FORMER US SECURITY ADVISER HOLDS OPTIMISM FOR THE REGION
Stephen Hadley sees cooler regional heads such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia prevailing, he tells James Langton
It is business as usual at the Emirates Palace hotel. In the cavernous golden lobby, a small army of workers is putting the finishing touches to a colossal Christmas tree, while guests sip on their Dh60 cappuccinos.
From the auditorium downstairs come the faint notes of an orchestra rehearsing for tonight’s Abu Dhabi Classics concert.
Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to president George W Bush, settles into a plus-sized silk cushioned armchair and considers the world immediately beyond these gilded walls.
It is not a pretty sight. In a matter of hours, US president Donald Trump is to make the incendiary decision to relocate the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. If Iraq now only smoulders, then Syria continues to burn.
Yemen is still reeling from the murder of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh by his former Houthi allies, while this week’s GCC meeting shows divisions over Qatar’s support for terrorism are still far from healing.
But Mr Hadley, now 70 and with a lifetime of service in foreign affairs, appears surprisingly optimistic, although he would probably say realistic.
He is visiting the capital as the guest speaker at a conference on international development, timed, as it happens, with the latest Trump announcement. What will happen tomorrow – and beyond?
“We don’t know,” Mr Hadley admits. “There’ll be a lot of hype, there’ll be a lot of justifiable concern.”
He suggested that Mr Trump should hold to the traditional American presidents’ view that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people, but also acknowledge that the city would serve as the capital of two states in the future.
Jerusalem cannot house any foreign embassies, according to Resolution 478 from the UN Security Council.
“The issue about the status and boundaries of Jerusalem, particularly of whether it is going to be the shared capital of two states for two peoples, is an issue for final status negotiations,” Mr Hadley says.
“The timing on actually moving the real estate – well, that’ll depend on construction and developments. And all he would be basically saying is what everybody already knows, that Israel’s parliament is in Jerusalem, its prime minister sits in Jerusalem. Its ministers have offices in Jerusalem.”
His former boss, Mr Bush, neatly side-stepped the Jerusalem embassy issue by simply putting off a decision until his second term of office ran out.
There is a sense that Mr Hadley does not promote Mr Trump’s decision, nor does he outright condemn it. With one important caveat, though.
“There’ll be a lot of concern because the administration has not laid out their Middle East proposal, so there is no context for it,” he says. “And I hope that the administration will understand that and place it in the way that I have just described.”
While he believes the announcement will “kick up a lot of dust initially”, he says that many governments in the region “don’t want to make it into a big issue – but then they have to show solidarity with the Palestinian people”.
Mr Hadley hopes that “after the initial response people will take a deep breath, particularly if the administration is making progress on the framework for some kind of resolution.
“And by resolution, I mean an Israeli-Palestinian peace embedded in a broad reconciliation between Israel and the rest of the Arab world.”
His views on the wider Middle East were set out almost exactly a year ago in a proposed strategy for the region crafted with Madeleine Albright, former president Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, and published by the American think tank the Atlantic Council.
To summarise, it proposes a tough response to the threat of terrorism and ISIL, while encouraging and supporting regimes seen as reformist, to create a climate of peace and stability.
It does not see a massive injection of US dollars as a solution, nor the sort of military invention seen in Iraq, but still places America in an active role in both areas.
“A lot of the things that we talked about have come true,” Mr Hadley says. “One was the bottom-up process, that there were young people, a lot of them women, who were starting businesses, who were starting civic organisations, who were dealing with their own problems.
“And there were governments that are trying to reform, trying to respond to the demands of their people for better education, better jobs, better health care, bringing their economies in their countries into the 21st century.”
The UAE was one of those countries identified as being in the forefront of that movement.
“Now it looks like Saudi Arabia is moving in that direction, with Vision 2030 and the leadership that the crown prince and the king have given,” Mr Hadley says.
On terrorism: “We’ve made great progress. That is to say that the moderate countries of the region have made great progress against terror. ISIL is now completely out of Iraq and will soon be defeated in Syria, and the caliphate is no more.”
Mr Hadley believes it would be fatal error for the US to say the job’s done in Iraq and end its active military support of the government.
“The US is going to have to leave a significant military force there, somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 after ISIL is defeated.”
While Iraq is now settling down, he believes “they have hard decisions to make about how they are going to move forward as three communities – Sunni, Shia and Kurds – in a unified Iraq.”
The role of the American government, he says, is to allow this to happen without interference from Iran. Something similar holds true for Syria, where even here Mr Hadley sees some light on the horizon.
“For the first time we’ve got some ceasefire zones, we have some diplomatic activity,” he says. “Maybe we will actually get a path forward that begins to wind down the civil war in Syria.
“If there is a peace arrangement in Syria, it has got to be one that does not legitimise or consolidate Iranian control. We should have been doing a lot of things in Syria that we are not doing and that would have put us in a much better position than we are now.
“But without looking back, we are where we are and we need to do all we can to try to stabilise that country in a way that keeps it independent and does not again basically turn it over to the Iranians.”
It is clear that Mr Hadley feels the Obama government made major errors in its dealings with Tehran, and he feels sympathy for the Trump administration’s decision to refuse to ratify the international deal Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
The Obama approach “meant we were not addressing Iran’s development of ballistic missiles that would allow it to deliver nuclear weapons, its support for terror, for Hizbollah and its destabilising of the neighbourhood from Iraq, to Syria, to Lebanon, Yemen and some extent Bahrain.
“Those issues need to be addressed and the Trump administration came in saying, ‘we need an effort together to address issues about Iran’.”
The intention of the White House and congress, he says, is “about how to use the issue of sanctions to incentivise our allies to work with us, to get Iran to extend the limits of the nuclear agreement, provide for greater inspections, put some limits on its ballistic missile programme, and begin to constrain and dial back some of its destabilising activity in the region”.
Central to US policy is its warm relationship with the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The announcement this week of a new political, economic, and military decree to bind the two countries closer together does not surprise him.
“They’ve always been close together. I think [Saudi Crown Prince] Mohammed bin Salman took inspiration for his Vision 2030 from the UAE’s vision 2021.
“So they’ve always been close and of course they’ve been close together on Yemen, and they’ve been close together on what to do about Qatar, so I think it’s making visual or concrete what we’ve always known all along.”
But this developing relationship should not sideline the GCC.
“The hope that I have, which is also the hope that has been expressed by the Trump administration, is that Qatar will come back into the fold of being a responsible player dealing with the issue of terrorism, dealing with the issue of Iran.
“There is a great need for the Gulf states to deepen their co-operation in intelligence, in counter-terrorism and in defence co-operation; things like missile defence.
“And I think that is still on the agenda, certainly that it is still the preferred alternative for Saudi Arabia and the UAE.”
On Yemen, Mr Hadley says the approach by the UAE and Saudi is widely misunderstood by the international community.
“What do you do when rebel forces in a neighbouring country are shelling your cities and towns? You can’t ignore that.
“This is not just some sort ideological effort by the Saudis and the Emiratis to check the Iranians. This is to deal with a real national security threat. The missiles that come out of Yemen are directed at Saudi towns and cities.”
Saudi and the UAE are seeking a political solution, he says, “but a political solution that does not have the Houthis taking over the whole country or essentially Iran taking over the whole country”.
The killing of former president Saleh, he suspects, shows that, “at this point the Houthis don’t seem to be ready to come to the table in a realistic way. And the death of Saleh is going to make the situation even more difficult”.
It strikes a pessimistic note on what has been generally a surprisingly positive conversation.
“Well, Mike Hayden, the former director of the CIA, tells his audiences that this is the difference between intelligence officers and policy people,” he begins.
“The intelligence officer will tell you that the glass officer is half empty and it is leaking. The policy person will tell you, ‘no, no, that glass is half full and I have got a strategy to fix the leak and fill the glass the rest of the way up’.
“So if you’re policy person, your job is to deal with the situation as it is and find the way forward to make it better. And there are some ways forward – but they will be hard to achieve.”
This is not just some sort ideological effort by the Saudis and the Emiratis to check the Iranians. This is to deal with a real national security threat