George Mitchell, a powerbroker in the Senate for years as leader of the Democratic majority, still has a voice that counts in Washington and abroad, having built a career out of the belief that the world’s trickiest problems can be solved by negotiation.
But Europe should not expect special favours, he said in an interview with Prospect. “The United States led the way in the creation of international institutions in the aftermath of the second world war in an effort to secure the peace and promote stability and prosperity. Part of the purpose was to embed the major nations of Europe into a series of alliances that would make less likely the kinds of conflicts that occurred regularly in Europe’s history—and they have been remarkably successful.”
But Mitt Romney has stated that there will be no American help for the eurozone crisis, Mitchell noted, and even from the Obama administration, he said, “I think it is correct that there is unlikely to be any direct help,” other than through support by the International Monetary Fund.
President Bill Clinton sent Mitchell as special envoy to Northern Ireland, where he was one of the architects of the 1998 Good Friday agreement, and President Barack Obama sent him from 2009 to 2011 as envoy to the Middle East, to try to break the deadlock between Israel and the Palestinians. But November’s presidential election comes at a time of formidable problems for the US, at home and abroad, Mitchell acknowledged.
“All American presidential elections have been or are important,” he said, “particularly in the modern era when the US is the dominant military and economic power in the world. But one of the few things I agree with Romney on is that this is a critical election.”
Abroad, the US faces calls for intervention, when it would prefer to withdraw. How to respond to Syrian bloodshed is “a very difficult question. We’ve never had in the US a true national debate on the criteria by which we judge when we should intervene,” he said. “Is it deaths, and if so, 100 or 100,000? You don’t hear many demands for intervention in Africa but millions died in the Congo, hundreds of times the number in Syria.”
Nor are the demands about to slacken. “What we’re seeing now is the new norm,” he said—“conflicts, uprisings, terrorism.” By the middle of this century, the world will have more than 9bn people—and 33 per cent of them will be Muslim, compared to 23 per cent now. That represents an enormous challenge, for the west, and for the US, as the now-dominant power.” The US should not “contemplate a century of ongoing warfare in Muslim countries.”
In Syria, he said, “my hope is that we will take a number of steps that are short of direct military action.” In Iran, as Robert Gates, the former defence secretary, said “the US does not have the capability of destroying Iran’s nuclear capability by air alone.” It could do so “only by a major campaign” of land forces—which it does not want to launch.
“Iran is a different order of magnitude from Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Mitchell added: “It is of course possible that there could be targeted attacks on Iran, perhaps preceded by covert action. But it is not likely that the United States would now enter another major land war in that region.”
The next president, he said, “may have to make that very serious decision” about how to respond to Iran. “One great danger is that Iran, if it acquires nuclear weapons, could precipitate the disintegration of the [nuclear] non-proliferation regime.”
Although Tehran insists its work is purely for civilian purposes, UN inspectors, the US and EU governments believe that it is designed to put Iran’s leaders within easy reach of nuclear weapons capability. “In the Middle East there are several countries now” assessing their own nuclear programmes. If they decided to advance their work, weapons capability “could spread round the globe,” said Mitchell, suggesting that even Japan might in some circumstances be persuaded of the need to acquire nuclear weapons by the proximity of nuclear-armed North Korea and China.
Nor will the next president find relief at home. Mitchell professes some optimism about the US economy, which “remains the mainstay of the world economy.” He agrees with Keynesian prescriptions that the federal government should spend more to revive growth, but adds it needs soon to be combined “with a serious programme of deficit reduction over the next three to five years that will deal with the problem of debt, including rising healthcare costs.”
Can Congress and the White House still agree deals, or has the bitter Republican-Democrat divide brought American democracy to a halt? Washington politics has become harder, he acknowledged. “In the entire 19th century, there were 16 filibusters in the Senate—that’s one every six and a half years,” he noted. “In my last two years as majority leader we had to file petitions to end filibusters 75 times.” “The Republicans have stated publicly that their number one goal is to defeat Obama and what that has meant, of course, has been to oppose and obstruct any initiatives of his,” he added.
But he says that pessimism is overdone. “Much the same was said in the early years of our country’s history and was repeated in the events that led to the Civil War, repeated again during the first world war, repeated again during the Depression and the time of [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt,” he said. “In each case there were very serious challenges and they were ultimately overcome. But democracy can be at times slow moving and messy, particularly when the people themselves are divided, and there is no doubt that the American people are divided.”
He added: “My hope is that after the election there will be a sense of greater realism on both sides” and that the US will avoid the automatic cuts in spending that might be triggered at the end of the year.
He denied that his time as Middle East envoy felt like failure. “We made our best effort and did not achieve the desired result, but that’s been true for the entire 60 years of this conflict. There have been ten presidents, 19 secretaries of state and innumerable envoys and innumerable Israeli leaders, and all have been unable to bring about a resolution to the conflict. But I remain hopeful because I think it’s so much in the interest of both sides to reach agreement.”
He acknowledged, though, that “the time is fast approaching” when a resolution may be impossible. Israel “faces a demographic tipping point. The most recent analysis I’ve seen suggests that by somewhere between 2015 and 2020 the number of Arabs will exceed the number of Jews. When that occurs, Israel will face the awful choice which they should not have to face of either being a democratic state or a Jewish state. Once the two-state solution [to the conflict with Palestinians] is lost it cannot be both.”
