Episode 43. US Interests in the Middle East Part I: Iran, the GCC & Syria with General Joseph Votel and Ambassador Barbara Leaf

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy (00:00):

Our podcast brings together senior US diplomats and senior US military leaders in conversations about their partnerships and how they tackle some of our toughest national security problems. You can find all our podcasts and more information at generalambassadorpodcast.org. My name is Ambassador Deborah McCarthy, and I'm the producer and host of the series. Today, our conversation will be on US interests in the Middle East. Our guests are General Joseph Votel and Ambassador Barbara Leaf. General Votel retired as a Four-Star General in the United States Army after a nearly 40-year career. He served as Commander of US Central Command from 2016 to 2019. His area of responsibility covered 20 nations stretching from Northeast Africa across the middle East to Central and South Asia. Before this command, General Votel was the Commander of the US Special Operations Command. Currently he is the president of the Business Executives for National Security, as well as a distinguished senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. Ambassador Leaf served as the US Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates from 2014 to 2018. Before arriving in Abu Dhabi, Ambassador Leaf was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Arabian Peninsula and the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Iraq. Among her many other senior assignments, she also served as the Department of State's first Director for Iranian Affairs. She is currently the Ruth and Sid Lapidus Fellow at the Washington Institute and director of the Beth and David Geduld Program on Arab Politics. General Votel, Ambassador Leaf, welcome to our podcast. I really want to extend a special thank you to you both for joining us via zoom to talk about US security interests in the Middle East. And I wanted to start with a few points for our listeners: during your respective tenures as CENTCOM Commander, and as US Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, you overlapped from 2016 to 2018. During that timeframe, you witnessed the rise and fall of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to limit Iran's nuclear program, increased tensions between the US and Iran generally, the wars in Yemen and Syria, and a dramatic rift within the Gulf Cooperation Council. CENTCOM and the United States relationship with the UAE were implicated in all of these issues. Now we've covered Iraq and Afghanistan extensively in other episodes, so today I'd like to focus on Iran's activities in the region, the Wars in Syria and Yemen, the GCC conflict, and how each of these fits into our larger conflict with Iran. But before we start, I wanted to ask each of you to share a little bit more about yourselves beyond the official bios and, specifically, how did each of you become interested in the Middle East?

Amb. Leaf (03:16):

The middle East was an accidental venture for me. I was, as a child, very interested in two things: language and calligraphy. Two of the languages that I wanted eventually to try out as a calligrapher were Russian and Arabic, Because of the beautiful script. I got to Russian first, in college, as I developed a real passion for foreign affairs, But by the time I got into the Foreign Service, I had decided I needed a new place, a new region to really explore, and fortuitously on my second assignment as a foreign service officer, I served in the operations center, the 24/7 watch. That was where I began to see the huge array of issues that were of deep and abiding interest and national security importance to the United States. So on my next assignment, I went to Jerusalem and I essentially never looked back, metaphorically speaking.

Amb. McCarthy (04:06):

And General, I understand that your first roommate at West Point had been educated in Iran where his father was a US Defense Attache. Did that inspire your focus?

Gen. Votel (04:16):

I wouldn't say that it inspired my focus, but I thought it was always an interesting juxtaposition that I thought about throughout my career, particularly as the CENTCOM Commander. This represented a time when our relations, our policy were quite different in the Middle East than they certainly are now. And I thought about that a lot. My first introduction into the Middle East was probably, very similar to many in uniform, and it was through a deployment. In my case it was a deployment to the Brightstar Exercise, in Egypt, which at the time was a huge exerrcise, nearly a hundred thousand troops on the ground, for a major exercise that extended for weeks, and of course it was an immersion into the culture and getting to work with the Egyptians. As Barbara said, you begin to get a little bit intoxicated by everything associated with the Middle East. And then of course we began deploying there more often, to Afghanistan to Iraq, different parts of the broader region. You really do become much more interested in the people and in the places, and in the cultures they have, and so you know, by the time I got to CENTCOM I had a healthy appreciation for it and really, really enjoyed my opportunities to travel throughout the region.

Amb. McCarthy (05:22):

Well, I want to turn now to the issue of Iran and what that country means to the United States. There's been a lot of press and controversy about the international agreement with Iran called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which the US signed on to under President Obama and then pulled out of under President Trump. But the US-Iran relationship is much more complicated. How big a threat is Iran to US interests in the Middle East region and what means has it used, including non-military, to carry out its objectives? And then we'll move to talking about what tools we have employed.

Amb. Leaf (05:57):

As a starting point, it's a country with which we've had a 41 year, frequently violent, non relationship. But for so much of that period, the violence has been one sided. In other words, Iran has looked for instance, during the early stages of the US invasion of Iraq to foster a proxy war with US forces using Iraq as the battlefield. And we've seen that over and over again. And of course it has a very long record of not only direct terrorism against the US, but also establishing proxy forces through which it does similarly violent ventures. In the grand scheme of things, Iran is not the original source of instability and violence in the Middle East. I mean, there are many factors that go into that, but it has, for decades, surfed on those troubled waters. It has moved along the seams, the riffs in the region and exploited them and particularly exploited sectarian divides and fostered greater sectarian animosity. So it's a significant destabilizing actor in the region, more so now than say 15 years ago. And it does bump up right against profound US interests in the region.

Gen. Votel (07:09):

Iran presents to the United States and our partners in the region and others who joined us in the region, really an irregular threat, something that was not always readily apparent to us as we might see in normal military forces. So the threat presents itself in the form of proxies as Ambassador Leaf talked about. It presents itself in the form of harassment type activities in the maritime environment, presents it in the form of cyber activities, where Iran tries to take activities in that area, presented in the information environment where Iran uses their influence with other people in the country to paint a picture of what the United States and our friends and allies are doing in the region. And of course in the past, it's also presented in the form of this nuclear weapons program that they've had some interest in pursuing. And so it is this multidimensional threat here it's different than other threats we face. It's not necessarily a direct existential threat to the homeland, but it is a serious threat to our interests in the region. And from that perspective, it means that we have to pay attention to what Iran is doing.

Amb. McCarthy (08:13):

What are the diplomatic tools we have used to counter? And what are the military tools?

Amb. Leaf (08:20):

In the diplomatic domain, there are many, and I could use two very different periods of my profession. One when I was the first director of the office of Iranian Affairs in the Department of State from 2006 to 2008, and then when I was ambassador. So when we established the office of Iranian Affairs, it was to do a couple of things. It was to fill a gaping need that we had in our analysis and understanding of this contesting power that we had dealt with with great difficulty over the years. From the time of the revolution and the rupture in diplomatic relations, we had gradually had a withering of expertise in the ranks of government as people retired. So we established that office, not only to bring policy focus on all the dimensions of Iran's challenges that it posed to the United States, but also to establish a cadre of Farsi speakers and Iran experts that would be able to really connect the dots on this rather mysterious country. And I put that squarely in the diplomatic wheelhouse, because what we did was establish a network of Foreign Service Officers in disparate places who would have direct contacts with Iranians, business folks, residents of different countries, regular citizens. We didn't have official contacts with officials of the government, but by this enriched network of contacts, we began to get a greater understanding of the internal dynamics. Plus it was people to people. We established a whole set of people to people's sports and cultural activities. Those have largely withered now. And of course over the years, of course, even at that time, and certainly in the last few years, and during my tenure, we've used a rich array of sanctions, punitive sanctions and restrictive sanctions, in collaboration with likeminded countries, Europeans, and of course, through the UN to restrict the scope of Iran's activities, or to punish it for what it does.

Gen. Votel (10:19):

The military component of this, the activities that we try to pursue, really have to be in conjunction, not just with the things that Ambassador Leaf just talked about, kind of the diplomatic end, but really the whole of the US government approach to this. As the CENTCOM commander, one of the things that I chaired on a regular basis, about three to four times a year, was a forum where we pulled together people at about my level from across the government, and it was an attempt to make sure we synchronized our efforts with regards to Iran. And this was an important aspect. In many, many regards, the military is very much a supporting effort to our Treasury efforts, to our diplomatic efforts, to other things. So I want to make that point right up front, so we don't create the impression that we're doing things separately. But when you look at the military response and the things that we do on this, you can characterize it in several categories. The most important, which I think is developing good, strong partnerships with people in the region, whether it's people in the Gulf or other parts of the region, have a good professional military relationship with them. This is I think really important. It allows us the opportunity to pursue security, cooperation, activities, to help develop their capabilities, to help get them the equipment that they need to do this. I think this is an important way that we can be seen as valuable partners to those in the region. And by the way, you know, we talk about our concerns about Iran. Many of those concerns are shared by our partners in the region as well. Another way we did this was through our presence and deterrence activities. You know, we do keep maritime resources in the region and at one time we had up to two carriers that were in the region at the time. That's not case right now, but my point is, is that we do have regular presence of military forces in the region that demonstrate some resolve, that demonstrate a capability to respond. And also very clearly make it obvious to Iran that we are going to protect our interests in the region. We plan, and we don't just do unilateral planning. We plan with our partners so that we can respond. So those are the types of activities that you see, we have a fairly robust counterterrorism capability that extends across the region as well. So there's a variety of things that we do on the military side that I think complement some of the things that are being done through the other elements of our power.

Amb. Leaf (12:32):

And you know what I would say, also, Deborah is one of the most important events that all of us ambassadors across the Middle East attended every year was an event that Joe and his predecessors and his successors have done for years, which is a bringing together of ambassadors and commanders across the region to talk about the issues of the day and really to gain a common knowledge across the CivMil divide. Because I had to have as clear an understanding as to what Joe was doing and his separate commanders were doing, as he had to understand where I was and what I represented, you know the diplomatic efforts. So that October meeting in Doha every year was a critical, must-attend meeting for all of us.

Gen. Votel (13:17):

And we actually matured the process so not only do we have ambassadors and chargés from across the CENTCOM area of responsibility, but we actually brought people in on the periphery. We had the Ambassador from India, we had representatives from Israel, and I mean this was really, really important. We tried to make sure that we had a forum that allowed us to talk through these kinds of things.

Amb. McCarthy (13:38):

Well Barbara, I wanted to ask you, you were the Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, a close security partner of the United States, which is only 35 miles from Iran, across the Strait of Hormuz. The UAE has had an historically complicated relationship with that country. Many Iranians live in the UAE. Can you comment a little bit on how this historical relationship between the UAE and Iran influenced how you managed your relationship with the UAE on Iran policy?

Amb. Leaf (14:08):

That's a really interesting question because of course the UAE is, it's a federation and when it achieved independence in 1971, that is the governance model that the seven rulers of the seven Emirates chose. And it was sort of counterintuitive when you think about the typical governance models at that time. And the fact that it was a period between two major Arab-Israeli wars, it was a time of rising terrorism across the region. It was a time of real turmoil, and yet they chose this model. But what that's meant is that while Abu Dhabi is the big brother, the largest, wealthiest, most populous emirate of the seven. Dubai has sort of first among equals among the seven as well in the sense that it's long had a history as a very strategic and critical trading point, north and south, east and west. And so from the outset, building on that trading history, the rulers of Dubai, and the current ruler is also the prime minister of the country, they perforce had to look to economic diversification and they did so through their strong points of maximizing their geography. Well, their geography puts them flush with Iran. And of course there's long been a resident population of Iranians, traders, businessmen. There was half a million of them when I got to the UAE. I did not so much see attention in our bilateral relationship between where we wanted to go on Iran, but there was a sort of a juggling that internally the UAE had to do. And that was over issues as, you know, counter terrorist financing so forth. Because again, Dubai is sort of the New York of the UAE and Abu Dhabi is the Washington, with the federal statutory authorities to manage foreign policy, of course, but also to look at these issues of how money flows and to what end. So I would say that the rising threat perception of Iran in the UAE, in the UAE government, brought us naturally closer together on these issues. And with the advent of the Yemen conflict, of course, there was a greater sense of that threat to the UAE because of the visibly growing relationship between the Houthi militia and Iran.

Amb. McCarthy (16:26):

I wanted to ask you both about what has happened within the Gulf Cooperation Council. I mean, the UAE is a member of it. There's a huge rift that has taken place between the UAE and Saudi Arabia on the one hand and Qatar on the other. And this rift has caused repeated postponements of a US-GCC summit to unveil what is termed the US Middle East Strategic Alliance (MESA). Can you each explain a little bit to our listeners, why this GCC, this Gulf Cooperation Council is important and how you leverage your influence as leaders to get members to stop squabbling and to focus on Iran.

Gen. Votel (17:06):

From my perspective, what the GCC provided, is it provided a platform, provided a framework, that brought the nations of the Gulf together. And so it gave us a readily available way to convene people, to convene our partners. So from a military standpoint, that was quite good. After I became the CENTCOM Commander, of course, we were very heavily focused on the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, but as I was talking to our GCC partners, it became very apparent to me that, yes, we understand the threat of ISIS, but what about Iran and how do we think about that? And so we took off on a course where we used the GCC membership as a way to bring people together, to begin a discussion on how we could cooperatively safeguard our interests against the threat of Iran. As you've mentioned here, the Qatar rift in particular, had a bad effect on that. You know, we've got something started, we're talking about this thing, we were thinking about cooperative efforts to move forward and then this event occurred, and it took the better part of a year, from my perspective, to bring the parties back together. What we were able to do is we were able to use the relatively collegial military relationships that have remained in place to eventually bring people back together, to include the Qataris. We did that in Riyadh, and we did it in Kuwait before I departed. And we did it one more time in the United States, where we brought everyone together. The GCC really performed that function and I know there's a great desire to move forward on the MESA piece, but I would just say that, you know, the basic elements, many of those things were actually being addressed through some of the cooperative efforts that we were approaching.

Amb. Leaf (18:42):

The family of the Gulf countries, of the six Gulf countries, they're just unquestionably stronger to the degree they are unified. They're not unified now. That's very clear. It's been three long, rather bitter years. And I think about it a lot, even now. That was a very tough and testing summer that we dealt with this explosive conflict among them. And it has left semi-permanent wounds. And I was brought to think about it again this week, because I was engaged in a conversation with a group and asked to present to the group my understanding of where Biden is and where his key advisors on the issue of, should he win, would a Biden administration return to the JCPOA? How would it attack the other issues, the ballistic missile threat, the regional demension of Iran's behavior. And I had to say, honestly, and this was a group of foreign interlocutors, that it's hard to imagine right now how the six Gulf countries sit down at a table with a common purpose of addressing the issues that they find really objectionable in Iran's behavior across the region. If they cannot get on a common sheet, if they cannot talk to each other, they have had only, even in this pandemic, they've had only the scantest government to government discussions, and that's a real missed opportunity as well. They've all been hard hit with this pandemic, as everyone has been across the world, and a common approach to that, information sharing and coordinated action, would help each of them. So it remains a priority I know for the Trump administration to try to bring these six back together, but until now, I think it's fair to say that we've not made much headway.

Amb. McCarthy (20:31):

Well I wanted to turn now to the issue of Syria. General, you were at CENTCOM at a critical time in the US involvement in Syria, including our missile attack, after the regime carried out another chemical weapons attack on its own and its population, Russia's entry into the war, and Turkey's direct intervention. How did you and your team work across the region to coordinate with the embassies to be clear about our objectives in Syria?

Gen. Votel (20:57):

I tried to travel. I spent a couple of weeks in the region every month, and I think the first and foremost thing that we tried to do was to make sure as we visited our embassies in the Gulf, or in the Emirates with Ambassador Leaf, is to make sure they understood what our priorities were and how things were going, kind of with our campaign plan in Iraq, and especially in Syria. So it was really important, I think, to make sure that our embassies did that and have that discussion and then as we went out and talked to kind of the host nation leadership here, that we were coordinated in the message, and we knew what was happening. I think we tried to be as transparent as we could, both in terms of where we were seeing success and where we thought there were going to be continuing challenge, problems in the long term. Certainly the Gulf countries were watching this with very close attention, but countries like Jordan and Lebanon who were right on the periphery of this, the effort in that regard was even more detailed because they were absorbing refugees from that, and certainly to a large extent Turkey, although outside my area of responsibility. We spent an awful lot of time talking with our colleagues up there in the embassy. So, you know, I think what we tried to do was knit together a network between the military side, the diplomatic sides and make sure people understood what was happening, where we were having successes, where we were going next and where we thought the challenges would lie in the future. And try to communicate that as clearly as we could and use that as a way to keep our partners in the region informed.

Amb. Leaf (22:22):

I will add to what Joe has laid out in saying that in addition to these really critical battlefield rotations that he did, and every time he came through Abu Dhabi, he was one of my most welcomed visitors because we had a chance to sit and compare notes across the region and then sort of do a diplomatic military set of messaging to the leadership in the UAE. That was quite valuable. And to the degree that the Emiratis saw that he and I were working as one, or anybody in his chain of command that helped me in my job, given the really significant role that the defense relationship had played in the bilateral relationship for decades.

Amb. McCarthy (23:04):

This concludes part one of our podcast with general Joseph Votel and ambassador Barbara Lee stay tuned for part two. This has been a new episode in the series The General and the Ambassador. Thank you for listening. The series is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy with the generous support of the Una Chapman Cox foundation. You can find our podcasts on all major podcast sites. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook, as well as visit our website generalambassadorpodcast.org. We very much welcome input and suggestions on this series. You can contact us at general.ambassador.podcast@gmail.com.