While writing last week’s column, my attention was drawn to three important articles that had appeared in the Foreign Affairs periodical, two from the current March/April edition and the other from May/June 2022: “Only the Middle East Can Fix the Middle East: The Path to a Post-American Regional Order” by Dalia Dassa Kaye and Sanam Vakil; “The Power Vacuum in the Middle East: A Region Where No One’s in Charge” by Gregg Calstrom; and, thirdly, “The Middle East Abhors a Vacuum: America’s Exit and the Coming Contest for Military Supremacy” by Kenneth M Pollack. The common thread between these articles and mine is that, until recently, the Middle East had a regional order in which the US occupied centre stage (along with its allies, but that is just a detail). However, the US departure from Afghanistan, regardless of how one might describe that process, left a leadership vacuum that beckoned other powers to compete to fill it. The three articles mentioned China and Russia as the main contenders. I have added Iran and anarchy.
The Middle East is not unfamiliar with having the notion of a “vacuum” applied to it. Back in the 1950s, US secretary of state John Foster Dulles spoke of the vacuum arising from the departure of the colonial powers, Britain and France, and the need for the US to fill it. Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel-Nasser famously riposted that the region was far from empty; it was filled with countries and peoples who, if they stood united, would never need the Western powers again. History tells the rest of the story of “Arab unity”: Arab leaders championed it under the banner of “Arab nationalism.” Egypt and Syria united into a single country that soon fell apart. There followed other failed experiments involving Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. The reason why they were unable to achieve this invincible unity is that these countries had not yet managed to build the institutional, political, and economic structures of the nation state. They were trying to fill a vacuum without knowing what to fill it with. Meanwhile, the conflict with Israel was fuelling policies wild enough to set other parts of the Arab region on flame, instead of building it up. Egypt raced to Yemen to support republicans in the Civil War there, without knowing and without the capacity to know what a Yemeni republic would have been about. The results of that entire era were epitomised by the disaster of 1967. That was not a defeat for Egypt alone, but for all Arabs. The October 1973 War, in which Arab militaries united with Arab oil, did not change the inter-Arab dynamic. Afterwards, all that remained of the October War alliance was division over peace with Israel.
Much has changed in the region since then, in addition to the above-mentioned American exit. If a race to fill a so-called vacuum occurs, that will not be the only one. Other international contests will depend on what happens in Ukraine. Three paths have coalesced from the two waves of Arab Spring in 2010-2011 and 2018-2019. The first is “chaos,” which is still unfolding in Syria, Yemen, and Sudan and, to a lesser extent, Libya. The second is the path to Islamist rule. This produced the extremist and terrorist groups that tried but failed to take control in Egypt and Tunisia but have so far succeeded in Palestine. The third is the reformist path taken by the Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, while some attempts to pursue it have occurred in Tunisia, Iraq, and Algeria. The Arab reform experiences vary considerably, but they all share a resolve to strengthen the nation state. Towards the end, they focus on modern institution building, comprehensive development, reorientation towards a market economy, and renovation of religious thought. The ambitious mega projects that are mushrooming across these countries testify to their race towards progress and international standing. In terms of foreign policy, they favoured assimilating Israel into the region in exchange for the restitution of Palestinian rights in the framework of the two-state solution.
The Arab reform countries cooperated closely during the tumult Arab Spring revolutions, terrorist waves and subsequent international crises. As their reforms progressed, they opened channels of reconciliation with the non-Arab regional powers, Iran, Turkey, and Israel. With the latter, they concluded peace and normalisation treaties. The approach has offered a considerable flexibility for combining the geopolitical strengths of the Arab nation states derived from their strategic locations and influence with their geoeconomic weight derived from oil and gas and market potential to advance their interests in the tripolar world led by the US, China, and Russia, and in which others, such as India and Japan are major players. The fifth Gaza war threatens to destroy this. While Iran played a role in this, Hamas had already been deepening the Palestinian schism towards its ends. Then Israel seized the opportunity to mount the biggest military show of force in the history of the region.
The Palestinian cause has resurfaced once again, on the one hand, to compel the Arab reformist community to grapple with a major threat to the security of a volatile region where flying sparks can ignite full-fledged wars and tangential hostilities, or, on the other hand, to open a window for resolving the Palestinian and Israeli questions at the same time. The details are many and complex, however, addressing them is a challenge that the Arab reform trend must undertake, bringing to bear a comprehensive, integrated, reformist and progressive approach.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 21 March, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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