Time for ‘creative passivity’ in Mideast

WASHINGTON — Sometimes in life, the best thing to do about a problem is nothing, at least initially. And as President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office, that may be the best advice about the Middle East.

The Middle East has been a boneyard for the past three presidents. They’ve felt the activist impulse that’s characteristic of American foreign policy — put troops in, pull troops out, impose sanctions, cut secret deals — whatever it takes, but do something. We send military forces in and out of the region like yo-yos on a string.

But as Biden resets policy, he should consider an initial approach that I would call “creative passivity.” Don’t be in a rush to adjust troop levels anywhere; the limited numbers now in

Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are manageable and useful. Similarly, don’t hurry to restart nuclear negotiations with Iran. Setting that table will take a while, and our diplomacy should seek to stabilize the whole region — from Lebanon to Yemen — and not just revisit the Iranian nuclear file.

Start in secret; explore options; as the ancients advised, “make haste slowly.”

The new administration will begin its Middle East policymaking sadder but wiser. Senior officials bear all the scars of past actions and inactions. This team, starting with Biden, shared the nation’s desire to intervene after Sept. 11, 2001 — into Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Libya. But they learned to distrust this interventionist impulse.

Biden, to his credit, was wary of some of these commitments, but he made mistakes on the other end: He was too eager to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, too ready to announce naively, as I heard him once say in a White House briefing: “Guys! Politics has broken out in Iraq.” Actually, what was breaking out back then was the embryo of the Islamic State.

The new administration embraces the consensus that the United States should seek the sweet spot in the Middle East between overcommitment and pell-mell retreat. Many prominent think tanks endorse this yearning for balance:

We need a “sustainable, limited, steady state approach,” argues a study by the Center for a New American Security. We should find a path “between retreat and overinvestment,” contends a Brookings Institution-study. We should avoid “threatism” that looks for enemies and should correspondingly “reduce reliance on military tools,” urges an upcoming Rand Corp. report.

But there are scores to settle: Biden will be pressed to reverse mistakes by the Trump administration. Many in Congress will want to cut military ties with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Others will urge a quick return to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. There will be pressure, too, for a renewed commitment to a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem.

All of these initiatives have merit, over time. But as the Arabs like to say: Slowly, slowly. Formally recapping the Iranian nuclear program is important but, for now, it’s enough to monitor Iran’s nuclear enrichment and make clear the red lines. Down the road, I hope the administration will consider pursuing a regional stability framework that would include Iran and the Gulf states — an organization that can reframe the Middle East the way the post-Cold War

OSCE did for Europe. But that can wait.

The new administration would be wise to learn from the United States’ recent successes in the region, as well as its mistakes. That is especially true in Iraq and Syria, which are often seen as emblems of American failure but in recent years have been the opposite. After the catastrophic overcommitments of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past two decades, the United States finally got it right, with small numbers of Special Operations forces, punishing air power and solid allies who would do the fighting on the ground against the Islamic State. Don’t mess with those successes.

A wise Biden approach will also find ways to maintain contact with countries that matter, even when they are governed by dictatorial regimes that suppress human rights, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

I had a lesson last week in how America can keep faith with good people in bad countries when I moderated a discussion with two Egyptian entrepreneurs whose companies — an electronic payments firm called Fawry and a medical firm called Dawi Clinics — have prospered thanks in part to financing from the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund. Creative, inexpensive tactics such as enterprise funds should be in the Biden tool kit.

Talk is cheap in the Middle East. If it were easy to solve these problems, we would have done so long ago. If there’s one clear lesson, after so many painful years, it’s that American military and diplomatic power are greatest in the moment before they’re used.

So keep that gun in the holster, visibly, and hide the diplomats in the backrooms for a while. Let others wonder and worry what the Biden administration may have up its sleeve.