Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Bill Burns, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and I'm delighted to welcome all of you to the Washington launch of Mark Lynch's terrific new book, The New Arab Wars, Uprising's Anarchy in the Middle East. I've long admired Mark and his work, and he's provided, I think, the latest book, a vivid reminder of why so many people have it. It's regional expertise, clear thinking, and the ability to connect the dots across very complicated Arab society. This really is a brilliant book. There's to be read carefully by anyone who's concerned for the Arab world or the future of American foreign policy in the Middle East. I'll add one other thing that I've long admired about Mark, and that is his creative, multi-disciplinary skills, not just in the Middle East. Only Washington foreign policy analysts who can use his grasp of contemporary American rap and hip hop to help describe the debate going on about American grand strategy, the rivalry between Jay-Z and the game. I don't know if Michelle Dunn, who's kindly agreed to moderate today's conversation, has both hip hop and rabble. What I do know, though, is that Michelle is another terrific Carnegie colleague, and has find an analyst as honest of the Arab world and all of its complexities today. I hope that you will join me in welcoming Mark and Michelle and what I'm certain is going to be a festival. Thank you all very much. Bill, for that kind introduction. I think, Mark, what I propose to do here is that you and I have a little bit of a conversation about your book. I enjoyed reading it very much, and there are some points I want to engage you on, and then we'll open it up to a broader conversation with all these people who are very interested in what you've written. Do I have to give my answers in freestyle rhymes? Not for my sake. Okay, so look, to start with a broad question. You know, your book is about the changes that have been taking place since the Arab uprisings. In fact, you interestingly refer to it as the Arab uprising, and you make a real argument about the connections and sort of in a way the coherence and cohesiveness of the things that happened in the different Arab countries over the last five years. But you know, it's become common now to speak of the Arab uprisings as over and done, and to say that the United States has no alternative but to work with the autocratic regimes in the region. And in fact, it's also become common, I think, for people to look at even the degree of support that President Obama gave to the uprisings back when they happened in 2011-2012 and to say, well, that was a mistake. You put forth quite a different argument in the book. And please just tell us a little bit about that, about how you see it. Okay, well, thanks, Michelle. And yeah, so I think that anybody who looks at the hopes that we had back in January 2011, February 2011, and looks at the way the region is right now, you really can't end up anywhere except to say, this has been a failure, right, that you haven't seen any of these countries really achieving their aspirations or their goals. You see this retrenchment of autocratic rule, you see this really quite, in many ways, almost unprecedented reassertion of repression and control. And so it's really easy then to say, okay, we're back to the way things were, we're back to the good old days when we can work with dictators and they can control their own countries, and we can just pursue our own interests. But the argument I make in the book and in the 2012 book also is that it doesn't really make sense to look at the Arab uprising, something which appeared out of the blue in January 2011, that this is a long process, which has been going on for decades about these really fundamental transformations in politics and culture and society, generational change, which is something which caused the uprisings in the first place, and none of the problems involved which caused the uprisings have been solved. In fact, in almost every case, they've become worse and more intense with fewer possibilities for resolution. So when I look at the way the Middle East is right now, the way the Arab world is, I mean, yes, it is a very far cry from those hopes of Tahrir Square, but it's also nowhere near an end point. It's impossible for me to look at Egypt, for example, right now and look at a country with the finances in absolute disaster, running on borrowed time on huge amounts of financial support from the Gulf, which is not going to be forthcoming indefinitely with the price of oil collapsing. Society is clearly not demobilized as we see people going back out into the streets, and the only response that the government seems to have is increased repression. And when I look at Egypt right now, I see a country which is in most ways less stable and less calm and less institutionalized than it was in January of 2011 or December of 2010, except that now you don't even have the idea that you could go towards elections, you can go towards democracy as a way of containing and channeling those societal disagreements. So I see Egypt right now as a good example of why the uprisings seen as a long-term process have really, we're at a midway point, nowhere close to an end. And so the policy with the idea of going back and working with these regimes, it's very tempting, but it's also likely to be a big mistake and a big disaster precisely because these regimes that we want to bank on are manifestly unable to control or to deliver the kind of stability that's promised. And so I mean, I believe that is what the policy is going to be. And right now, I think that actually is what the policy is, is to just work with these regimes as they are on the gamble that they can deliver stability. But I see very little evidence that that's the case. Well, I want to get back to that issue, both of what the US policy is now and what it might be in the next administration. But first, I want to go back to this issue of why did these uprisings largely fail? We can discuss Tunisia, which is, I think, still a going concern. Maybe you may see it in a slightly more negative way. I love Tunisia. We all love Tunisia. But your explanation for why the uprisings failed, I found in the book is a little bit different from what I hear from most other people. Right? In most of the conversations about what happened in the region, you hear a lot of criticism of the people who carried out the uprisings that they were disorganized and they didn't know what they wanted and et cetera, et cetera. And also, you hear a lot of people talking about, well, there was no basis in the societies to carry out the kind of change that the revolutionaries wanted to carry out democratic transitions or economic transformation and so forth. So that's where you largely hear the failure attributed, either to the activists themselves or to their societies. But you place a lot of emphasis on the role of actors within the region, particularly Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States and the role that they played. In fact, you say, and I'm quoting here, the blame for the failure of the Arab uprisings lies primarily with the regional powers that set out to destroy or exploit them, usually in direct opposition to the policies of the United States and the aspirations of the original protesters. So explain to us why do you place such emphasis on that factor in the book? There's an even pithier quote in there somewhere, but I have no idea where. Where I basically, that was a good one. But this one is basically, the Arab uprisings failed because the regimes killed them. And I think that that's the bottom line of a lot of this. And that shouldn't be a surprise because the uprisings were demanding change. And of course, the powers to be are going to resist change. Why wouldn't they? That's what politicians and power do. And especially in the Arab world, where to my eye, at least, the only real interest or aspiration that these regimes really have is to hold on to power. And when that power is threatened, of course, they're going to fight back as hard as they could. And so at one level, you could simply say that the uprisings failed in part because they simply couldn't generate enough power and momentum to overwhelm these very well entrenched and very powerful interests. To go a little bit farther, a little bit deeper beyond that though, what I would say is that there's different levels of this. And so at the first level, you have like the regimes like in the Gulf and some countries that never really face really serious challenges because they have the internal capacity and the wealth to protect themselves. And then you have their allies, the Jordans and the Maracos and the countries where external help, whether it's military, economic, political, could help them to overcome their challenges and to get through the process. Egypt and Tunisia just happened too fast. There wasn't time to mobilize support. And so they then become arenas for competition between the Saudis and the Qataris and the Emiratis and all these external players, all kind of fighting out their interests through local coalitions and local networks. And there, Egypt was obviously a failure. And Tunisia, I would like to believe, is still going to be a success because of the survival of democratic institutions and the formation of a constitution which enjoys consensus. But in each case, you see a pretty clear swing between a kind of a Qatari-backed coalition in 2011-2012 being replaced by a Emirati and Saudi-backed coalition in 2013. So in regional politics, the outcome is actually not that different. And then you have the battlefield states where basically that became an opportunity to fight these battles in going from political to military, Libya, Yemen, Syria. Those are places where the state simply failed and that became like a venue, a vehicle for these extraordinarily destructive proxy wars. And so one of the things that I try and do in the book is, and I don't want it to be read as simply saying it's all the fault of the external medallers. I think what they did was they served as intensifiers, as accelerants, helping their friends and hurting their enemies. They didn't create things out of whole cloth. I think that they worked with their local networks and in some cases those networks were stronger than in other areas. So I certainly wouldn't want to say that you ignore local politics or ignore the domestic. But I also don't think you can explain the domestic outcomes without this broader regional tapestry. Now, and what about the role of the United States and Europe, which you mentioned a little bit in the book, not quite as much? I mean, you say here, as I quoted, that what the Gulf states did, and this was true when, for example, when Qatar was the dominant external power regarding Egypt and Morsi was in power, it was true also that the outside patrons, the Gulf patrons, were doing things directly in opposition in some cases to what the United States and Europe and others were advocating, right? Was there something the United States could have done about this? I mean, you say that the Obama administration tried in vain to prevent this sort of proxy warfare, and in some places it's more political competition, in some places obviously it becomes out and out proxy warfare, but that they weren't able to do so. And I mean, how do you see that looking back? I mean, should the United States have been more active? Should it have cared more, given higher priority to this? Obviously the priority in the Obama administration in the Middle East was on other issues, was on reaching the nuclear deal with Iran, for example, and so what was going on in these Arab countries that had had uprisings was it was there on the policy agenda, it wasn't the top priority. Do you think there was anything more the United States could have or should have done, or they really could not have changed the outcome much? It's a great question, and back before I joined Carnegie and William Burns hired me, I used to interview him about these things and I felt great, great sympathy for what he was trying to accomplish, trying to deal with these competing regional interests and trying to align them on these shared goals, and I feel like I learned an awful lot about the frustrations of trying to do so, because ultimately I think that when it came to the Arab uprisings, it's not just that we couldn't coordinate with our allies, it's that we had very different interests from our allies, we were trying to accomplish different things. So I think that at least my view from the outside is that the Obama administration was quite sincere and quite invested in trying to bring about a transition to democracy in Egypt, in trying to establish institutions of a functional democracy with a peaceful rotation of power, rule of law, and full participation in the process. And that's something which if you look through, you remember this very, very well, Michelle, you look through 2011 or 2013, it was often it seemed that the United States was the only actor that was actually still calling for those things because everybody else was, they basically wanted victory. Whether it's the President Morsy just wanting support or whether his enemies just wanting support, but the idea of institutional democracy for its own sake, regardless of the winner, was not something which there seemed to be much other support for. And so in a sense, do I think that was the right thing to do? Absolutely. Do I think that we could have done different things which would have made that more likely? I'm honestly not sure because we were fighting against a stream both in the region and inside of Egypt where nobody else really seemed to want those things. I mean, that's a point you bring up repeatedly in the book that the United States was trying to support processes and not players, processes, building of institutions and so forth in these countries undergoing a change rather than, whereas some of the other players, the regional players and so forth and now arguably Russia and so forth were just picking winners. We're just backing someone and that, but it seems the United States did not come out ahead in this. That's something I think somehow to how we bear that in mind for the longer term. And I think that was the right policy even though it failed, but I remember our conversations back, Michelle, our conversations back in that period and I think that the competing perspective there was not so much about picking winners but about being more outspoken or more vocal in support of human rights and democracy versus focusing so much on elections and institutions. I think that's a viable and valid debate going forward and I think that's something which is very much unresolved. So for example, one of the issues that I think I've rethought a bit was I was very much in favor at the time of pushing towards elections on the premise that the endless deferral of elections would simply be a vehicle for letting the military stay in power. In Egypt. In Egypt. In Egypt. Whereas some of my friends in the opposition leadership said no, we have to get a constitution first, we have to. And in retrospect, they might have been right in the sense that it's very difficult to compete in elections when you don't know the rules, when you don't know what powers the presidency is going to enjoy, when you don't know what you when they're dissolving the parliament shortly before the election and you don't know what the balance of institutional power is going to be. So in retrospect, it might have made sense to go for the constitution first, but even then I worry that that would have simply then seen the exact same polarization and the exact same endless deferral of democracy. These are tough issues. It's not like there's an obvious easy answer which we somehow fail to find that these were enormously complex issues. It's true, it is tough. Although I think in Tunisia where they had a more prolonged transition and they sort of had a round table process where they argued out the shape of the transition itself things did go a lot better. Although we know lots of other factors. Can I just add though, that's Egypt. And I would say that when you get outside of those transitional countries I would actually shift the balance of blame a bit more. Looking at like the Syria's or the Yemen's or the Libya's especially Libya and Syria where I think that the regional competition for influence with particular groups within society in the absence of a real state. I think that was enormously destructive. And I think that again, my understanding at least of American policy was to try and get all of our so-called allies on the same page and proving unable to do so repeatedly. And again to me that sounds to me not like a failure of US policy in a sense of either not understanding or not attempting to do it but clashing, running head strong into or head long into this fundamentally divergent set of preferences. And that's where I think that's gonna be I think one of the deepest legacies of this entire period is whether this was simply momentary aberration and then we go back to some kind of regional order where the United States is aligned with its allies or if this signals something deeper and more profound where we now live in the Middle East where the US doesn't actually have any allies in the sense of allies sharing their strategic vision priorities and preferences. I tend to incline to the latter camp. I think this is much more profound. Most people I talk to, most elites I talk to in the region think it's the former. Once Obama's gone, we'll go back to normal and everything will be okay again. I think that's their gamble and I think they're wrong. I think it's actually much more profound and deeper than that in terms of this disconnect between the conception of how regional capitals in Washington understand what is the ideal regional order, what are our interests and how do we best achieve those interests? Well now you've opened up the difficult subjects of Libya and Syria and there's a lot in the book about that. You mentioned in the book that you were a supporter of the intervention in Libya and that you've sort of rethought that afterwards and that you've opposed, you've argued against US intervention in Syria. So I want you to talk about both of those a little bit. So obviously there was an external direct and Western intervention in Libya in which the United States was involved, NATO intervention and there clearly has been some intervention in Syria but not of the same type at all and a lot of discussion about what would have worked out. I've sometimes, so if you look at the two, Libya is clearly in a very difficult and bad situation but not nearly as disastrous as Syria and I think and probably still more reprehensible than Syria and clearly while there's plenty of human suffering in Libya, not on the scale of Syria. I've sometimes wondered for example if there hadn't been a NATO intervention in Libya if Libya would have turned out like Syria and I wondered if there had been an intervention in Syria if Syria wouldn't have looked now more like Libya. In other words, not in a great condition but not as bad as it is. Tell me how you look at these two. And then this is of course the problem is that whenever you're doing this you're always dealing with counterfactuals and then when you get into counterfactuals then all kinds of assumptions come into play. Well let me talk about Libya and then we can talk about Syria. So with Libya, so my rethinking of Libya and I hope I actually opened the book with this but not with Syria. The book stars like five or six pages on Libya and my take on Libya, I mean I was a strong supporter of the intervention for multiple reasons because of the clear and imminent nature of the threat of what seemed to be a strong international consensus but also because and this I wrote this at the time back in March, April, 2011 that this was happening in the heart of the Arab Spring and it was extraordinarily interconnected with everything else and to me the demonstration effect of allowing Gaddafi to slaughter the rebels in full view of the international community and the full view of the cameras would have not only been a human tragedy for Libya but would have basically then been a green light for every other leader in the Arab world to do the same to their own people fully secure that they would face no repercussions for doing so and so that demonstration effect was very, very strong for me. The other part of it is that again thinking of counterfactuals had we not intervened as NATO not intervened and that slaughter had taken place we would be sitting here today talking about why Obama let the Arab Spring be murdered in the streets of Benghazi and the abdication of responsibility. We would be having that conversation right now. Would it have become like Syria again? I don't think it would have but that's a different for it's a much bigger question topic we can go into. I did, so what I ended up coming back with was saying that I actually do not kind of recant my support for the intervention in Libya as if it would matter I mean it happened and recanting doesn't change anything one way or the other but that we have to learn the lessons of that intervention and its failure when considering future interventions that it's simply to me intellectually and ethically irresponsible to not consider the outcomes of your actions and to not learn lessons. I can't understand why we would refuse to learn the lessons of the outcome. Now of course those lessons are always difficult and contentious and contested whether Syria could be your comparison point or some other country be your comparison point. I mean we can go lots of different directions there. I just think that you have to take into account what actually happened in Libya when assessing future possible interventions. Now you switch over to Syria. Yes I mean this is the human tragedy of the 21st century. I mean this is off the charts. There's no comparison between what's happening in Syria, what's happening in Libya and Yemen although what's happening in Libya and Yemen is tragic in its own right and we don't want to minimize the enormous humanitarian suffering and casualties of war in Yemen or in Libya but Syria is on a scale and a magnitude beyond anything else that I mean so it has to be looked at in its own right and there the, so my major objection to intervention has to be separated into two separate areas. One is kind of pre-early 2012 and then it's after early 2012. In the early uprising there's, the book actually spends most of a chapter going back and recounting in some detail the debate that took place in large part among Syrians back in the second half of 2011 about the militarization of the insurgency or what was then a rebellion not an insurgency and the merits of calling for international intervention and it's fascinating to go back and reread those debates today because so many of them in my view were extraordinarily prescient in terms of warning what would happen should you see either the militarization or mostly this is about militarization rather than intervention they warned that if you militarize and begin an insurgency against a strong entrenched and regionally backed regime you don't overthrow it because they're too strong to be overthrown that way. What you get instead is the militarization of society and politics within the rebel controlled areas that the spirit of civil revolution would die out being replaced by the hard men with guns and with the flows of weapons and ultimate anti-hotists and all these other things you know much of what we've seen since 2012 is previewed in some of these extremely sophisticated and smart debates that took place in the second half of 2011. In my view once you began to see this push towards insurgency in early 2012 the die was largely cast at that point what has happened since was largely built into that decision to go to war and I don't think that anything the US did would have made any really significant difference and here I would go through and I'm sure we'll get questions from the audience we can go through in detail but I think that almost well not almost all of the proposals that were put on the table would have gotten the United States more deeply involved but would not have resolved the war what they would have done would have been to escalate the regional the counter interventions by Russia and by Iran and just more rapidly ratchet it up to a level of destruction with US direct involvement here whether it's no fly zones whether it's safe areas whether it's any of the kind of those limited forms of intervention and if you go back and you read the proposals carefully of what was being suggested the architects of those proposals didn't think they would end the wars they I mean you can't I think do a military analysis of this or a strategic analysis of it and think that it would end the wars but they thought it would produce a more stable or a preferable position for negotiations to begin whether it's arming or no fly zones or the like but I was never convinced by that and again we can go through the details of it mostly what I saw was a strategic stalemate that was more or less locked in by the point that the insurgency began where every move by one side every advance by one side would be met by a counter reaction from the other side if the rebels are moving towards Damascus this bullet intervenes to protect them if the rebels look like they're about to lose massive new floods of anti-tank weapons and guns start appearing and then they regain their control and they start advancing and then Iran steps in and this just steady cycle is pretty much the definition of a strategic stalemate the only hope that I ever saw for ending this once it got to that point was to have some form of international accord where US and Russia each get their allies on side and you begin to then de-escalate from the top down which is largely how I interpret the cessation of hostilities and the current round of diplomacy whether it'll work or not I don't know I think it might be too late for anything to work in Syria the social science tells us that civil wars like this typically last about 10 years I suspect this being a particularly bad one is probably gonna be on the far end of that rather than on the near end of that I don't think it's anywhere near resolution yet but what I've never seen and believe me I think I've looked at all of the proposals that have been out there I've never seen one that truck me as likely to lead even remotely likely to lead to a resolution of the war reduction of deaths or the like and this is what makes it a true tragedy in my sense is I think there was an opportunity to preempt that and I think that if you wanted to put an exact date on it I think in the book I'd say a Kofi Annan's mission was probably the last best chance I actually think that it might have been earlier than that when the Guthrie-backed UN resolution failed in the Security Council that might have been the point but certainly when Annan's mission failed I feel like unfortunately the die was largely cast Okay, I'm sorry that was a really long answer That's all right, I'm sure we'll have more Just let me ask you, I wanna ask you two more things briefly before we go to the audience So there is some talk in the book about the phenomenon of the Islamic State and of course the continued existence of Al-Qaeda and you make an argument in the book that the campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood that sort of started with the coup in Egypt but then was very much carried out in the Gulf and elsewhere has really helped the rise of the Islamic State and I don't think that's a connection that a lot of people here make if anything they see the Muslim Brotherhood as being part of an Islamic spectrum that includes Daesh and Al-Qaeda and so forth but you're sort of making the opposite argument So I'm not saying kind of a straight line that says the Egyptian coup leads to Daesh that would be silly because there's lots of other Iraq, there's legacies of Iraq, there's the war in Syria all those things are important My argument about the Muslim Brotherhood though is that you've always had, I mean always in the time period we're talking about you have a spectrum of Islamist groups as you're describing and they're competing with each other for support, for institutional power, for popularity, for ideological credibility that sort of thing and the Muslim Brotherhood for all of its flaws was very clearly one of the forces opposing Al-Qaeda and that Daesh came too late for that but if you go back and review a decades worth of competition between Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood you can see that it's ideological and narrative the word everyone in Washington loves so much but it's very real, you know, are you going to be a part of society and change it slowly from within and participate in elections and have social services or are you going to be a movement outside of society you see as fundamentally unacceptable which you're going to change from above through force I mean very different ways of understanding the relationship between the organization and society and the Muslim Brotherhood was powerful in that sense they were in a position to control significant parts of the Islamist street they had a commanding position within institutions, within mosques, with a whole set of areas with which they were in a position to control their own people, to keep the Al-Qaeda types out of their areas and to make a pitch to the kind of the undecided Islamist leaning people that they had the better alternative, the better path and after the coup all those things disappear I think you also make a kind of a more also practical argument in the book that the elimination of the Brotherhood as a political actor, not only in Egypt but a lot of other countries left a lot of younger Islamist leaning people leaderless, angry, vengeful and susceptible to recruitment How do you convince a young Egyptian Muslim Brother that democratic political participation is the way to go after what they saw in July and August of 2013? I mean it's just you'd have to be pretty stupid to accept that and they're not stupid and so what that does is that creates this pool of people who are now available for recruitment and in some ways that this rising thing might be how few of them actually have gone in that direction but I don't think that can be taken for granted in the over the long delay you eliminate the middle and it's going to be you're just going to open up room for competitors Alright one last point Can I give you one last point of this though they crack down on Egypt but she mentioned the regional part of it it's extremely important but as you know these alliances are diverse right and so at the same time that Saudi Arabia is supporting a crack down in Egypt they're still working with Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood via al-Islah the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is an active part of the Syrian opposition coalition you know this is not an all or nothing type thing it's often made out today Regarding U.S. policy now in the book you're largely quite supportive of President Obama's Middle East policy but I did think I was able to infer a little bit of criticism regarding maybe what I would describe as a kind of giving up on the Arab uprising so of just sort of returning to well let's just work with the regimes and so forth and you point to the danger of this of this kind of policy for the next administration so what are you proposing as an alternative On that I would have recommended a much stronger stance on Egypt after the coup I think to me it was obvious that when you have a military coup you should invoke the relevant law and call it a coup and suspend military aid as you're legally required to do I mean to me that was a no brainer I don't know why that wasn't why I do know why but I think that's something which should have been done differently and in terms of then this general alignment and accord with these regimes I think this is clearly triage in other words there's some things that really really matter Daesh really matters and the Iran deal really matters and the prospects of forcing through democratic change in the Middle East have now plummeted to less than zero so you cut your losses and you try and accomplish what you can with the resources that you have I understand that completely and it makes sense on its own terms so yes there's criticism but there's also an understanding of the limits within which they operate but I do think that when you get to and trying to figure out a grand strategy you know you're basically this is the tension you're always going to face is that you make these temporary deals with regimes that your analysis suggests are likely to be unstable over the long term and which do not seem to share your interests and values it's a way it seems to me of achieving short term gains at the expense of getting trapped in long term commitments that don't necessarily serve your interests and that's where you know whether it's Obama whether it's the whether it's his successor whoever she may be I mean I think that there's going to be a reckoning with this sooner rather than later and because I don't think it's stable we want it to be stable we want many things I want an army of flying pink unicorns I don't have one and so if I make a strategy based on this brigade of unicorns it's not going to be a good strategy and so I think that there's going to be this incredible temptation to double down on these regimes because that's what we have to work with and then we'll see them kind of collapsing beneath our feet and I think the argument that you made in the book is not that it's just the short term versus the long term I mean you argue sort of that in real time there are not as many shared interests and that some of our partners are actively undermining I live in the world of Twitter where long term you know basically short term is tonight and you know long term is next week right okay I'm not saying next week but what I'm saying though is that every indicator that I would want to look for for political instability is getting more intense and more active with the collapsing price of oil the failed regional wars the you know the in the country by country so I think this is something which rather than being put on the back burner is something to deal with in this perspective long term is something to be looking at in fairly urgent terms in the Twitter long term in the Twitter long term let's open it to questions from the audience please wait for the microphone to come to you and please give us your name and affiliation thank you very much Michael Kurtzig retired from the public agriculture you talked about a lot of politics you didn't say much about economics except the shambles the Egyptian economy is in shambles no question about that is there any hope for these countries as far as jobs are concerned when in Egypt you have 55% of the educated women unemployed, 40% of the men are unemployed there are no jobs in Egypt are these countries mostly on a global welfare system now on a public dove being given by us so by the Saudis, by others but is there any hope in this category thank you I'll take a few questions at a time okay thank you my name is Rasha Elas and I'm the Washington correspondent for the Arab Weekly I was among the few members of international media who actually covered Syria from inside the country because I'm a dual citizen and I was able to go in and one thing that always struck me over there is you know I constantly ask people both in regime and rebel controlled areas what's your vision for Syria what do you what's the future who are you as a citizen of a modern nation state what do you want in the Constitution what's your definition of secularism separation of mosque and state if any and it seems no one has an answer on that I mean no one can even agree with the definition of secularism is so that's my question to you you know how to overcome that you ask a French person what it means to be French and they have a you know a lot of republic and secularism and all that and you ask an American teenager and they have an idea but you ask an Arab these days and they don't a young Arab they don't really have much of an idea okay I will take one more question do we have a oh okay we've stunned the room go ahead alright I'll try and deal with these two these two very different questions unfortunately on the first one about economics there's a reason I don't talk about it much which is that I'm not an economist and anything I say will largely be second hand fortunately Carnegie employs a lot of really good economists and so they could answer better I will say though that you know the the one thing which is obviously people are paying attention to and they should be paying attention to is the implications of a long term to the long term low oil prices because I mean that's something which really cuts to the core of the balance of power in the region and in the regime survival strategies of much of the region and I think that most like the the Gulf countries they can survive a few years of low oil prices the vast reserves and you know they can figure out ways to get through on the lending markets and that sort of thing but if this turns into a 10-20 year reality then it's something very, very different and forms of regional intervention that now seem largely costless become costly forms of subventions to your own citizenry as a way of basically purchasing social stability and survival suddenly become not viable and if you look at the numbers in a place like Saudi Arabia right now I mean there's a reason why Muhammad bin Salman is so urgent about these reforms because the numbers just don't look good and so there I think that the economics is a very big part of why I don't see the uprisings as being any work close to over but do note though that says nothing about a new round of uprisings demanding democracy or anything like that and all kinds of forms of popular mobilization based on economic deprivation and deep and profound resentment of seemingly corrupt and out of such elites that call for things that are nothing like democracy so I think that's an important thing to keep in mind on the question of visions of Syria I mean I think that so if you were going traveling there in 2011 I found the Syrians that I talked to back then to be full of ideas and just bubbling with ideas for the building of a new type of citizenship and national unity based on democratic participation and getting rid of the legacies of the past I think the last few years has been survival and just dealing with the consequences of a ferocious and violent war and I think it's I know people who are involved with NGOs USIP had a big project on the day after project and there's a lot of people who are out there trying to promote exactly the kinds of ideas that you're talking about but I think frankly it's a lot to ask of anybody to come up with a positive vision for their future at a time when they're trying to keep their families from being slaughtered and one of the big things there is the magnitude of the refugee and displacement problem where millions of people outside of their homes outside of the country many more millions displaced from their homes within Syria the last estimate I saw said that over half the population of the country is now displaced in one form or another and again it's very difficult to imagine like a civil conversation about the future identity of a country or a nation when you're facing that level of displacement and the like at the same time I think this is hugely important what you're describing and I think that again this is one of the long term ramifications that we're gonna be grappling with Syrians can be grappling with the regions can be grappling with everyone's gonna be grappling with for decades to come I don't think as against like a lot of other people apparently I don't think that the borders are likely to change I don't think that we're likely to see the de jure redrawing of borders into new little five states carved out of Syria three states carved out of Iraq but I think de facto I think a lot of those kind of partitions on the ground have already taken place and sorting of populations through horrible ethnic cleansing and sectarian cleansing has already taken place and I think we're probably gonna see a fair amount of what would in Arab political tradition be quite radical decentralization and strong federal or kind of local level type of control within relatively weak central governments to try and accommodate those enormous differences that you now see because I don't know how do you how could you possibly envision a unified Syrian national narrative right now given all that's happened and given the enormous distance between regime supporters and regime opponents great question but there is no good answer there's a question in the back of the room there thanks Mark. Hi Matt. You spent a lot of time this afternoon talking about enduring instability risks that are still present in the region in Egypt and in a lot of the US partner states. I'm wondering if you could spend a little bit more time talking about what specifically what type of forms that instability would take today. Is this another round of mass protests like we saw in 2011 I think not but then what other forms of instability are you really worried about when you talk about those enduring risks? Behind you. Hi Richard. Richard Chimera from the Middle East Policy Council. Mark I look forward to reading your book by the way. I was just in the region right after the Obama Doctrine came out and I'd be curious if you're taking that. Thanks for that Jeff for David. Pardon? The Obama Doctrine was that Goldberg or? Yeah the Goldberg one. Anyway two comments struck me that I'd be interested in your thoughts on. One was from the non-Saudi side which was somebody telling me that it's about time we finally told the Saudis the truth and the other was from the Saudi side which said in the previous decade you were encouraging us to join you in opposing Iran in the region and now you're about to abandon us to Iran in the region. So I'd be curious your thoughts on those two. And Mary Ports currently with the counter-ISIL coalition. I want to also follow up with the Saudi aspect. You spoke of generational change and we have recently heard of the new economic policy Mohammed Bin Salman has introduced. And I would like to hear your thoughts on changes within those let's say autocratic allies. And corollary to that there's been a lot said about the damage to US leadership, the role of US leadership. Can you speak to this picture given those possibilities? Okay, thanks. Okay, so let me, Kyle answer you first and then all those two questions kind of go together I think. So in terms of the specific types of instability. Yeah, I actually agree with you. I think that the eruption of large scale mass protests of the Takriir variety are unlikely. In small part because I don't think they'll be tolerated. I think it'll escalate the violence much more quickly. And I think that actually the type of instability I expect is actually much bloodier and a lot of it will take place within institutions. I mean, I think coups and counter coups are more likely than the occupation of central squares and 18 days of international and internal diplomacy. And that's actually not a happy idea at all. That doesn't mean that the crowds won't matter though. I think that you see kind of perennial, you now see mobilized populations that are not going to be demobilized. I just mean, and I think what you mean also is that they're unlikely to get the opportunity to mobilize in this kind of long-term nonviolent way that we saw in early 2011. So yeah, the instability takes lots of different forms and the ones to watch right now are violence, internal, kind of intra and inter-institutional conflicts. For example, between, you know, Mhavrat and the military, that sort of thing. And then finally, intra-elite conflicts which are really easy to see in a lot of these countries right now. In terms of the Saudi relationship and US leadership and credibility and all those things, you know, at one level, I mean, what Rich, what you said, Richard, what you said is I think you hear that all the time, of course, is this idea that the US has abandoned, that the US has basically, that it's not that they've gone their separate ways that we have and we've stopped doing the things that we, and there's a coherent narrative there. And I actually think that it's not even the Iran deal so much as, I wrote this in the Washington Post a while back, that it was with the Mubarak was where this really gets started, you'll abandon us when you don't need us anymore and that this then translates into everything which follows. The Iran deal is about abandoning us, the not intervening in Syria is about abandoning us. I will say that I know you've been working over there for a very long time and you probably remember that the Gulf expressing their fears of us abandoning them back in the late 2000s and in the mid 2000s and the early 2000s and in the late 90s and in the mid 90s. I think that this fear of abandonment and related this loss of credibility and leadership is just an integral part of all alliance politics. I mean, this is just how allies interact with each other. It's a bargaining game and saying that I feel that you are going to abandon me is another way of saying give me things. And my response to that can be, sure, here are things, now I'm your leader again or they can be, we'll give you things but we also want things from you in exchange and I think that what you've seen from Obama has been more of that latter part of saying, yes, we're going to increase arms sales to the Gulf and to Israel to historically unprecedented levels but we also want you to support our policies and that I think is what's being described as abandonment and again, that's my cynical take on it but I'm older, I've been around longer than you Richard so I've earned my cynicism. I'm just kidding. And then on the generational changes and Muhammad bin Salman's reforms and all that stuff and to me this is, I don't have a read on this yet. I mean, what he's describing seems to me wildly unrealistic and almost certain to fail. I mean, it's just, you look at these plans and it seems incomprehensible that they could possibly succeed, the numbers don't add up, there's enormous societal resistance and all those things and yet, it's quite interesting to finally see someone actually trying to shake up what was a deeply entrenched and problematic system and so whether that should be supported or not, I think it's very much an open question. I mean, if there's actually a move towards fundamental reform, it's interesting to watch at least but in terms of generational change, I mean, one of the things that I don't know about this audience, raise your hand I guess but I've been doing a lot of public speaking at universities especially over the last four or five years and in almost every audience that I would speak to there would be at least one and often more than one Saudi student here on one of the King Abdullah fellowships or the other kinds of fellowships and just unbelievably talented, smart people who are getting advanced degrees in all fields and significant portion of them planned to stay in the United States or stay in Europe, stay in the West. Substantial portion of them are gonna go home and that strikes me as likely to be a strong force for change from within. I mean, these people that I've met, huge numbers of them and just so incredibly capable and smart and talented and so I actually, you never know when exactly youth will change things but this just strikes me as the real introduction of a real wild fact, a real wild card in a positive way and since we have so few positive things we can talk about today, I really wanna talk about that one. Let's follow up on one aspect of that because we haven't discussed Yemen much. What about the more assertive Saudi foreign policy and the ability to project power and the willingness rather to project power militarily? President Obama said he wanted allies in the region to deal with their own problems and the Saudis and Emiratis have now done so with Yemen. Is that a net plus or a net minus for the region and also for US interests in the region? The intervention in Yemen has been an unmitigated disaster. I mean, it's just been a horribly conceived, horribly executed policy which is now a quagmire from which can't be escaped, enormous human cost and I have absolutely nothing positive to say about the Saudi Emirati intervention in Yemen and I think the United States should have opposed it rather. I mean, basically my read of it is the Obama administration basically said it's clear that this really matters to you and you're gonna do it anyway. So go ahead and mess it up. Oh, and it happened to coincide with the Iran agreement? For the Iran agreement, right. So there's a lot of talk in the media and in the blob about how non-intervention in Syria was supposedly a way to appease Iran, which I think is just really ridiculous. I think you have really strong reasons for non-intervention that are not reducible to this grand scheme to work with Iran. Yemen, on the other hand, I think is very clear, not as a stop to Iran, but as a stop to the Saudis basically saying you really want this, you can have this in exchange for not getting in the way of the Iran deal. I mean, not that. Publicly supporting the deal. Not that crude, but along those lines and I think that now the failure of those military campaigns and the political and military failure of the campaigns is pretty clear. Everyone's looking for an exit strategy but it's not obvious to me that there's enough of a foundation left to rebuild a Yemeni state on, but something has to be found that it's gonna be extraordinarily difficult. It was quite interesting to see the Saudi Foreign Minister yesterday saying suddenly that the Houthis are an integral part of Yemen and someone will always have to live with unlike the Ash and Al-Qaeda, which are enemies. That strikes me as a positive sign. But the thing about this has always been the role not just of the Houthis but of Ali Abdullah Saleh and that alliance has been at the center of this from the start and until something is done to figure out a way to re-engage with both, Yemen is so complicated, right? But you have to figure out a way to re-engage the Houthis, Ali Abdullah Saleh and the networks around him deal with the Southern, quite intensely held now, resentments of centralization. Basically, you have to go back to where Jamal Ben-Amar was the year and a half ago with a national dialogue and somehow figure out a way to start it up again and rebuild it, but we- The small matter of Al-Qaeda. And the small matter of Al-Qaeda. So I think this is, I can see very few, if any, positive gains which are followed from that intervention and, unfortunately. We don't have time for one more question. Mike Lemon, retired state. Mark, presuming that you and Michelle were asked to be on the next transition team for the incoming administration. And you've got some fairly stark choices about approaches at least from what one follows in the media today. What would be the grand strategy if that's the right term to use that you would advocate in the approach to the Middle East? From a proactive maximalist engage with all players all across the, to a more minimalist, selective tactical engagement with varying players. How would you, given what you see now and assess in the region, given what you assess in terms of the philosophical, political approaches of the primary contenders, what would you advise? And let me just build on that a little bit. It's a great final question. Thanks for that. But I mean, you also sort of suggest in the book something, Mark, that I've often thought about, which is that the partners with whom the United States is used to working in this region, as you say, don't have the answers to the problems. And we don't necessarily, as outsiders, have either the answers or the means to execute them. So what kind of a role makes sense? Well, I mean, on this, again, I tend to be, as you know, more of a minimalist on these things and trying to be extremely realistic about what can actually be accomplished through the exercise of American military or other types of force, when you're pushing against the interests of people on the ground. And, you know, trying to, you know, so you can change the balance of power through long-term massive deployments of U.S. troops. And as soon as you leave, it'll go back to the status quo ante. And so, unless you're willing to advocate for that kind of long-term, you know, military presence on the ground, which would be a valid argument for someone to make, but most people aren't, then I think you have to scale back your ambitions to match the resources that you're willing to bring to bear on them. So with that, and answer your question, I mean, I think that the top priorities should be, number one, lock in the Iran nuclear deal and make it clear that it's not going away so that people can then realign, stop hedging against its possible end and realign their strategies accordingly. Put a lot of, put a huge amount of diplomatic energy and attention into trying to end the three major wars, the Syria, Libya, and Yemen diplomatically, while also trying to marshal huge amounts of international financial assistance for the rehabilitation, repatriation of refugees and rebuilding of those shattered countries. No new military interventions, I mean, I know the new president is gonna want to bomb Syria, just to prove that she or she is not Obama. It's like a rite of passage for new administrations. Once that doesn't accomplish anything, then get back to the business of not getting into new wars, new military interventions, because I think you need to have, as with like getting to a real democracy, they always say it's not the first election that makes democracy, it's the second election, the second peaceful rotation of power. And so in this case, one administration doing something isn't enough. It wasn't enough for Bush and his neocon policies. It's not enough for Obama and his retrenchment policies. It needs to have continuity over multiple administrations to get locked in as the new structure. And I would, that's what I would like to see. It needs to be the locking in of this new reduced American presence in the region, and then the rebuilding of relationships and alliances around that. But you know, I have to say your last line in the bookmark. You say America would be better served to consolidate its retrenchment from the region and invest its support not in brutal regimes, but in those Arabs seeking a more democratic future. You just said that. What does that mean, though? What does that mean? Who are those Arabs and what is investing in them mean? Well, then we have to, that's the next Carnegie report, right? But no, but absolutely. I mean, I think that that's the last part that is just the trying to support these youth. And here's where your question about economics comes in. This is where all of the things that we're working on in kind of these other Carnegie projects is trying to find ways to support the people in especially this rising generation. But none of that in my mind, it's not contradictory with avoiding interventions. Does that mean ramping up economic people to people engagement, education, I don't know, the different forms of engagement? Is that what you're talking about? That would be nice. But the problem is that there's vanishingly few places anymore where we're welcome to do those things. I mean, it's kind of hard to run people-to-people programs in Egypt when everybody you talk to gets thrown in jail or barred at the airport. So it's kind of hard. But that I think is where we have to kind of put our energies in the future. But I suspect that everyone will say they're gonna do that and then not based on past experience. So, okay. Well, we are selling Mark Lynch's book outside. He is going to report directly to the table so he can sign copies for you. But first, thank you very much for being here and join me in thanking Mark Lynch. Thank you.