By Aila Boyd – Guest Writer
Cloverdale resident Edward Lynch has been busy. The John P. Wheeler Professor of Political Science at Hollins University released one book in June of this year and has another set to come out next year.
Like much of Lynch’s research, both books examine political conflict related to the Middle East.
“Like a lot of people, I was caught up in the great hopes of the Arab Spring. It was about people who had lived under dictatorships for so long and how they might actually be able to live in a democratic system where they have freedom. The potential for this area is so great,” Lynch said. “The people want to succeed so badly, but are held back by terrible governments. There is very little bad feeling about the United States in many of these countries.”
He hopes the books will help readers understand the responsibilities of those who live in super powers such as the United States. While events that happen in far off places may seem irrelevant to those living in the United States, he noted, at the end of the day they involve real people.
“These broad, sweeping political movements involve real people who will suffer or not suffer depending on, among many other things, decisions made in the White House and State Department,” he explained. “As a citizen in a super power, we have an enormous responsibility to hold our leaders to account and make them recognize that even if they are trying to do something good, they can end up doing something very bad.”
Lynch was inspired to write “The Arab Spring: The Failure of the Obama Doctrine,” which was published by Praeger Security International, after closely following the developments of the Arab Spring 10 years ago. It wasn’t until 2019 that he was able to truly delve into the topic while he was on sabbatical from the university.
As he explains in the book, the Arab Spring was a series of revolutions that swept across the Arab world in the early 2010s.
“I chose this because, in my opinion, it was the most important foreign policy challenge of the Obama administration,” he said. “During the eight years of the administration, there were of course other challenges but I don’t think any of them presented the complexity, the opportunity and the danger that the Arab Spring did.”
The particularly difficult development that came out of the Arab Spring, he asserts, was that many of regimes that had historically been partners of the United States were toppled and replaced with more adversarial leaders. While the events that occurred halfway around the world might not have seemed relevant to Botetourt County residents at the time, he stressed that they did, in fact, impact local life.
“What happened in that region had an almost immediate impact on gas prices in Botetourt County and what we paid at the pump,” he explained. “The U.S. is a heck of a lot less vulnerable now that it was four years ago, but at the time of the Arab Spring the U.S. was highly dependent on foreign oil supplies.”
Lynch asserts in the book that the administration handled the series of revolutions in a muddled manner, which ultimately led to the lessening of the country’s influence in the region.
“The approach of the Obama administration was deliberate inconsistency. Obama rejected the idea that he would take a region-wide approach to any region no matter what was going on. He said he would react to whatever was going on in the Middle East on a case-by-case basis,” he said. “To a certain extent that makes sense. Every country and event is different. But a super power like the United States also has to be concerned about how its actions are perceived by others. All that the global community saw was inconsistency.”
In the early days of the Arab Spring, Lynch explained, the administration ignored the revolution that started in Tunisia. It wasn’t until a similar revolution broke out in Egypt, which was of greater interest to the United States at the time, that the administration started to connect the dots. However, Lynch said, officials misapplied some of the lessons from the earlier revolution.
“They wanted to make sure if there was going to be positive change in Egypt that the U.S. got credit for it. Obama and others in his administration put pressure on a pro-American authoritarian leader to leave without paying any attention to what might come next,” he said.
From there, Lynch said, the administration continued to make miscalculations about how to handle other Arab Spring revolutions. The repercussions of the administration’s decisions continue to this day, including the continued civil war in Syria.
“Lack of assistance for the democratic forces in Syria has meant a civil war that is now in its second decade with hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of people displaced,” he said. “The book goes case-by-case pointing out how the wrong lesson was learned by U.S. officials virtually without exception during the Arab Spring.”
Additionally, as noted in the book, many current officials were also in positions of leadership at the time of the Arab Spring. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is one example he gave.
The second book, which will be published in the spring of 2022 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, is titled “Isolating Qatar: The Gulf Rift Crisis 2017-2021.” It focuses on the tense situation that occurred when Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates announced a complete boycott of Qatar in June of 2017.
Located on the west coast of the Persian Gulf, the independent emirate is home to a little more than 3 million people. Based on gross domestic product per capita, it is the wealthiest nation in the world. “It is a nation that has used its wealth very shrewdly to carve out for itself a role in foreign policy that really outweighs their military strength,” he explains.
In the book, Lynch explores the historical and contemporary causes that led to the boycott, including the fact that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates don’t like the way Qatar uses its wealth to its advantage. “They view Qatar as an upstart interloper,” he said.
The fact that Al Jazeera is located in the country also contributed to the boycott because some Middle Eastern countries disagree with the broadcaster’s coverage.
“All of this came to a head in 2017 when four nations declared a very expensive boycott of Qatar. They withdrew their ambassadors. They ordered all of their citizens home, except for Egypt. They expelled all of the Qataris living in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and UAE. They closed their air space. And they cut off all trade,” Lynch explained.
The four countries made 13 demands that the Qatari government dismissed out of hand. Surprisingly, he said, the boycott didn’t cripple Qatar. The country quickly leveraged its wealth to create new trade relationships, subsidized its airlines, continued building a stadium for the 2022 FIFA World Cup and continued sponsorship of Al Jazeera.
An example of how Qatar put its wealth to use was the way in which it built a dairy industry from the ground up in a matter of days. Prior to the boycott, it received the majority of its dairy products from Saudi Arabia, which was obviously no longer an option. “The government spent a couple billion dollars to create a dairy industry from nothing. They built the facilities and bought 2,000 Holstein cows from the United States,” he said. “Qatar is now a net milk exporter. They didn’t have a cow in the country in 2017.”
In addition to providing context for the boycott, Lynch explained how other countries in the region and across the globe reacted to the act of aggression.
“The crisis ended earlier this year in January. Everyone from the region gives the lion’s share of the credit for ending the crisis to the Trump administration and to Jared Kushner,” Lynch said. “Qatar made no significant concessions. They clearly came out the winners.”
Lynch stressed that the United States should continue to be mindful of how the boycott played out. He said that small countries like Qatar can’t be overlooked, especially if they are wealthy.
“All of us need to pay attention to what some of these small states are up to. International relations are complicated, which provides opportunities for people in the United States to take advantage of this by playing one side off the other and seeking new places where they might want to invest their money,” he said. “There are a lot of people who have international stocks in their retirement portfolios these days.”
Research on the books took him to that part of the world, including trips to Oman, United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Qatar. While in those countries, he spoke with government officials who had worked to prevent revolutions from occurring, as well as academics.
The opportunity to visit foreign countries was eye-opening, Lynch said. “It was fascinating to see the combination of things that are very different, like going out into the desert and seeing camels walking by, and things that were very much the same, like office buildings and roads,” he noted.
The experience has also given him a bit of credibility among his students at Hollins because they know that his knowledge has come from being on the ground in a lot of the places he teaches about. “It’s one thing to be able to say this is what I think the Qataris were up to during this crisis, but it’s something else to be able to say the foreign minister told me that this is what they were up to during this crisis,” he said. “It gives me a breath of perspective in order to bring these areas alive for students.”
