When future historians write about American foreign policy during current era, they will see a number of contradictions in US positions on critical international and regional issues. The major contradiction is on the Palestinian issue. Although US administrations, democrat or republican, and their presidents start their eras with the intent of reaching a peaceful settlement, they launch initiatives, convene conferences, send envoys to the region, and Israel continues to obstruct these efforts. At the same time, the US continues — and even increases — its military, economic, political and diplomatic support for Israel, which encourages Israel to even challenge American diplomatic efforts, as was clear when Barack Obama, at the beginning of his term, tried to provide a vision for a balanced settlement based on the two-state solution and stopping the building of settlements. In his address before the UN General Assembly in 2013, President Obama said that the situations in Iraq, Syria and Libya must cure any person of the illusion that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the source of Middle East problems. This sharply contradicts what he said at the beginning of his presidency — that reaching a settlement to this conflict will help solutions emerge to the region's conflicts and encourage its countries to be more cooperative with the US. The second contradiction followed the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The US reaction was forceful, to the extent that it almost ended the policy of detente, which had been in force since the early 1970s. During the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan, the US increased its support to the mujaheddin, a policy that ended with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The US was content with this “victory”, but without any effort to build the country politically and economically, a vacuum was created that was filled by the Taliban and, subsequently, Al-Qaeda, which emerged as a harsh enemy of the United States. The third contradiction, paradoxically, came with the issue of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, which the US regards as one of its international goals. It was one of the three founders of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It is well known that the Middle East is one of the sensitive and strategic regions threatened by nuclear proliferation, as a single country, Israel, assuredly possesses nuclear arms, a fact that will encourage others in the region to build nuclear devices. In the 2010 NPT Review Conference, the UN issued a resolution calling for an international conference in Helsinki in 2012 aimed at declaring the Middle East a zone free of nuclear weapons. However, the Obama administration obstructed the conference on the pretext that “the regional environment is not ready.” The real reason was that Israel opposed the conference. Obama took that decision at the same time as he declared, when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, that his goal was to make the world “free from nuclear weapons.” The US achieved global dominance with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its withdrawal from the international scene when Boris Yeltsin assumed power in the Russian Federation. Regardless of what Yeltsin did to show that Russia was a reliable ally and that the Cold War was over, and despite US President George H W Bush's promise to Yeltsin that NATO would not be extended to Russian borders, the US pursued a policy of expanding the alliance to Eastern European and Baltic States that share borders with Russia. Continuing this policy towards Russia, George W Bush adopted the strategy of building anti-missile defence systems in both Hungary and the Czech Republic. This culminated in encouraging Georgia and Ukraine, former republics of the USSR, to join NATO. This inflamed Russian nationalism and was regarded by the new Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as a threat to Russian national security. That was the backdrop to the recent deterioration of Russian relations with the US and the West, a development that a number of historians regard as the beginning of a new Cold War. The most recent contradiction was the US's reaction to the 30 June revolution in Egypt, where Obama suspended essential components of military assistance to Egypt. The paradox was that this decision coincided with Egypt's fight against terrorism in Sinai, which was threatening not only its national security, but also security in the region and beyond. It was paradoxical that the US, which launched a global war on terrorism after 9/11, was punishing a country engaged in fighting terrorism. More recently, the administration has recognised this and promised to deliver 10 Apache helicopters — a promise that has not materialised until now. The writer is executive director of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs.
