It appears that the Middle East continues, in one dramatic way or another, to be at the centre of world events. Certainly while the drama of the murder of journalists was centred on France, it took Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, in his impetuous way, to draw attention to his, and presumably his government’s perception, that his country was the psychological centrepiece of the drama in Paris.
And however much the Nato countries seem to have wished to keep the Ukraine issue, and what they deem to be their successful exertion of pressure against President Putin’s Russia, as the centrepiece of world news, along with the power of the Western world, the shock of the Charlie Hebdo murders has quickly reversed any inclination of public opinion to go that way, and it came to dominate global diplomatic priorities.
So, for a while last week, the Nato discussions with Iran were cast in the shadows, and so was what we can call the furious regional civil war in the Middle East that for many years dominated American foreign policy, whether under President George H W Bush in the course of the Persian Gulf War centred on Iraq, President George W Bush’s intervention in Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein, the Nato intervention in Libya in 2011, the continuing Nato presence in Afghanistan’s civil war, only recently taken to be resolved, and now the Syrian civil war that, even with President Obama’s hesitations, has now drawn in the President through the American long-continuing presence in Iraq.
The rise of Islamic State (IS), has now brought an unwilling Obama, hesitant to use his country’s ground forces, into what is now seen to be a war of the IS not only for Syria, but for an Iraq not too long ago described by the American President as stabilized enough to permit the withdrawal of the American military. And the Syrian civil war, too, has drawn Turkey, a formal Nato member, into unwilling involvement in that expanding imbroglio, upsiding Turkey’s relatively peaceful relationship with Saudia Arabia and the Gulf States, and causing increasingly negative relations between the Turkish President and the Nato powers.
The war in Syria itself has appeared also to shake up the government of Saudi Arabia, not usually so publicly involved in the various Middle Eastern countries’ disputes, and more or less a silent ally of the Nato powers, until Syria seemed to be becoming too destabilized for comfort. In addition the rise of the Muslim Brother-hood to government in Egypt, and then the turn of the Egyptian military against the Muslim Brotherhood government, seemed to draw the concern of the Sunni Saudi regime, as well as the other Gulf States into a state of continuing wonder as to the state of a country once the centrepiece of Middle Eastern affairs.
But suddenly, in the midst of this almost unbearable turbulence, particularly in the case of conservative regimes like that of Saudi Arabia, it appears to have been a surprise when the currently, increasingly convoluted, series of confrontations in the Middle East found themselves suddenly capsuled in the surprising event of the murder by French radicals of Algerian origin who had spent time in the Middle East, of the staff of a little known satirical journal in that country.
All of a sudden, to the Nato powers, in this case France above all, the turbulence had refocused its direction and has brought what can be described as the Middle Eastern civil war, the subject presently of Nato intervention in its raging centrepiece of Syria, right into the centre of Europe itself.
The massive demonstration of concern in France itself, and the rapidity of the presence of the Nato powers’ leading officials in Paris, itself suggests the absolute surprise at this de facto, though non-state, intervention in France cum-European affairs, onto European and therefore Nato soil itself.
The presence of so many high dignitaries in France in the massive demonstrations that have taken place itself signals the surprise effect that the Charlie Hebdo murders have had on the Western world. But as Western leaders have scurried into Paris, noticeably absent was the leader of the Nato coalition, the United States President. The meaning of the controversy that this has thrown up – concern about an apparent American distancing from a grieving Europe – has given rise to concern about the present orientation of a President whose manifesto, on originally seeking the presidency, was decidedly against further American military intervention in the Middle East.
Of course, Obama’s commitment to American military participation, even though up to now, a largely air intervention, against the rise of the IS presence in Iraq and Syria meant, in fact, that he was being forced to renege on his original commitment to largely remove the American military presence in that arena. But over the last few months, the President will have found the weakness of an Iraqi regime which the US installed was cramping his strategy of a successful end to the continuing civil-military imbroglio in the country.
There will inevitably be a US-cum Nato review of present tendencies in what we have referred to as the Middle East civil war, and their implications for the Nato powers and therefore politics in the Nato countries. They will be aware that the Nato intervention in Libya, so forcibly supported, at the time, by the French government has solved little in that country – indeed, as we have observed it has been leading to a virtual civil war there.
With the civil war in Syria, and the intervention of IS beyond that country, Nato will be wanting to contemplate the consequences not only for resumed internal conflict in Iraq, but also in a normally fragile Lebanon.
And then, of course, room will have to be made, and no doubt it is already being made, for dealing with the implications of Saudi Arabia’s stubborn refusal of a policy towards controlling the descending spiral of oil prices, even to the extent of a disruption of OPEC – a policy which is bringing Middle Eastern crisis decision-making into this hemisphere, as our neighbour Venezuela is discovering.
In the atmospheres of both peace and war, the Middle East’s influence, fearfully negative, is at the shores of countries far and wide.