It would probably not be an overstatement to say that the year just passed was dominated by events in the Middle East. Following the overthrow of President Mubarak of Egypt in 2011, there was major interest in who, and what kind of regime, would succeed him. But the elections, in July 2012, that produced a Muslim Brotherhood government led by Mohammed Morsi, from which a certain degree of stability was expected, produced the opposite.
For the Muslimists’ relatively early demonstration of their determination to dominate the political system was to produce an increasing concern that peaked in the middle of 2013, with the military once again entering the scene, and throwing the country’s constitutional system out of the window.
During 2013 too, the simmering revolt that had emerged against the longstanding Ba’athist regime now led by President Bashar al Assad began to be of deepening concern to the major Western powers. By September last, they began to beat the drums of war, members of the European Union, led by France and Britain, starting to insist that the time for a major power intervention had come, ostensibly on humanitarian grounds as it was increasingly widely alleged that Assad had resorted to the use of chemical weapons against his opponents.
That insistence, however, seemed to push President Obama into a corner to which he was, apparently, hoping not to go. The President was insistent that his government would not stand for the use of chemical weapons against civilians in particular, but he seemed cognizant of the fact that he had initially won his first presidential electoral victory on anti-George W Bush Middle East intervention of the kind that had eventually brought a degree of popular animus against Bush’s administration.
Yet such was sentiment in the Western world against the use of chemical weapons, that as Britain and France began to insist on a military intervention, and domestic opponents of the American government began to take up the theme, Obama could not resist a move in that direction.
That the intervention did not occur indicated another strand of anti-war sentiment in the Western world – no doubt, in part, a leftover from the Bush anti-Iraq intervention which Obama had opposed, but which the political leadership had not picked up. For the British government of David Cameron, having beaten the drums of war against Assad as loudly as it could, found its own parliamentary supporters against such an initiative, and quickly had to reverse course.
That reversal permitted Obama to take a similar course towards his own Congress, where, as he was well aware, some degree of anti-war sentiment, particularly as it related to a Middle East, and an Iraq still visibly in turmoil, still existed.
That curious turn of events as far as the Western powers were concerned, permitted two things which still pervade the diplomatic atmosphere in relation to the Middle East. The first was the possibility of a reversion in the United States to a position of the use of diplomacy over war, most strongly proposed by Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry. This position was now enhanced by an unexpected turn by the new government in Iran, following presidential elections there, towards a possibility of settlement of the issues surrounding both the Syrian civil war, and its own position vis-à-vis the possession of nuclear weapons, by peaceful means – that is, through negotiation.
That Iranian orientation, pushed by President Putin of Russia, swung the day in favour of negotiation in two directions. The first, and more important, was to move the Syrian stage from war to negotiation, over the use and transfer, of chemical weapons. Thus, from Obama’s point of view, it would reverse the tendency for the US to subordinate itself to the drums of war.
The second direction was an American, and therefore NATO decision, to accept the subordination of the resolution of the immediate Syrian question, and possibly its aftermath, to a global, rather than simply Western, determination. It therefore shifted the issue to the United Nations platform, and away from the previously dominating preoccupation with it, of the NATO powers.
The present course of events which has continued into 2014, recognizes too, the insistent determination of Russia under Putin, that that country’s interests in a peaceful resolution of issues in the Middle East are as significant as the interests of the NATO powers. The course of events, as a result of the deliberate diplomacy initiated by the newly-elected Iranian regime, and President Obama’s decision to initially symbolically accept the diplomatic intimations of the Iranian President Rouhani during the latter’s visit to the United Nations General Assembly last September, has also consolidated a previously hardly visible American attempt to initiate normal, open, diplomatic negotiations with the new Iranian regime.
For the Obama administration would appear to have accepted, even in spite of some opposition in the Congress, that the US cannot be the sole arbiter of the resolution of the turbulent issues in the Middle East, and least of all now, that of the civil war in Syria.
The year 2013 has therefore ended pointing diplomacy towards the issues in the Middle East as subject to a framework wider than that previously enunciated by the US or the NATO powers. True, the return of Iran to orthodox diplomacy in the Middle East has not been pleasing to some of the power there themselves. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies are particularly concerned, and this would appear to extend to the military regime in Egypt, whose overthrow of the Muslimists there is itself still open to wider acceptability.
The new diplomatic picture, particularly the decision to negotiate Iran’s position on nuclear weapons has also irritated Israel, almost placing that country in a diplomatic camp with Saudi Arabia.
In the meantime, the Russian government takes a stance of continuing quiet diplomacy, cognizant of the fact that a high degree of volatility still exists in the Middle East, with Iraq and Libya demonstrating much instability. From President Putin’s perspective, the resolution of issues in the Middle East would appear to have taken a turn from being a Western or NATO monopoly, to being subjects for international consideration, including, really for the first time since the end of the Soviet Union, today’s Russia.
