It would be hard to dispute that perhaps more than any other region of the world, the Middle East finds itself in a degree of turbulence that is now dominating the attention of the major Western powers, as well as affecting other countries, large and small. Here in the Caricom arena, at the beginning of the year our major concern, as far as that area was concerned, was the sudden rapid decline of oil prices that seemed to be on the brink of giving us some financial respite.
But sooner rather than later, we were to find out that that process was, in large part, an aspect of the contest between the United States and Saudi Arabia in particular, as the former forced a focus on the development of shale oil being extracted on its own territory, while the latter took advantage of, or certainly did not resist, what appeared to the rest of us to be a sudden, but persistent decline in world oil prices.
All of a sudden, Saudi Arabia seemed to move out of a more normal posture of a close relationship with the United States in its policies that could have a major global impact, and to see its relationship with the US as more competitive than complementary.
Almost contemporaneously, President Obama who, at least in the dominating perception of his country’s electorate had promised not to force, or induce, the United States into any further military encounters in the Middle East, found himself having to react to the continuing domestic struggle for power in Syria, by finding it necessary to confront the Islamic State which seemed to want to ravage not only Syria, but also Iraq, a military evacuation from which the President was anxious to undertake, in accordance with his electoral promises.
The normally militarily quiescent Saudi Arabia itself, perceiving the essentially Shi’ite Islamic State’s intervention, and apparent physical takeover of Syria, as a direct challenge to the status quo between Sunni and Shi’ite forces in the Middle East, now seemed to abandon, indirectly if not directly, its more or less normal stance of no overt intervention in Middle Eastern domestic or overlapping political struggles, and to throw its strength behind those forces seeking to maintain the status quo in the area, and most importantly in Iraq.
As his political opponents in the United States have quickly realized, President Obama’s return to open conflict in Iraq, even if in terms of air support for local forces, has now qualified the political stance that gave him effective leverage against the Republicans in both his presidential elections. And it has lessened the political salience of overt intervention in the area as a domestic political or electoral issue.
And while the Islamic State forces have forced a situation in which there are no effective boundaries, in military terms, between Iraq and Syria, they have also forced a stalemate in the internal war against the Bashar al-Assad regime, as the Western powers no doubt feel that there is no credible alternative to him. And yet, it is difficult for the US to define the Islamic State as an effective enemy in the traditional Cold War terms, which would have included a direct military (ground troops) presence in the area. For this is something that would destroy the basis on which President Obama gained legitimacy for his election to the presidency of the United States.
So for the United States, time has not stood still in the Middle East. Obama’s diplomacy towards Shi’ite-led Iran, predicated on a successful conclusion to the current negotiations on that country’s development of a nuclear war capability, has hardly been particularly pleasing to his traditional Sunni ally, Saudi Arabia. Yet for the US, in global terms, that objective takes precedence over the traditional feelings of its Middle Eastern allies, whether Saudi Arabia or Israel.
Most disturbing for the US, from that perspective, is the posture adopted by Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel who, making opposition to the American initiative towards Iran a central aspect of his domestic elections, has taken the chance of pending presidential elections, and a generally favourable popular attitude to Israel, in the United States, to directly confront the Great Power itself.
For while Netanyahu perceives the American initiative towards Iran to be mortal danger to his country, undertaken by Israel’s own dominant, and first and last-resort protector, the United States, that protector, and indeed much of the Western world, perceives Obama’s current initiative to be a significant one for the normalization of American-Middle East relations.
For the United States, the inhibition of a development of a full nuclear weapons capability by Iran, is an important initiative towards inhibiting other states in the area, for example Saudi Arabia itself, from seeking to develop a capability, a consequence of which would be a nuclear arms race of unpredictable proportions.
As these developments continue, paradoxically the United States’ major ally in the Middle East of recent times, Egypt, though once seen as a major opponent, has effectively insulated itself from any American pressure towards democratization, or at least a diminished militarisation of that country’s political system. Egypt, once the centre of Middle Eastern diplomacy, whether under Nasser or his various successors, and indeed the centre of American diplomacy on the Palestine-Israel issue, appears to play a minimal role in the variety of events in the area.
The country has had little influence as an arbiter in the continuing dispute between the Palestinians and Israel. Its relative isolation, under the present military dictatorship, in wider Middle Eastern affairs, appears to permit it to have little influence vis-à-vis the Israelis, apart from the palliative of negotiating rights of passage for the Palestinians with Israel from time to time.
At present, with the Islamic State raging over the area, and with little indication that any credible political force can attain dominance within Syria or Iraq, in terms of their traditional boundaries, American diplomacy and its indirect military intervention in the area seems essentially constricted to seeking to coping with Islamic State.
And while it seeks to come to a resolution with Iran on what President Obama at this time believes to be the dominant issue of preventing its ownership of a nuclear weapons capability, it is a very open question as to whether the Iranians will feel sufficiently grateful to him for normalizing their position in global relations, to seek to subsequently intervene with its Shi’ite allies, to stop or minimize the present commotion in the area.
Yet, as the Islamic State, and its religious-cum-military allies spread their wings into an unstable Libya, and then into the African continent itself, American diplomacy will have to turn to concentrating on what is its effective influence in political affairs beyond the Middle East itself. It seems doubtful that its European allies, with their eyes bent on the isolation of Russia in terms of the situation in the wider European continent, will want to embroil themselves unduly in a Middle Eastern arena in which boundaries no longer seem clear. And certainly France will be watching the Islamic interventions in African states, where that European state still believes itself to have major interests.
And an economically powerful Germany will certainly prefer to find solutions to the EU’s present conflict with Russia which, they believe, constitutes a threat to the integrity of Europe itself, as they have come to define it in the post-Cold War era.
