WarSclerotic

Russia is negotiating its biggest weapons deals with Egypt since the Cold War as it seeks to capitalize on U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to cut defence aid to the military-backed government.

Egypt is seeking as much as US$2 billion in Russian weaponry, including MiG-29 fighter planes, air-defence systems and anti-tank missiles, said Ruslan Pukhov, a member of the Russian Defence Ministry’s advisory board and head of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Moscow.

The Russian defence and foreign ministers will fly to Cairo this week for two days of talks with Egyptian officials on “military-technical” cooperation, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Nov. 8. Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy confirmed the arms talks in an interview with Russia’s state-run Arabic language channel RT Tuesday.

The Obama administration last month suspended some military aid to Egypt, including US$260 million in cash and deliveries of F-16 fighter jets, helicopters and tanks in an effort to prod the North African country toward democracy. Egypt’s army ousted President Mohamed Mursi in July, leading to clashes between security forces and Mursi’s supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood that have left more than 1,000 people dead.

The Russian visit sends “a strong political message that stresses the desire” of Russia “to bolster relations and cooperate with Egypt in all fields,” Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Badr Abdelatty said by phone Tuesday. This doesn’t mean “substituting one party with another but rather diversifying the alternatives and choices.”

Egyptian officials are seeking financing from an unidentified Persian Gulf country to buy as much as US$4 billion of Russian arms, Palestinian newspaper Dunia al-Watan reported Nov. 6, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Kuwait have pledged at least US$12 billion to Egypt’s new government.

US AIR FORCE / JONATHAN SYNDERThis US Department of Defense photo shows an F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft as it flies over the Pacific Alaskan Range Complex. The United States has delayed plans to supply Egypt with an additional four F-16 fighter jets due to unrest gripping the country, the Pentagon said on July 24, 2013.

Russia signed a weapons deal with Iraq last year that’s worth more than US$4.2 billion, its biggest with that Middle Eastern country since the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

At the top of Egypt’s shopping list is the MiG-29 M2 fighter jet, an advanced version of the Soviet-designed aircraft, Pukhov said in an interview in the Russian capital. Egypt is interested in 24 of the warplanes, a package that may be worth US$1.7 billion, according to Pukhov.

Egypt may also be interested in short- to medium-range Russian defence systems such as the Buk M2, Tor M2 and Pantsir- S1, according to Said Aminov, editor-in-chief of pvo.guns.ru, a defense information portal.

“The only issue is Egypt’s ability to pay,” Igor Korotchenko, another member of the Defence Ministry’s advisory board, said by phone from Moscow. “Russia is prepared to supply a wide range of arms to meet Egypt’s requirements.”

A lot will depend on how willing Gulf countries are to finance Egypt’s arms purchases from Russia

A spokesman for Russian arms broker Rosoboronexport, Vyacheslav Davidenko, declined to comment on the Cairo talks. Egyptian military spokesman Ahmed Mohamed Ali couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.

The Egyptian government installed by the army after Mursi’s overthrow has said it expects to hold elections next year. Egypt, an American ally for more than three decades, received about US$1.3 billion a year in military aid from the U.S. prior to Mursi’s ouster.

Egypt and the Soviet Union became allies in the 1950s when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev forged ties. Egypt received Soviet military assistance, including during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, and the Soviets financed infrastructure projects such as the Aswan Dam to irrigate land and supply electricity.

The ties lapsed after Nasser’s death in 1970, when the Arab nationalist was succeeded by Anwar Sadat, who set the regional power on a pro-U.S. track that accelerated under Hosni Mubarak, who was toppled in 2011. In 1972, Sadat expelled thousands of Soviet advisers and in 1976 ended a treaty on friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union.

“They are trying to send the U.S. a strong message by approaching Russia the way they are, which is ‘unless you stop linking military aid with political issues, we’re going to look elsewhere,’” Yasser el-Shimy, an analyst for the International Crisis Group in Cairo, said by phone Tuesday.

“A lot will depend on how willing Gulf countries are to finance Egypt’s arms purchases from Russia,” el-Shimy said.

That the socialist French government of François Hollande just blocked a bad deal with Tehran, emerging as the hero of the Geneva negotiations, is on one level a huge surprise. But it also follows logically from the passivity of the Obama administration.

American foreign policy is in unprecedented free-fall, with a feckless and distracted White House barely paying attention to the outside world, and when it does, acting in an inconsistent, weak, and fantastical manner. If one were to discern something so grand as an Obama Doctrine, it would read: “Snub friends, coddle opponents, devalue American interests, seek consensus, and act unpredictably.”

Along with many other critics, I rue this state of affairs. But the French action demonstrates that it does have a silver lining.

From World War II until President Barack Obama waltzed in, the U.S. government had established a pattern of taking the lead in international affairs and then getting criticized for doing so. Three examples: In Vietnam, Americans felt the need to convince their South Vietnamese ally to resist North Vietnam and the Vietcong. During much of the Cold War, they pressured allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to resist Soviet pressure. During the 1990s, they urged Middle Eastern states to contain and punish Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

In each case, Americans rushed ahead on their own, then beseeched allies to work together against a common enemy, a completely illogical pattern. The nearby and weak Vietnamese, Europeans, and Arabs should have feared Hanoi, Moscow, and Baghdad more than the distant and strong Americans. The locals should have been begging the Yankees to protect them. Why was this persistently not the case?

Because the U.S. government, persuaded of its superior vision and greater morality, repeated the same mistake: seeing allies as slow-moving and confused hindrances more than as full-fledged partners, it brushed them aside and assumed main responsibilities. With rare exceptions (Israel, and France to a lesser extent), the American adult unthinkingly infantilized its smaller allies.

This had the untoward consequence of leaving those allies with an awareness of their own irrelevance. Sensing that their actions hardly mattered, they indulged in political immaturity. Not responsible for their own destinies, they felt free to engage in anti-Americanism as well as other dysfunctional behaviors, such as corruption in Vietnam, passivity in NATO, and greed in the Middle East. Mogens Glistrup, a Danish politician, embodied this problem, proposing in 1972 that Danes save both taxes and lives by disbanding their military and replacing it with an answering machine in the Defense Ministry that would play a single message in Russian: “We capitulate!”

Obama’s approach pulls the United States back from its customary adult role and has it join the children. Responding to crises on a case-by-case basis and preferring to act in consultation with other governments, he prefers “leading from behind” and to be just one of the pack, as though he were prime minister of Belgium rather than president of the United States.

Ironically, this weakness has the salutary effect of slapping allies hard across the face and waking them to the fact that Washington has too long coddled them. Jaundiced allies like Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Japan are waking to the reality that they cannot take pot-shots at Uncle Sam, assured in the knowledge that he will save them from themselves. They now see that their actions count, a sobering new experience. For example, Turkish leaders are trying to light a fire under the administration to get it to intervene in the Syrian civil war.

Thus does Obama’s ineptitude have the potential to turn reluctant, self-absorbed partners into more serious, mature actors. At the same time, his incompetence promises to change the U.S. reputation from overbearing nanny to much-appreciated colleague, along the way reducing ire directed at Americans.

Of course, a weak foreign policy presents the danger of catastrophe (such as facilitating an Iranian nuclear breakout or not deterring a Chinese act of aggression that leads to war), so this silver lining is just that, a small recompense for a much larger gray cloud. It’s not something to be preferred. Still, should two conditions be fulfilled — no disaster on Obama’s watch and a successor who reasserts American strength and will — it just might be that Americans and their allies look back on this period as a necessary one with a positive legacy.

Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum.

There is no reason to be happy about the latest round of talks in Geneva failing to end with an agreement. The sides have already agreed, more or less, on the framework of the deal and on some of its details.

More discussions will still be needed, and perhaps the Israeli protestations will move Western governments to try harder with Iran. But the deal is not far off.

The reason is simple: The Iranians are very much in need of a deal for sanctions to begin being removed, and the six superpower governments want a deal in the hopes that it will maybe stop Iran’s nuclear program.

Most facets of the deal which have already been agreed upon have already been made public, and assuming the reports are correct: The deal will be for half a year, during which the Iranians will cease enriching uranium to levels of 20 percent — which brings them closer to the ability to enrich to weapons-grade uranium — and will convert uranium that has already been enriched to this level to nuclear fuel rods. The Iranians will limit the number of centrifuges that produce uranium enriched to 3.5%, and will not activate the advanced centrifuges they have developed. They will not, however, be required to cease enriching uranium to the 3.5% level.

Additionally, the Iranians will not activate the heavy water reactor under construction in Arak, which will eventually allow it to produce plutonium and can also be used to make a nuclear weapon, but they will not be required to stop building it — which essentially renders the impending deal sterile because the reactor is not yet active regardless. The Iranians will also agree to stricter international supervision over their nuclear facilities.

It was France which delayed the closing of the deal during the last round of talks, arguing that the clauses pertaining to the Arak reactor and the existing stockpiles of 20%-enriched uranium were insufficient.

It would appear that the framework for the proposed deal is based on the right idea. The American government claims that comprehensive negotiations over the problematic aspects of Iran’s nuclear program will carry on for years, but in the meantime the Iranians will continue pushing the program forward. This will include activating their advanced centrifuges, will increase their stockpile of uranium enriched to 20% and making the Arak reactor operational.

Therefore, the initial agreement being proposed will freeze the nuclear program by at least half a year, and will perhaps even deteriorate it in other areas. In exchange the West will scale back its economic sanctions regime, but will not remove the primary sanctions. During this time period a comprehensive deal will continue to be negotiated, but if such a deal is not reached and the Iranians return to their current path, then the sanctions can be tightened again.

If a comprehensive deal is reached and is palatable to all sides, then all the better. But it still remains that the initial deal consists of glaring holes that detract from its advantages. Firstly, this deal can be effective against a nuclear program in its early stages, but the Iranian program is in a very advanced stage, and Iran is capable of producing several nuclear bombs within a number of months from the time it decides to do so. The proposed deal does not truly hinder Iran’s ability to make a nuclear breakthrough. Secondly, the promised sanctions relief appears to be more extensive than what Israel was initially told, will grant the Iranians greater economic breathing room for the duration of the negotiations with the West, and also in case those sanctions need to be reapplied. More importantly, if a final agreement is not reached then despite the reimplementation of sanctions there is no guarantee they will work, because many countries are not proponents of such sanctions to begin with.

Thirdly, the deal will effectively grant recognition of Iran’s right to enrich uranium — in contrast to the decision made by the U.N. Security Council that Iran has violated. This affirmation will be hard to undo. And what will happen if a deal is not reached after six months — will Iran go back to advancing its nuclear program under the claim that the superpowers have already recognized their right to enrich uranium and build the reactor at Arak? Another troubling aspect is also related: Iran entered these talks from a position of weakness, due to the sanctions. The United States, however — at least in Israel, Saudi Arabia and perhaps in Iran — is seen as lacking in toughness, to such an extent that even France is more stringent.

Imposing sanctions against Iran was made possible by the Israeli stance and its threat of military force. However, if the aforementioned deal is reached, Iran will also receive assurances that the U.S. will not attack it, at least while the deal is still valid. In this situation it will be very difficult for Israel to strike militarily, as doing so would nullify the deal forged by the Western powers. And when the military option is put on ice, the ability to pressure Iran is considerably less.

Dr. Ephraim Kam is a former deputy director of the Institute for National Security Studies and specializes in security problems of the Middle East, strategic intelligence and Israel’s national security issues.