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The Washington Quarterly published a new report titled “Bringing the United States Back Into the Middle East” by Shadi Hamid and Peter Mandaville. Shadi Hamid is a POMED board member, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban Center for the Middle East at the Brookings Institution. Peter Mandaville is a professor at George Mason University and a former member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff.
The article argues that while criticism of the Obama administration is valid, it is time to “move beyond critique and articulate not just a bold vision, but one that policymakers can realistically implement within very real economic and political constraints.” Hamid and Mandaville argue that to do this, the administration must reconsider counterproductive policies such as “turning a blind eye” to Arab countries so long as regimes assist with “regional security interests.” These policies, as well as the doctrine of “leading from behind,” have acted to confirm the belief that U.S. influence is in decline. The authors argue that the United States has more influence than it believes, and can use that influence by developing a new strategy.
Mandaville and Hamid propose that the United States establish a Multilateral Endowment for Reform (MER) premised on the pre-existing MENA Incentive Fund with an initial funding stream of 5 billion USD. According to the article, “our proposed MER, which operates on similar principles [as the MENA Incentive Fund] but at a much larger and multilateral scale, would provide the contours of a new framework to incentivize reforms and could reshape our basic relationship with the Middle East.” The MER would tie economic assistant to explicit democratic reforms and would require “mechanisms of accountability” such as “clear and enforceable benchmarks, ongoing monitoring, and transparent criteria—not to mention the necessary political will—for suspending or terminating funding if reform commitments are not met.” The benefit of this multilateral fund with clearly set parameters would be to both decrease the financial burden on the United States and simultaneously provide a uniform system for “aggregating, programming, and disbursing large-scale assistance focused on democratic reform in the Middle East.”
Moreover, the authors argue that the MER will not only provide leverage and influence in transitional countries—where political will already exists for reform—but in non-transitional countries as well, such as those of the Gulf where reform minded politicians may be encouraged to enact modest but important reforms if the United States ties security sector assistance to human rights benchmarks. MER funds could, the authors write, “directly support aspects of democratic consolidation such as overhauling the civil service sector, justice sector reform, and anti-corruption initiatives.” Thus, this new approach would move beyond conventional democracy promotion tools and avoid “tinkering at the margins” of U.S. strategy in the region.