The end of the American pax in the Middle East

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A chaos in which everyone commands and nobody commands. The real game-changer today appears more and more to be the square, those protests that increase with the passage of time

Eugenio Dacrema

March 5 2020

Libyan demonstrators during a demonstration calling for an end to the Khalifa Haftar offensive against Tripoli, in Martiri square in central Tripoli, Libya, 27 December 2019. REUTERS / Ismail Zitouny

There are those who call it “Post-American Middle East“, or “Multipolar Middle East“. All definitions that often leave the time they find. In fact, America has never left, despite having lost the hegemony of the past, and for a geopolitical region to be truly multipolar we should see few leaders and many followers. But is not so. Perhaps the most fitting description of the Middle East today is given by Pierfrancesco Favino as “Lebanon”(Nickname particularly apt for this example) in the film Criminal novel: “If everyone in one place commands, it means that nobody commands.” This is now the climate that seems to emerge in the management of many of the region’s most crucial crises, from Libya to Syria, passing through the Gulf, Iran and Iraq. Of course, even if no one commands, we can still say that some players have been, until now, much more skilled than others.

Since his speech in Syria in 2015 Russia managed to rebuild a respectable regional influence by skillfully using the few real projection tools at its disposal: an army and a military industry of a certain importance (although incomparable to the US and destined to be soon overcome from China) and a large diplomatic class, heir to the Soviet tradition. Others, like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Qatar, after having spent much of their modern history in the shadow of other powers, from Great Britain to the United States, have now risen to player independent first-rate despite their tiny territorial and geographical size, using the great heritage made available to them by huge reserves of hydrocarbons. Also there Turkey, after having largely ignored its eastern neighborhood in favor of its relations with the West for most of its republican history, for at least a decade it has returned to weighing in the Arab arena, becoming, for better or for worse, an essential interlocutor from Syria to Libya and awakening in some not always pleasant memories of the Ottoman era.

Next to these newcomer in Middle Eastern politics we also find more long-standing protagonists, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose leadership today it looks more tarnished than it used to be but that they are always able to have their say on every game in the region. Finally, we must make some effort to remember those nations with a past as protagonists and for years now forced to juggle between internal political and economic crises and growing international irrelevance. In this saddest category we find ancient glories such asEgypt, now entered a phase of stagnation political and economic the end of which is hard to see, or the Jordan Hashemite, once the protagonist of the Middle Eastern games and today forced to beg for financial support from old and new allies for an economy that has long since become unsustainable. But perhaps the darkest cone of shadow is the one that has enveloped the Palestinian cause for a decade, which has become for many inside and outside the Middle East “past water”, left frozen in a perennial status quo of employment and segregation. It took Donald Trump, and his proposal from Deal of Century to awaken, at least for a few days, the attention (and indignation) of the world on Palestine.

The end of the American hegemony has therefore made the political mosaic of the Middle East much more complex and unpredictable in a few years, often leaving commentators still accustomed to explaining its dynamics using filters developed during the Cold War or theit was Bush. But to navigate the maze of divisions, alliances and partnership tactics that cross this region today, transforming quickly, today new maps are needed, to be drawn in pencil in order to erase and rewrite them after a short time. Of course, on closer inspection, not everything we see today is totally new. Traditional divisions, such as the one between Saudi Arabia is Iran, and their allies, still resist despite other profound changes. The same applies to apparently stainless alliances such as that between the United States and Israel or between the United States and Saudis, or those, politically opposed, between Iran, Syria, and non-state movements such as Lebanese Hezbollah. But for over a decade to these faults of division is conflict traditional overlaps with others, often much more decisive for the evolution of today’s crises.

To explain much of what we see today in scenarios like Libya is Syria it is perhaps perhaps more useful to look at a more recently formed political fault, which has emerged since Arab springs in 2011 and developed in the following years in various crisis areas in the Middle East. A division that sees on one side those states that in the last nine years have emerged as the most important sponsors of the Muslim Brotherhood international and its branches around the region, such as Turkey and Qatar, while, on the other hand, we find those powers that since 2011 have taken on the task of defending the status quo authoritarian of the Middle East, such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Not a struggle, this, between two radically different models – for example liberal democracy and dictatorship – as perhaps many of us had hoped for on the eve of the Arab springs. But the comparison between the traditional conception of the state in the Middle East, dominated by secular and authoritarian regimes supported by military and economic elites (often superimposed), and a sort of illiberal populism with Islamist veins. The latter, although only slightly more democratic than the former, today is often closer to the tastes and cultural references of the Middle Eastern masses than to authoritarian and liberal secularism Top-down advocated by traditional regimes.

And this is how we find in the rare surveys carried out among Arab populations Erdogan at the top of the list of the most loved leaders and only much more deeply the names of the Egyptian President al-Sisi, of the Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman, or the Iranian Supreme Guide Khamenei. We saw the first big game between these two sides forged by the Arab Springs in 2013, when Mohammed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who emerged victorious from the first democratic elections in Egyptian history, was overthrown by the coup d’état by General Abdelfatah al -Sisi, massively supported by the Saudis and Emiratis. And again in 2017, when Riadh and Abu Dhabi launched their own political-commercial embargo on Qatar, accused of supporting international terrorism, a label often used extensively to define any form of political Islam. Finally, it is this relatively new fault of ideological division that characterizes today most of the developments that we see for example in Libya, where the Serraj government, also supported by groups close to the Muslim Brotherhood, is today strenuously defended by Turkey, while its rival Haftar receives vital support from the Emirates and Egypt.

To tell the truth, we could say we were lucky if these two were enough splits old and new to filter all the complexity of today’s Middle East. But unfortunately this is not the case. To overlap and mingle with these ideological-hegemonic contrasts there are also more or less impromptu incursions of great international actors, contingent tactics and “parallel convergences” between opponents on paper, and the often unexpected effects of all these overlapping strategies .

There is, for example, the Russia, for which the Middle East is only a playground for a much larger game aimed at the disintegration and renegotiation of the liberal order imposed by the West after the end of the Cold War. Or Turkey, the main sponsor of the armed opposition in Syria and the Serraj government in Libya, which seems to be very comfortable managing these crises with Moscow, formally the best ally of the Assad regime and supporter of General Haftar. Or the UAE, among America’s closest allies and among the best partner of Russia and all those ready to preserve it status quo of the region. In a world where everyone plays their game with good cards but no real trump card, even the rules of the game are quickly transformed. Where once there were armies and clashes between states, today we find conflicts fought almost exclusively by armed parties, militias, mercenaries, by a new collection of non-state entities once snubbed by analysts as a simple residual factor of Middle Eastern politics. Even in Syria or Libya, where the parties often call themselves “legitimate government”, “national army”, in hindsight most of those who take up arms do it under the flags of a militia or a mercenary company.

But what really worries us about the new Middle East is the multiplication of crises without a real solution on the horizon. From Syria to Yemen via Libya, the multiplication of the actors involved has only tangled already enormously tangled skeins, freezing entire nations in endless conflicts. Because in the Middle East where everyone commands and no one is enough to start a war but hardly everyone will end it. But be careful: in this new order, which looks a lot like a new chaos, in all likelihood the real turning point will be neither amazing military victories nor miracles of diplomatic ability. The true game-changer today it appears to be more and more the square, unpredictable by most, and often equally overwhelming: those protests that have never really stopped since 2011 and which indeed seem to grow and spread with the passing of time. In the Thousand and One Nights, Sinbad the Sailor comes across an island with his companions which then turns out to be a whale ready to sink. The square today appears more and more that whale that is waking up, ready to leave soon all these countless leader in the air.

@Ibn_Trovarelli

This article is also published in the March / April issue of eastwest.

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