Throughout its modern history, the Arab world has become used to being on the receiving end of the actions of global powers that have entrenched interests in it. As a result, it has also become used to largely navigating political situations shaped by the will of those foreign players.
This has created a sense of savvy victimisation, in which most of the powers in the Arab world have publicly rejected foreign interests and all justifications meant to legitimise them, but in reality have also found ways to situate their interests, and often more importantly ways of ensuring their survival, in the plans of those foreign powers.
The situation is very different today, when the interests and will of the distant global powers meet the interests and will of a select few regional actors. Over the past decade, there has thus been a convergence in the views of some Arab and non-Arab powers in the region concerning the future of different parts of the Arab world.
This is not necessarily a new phenomenon, as there has been strong cooperation between Arab and non-Arab powers in the region before during different historical periods and on consequential strategic matters. What has been novel, however, over the past decade or so has been the meeting of minds, and not just of interests, between powerful Arab and non-Arab actors in the region about how different parts of the Arab world ought to look politically and economically in the foreseeable future.
There has also been agreement about the mechanisms to effect developments that have often been highly intrusive in the affairs of these parts of the region.
Part of that meeting of minds has seen the coming together of political-economy elites that have, for understandable reasons, come to think of themselves as winners amidst a sea of losers. This in itself has been the outcome of the widening power differential within the Arab world that the previous article in this series presented.
The larger point, however, is that this convergence of selected Arab and non-Arab interests has created alliances that control major financial and media centres with effective lobbying satellites in the West whose collective power the Arab world has not experienced for a long time.
The global powers have taken note of these changes, and the US, China, the European Union, and Russia have all come to realise that attempts to reshape the Arab world, or parts of it, according to aspirations and plans detached from its realities and without powerful local partners end up costing colossal resources and yielding marginal returns.
As a result, while these global powers might well engage in different types of rhetoric concerning the Arab world’s wars and disasters, their primary strategic positioning and the serious deployment of their resources are framed with close attention to and consideration of the interests and plans of the regional players (Arab and non-Arab) that they see as the winners in the region over the past quarter of a century.
There is a positive side to this in that the interventions of the key global powers in the region have become, and in the medium term will likely continue to be, minimalist relative to their interventions over the past quarter of a century. Another positive side effect is that most parts of the Arab world will be spared the tumultuous geo-political consequences of the nascent strategic confrontation between the US and China, although the geo-economic consequences of this are almost certainly unavoidable.
However, the flip side is that most parts of the Arab world, with the exception of those in Arab-non-Arab alliances and attached to the interests of the global powers, will at best be spectators in the US-China strategic confrontation. This means that they will not have the opportunity to extract serious benefits from the most momentous global geopolitical transformation in the past eight decades and since the end of World War II.
Another side effect is that different parts of the Arab world are losing their agency. With the power differential within the Arab world widening, and with another powerful differential between the Arab world as a whole and most non-Arab stakeholders also widening, the different Arab countries will sink under the weight of acute political polarisation, ballooning demographics, and unsolvable economic challenges.
Many of them will come to realise that their best bet is to become malleable pawns in the grand games unfolding around them.
However, some groups in the Arab world will almost certainly reject this fate. Anger amongst the few will emerge out of the resignation of the many, which will give rise to revolutionary sparks that will likely take place in those parts of the Arab world that the regional power alliances and global powers take for granted.
These sparks will likely spread, affecting the region’s socio-politics as well as the geopolitical order that is now becoming entrenched. As the next and final article in this series will show, for those daring to speculate all of this opens up different futures for the Arab world.
* The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 4 December, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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