Foreign Policy Pinned

I'm not a very good chess player. Charitably, I'll assume it's because I haven't spent enough time in front of a chess board to develop the spatial reasoning and analytical skills necessary to "see" the right move in the manner of more experienced players. That said, I couldn't help but think of the game as I read Dan Murphy's op-ed in the CSM about the Saudi response to the Arab Spring.

In chess, a pin is "a situation brought on by an attacking piece in which a defending piece cannot move without exposing a more valuable defending piece on its other side to capture by the attacking piece." Having a major piece pinned isn't fun. A well-executed pin can dramatically reduce flexibility, cripple offensive capacity and create all kinds of headaches. So it's worth observing that, through deft use of its petroleum reserves, Saudi Arabia has effectively pinned American foreign policy in the Middle East.

The American response to the Arab Spring has been, to use Murphy's term, "conflicted," with protests in different countries perceived and treated differently depending on how crucial their stability is to the architecture of American power and prosperity. The Saudis, who have thusfar forestalled serious domestic challenges to their rule, know their own centrality to American concerns in the Gulf. The American economy is highly dependent on Gulf oil. The colossal trade deficit America has run for much of the last decade is closely related to that dependence. America's short-run economic health is exceedingly vulnerable to oil price shocks. Unsurprisingly then, American policymakers have labored for decades to ensure that no single power gains sufficient control over Gulf oil to dictate the terms of continued economic prosperity. One can make a very persuasive case that American Middle Eastern policy as a whole has been misguided; that the U.S. overestimated the importance of allied regimes in places like Egypt and Yemen. When it comes to the Gulf, though, the United States really does have an interest in political "stability" that's difficult to just wave away, even for someone like me who'd really like to. If you disagree, recall the kind of crazy electoral outcomes that economic volatility, moving from an already miserable baseline, can produce ("I, Michelle Marie Bachmann, do solemnly swear...").

So we're left with a situation in which our response to the Arab Spring looks, at best, opportunistic and hypocritical - a means of "managing" regional unrest while still keeping our basic faustian bargains in tact rather than forging sustainable relationships with populations undergoing profound political change. Maybe this is all inevitable, but here's the thing: this pin isn't new. Our strategic vulnerability here has been obvious since the Nixon era. We've had three and a half decades to reconfigure our energy economy and render the Saudi pin irrelevant. Instead, we've left it in place, deciding to manage the problem through expensive military engagement and convoluted political maneuvering that's left the U.S. as strategically vulnerable as ever while sapping it of flexibility and moral legitimacy.

I suppose I'm not the only one who's bad at chess.