Qualitative transformations in the world are often the product of wars, which generate opportunities that help usher in new stages of progress. The aftermath of World War II gave rise to the UN and its affiliated organisations. Despite all the pressures this international institution has come under through the years, the fact remains that no new world war has occurred and no cities have suffered nuclear bombardment since then. Despite the antagonism between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, what is more, they never went to war with each other. Meanwhile, the world has become better off in terms of education, health and technology. The latter has enabled massive expansion in both global connectivity and scientific research, including the search for life beyond earth.
The end of the Vietnam War, followed by the end of Maoism in China, ushered in an Asian transformation aiming for prosperity and integration into the global economy. Not only did this help end regional and local conflicts, it also paved the way to economic cooperation under ASEAN. The rapid prosperity this generated across Southeast Asia enabled its economies to rival Europe’s. Out of this environment, China emerged as a new great power championing a peaceful approach to global leadership. Europe too embarked on a project of peace, progress and prosperity, beginning with six countries that spearheaded the drive for the European Union, which eventually expanded into a bloc of 27 states spanning eastern, western, and southern Europe.
Only the Middle East has lagged behind. During the 2010s, the region was hit by numerous intertwined scourges. First, it suffered a decline of unified, centralised states, which were replaced by a long list of failed states. Second, it experienced a proliferation of conflicts inflamed by the Sunni-Shiite divide and competition over natural resources. Third, these regional conflicts became intertwined with international interventions by the US, Russia, Britain, and France in the war against IS and its self-proclaimed caliphate, which led regional powers to intervene in neighbouring countries to contain the spread of terrorism.
Fourth, the conflicts became increasingly fluid, shifting from domestic to regional arenas while players varied from small terrorist groups such as Bayt Al-Maqdis in Sinai to international organisations such as IS and also included world powers such as Russia, which intervened militarily to defend the Bashar Al-Assad regime. Fifth, there emerged new transnational economic actors whose activities became intertwined with the work of organised crime syndicates, drug traffickers, and antiquities smugglers. Sixth, all these scourges combined to exact enormous human and material costs, including widespread destruction, countless dead and wounded, and millions of displaced people and refugees.
The beginning of the 2020s brought about the end of the so-called Caliphate, the ebbing of anarchy and the revival of national cohesion. The process began with the Arab monarchies that had survived the Arab Spring and its repercussions. Also central to this development was Egypt, where the state survived the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist project thanks to the bold and patriotic role played by the Egyptian Armed Forces. By the middle of this decade, 12 Arab states were not only free of militias and civil war, they had also taken strides in the framework of national development projects, whose visions for attaining global standards had set 2030 as their first major milestone.
In this way the Middle East stopped being the exception to the transformation taking place elsewhere in the world. The states that had managed to avoid or weather the storm of the Arab Spring had learned two lessons. The first was that preserving the state and its sovereignty was essential, for without them fragmentation and collapse would follow. The second was that reform, in all its political, economic, social and cultural dimensions, was unavoidable. However, it was equally crucial not to allow reform to become a recipe for chaos, national division or subordination to transnational groups and international institutions operating under the banner of globalisation. It was time to stop taking lectures from international human rights organisations or states that believed they represented the culmination of history.
Those two lessons were reflected in the experiences of the Arab Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. Their opposite could be seen in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Palestine and Sudan — in different ways, the most devastating being the civil wars that began as a spring of youthful aspirations but ended in a harsh and destructive winter. The net result of these experiences is that the state’s central role has been restored. This made it possible not only to halt fragmentation across the Arab world, but also to prevent the Kurdish bid for independence in Iraq, to defeat IS in Syria and Iraq and, more importantly, to ensure that the fifth Gaza war weakened the “Axis of Resistance and Rejection” without eliminating it.
However, the chain of events set into motion by the Al-Aqsa Flood brought about the fifth Gaza war and then the fourth Gulf war. Then the interrelated dynamics of those two conflicts led to a regional war pitting the US and Israel against Iran, a war that threatens the Arab region as a whole. The Middle East is now in urgent need of rescue, but this will come not from the US, Europe, Asia or Russia but from within the Arab world itself.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 July, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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