Iraq’s New President, China’s Party Congress, Israel-Lebanon Maritime Agreement, and More Podcast

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, Iraq tries again to form a government, China’s communist party opens its twentieth national congress, and Israel and Lebanon prepared to carry out a striking new maritime agreement. It’s October 13th, 2022 in time for The World Next Week. I’m Bob McMahon and today we’re joined by Steven Cook who’s filling in for Jim Lindsay. Steven is the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies and he directs one of the Council’s fellowship programs. Steven, thanks for being here.

COOK:
It’s always great to be with you, Bob.

MCMAHON:
Great to have you and great to have you while Middle Eastern issues are in the forefront. So let’s start in the Middle East. Today, as we were taping this podcast I believe, Iraq’s parliament is moving to elect a new president. It’s the fourth time this year it’s tried to pick a head of state and though the presidency is mostly a symbolic position, it does play an important role in forming an Iraqi government and also putting in motion a whole set of developments that will conceivably create a bit more stability in Iraq. Steven, can you give us a sense of what’s at stake in this election?

COOK:
Well, stability would be a nice thing in Iraq. Let me just step back for a second away from the implications of an election of a new president and talk about the actual election.

MCMAHON:
Please do.

COOK:
We actually don’t know who it’s going to be. Part of Iraq’s governing structure is that the president is always a Kurd and the problem is that the two main Kurdish parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, who the incumbent president comes from, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and the Kurdish Democratic Party, those are the two main Kurdish parties, have not been able to agree on a candidate. They’re trying to force the issue by bringing it before parliament and hopefully we’ll have a new Iraqi president. And that’s important, because, as you point out, the role of the president is largely symbolic, but also taps the winner of the party with the most votes, the leader, to form a new government. And it’s been a year since Iraq’s elections. The government in Iraq is a caretaker government and that has a whole host of implications. Without a government, you can’t have a budget. So even though oil prices have been very, very high and Iraq’s budget is based on 95 plus percent on oil revenues, the government hasn’t been able to tap into those oil revenues and Iraq is confronting a whole host of issues, whether it is the continuing extremist threat, whether it’s the ravages of climate change. A year ago, the National Intelligence Estimate, this is the broad conclusions of 17 American intelligence agencies, identified Iraq as the country in the Middle East most vulnerable to climate change. So you have crops that are failing, lakes that are drying up, these historic marshes in the south that are drying, piled on top of all of the problems that Iraq has encountered in post-American invasion Iraq. Iraqi political class is corrupt. Iraqis are unemployed. As I mentioned before, the extremism threat, the country’s sovereignty is compromised. There are Iranian forces and Turkish forces within the country. So it’s very important that the Iraqi parliament elect a president and that the president taps a leader to be the next prime minister. Of course, the guy who got the most votes, Muqtada al-Sadr, who had the largest facts in the parliament, withdrew all of his people from the parliament. So even if there is a president, there’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty in Iraq. And what is unfortunate is that Iraq has been in an extended state of collapse for a number of years now. When I was there prior to the pandemic in late 2019, there were protests that had engulfed the country and that has essentially continued and they’re quite violent. The trust in government institutions is very, very low. This is a country that, as I said, is quite unstable. So any movement towards a president and then hopefully perhaps a government would be a very good thing.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, we should note also, it wasn’t that long ago that the so-called Islamic State held sway over a chunk of the country as well. Now it seems by all appearances they are not regathering strength, but it also looms out there as a potential specter because for the reason you just said Steven. I thought also the climate thing you mentioned was interesting because I remember not too long ago reports about these crazy dust storms blowing through the country and really paralyzing it, really manifesting in a way like what are the problems with Iraq. On the point of the Kurds, Steven, then do we have a sense of whether … The Kurdish region, we’ve often said how autonomous it is and the some have tried to declare it as an independent entity. Are they invested in an Iraqi state or is this in some way they’re not really incentivized to resolve this dispute over presidential candidate because they don’t really care?

COOK:
Well, this is part of the split since the American invasion of Iraq. Of course the PUK, Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, fought a very short and mini conflict in the mid 1990s. And this is two entities that are wary of each other, distrust each other. The PUK stronghold is in Sulaymaniyah and the KDP stronghold is in Erbil. And when you travel from one to the other, it’s an odd thing because even though they’re on the same team and they run the Kurdistan regional government, you can tell even as you go through checkpoints in these places that there’s not a lot of contact and a lot of mistrust between these two parties and their related militias and security people and so on. So the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan has essentially controlled the Iraqi presidency since the American invasion of Iraq and now the KDP wants its term, but it was the KDP that really drove this ill-fated independence referendum that the central government along with other external actors really crushed a number of years ago. Whereas the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan has said, “Look, Iraq is a big wealthy country where Kurds, we’re important. We can be power brokers within a big important wealthy country. If we’re out of Iraq, we’re just a small poor country.” Whereas the KDP counter says, “Look, we have our own oil resources. We can be big players in the region on our own.” It doesn’t seem that the central government in Baghdad is willing to let the KRG go, nor does one of the two major factions want to go. This is yet another one of those complex problems that plague Iraqi politics and make it harder for Iraq to be successful. Just one point on the question of extremism, I get very nervous when we say things are over and yes, the Islamic State does seem to be on the ropes and hasn’t been able to regroup and pose a existential threat to the Iraqi state that it did in 2013 and 2014 and 2015, 2016, et cetera. But they’re still out there and they’re still capable of committing terrorist attacks. Plus there are other extremists, Al-Qaeda, Turkmen extremists, the city of Kirkuk is contested and there’s extremism around in that environment as well. So let’s not move on from that issue just yet.

MCMAHON:
Heaven forbid we should have something that settles down and becomes peaceful. Really quickly, then on that front then, do we see a U.S. presence continuing there for the foreseeable future? Does the U.S. have any sway over trying to get Iraq to sort out its political business?

COOK:
There are figures within the Biden administration who do have a lot of experience working on Iraq, namely the coordinator for the Middle East of the White House, Brett McGurk. But it doesn’t seem that the United States has the same kind of influence it once did. There has been a significant draw down of American forces and the American profile in Iraq. I also think the current Iraqi government is a caretaker government. So there’s only so much that you can do. There has been a number of strategic dialogues between the United States and Iraq, but until there’s a new government, there’s really not a lot that we can do. We can counsel them about the importance of it. But when you’re talking about the Iraqi political class, you’re talking about a spectacular corruption. People who, some of whom are obviously penetrated by the Iranians, who really do have sway in post-U.S. invasion Iraq. And many of these people have put their own parochial interests and the interests of their specific community— the United States basically set up a system of ethnic and religious spoils in Iraq after the invasion—and that has created this environment of corruption and where the interests not just of politicians but their community has superseded that of the country. So yes, we’re still there. How engaged we are, really not very much on this particular issue. I think the most important aspect of the U.S. relationship with Iraq right now is the continuing the training mission of Iraqi forces and the hope that Iraq can really establish its sovereignty, be somewhat stable and fight off extremism.

MCMAHON:
All right, well let’s see if some leadership emerges then.

COOK:
Well, we shall see. No one ever won money betting on stability in Iraq, I should say. Well Bob, let’s move from the Middle East to Asia and let’s continue the conversation about leadership selection. This Sunday, this Chinese Communist Party, also known as the CCP, will open its 20th national conference. This is a conference that’s held every five years in order to announce who will run the country for the following five years. All the decisions are made prior. What can we expect, what’s significant about 20th congress?

MCMAHON:
So as Steven indicated, there’s pretty much zero suspense in terms of the main leadership question going into this Congress. That is because by most accounts this is going to be the party congress that coronates Xi Jinping as leader for third term and really as long as he would like to be leader, which is breaking the norm set by Deng Xiaoping that there would be two successive terms and then they would groom another leader to take over. What will happen is that the uppermost echelons of leadership, it’s expected that Xi will populate the standing committee of the Politburo, the most powerful upper part of the pyramid of power in China with his own choices. So that really cementing his support and the people who are aligned with him and all sorts of things. You’re going to see interesting references, again by most accounts and expectations, you’ll see references to. “Xi Jinping thought”, which is echoing what we had seen under the Mao Zedong era with Mao Thought, which is incorporated into the Constitution, making it harder to counter Xi’s policies going forward, and really putting into place or furthering by all expectations this move towards a tightening of the rule of the party and also the assertiveness if not aggressiveness of China’s actions internationally. So-

COOK:
Bob, are those two things, the tightening of the rule of the party as well as this more active and aggressive foreign policy, is that what Xi Jinping’s thought is? Is that the cornerstone of this and as a result this is what we can expect from China going forward?

MCMAHON:
That’s a good question. My understanding is the thought or various almost philosophical statements of Xi, that it’s hard to see them connecting necessarily to policy, but in essence it is. It’s further adding up to that. Xi Jinping thought is not we will take over Taiwan, but that he has intent by most reports to do so and so we should expect the country to continue to move in that direction. For example, the unification with Taiwan.

COOK:
Do we believe that this coronation of a fifth term, which as you point out is outside the norm, do we believe that this is setting the stage for the forcible unification of Taiwan or are the Chinese going to continue to bear policy of strategic patience?

MCMAHON:
That is a crucial question, I think is among a short list of questions that China experts will be looking closely at, looking for indications that the doubling down on the Taiwan policy. Yes. Already we had a couple month period where there have been more aggressive than ever Chinese patrols in and near Taiwan and so forth, and huge concerns, especially after the visit of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan.

COOK:
And so we should expect at this conference there to be some sort of aggressive statement about Taiwan.

MCMAHON:
I think that’s to be expected. Among the other things that will be looked for are, is the party going to back away from this aggressive zero-COVID policy. So this is less of an international thing, but a really important local one. And there were a number of reports and especially forwarded on social media in the last 24 hours of people putting out protest banners about the COVID policy about what it was doing to China and clamping down and it was really hurting the country on multiple fronts. And this is seen as this real personal imperative from Xi to declare zero-COVID, which is seen as impossible. But China being China under the current regime, it has incredibly thorough testing. People are getting tested every day if not every other day to do all sorts of things. It also brings a question about how are so many people going to be able to attend this party congress? Well you can bet that they’ll be so thoroughly tested that there’ll be little doubt that they carry any sort of antibodies and so forth. So zero-COVID is going to be a big marker. And then economic challenges, China’s facing a real serious economic challenges, growth levels that we haven’t seen in a long time in China in terms of slower growth. And part of that is blamed by some on Xi’s shackling of the so-called animal spirits of the economy. The economic or the-

COOK:
Well, if you shut down a city like Shanghai for, what was it, six, seven weeks?

MCMAHON:
Yeah.

COOK:
Of course it’s going to have an impact on the economy.

MCMAHON:
It’s been the shackling of cities the size of Shanghai and many others, by the way. Chinese cities are enormous by any standard and many of them have gone through this and a number of them play important roles in the global supply chains if not in local supply chains. And so yeah, to your point Steven, absolutely that’s, there’s a direct throughline on that as well as some of the broader markers in terms of the real estate market and so forth.

COOK:
Is there any indication ahead of time, any indication going forward that there’ll be any change to the zero-COVID policy, or Xi is so wedded to this that there’s no possible way that they can move away from it? The economy has suffered, which has knock-on effects to the global economy, but can you imagine what it must be doing to Chinese society?

MCMAHON:
Right. It’s a crucial question and it’s going to be a crucial indication of once he is anointed, let’s say, does he feel comfortable enough to do an about face and say, “Okay,” and become pragmatic and loosen up the controls and set a new set of protocols in and around COVID policy? We’ll have to see. Up to now it has been what your reference to the intertwining of him and his aim to hit zero-COVID, and how much this has become almost a personal quest that has been what has been guiding us because it’s been extraordinary and we really haven’t seen it anyplace else in the world, Steven.

COOK:
Yeah, nothing like it. I think that you use the right word for it. Extraordinary. And the ability of the Chinese to lock down millions of people. I think we’re going to be seeing the effects of that for quite some time, not just next week.

MCMAHON:
Absolutely. So it’s a week long congress. You can be sure that it’s being watched very closely in the region, but also certainly in capitals like Washington, which just yesterday released its updated National Security Strategy and China was paramount as a concern, as a competitor and a country with the ability, as the strategy said to shape the landscape of the world. And also though mentioned as a potential partner in dealing with some of the world’s biggest problems. So this very complicated relationship, U.S. laying out markers, it’s also the Biden administration is in the middle of enacting really strict controls on certain exports, in business with certain major Chinese firms. So we’re entering into a very tricky period and all the more reason wanted to see what Xi emerges from this congress.

COOK:
Yeah, absolutely. And you make a very important point about how complicated the relationship is. And people talk about great power competition, but when you have these two big countries where they could cooperate to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, yet there’s this intense competition and there’s political incentive to talk about it in terms of competition makes it very, very hard to manage the cooperative aspects of the relationship, which I think we all could benefit from.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. There’s going to be a premium on finesse and careful handling and then there’s been little supply of that in many other spheres of the world. But Steven, I want to move back towards the Middle East actually and talk about something that took me by surprise, I think some other regional watchers, which was an agreement reached by Israel and Lebanon of all places.

COOK:
Speaking of cooperation and complexity.

MCMAHON:
Yes, exactly. And not only that, it was an agreement that involved the maritime border, more particularly gas fields in the Mediterranean. My understanding is that for Lebanon to agree to this, it involved the blessing of Hezbollah, a sworn enemy of Israel. There are certainly those in Israeli politics and society that don’t agree with the deal. But Steven, can you tell us a little bit about what this agreement’s about and will it actually take place?

COOK:
Yeah, this has been fascinating to watch and the administration, the Biden administration, has been working at this quietly for quite some time. I think you have to be in the weeds of Lebanon and Israel to really understand and have followed the American efforts to negotiate this agreement. And what it is there’s a lot of gas in the Eastern Mediterranean and there’s a lot of gas off of Israel and there’s a lot of gas off of Lebanon. And as these things would have it, geography doesn’t care about politics and borders. And there is a field that straddles both Israel and Lebanon and of course there’s disputed borders there including a maritime border. So what the Biden administration has done is help the Israelis and the Lebanese establish a maritime border. The land border remains disputed in a number of places and UN observers remain in place there and it’s a very heavily fortified border, believe me, I’ve been up there. But there is an agreement between the state of Israel and Lebanon over what the maritime boundaries are, and there is an agreement over what’s called the Karish Field and the Qanaa prospect and there is an agreement; Israel is going to give up right to certain areas and they will be compensated from the exploitation and marketing of the Lebanese gas for the areas that they have withdrawn from. This is extraordinary as you point out. First of all, Lebanon and Israel remain at war. They don’t recognize each other. This agreement though, the Lebanese president said he was satisfied by the agreement the Israeli prime minister said he was satisfied by the agreement and Hezbollah, which is a state within a state which controls much of Lebanon. It may not even be a state within a state anymore. It may be the state or supersedes the state in ways signed off on it, an implicit recognition of Israel. You have to see it that way. Of course, Lebanon is in desperate economic situation.

MCMAHON:
Some have said almost failed state status.

COOK:
It is. When you have a third of the population that is food insecure, a country that used to be referred to as the Côte-d’Azur of the Middle East, the Paris of the Middle East, the Nice of the Middle East, and you have a third of the population that is food insecure and there are Lebanese who are picking through garbage looking for food. Even during the depths of the civil war, there weren’t shortages like you have in Lebanon where there’s no electricity, no fuel even to run generators. So this situation is very bad. So clearly this desperation has driven Hezbollah, which has been blamed for a lot of Lebanon’s travails and the Lebanese government spectacularly corrupt just like the Iraqi government into making this deal. Here’s the problem. So Israelis don’t actually know how to ratify it. It’s not a treaty. They don’t have relations with Lebanon. They’re not exactly sure. They’re trying to work through the modalities of that. And of course the other problem on the Israeli front is it’s election season in Israel. There’s an election coming up in November and the leading candidate of the opposition former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has assailed the current interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid for signing this agreement saying it’s going to benefit Hezbollah, which has tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of rockets prime to rain down on Israeli cities—so basically, giving them economic relief. It could be an issue in this coming election. And Netanyahu has vowed that if he becomes the next prime minister of Israel, he’ll tear up the agreement. We’ll see. It’s very often the case that politicians make a lot of hay about agreements that they can’t do anything about and they’re quiet about things that they can so we’ll have to see. And of course the other problem with it is the instability, the failed nature of the Lebanese state. We don’t know what’s going to happen there. So it’s not a peace agreement, it is a step forward. It’s important that Hezbollah is at least implicitly recognizing Israel as the same with the Lebanese government, which perhaps without Hezbollah superseding it in places may have already taken steps in this direction. It is an important step, Let’s hope it’s durable, particularly for the Lebanese,

MCMAHON:
But we should assume that whatever the immediate weeks bring about, we’re not going to see any gas leaving those fields in maybe even years.

COOK:
Right. The Israelis do have an offshore platform and are ready to make it operational and start exploiting gas there. But of course when we’re talking about this agreement and these particular, what they call blocs, it’s going to be a long time. The Lebanese partner is Total, the French conglomerate. It’ll be a long time before they can exploit it, but at least it is potentially very good news for the Lebanese and potentially a stabilizing factor in the Lebanon-Israel relationship.

MCMAHON:
Okay, we’ll take good news where we can get it, Steven.

COOK:
Especially in the Middle East, we’ll take good news where we can get it. All right, enough of the Middle East. Let’s pivot to the audience figure of the week, which listeners can vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR’s Instagram story. This week, Bob, our audience selected, “North Korea marked 77 years of ruling party.” Tell us what that’s all about.

MCMAHON:
It’s a time for communist parties, I guess, Steven, and we’ve got the China congress coming up and we’ve got the palindrome anniversary of the North Korean party. And as North Korea likes to do, as Kim dynasty leaders like to do, they mark the anniversary with some sort of show of force. In this case, there have been a steady amount of tests going on missile launches and Kim Jong-un used the anniversary to state that this recent number of missile launches, including nuclear capable missiles, were to quote-unquote, “hit and wipe out potential South Korean and U.S. targets.” One of those missiles, by the way, was sent over territorial Japan, which gave Japanese officials a start, needless to say, and it’s at a time when there’s naval drills between the United States and South Korean forces, and then there’s a great expectation that there was going to be a nuclear test by North Korea, which would be the first in a number of years. So it’s a period of renewed concern and tension on the peninsula and it also involving U.S. planners and also concern that there doesn’t seem to be a way of leveraging any response other than the broad military response with demonstrations and on training exercises and so forth.

COOK:
But didn’t this come on the heels of a major South Korean and American air and naval exercise? The first one in a long time, actually.

MCMAHON:
Yes. And so those exercises did come, but these tests were actually occurring before that. The ramped up tests came after that because those always antagonize the North Koreans. And so it’s a major alliance. The U.S. and South Koreans make clear what they’re trying to do in these tests and so forth, and also clearly try to send a signal to the North Koreans not to mess and not to take any unprovoked actions towards the south or towards U.S. targets. So it’s an anniversary gesture, it’s a response to U.S.-South Korean exercises and potential future exercises. And it just brings to the fore the fact that there’s seems to be fewer tools to deal with North Korea. Certainly the old route of punishing it or even threatening it through the UN Security Council has gone by the boards where Russia and China are not interested in really in furthering that approach anymore. And so it’s just raises questions, Steven, about what’s to be done about North Korea.

COOK:
It really has become routine, the idea that the North Koreans are testing ICBMs is something that is a little capsule story in the Washington Post or the New York Times. It’s not something that people get upset about, but it really is something to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, especially since the Security Council is so broken. Our relations with Russia and China who are aligned with the North Koreans are so fraught at the moment. It’s hard to have a dialogue or convince Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping to work with the United States to contain the North Koreans. And so this could be a big military buildup. The Japanese, the South Koreans along with the United States with regards to security and the Korean Peninsula. That seems to me the only answer. Can you sanction North Korea more?

MCMAHON:
Yeah, no, I think you’re right Steve. I think given the options and look at not too distant past options of diplomacy, you had President Trump ratcheting up to rhetoric, which then ended up partly yielding unprecedented summit with Kim, a couple of summits and nice language between the two and personal gestures of fondness, love letters as the president referred them. But at the end of the day, non very discipline set of talks that yielded anything major, other than that there was a suspension in nuclear tests, certainly. And some could say in the midst of everything else, there’s ongoing North Korean testing of the Biden administration to test its mettle. We’ll see. But certainly I think what you nailed it, Steven, in that one of the main out-croppings here has been South Korea and Japan are going to arm up further. So we should watch for that and see what that results in terms of regional arms and also how China responds.

COOK:
Yeah, everywhere you look, there seems to be tension, instability, and very significant problems. You have to wonder about the ability of the Biden administration to take all this on and manage it all.

MCMAHON:
As our boss. Richard Haass likes to call it is the crowded president’s inbox. And there’s some things you need to deal with quicker than others, but you got to deal with a lot of them.

COOK:
Indeed, the world is in disarray.

MCMAHON:
To cite another well known Richard Haas work, which is a book of his.

COOK:
Well, that’s our look at the World Next Week. Here are some other stories to keep an eye on. The UN observes International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction. Foreign ministers of the Commonwealth of Independent States meet in Nur-Sultan, which is the capital of Kazakhstan, but I think it’s back to being called Astana. And then third, the Rugby League World Cup kicks off in England. I have a few buddies who are going to be paying very, very close attention to that.

MCMAHON:
You’re going to be waking up at dawn and watching some of those matches.

COOK:
Not me, not me, but my rugby player friends from college, some of them might very well be.

MCMAHON:
All right. Well please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please leave us a review while you’re at it. We do appreciate the feedback. Please note that opinions expressed on the world next week are solely those of the hosts or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. This program was produced by Ester Fang with senior podcast producer Gabrielle Sierra. Our theme music is provided by Miguel Herrero and licensed under Creative Commons. This is Bob McMahon saying so long and thanks Steven for joining.

COOK:
As always, this is a great pleasure. Thank you.