Foreign Policy Across the Pond
By: Morgan Ortagus
A note from Morgan:
Thanks to the Pinsker Centre, I was across the pond this week lecturing on American Foreign Policy. I had the distinct honor of speaking to students and foreign policy experts alike at Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham Universities on the long-standing and powerful relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as our role in the era of Great Power Competition.
It is a time-honored tradition that when Americans go to the United Kingdom and give speeches, we must pay homage to Winston Churchill. This story starts in the Middle East during World War II, with the first Saudi King, who had a very long name but was known as Ibn Saud.
He was a deeply devout Muslim. Naturally, he disdained drinking and smoking and did not tolerate them in his presence. In February 1945, a historic meeting took place when U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with King Saud onboard a battleship in the Suez Canal. In 1945, Saudi Arabia had yet to exploit its oil wealth. It was an incredibly poor country at this point and no senior American leaders had even met the King yet.
This meeting was a turning point. It launched U.S. relations with the Arab world for much of the post-war era. Now, even though FDR was wheelchair-bound at this point, he was still a chain smoker who usually finished two packs of Camels a day. The meeting lasted several hours, and so he would have been craving one. But out of respect for King Saud and his wishes, FDR abstained from smoking or drinking in front of the King the entire meeting.
Three days later, Churchill met King Saud at a desert hotel. Winston made clear his position on the same matter right up front, telling the King: “I must point out that my rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after, and if need be, during all meals and in the intervals between them.” We sure could use Churchill’s boldness in the world today – and his cigars as well.
Churchill’s stance didn’t endear him to King Saud, and that wasn’t the only principled stance he took during the meeting. The other reason we should all admire Churchill is because he was an advocate for ensuring a home for the Jewish people as they were being slaughtered by the millions in Europe. And he made that clear in his meeting with Saud, hoping the King could support what would later become the state of Israel.
The Saudi King answered that would be: “an act of treachery to the Prophet and all believing Muslims which would wipe out my honor and destroy my soul. I could not acquiesce in a compromise with Zionism much less take any initiative.”
That’s where we were in 1945. And that’s what you heard a lot of throughout the Middle East - for decades. That’s what I heard when I worked in Saudi Arabia and Iraq in the 2000s. But today, the Middle East I see is brighter and more optimistic than when I lived there.
Fast forward 75 years to 2020 and four Arab nations were making peace with Israel. These deals, collectively known as the Abraham Accords, were the first peace deals between Israel and Arab nations in 26 years.
I was enormously proud to be the only woman on the Abraham Accords team.
For the past several decades, there had been a strong idea taken for granted within the foreign policy community that peace between Israel and the Arab World was firmly linked to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. That may have been true at one time, but it increasingly was not the case over the last decade.
In late 2016, then-Secretary of State John Kerry famously spoke to a large international forum and laid out what was the conventional thinking of the time, saying: “There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab World. I want to make that very clear to all of you. I’ve heard from several prominent politicians in Israel saying ‘Well, the Arab World is in a different place now, we just have to reach out to them, we have to work some things with the Arab World, and we’ll deal with the Palestinians [separately]. No, no, no, and no... There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab World without the Palestinian Process and Palestinian Peace. Everyone needs to understand that.”
Well for every time John Kerry said no, there was a new peace deal.
Some of the reasons for the deal was not anything that Israel did. At the State Department, we sometimes joked there was two key – albeit unwilling - supporting actors who deserved a lot of praise for the Abraham Accords: Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei – both of whom hate the idea of peace and Israeli normalization with a burning passion.
Arab countries were also deeply threatened by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The JCPOA or Iran deal gave the regime tens of billions of dollars when it was finalized in 2015. And naturally, the Iranians spent huge amounts of that money on terrorism and military expansion, trying to destabilize the Middle East and overthrow Sunni governments. Iran tried to create a Shia crescent with control over Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, and Yemen. And they had their hearts set on undermining governments like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and many others too.
The Arab nations realized they shared a natural ally in Israel. They also saw that Israel and the United States were attached at the hip and that deepening their relationship with the United States meant working with Israel. Secretary of State Pompeo – who was my boss, and President Trump – who was Pompeo’s boss – talked or met with the Israelis probably every single week. And most of those times the calls were about how to weaken the Iranian regime, going into operational details together. It was natural for Arabs to recognize that Israel was no threat to them – they were in fact a potential ally against their real threat, Iran.
So, everyone thought that you had to solve the Palestinian problem before you could solve for Israeli-Arab peace. We had a couple of different perspectives. First, if you could tackle the problem of Iran, you would get a far more peaceful Middle East. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia once described how he believed this could happen when he told our government: “You have to cut off the head of the snake”. Of course, that meant Iran. The regime is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism - they killed dozens of British soldiers in Iraq with IEDs and hundreds of Americans. They are currently plotting as I speak to assassinate at least a dozen British citizens in London, according to your government. They are also the top funder of terrorism and provided over $20 billion to terror groups in the past decade. So first, we left the Iran deal and took a hard-nosed approach to Iran with the Maximum Pressure Campaign that imposed strict sanctions on the regime.
The second thought we had was that if you make peace between Israel and Arab nations, it will force the Palestinian Authority to finally make concessions and agree to a deal - since they have refused so many before. We didn’t get there yet, but Arab states have overwhelmingly stopped trying to help the Palestinians because they are so fed up with their stubbornness and corruption.
Now, some have tried to claim these deals aren’t really significant, or that they won’t really change anything on the ground. That’s just not true.
More than 127 memorandums have been signed and established to solidify economic and diplomatic relations between the countries. One study estimated that just taking away the trade barriers alone could bring over $300 billion in new economic activity over a decade – that’s jobs and stability for a region that was destabilized for years by wars.
One of the reasons the United States has been involved in the Middle East historically has been to ensure the supply of oil. Rewinding back to the meeting with FDR and King Saud. One of the key agreements made between them was that the United States would help protect Saudi Arabia and in exchange, Saudi Arabia would provide the U.S. with oil.
The United States used to be dependent on foreign oil for the functioning of its economy. And so, in 1973 when the Arab oil producers issued an embargo on oil exports to countries supporting Israel, it revealed once again to the United States its vulnerability to the supply of oil.
That relationship and mutual dependence – oil and security – has been a bedrock of how the United States and the Middle East have worked together for decades. And it’s rapidly changing along with the rest of the world. The Stone Age did not end for a lack of stone, and the Oil Age will not end for a lack of oil.
The Saudis have long understood their black gold will not sustain them forever, and their leaders – especially Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman - are working to transform their economies before that happens. I met MBS – as he’s known – last month with other Saudi leaders, and they are really turning their country into something that would have been unrecognizable even a decade ago.
Keep in mind that last year, about 70% of Saudi Arabia’s government revenue for their budget came from oil sales. Iran’s has been around 40% and many countries in the Middle East are somewhere in between. The status quo of both their economic models and geopolitical models will have to change if they wish to survive and provide for their citizens. When it comes to Saudi Arabia, they want to have the world come to them for business, tech, investments, and tourism. Normalizing with Israel is going to be part of that process – and I think it’s simply a question of how and when- not if.
However, today, America, Britain, and the rest of the world are exposing themselves to a new form of energy insecurity that the public is quite unaware of. 30 years from now, we may not care much at all about oil, because we could all be driving electric cars. And that’s exactly where our next weakness lies, this time from China.
If we thought OPEC’s control over the oil markets was bad, we are not prepared for what we’re walking into: China has control over about 85% of the supply chain for the batteries that go into electric vehicles. That’s everything from the mining of ores like lithium, their processing, the electrodes, the manufacturing, and then the semiconductors. Right now, China controls about 20% of the world’s semiconductor supply. Taiwan controls the same amount, but they have over 90% of the world's most advanced chip manufacturing.
If China took over Taiwan tomorrow and controlled both of those products, they would instantly become the world’s super-OPEC by themselves. If you are a country that offends Chairman Xi, just watch what happens to your economy if they shut off the supply of semiconductors – just watch. China’s neighbors already know what happens – every few years, China suddenly shuts off access to important trade when they are aggrieved.
The question of whether China will invade Taiwan and whether the United States will go to war with Taiwan is the single most important question facing policymakers in Washington today. But this question should be treated with the utmost importance by those in the UK and the continent as well.
We’ve seen how devastating Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been to Europe, disrupting global energy and metals markets, and displacing millions of Ukrainians. If there is a war between the United States and China, the impact on the global economy would be far worse: some projections say a five to ten percent economic contraction would occur – making the 2008 Financial Crisis look tame in comparison.
Worse would be the tens of thousands of sailors and soldiers likely dead on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, and the potential subjugation of tens of millions of Taiwanese citizens to the genocidal Chinese Communist Party should they lose.
Deterring such a war is the paramount challenge of the coming ten years – and it cannot be accomplished by the United States alone.
Europe’s largest two wars in the past century were started because Germany in 1939 and Russia in 2022 thought that their enemies were not willing to fight. That is how deterrence fails and how wars start.
This perception was paired with the belief that Britain and France were unwilling to defend the existing order after they had permitted Germany to rearm for 15 years. Hitler believed he could deter British intervention and achieve a rapid victory against Poland in 1939. Hitler believed he could storm across the continent without much cost. Sound familiar?
The great mistake of European powers before 1939 was signaling to Hitler they had no resolve and refusing to stand up to both the small and large provocations. Sadly, European leadership repeated this mistake in 2021 when they repeatedly provoked Putin with weakness like the constant petitions for Ukraine to negotiate away its security while they built new pipelines to deepen their dependence on Russian oil.
We must – absolutely MUST – understand how Europe and America failed to prevent Putin from starting a new war, the first major land war in Europe since WWII.
Together with the United Kingdom, the United States built a whole international system after WWII to prevent that war from emerging. WE FAILED. And yet there has been far too little reflection by Europe’s leaders or the Biden Administration into why. Worse, we haven’t changed course when it comes to China.
China is building its military far more rapidly than the United States and our Asian neighbors. They have eclipsed our number of ships. They have more shipbuilding capacity in one shipyard than we do in all of ours combined.
But they are facing a demographic crisis that will start impinging on their manpower and economy severely a decade from now. At the current rate, China will reach parity or exceed America’s military might in just a year or two. This window – roughly from 2025 to 2033 – is incredibly dangerous and could be the window for war.
Why does this matter for Britain? First, there’s the moral imperative of helping a free people defend itself against a marauding and genocidal regime. Just to focus on one aspect – religious freedom - there are millions of practicing Christians in Taiwan. Soon enough, those churches will have to fall in line with the People’s Republic’s edicts – where on the mainland, pictures of Jesus in churches have been replaced with portraits of Chairman Mao.
There’s the economic imperative: if China invades Taiwan, the island’s entire semiconductor industry will either be destroyed, setting off a massive global recession, or it will fall into China’s hands, making the OPEC of the 1970s seem like child’s play.
And there’s the rest of the post-WWII world order that will be at risk, particularly freedom of navigation and the ability for ships to transit peacefully around the world. One outcome that those of us in the last U.S. administration worried quite a bit about is that a victorious China would seek to impose a dividend on the rest of the world through its domination of the naval lanes that facilitate global trade. In this world, if you cross the CCP, don’t bet on the next few shipping containers making it to your port.
This reality is not far-fetched, our error here is not thinking like our enemies do: which is far colder and more ambitious than how we often think.
Does China need a war with Taiwan? No – it can accomplish its aims through other ways, much like Hong Kong fell into China’s sphere of control without open conflict. But if there’s one thing that made Xi pause and think, it was watching Putin’s invasion of Ukraine totally fall apart. Every month that Ukraine defies the odds is another month Xi is second-guessing his potential plans to invade Taiwan.
On that note, I cannot stress enough just how proud I am – and so many of my fellow American national security leaders are – of the role the United Kingdom has played in protecting Ukraine. There has been a moral clarity from this government that frankly I don’t even see in the U.S. government. Britain was equipping Ukraine before the war broke out, not just afterward. We were all elated to see the UK is now sending long-range missiles to Ukraine – that’s how they not only survive this war - but win it. And it sends the right message to China.
Beyond military odds, the most important thing that can prevent China from making that decision to go to war is their analysis of how European countries will react. If the UK and others make it seem to China that business as usual can continue in the event of a war, we should expect to see more years like 1939 and 2022. On the hand, if Europe and America signal our resolve and start taking the small and large steps necessary to stand up to China, perhaps we can avoid that war.
So, whether it’s in the Middle East, Ukraine, or on either side of the Taiwan Strait, I’ll ask you all to consider: What ways can the United Kingdom and America stand up to the bullies, terrorists, and dictators? Because standing strong and fighting together is the best way we can give peace a chance.
Last Monday was Memorial Day in the United States, similar to Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom. We share these days because we have shared in their losses. Hundreds of thousands of our soldiers died together fighting the scourge of Nazism. But we prevented the world from falling into total darkness. We worked together through the Cold War against another evil empire. And we won that one too – we could not have done it without you. 454 of your best men and women died in Afghanistan after we called on your support to fight against radical terrorists.
I can recall vividly one of the best meeting Secretary Pompeo had anywhere in the world was with Jeremy Hunt back when he was Foreign Secretary. Over a long meeting and lunch discussing China, in the end, Hunt looked at Pompeo and said, “Mike, this is a challenge only the United States can confront. You’re the only ones who can take them on.”
I never forgot that moment in over 50 countries and countless meetings around the world with Secretary Pompeo. America can’t do it without you. We should never take our friendship for granted; because the world would look so much darker without it. The state of our union is quite strong indeed.
Wonderful article Morgan.