's fundamentalist regime would lead to changes in the Middle East matched only by those following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

It is important to consider the possibility that the USSR, since the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev, and completely contrary to the conventional wisdom, now is supporting the very opposite of what it has traditionally been thought to want in the Middle East: an area of turmoil so that it can fish in troubled waters. It seems clear, for example, that the Russians find the possibility of an Iranian breakthrough as troublesome and threatening as the US would have, had it been thinking clearly instead of helping Israel smuggle arms to Iran. One Soviet consideration, of course, may be the presence of a very large Muslim population in the Soviet Union. If all of this is true, one assumption that may urgently need changing is that US and Soviet interests are at odds in the Gulf. Instead, in this instance, they may actually overlap. As Howard Baker, Reagan's Chief of Staff, said recently, "the United States and the Soviet Union pursuing the same interests in the Persian Gulf would not be a bad thing." Baker added that a de facto joint US-USSR agreement to counter the possibility of a breakthrough would be "unprecedented."

US and USSR: Similar Interests in the Persian Gulf?

Buttressing this view are the mollifying gestures Mikhail Gorbachev has made since he assumed power. His glasnost and all of the disarmament proposals advance, his cessation of jamming of the Voice of America, and his expressed willingness to pull out of Afghanistan—provided the dissident forces there are no longer militarily supplied—strongly suggest that Gorbachev genuinely wants to alleviate foreign policy concerns, lighten the Soviet armaments burden, and turn more attention to increasingly serious economic, demographic, social, and political problems within the Soviet Union. Gorbachev may also be more concerned than were his predecessors about the likelihood of a superpower confrontation that could actually lead to a nuclear exchange.

The true cold warrior, of course, has an answer for all of Gorbachev's mollifying gestures. Gorbachev, it can be argued, has the same aims as his predecessors. The difference is that Gorbachev is a very effective salesman, whose initiatives aim at lulling the West into complacency. China is apparently unimpressed by Gorbachev's new look, and Germany's Helmut Schmidt has observed that, appearances to the contrary, Russian policy under Gorbachev will remain one of "cautious expansionism."

Trying to decide who is right about current Soviet intentions is tricky business since US Kremlinologists have about the same record for accuracy as US economic forecasters. Are America and the Soviet Union still engaged in a "struggle for control of this planet," as Robert Novak describes it? Or is each superpower actually preoccupied with its own domestic problems? Both schools of thought have their adherents.

Almost half a century ago, Churchill made his often quoted remark about Russian intentions being "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." George Kennan, on the other hand, thinks too much has been made of the Russian puzzle. Despite adventurism that resulted in the Cuban missile crisis, the invasion of Afghanistan, and Soviet support of Nicaragua, Kennan believes Russian behavior is eminently explicable and to some degree predictable. His overall conclusion is that the Soviet Union is much more reactive than aggressive. If this is correct, Gorbachev's apparent intentions are his real ones, since he is reacting to tremendous domestic pressures to ease foreign tensions.

Discerning Soviet Intentions

When one is not sure, a good piece of advice is to prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and devise a test to expose the other party's real goal. The US government has an opportunity right now to put the Russian leadership to such a test. It can use the much-discussed international conference on the Middle East as a way of probing Gorbachev's general intentions in the region. For openers, there are promising signs. The first American-Soviet summit dealt with all the regional conflicts except the Middle East, the most dangerous one. Just before the Iceland meeting, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze made a point of mentioning the Middle East as a topic for the next major summit. In the interim, Russia has pressured Syria's Hafez Al-Asad to ease up on his bloody feud with PLO chairman Yasir Arafat. The Soviets have also ordered the elements of the PLO dependent upon Soviet funding (Nayef Hawatmah's DFLP and George Habash's PFLP) to reconcile with Arafat. This can be understood as Russia's way of making the Palestinians more readily available for such a conference by reducing the number of leaders who would criticize Arafat for participating. The Soviets obviously want such a meeting so long as they, as a permanent member of the Security Council, have a say in the outcome.

Though the timing leaves much to be desired, this gives the Reagan administration an historic opportunity not only to test Soviet intentions but to move towards a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. All the US has to do is ask the Soviets to adopt our prescription for the resolution of that conflict, i.e., the Reagan peace plan put forth in September 1982 and based on UN Security Council Resolution 242. That plan provides the general outline of the solution, negotiations covering all the occupied territories, including Jerusalem, with the result being a Palestinian entity federated with Jordan. Israel, of course, rejected the Reagan plan the day it was announced. By contrast, all the major Arab leaders have acknowledged the Reagan Plan's compatibility with their own Saudi-drafted Fez principles for peace. If the US proposed that Russia accept the Reagan plan, and Russia did, the Western European states would immediately do the same. In all likelihood, China, the fifth permanent member of the Security Council, would then join the bandwagon for peace. The combined weight of the agreement of those countries (plus that of almost all of the other countries in the world) would put enormous pressure on Israel to make the kind of concessions that Arab negotiators could honorably accept. If that process led to a final agreement, it would of course be guaranteed by the United States and the USSR. The only initiative required would be the acceptance by the Soviet Union of the American prescription for a resolution of the conflict. The PLO would in turn accept UN Resolutions 242 and 338 with the understanding that they would lead to self-determination for the Palestinians.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But also a quite realistic prescription for peace, since there will never be an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict without Russian concurrence. And what Russia would be asked to accept is what the US has already proposed.

A Presidential Initiative Would Be Supported

This scenario presents President Reagan with the opportunity to achieve an agreement of great value in and of itself. It would also be an integral part of a series of US-USSR disarmament agreements upon which Reagan's successors can build. All are within his reach if he has the imagination and the courage to go after them. On the Middle East, an initiative by Reagan to work in tandem with the Soviets would be possible for the same reasons that made it possible for President Nixon to make an opening to China, or Charles de Gaulle to negotiate Algerian independence. Reagan would surely encounter fierce American Zionist—and, therefore, Congressional—opposition, but there is little doubt that he could overcome it. History proves that the American media and the American people will support a president in any major foreign policy initiative, so long as he explains it clearly.

Averell Harriman probably had more experience in dealing with the Russians than any other American in this century. He was present at Yalta, he served as Ambassador to Moscow, and he was chosen by President Kennedy to negotiate the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. His advice in dealing with the Russians is to keep one's guard up and to keep one's hand out to accept friendship and cooperation. Gorbachev's hand seems to be extended and he is presently in full command at the Kremlin. If he comes up empty-handed, he may be forced by domestic pressures to lapse back into cold war rhetoric. From our side, there is little doubt that President Reagan has his guard up. If he now is willing to extend his other hand to Gorbachev on the Middle East, the results may astonish them both.