In late 2010, a wave of protest and civil unrest swept through nearly every Arab nation. Dubbed the Arab Spring, the protest’s whipped through the region like one of their legendary sand storms, and swept rulers in the countries Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen out of power. In their wake have been uprisings in Bahrain, Oman, Algeria, and Syria.

The term “Arab Spring” is meant to be an analogy for the thawing out of the average Arab citizens acceptance of rigid and authoritarian regimens. This is more a hope than a reality, and the events have exposed America’s weakness and limits in foreign policy regarding the Arab region.

From the start, the Obama administration has had a schizophrenic response to the events of the Arab spring. The protesters in Iran, arguably the start of the Arab spring, got very little, if any, support from the U.S. Though President Obama was near-silent toward Iran, the President was quite forceful in telling President Mubarak of Egypt he had to go. Odd, given that Mubarak was the only true ally of the U.S. in that area.

He might have been a dictator, but he was our dictator. Now, the Muslim brotherhood stands poised to take political power, just as Hamas did in Palestine. As Libyans began to fight against Gaddafi, the U.S. took a position of leading from behind in helping to enforce a no-fly zone, and providing other low-key military assistance to the rebels, while Syrian rebels were getting, and still are getting, slaughtered by the hundreds with only words of support from the international community.

Opponents of President Obama believe his ambivalence is another sign of weakness in his administration, but you can argue that he’s politically stuck. The stark realty is that Iran, Syria, and every other situation in the Middle East exposes an ugly truth about foreign policy for that region; there is not much that the U.S. can do.

Americans, the citizens not the politicians, are a strange lot. We cannot stomach human rights violations wherever they occur: China, North Korea, Darfur, South Africa, or the Middle East nations. When we see 8500 innocent civilians killed in Syria, we feel the need to do something to stop it.

However, the only way to stop killing on that scale in a country a world away is through force. We are either going to send troops in, or we have to arm the rebels and lend military support similar to what was done in Libya. Unfortunately, the American public does not want to do that, and therefore neither does President Obama.

Instead, we get empty statements from our President and other world leaders about how President Assad must give up power. Really?  According to whom? Every time a statement like that is issued, I hear President Assad saying, “So what? Who are you to tell me what to do,” and “Okay, well make me leave.”

Even if President Assad is not saying those exact words, they are certainly the sentiments of the reality on ground. Dictators are either forced from power by their own people or forced out by an outside force. In either case, force is what is needed for changes.

Unless we force him from power, there is nothing we can do. And that’s the problem every President must face at times. Situations in the world that we would like to alter, but the choices on the table on how to do it are not good choices. Whether we are talking about halting the killing in Syria, or stopping Iran from going nuclear, force is the only thing that is ultimately going to work. And going that route is fraught with other implications and unintended consequences.

Diplomacy is its own minefield. It takes a long time to work, which is not exactly good for the people getting shot at in Syria. And an unspoken assumption in diplomacy is that the person across the table is a rational actor. The heads of oppressive governments are seldom rational, and rationality, as Americans and Europeans measure it, is completely absent from the Muslim world.

In America, for instance, ostensibly everyone gets a say while the Middle East is fraught with authoritarian discipline, often guided by religious doctrine; a “do this, or there will be consequences” approach. Couple that with the general principle of dictatorship — doing what is necessary to stay in power — and you have a volatile mix that Americans may never understand.

President Reagan, in his memoirs, has famously lamented getting the U.S. involved in Lebanon. His opinion being that if he had to do it again, he would not, because, we (America) do not understand the Middle East. This remains true to a large degree today. President Obama is in charge now, but if it were President McCain, or if it turns to be a Republican candidate in 2012, not much will change.

Force is what is necessary, and we cannot send troops into every Muslim country that decides to start shooting up their citizenry. Does anyone really see a President Romney sending in ground troops to Syria? No, the best we can hope for is a President, present or future, who can explain that some things we cannot affect, and that the things we can, may require force.

We will have to make hard choices about what is in our national interest, preventing Iran from a nuclear bomb, and things that, while sickening, do not affect the U.S. directly, like what is happening in Syria. The only question remaining is whether the voting public will understand and accept those distinctions.

Image Courtesy of Fabio Rodrigues Pozzebom / ABr [CC-BY-3.0-br], via Wikimedia Commons

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In the much-anticipated speech to the state department, President Obama stated that a “mutually agreed swaps” would help create a “viable Palestine, and secure Israel.” He later insisted in an interview with the BBC that the ‘1967 border’ had to be the basis for negotiations on a Palestinian State.

Within a day of the President’s speech, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his governments displeasure about Obama’s views. According to Netanyahu, the borders before the 1967 Middle East conflict were “indefensible”, considering that Israel has constructed an extensive network of settlements beyond those lines. An estimated 300,000 Israelis live in the settlements of the West bank, even though these are illegal under international law, a fact which Israel disputes.

In Thursday’s speech, Mr Obama spoke about the Arab Spring and what this meant for US role in the region. The American president praised the recent developments stating “through the moral force of non-violence, the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplish in decades.” He acknowledged that the rest of the world had to be patient because change would take years to be constructively implemented. Obama also spoke about the future of US policy to the Middle East, and went into a murky description of the link between US interest and the hopes and desired of the region. When he reached the issue of the continuous conflict between Israel and the Palestinian territory, the President said “The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine.”

“The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”

The Israeli Prime Minister, who is due to meet President Obama for talk at the White House Friday, said that the 1967 border would leave major Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria outside Israeli territory. In a statement, the Prime Minister rejected the idea and said “the viability of a Palestinian state cannot come at the expense of the viability of the one and only Jewish state.”

In the statement, Netanyahu called on Mr Obama to reaffirm commitments made to Israel in 2004.

The speech to the state department was far less inspirational than that in Cairo two years ago, according to Jon Leyne of the BBC. Mr Obama summed up an encouraging and poised, yet awkwardly restrained US position towards the flood of democratic momentum in the Middle East and North African region. He said that in the past, the US had accepted the status quo but has now seen a chance to pursue the world as it should be.

Observers, however, are skeptical. How does the President intend to carry out his ideas for a ‘better’ regional situation? With Netanyahu’s blunt rejection of the 1967 borders in what could have been a constructive move in the otherwise stoic conflict, negotiations could already be deterred from moving forward.

The greater realisation is that the Arab Spring could indicate the decline of American influence in the region. As the President himself acknowledged, it was not the US who pushed the people into the street, and his government will have to accept that not all of the nations in revolt will choose to follow the form of democracy that America promotes.

Obama’s best guess is that Israel eventually will soften up on their demands and their deep-rooted objections to a Palestinian state. The unity deal signed between rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah earlier this month – along with Mahmoud Abbas’ call for UN recognition – could provide the needed international pressure to revive talks between the two authorities. Until then, Obama can only hope he’s on the right side of history.

Image provided by The National Academy of Sciences

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