Who Will Win the Middle East?
How New Rivalries Are Transforming the Strategic Landscape
Since the middle of the twentieth
century, the Middle East has seen regional hegemons come and go. The
1950s and 1960s were Egypt’s era: Cairo was the Arab World’s capital and
the home of its charismatic postcolonial leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
But Israel’s victory over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the 1967 war;
Nasser’s death, in 1970; and the spike in oil prices after the 1973 war
brought that era to an end. As millions of Egyptians and other Arabs
left home for the oil-wealthy Gulf, the gravity of Arab politics went
with them. As the Gulf’s fortunes rose, especially in Saudi Arabia, so
too did Riyadh’s political clout. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s invasion
of Kuwait in 1990, however, and the subsequent U.S.-led war, which was
launched from Saudi soil, made clear that oil could buy Gulf countries,
including Saudi Arabia, a lot of influence, but they still needed
American protection.
After the Gulf War, in the first half of the 1990s, the Oslo
Agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the
Israeli-Jordanian Peace Treaty, shepherded by Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin, gave rise to Israel’s moment in the Middle East. Regional
economic cooperation took center stage, casting the politics of the
previous four decades aside with the optimism of peace and integration.
Rabin’s assassination in 1995 abruptly dashed those hopes. The peace
process floundered by the end of the decade, as a new rightwing in
Israeli politics rose to power, hardly disposed to any closeness to its
neighbors.
Then there was a void; the 2000s was no one’s decade. No Arab country
had the power, resources, or credibility to assert itself across the
whole region. Sectarianism spread, fuelled by the U.S. occupation of
Iraq and ensuing civil war. Arab republics, such as Egypt, Syria, and
Tunisia, witnessed shocking levels of corruption that eroded the
foundation upon which they were built in the 1950s: social equality and
the consent of the lower middle classes to the reigning regimes. In the
Gulf, the ruling dynasties sought to turn their desert towns into
glittering cities, modeled on Hong Kong and Singapore, and detached
themselves from the problems of their other Arab neighbors. Whereas in
previous decades the region’s strategic landscape had depended on one
country’s ascendancy, by 2011, with so much of the region muddling
through and failing to put together serious national or regional
political projects, the dominant players in the Middle East seemed to be
economic actors, from multinational corporations to regional financial
interests.
The Arab uprisings of the last three years shook up the balance of
power once more, toppling three of the Arab republics, Egypt, Libya, and
Tunisia; threatening Arab monarchies in the Gulf; and sewing chaos
around Israel. Whereas most observers evaluate the uprisings in terms of
the political changes they did -- or did not -- usher in, there are
other forces at play. A larger power struggle has emerged out of the
ashes of revolution, repression, and war from Tunisia to Syria, which is
reshaping the entire strategic landscape of the Middle East. Its
outcome will transform the entire region more than any regional rivalry
or the rise or fall of any single power in the preceding half century.
The emerging confrontation is over the nature and future of the region’s societies, from North Africa to the Gulf.
FACE OFF
At the heart of this transformation are two groups of countries
and political forces with opposing objectives. The first, led by
Islamist forces in Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and the large Arab political
Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, aims to channel the
energy of the Arab uprisings toward a gradual Islamization of the
region. The definition of that Islamization varies depending on the
ideologies, backgrounds, and social and political circumstances of each
country. The camp’s unifying conviction, however, is that political
Islam is the sole framework for governing. Its members believe that,
unlike the old rhetoric of secular Arab nationalism or republicanism,
Islamism can actually win the support of the widest social segments in
the region -- and keep it. To promote its goals, the camp uses a loosely
organized network of media, religious authorities, and financial
interests to rouse wide sections of the more than 180 million Arabs who
are under 35 years old to demand bottom-up change.
The other camp, led by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies, such
as Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, and supported by Egypt, Israel,
and Jordan, sees this transformation as a threat. They -- the
traditionalists -- believe that Islamization will bring further
fragmentation in some countries, such as Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria;
highly disruptive political and social discord in others, such as Egypt;
and the strengthening of jihadist groups across the region. Favoring a
more gradual, managed, and cautious evolution of the existing order, the
traditionalist camp relies on militaries, security apparatuses, media
and financial interests, and other state or state-backed institutions to
enforce a message of national preservation and shield their countries
from the upheaval unfolding across the region.
The battle between the two groups is a new kind of fight in the
Middle East. Previous struggles between Arab secularists and Islamists
(for example, between Nasser and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the
1950s, or between the Assad regime and the Brotherhood in the late 1970s
and early 1980s) were country and regime specific. The Arab-Israeli
conflict, meanwhile, has been primarily over territories. And the
contest between secular Arab republics and Gulf monarchies throughout
the 1960s (such as between Nasser’s Egypt and Saudi Arabia) revolved
around the survival of specific regimes. This emerging two-camp
confrontation, however, is over the nature and future of the region’s
societies, from North Africa to the Gulf.
TROUBLE IN EVERY DIRECTION
The struggle between these two camps will be determined by four
factors. The first is Egypt’s future. With nearly 90 million people, the
country is the home of a third of all Arabs and, for decades, has been
the region’s cultural trendsetter. Political Islam has already shaped
Egypt’s politics since the fall of President Mubarak, throughout
President Mohamed Morsi’s year in office, and, since Morsi’s ouster last
summer, in the ongoing struggle between the resurgent nationalists --
and at their core, the military establishment -- and the Islamists. But
it is really Egypt’s economy that will determine the country’s course.
If Egypt’s government, likely led by Field Marshal Abdel Fattah El-Sisi,
who is widely expected to win a May 25–26 presidential election, can
finally put forward badly needed economic reforms, including cutting
back on unaffordable public subsidies, without losing popular support
and risking another round of political protest, then Egypt could regain
its status as a player in the region and significantly bolster the
second camp. But that is a tall order. And if it fails, another round of
unrest would doom the traditionalists’ camp.
The second variable is the future of Algeria, North Africa’s largest
and richest country, thanks in large part to its oil and gas wealth.
(Algeria is Europe’s third-largest energy supplier.) The military regime
has been buying time until it can find a replacement for the ailing,
aged President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. His replacement must be acceptable
to the generals who have controlled the country for over four decades
and be conciliatory to the political Islamists that fought the regime
throughout the 1990s in a war that cost 100,000 lives. The regime still
survives by buying off such dissenters and playing off the public’s fear
of returning to the violence of the 1990s, which compels many Algerians
to accept the lack of plurality in return for peace and stability. But
although the Algerian regime survived the wave of protests in 2011
intact, it is hardly bulletproof. Algerian political Islam has evolved
beyond its 1990s antagonistic worldview. New Algerian Islamist parties
could reemerge as a serious rival to the military regime. And with
Algeria’s immense financial resources, this would give the first camp a
major strategic advantage.
The third factor is Saudi Arabia, where the royal family is digging
in its heels. A rising middle class that has a huge stake in the economy
-- and has been increasingly exposed to political and social currents
outside the conservative kingdom -- has finally started to demand
political representation. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s economic prospects
are slowly deteriorating. (The country is expected to become a net
energy importer by 2030.) A sagging economy will only hinder the royal
family’s ability to keep buying middle-class support through social
welfare and public allowances. The threats of a low-level Shiite
insurgency in the kingdom’s eastern province, a renewed Shiite Houthi
militancy on the borders with Yemen, or a protest movement among young,
disaffected Saudis could erode the government’s authority. A weakening
of the Saudi regime would undermine the traditionalists’ camp by
diverting the resources and dampening the will of its most powerful and
assertive member.
But there is another scenario. King Abdullah, who is 89 years old,
has shuffled responsibilities and positions within the ruling family,
and the rising (relatively young) princes are aware of the challenges
their political system faces. If, motivated by these existential
threats, the Saudi regime can evolve and turn the kingdom into a
functioning constitutional monarchy in which the political, social, and
economic rights of large groups of young Saudis are respected, it could
lead to a long but relatively stable transition. A new, assertive Saudi
leadership, buoyed by political legitimacy, would imbue the
traditionalists’ camp with strong momentum.
The fourth factor is just how much more chaos the Middle East sees
over the coming decade. The civil war in Syria is likely to end with a
semblance of a centralized authority in Damascus, surrounded by
quasi-independent political entities. Several Salafist jihadist groups
in the country could manage to entrench themselves in the increasingly
lawless desert plains extending from eastern Syria to western Iraq,
where they could try to establish Islamic statelets, isolated from the
surrounding world (as similar groups have tried in Afghanistan and the
Caucasus). Their presence will be a source of violence and political
fragility, primarily for Syria and Iraq, but also for Lebanon and
Jordan, opening more fronts in the battle between the two camps.
The camp that can turn the political contests in the region to their
advantage, by deflecting potential chaos and inflicting its consequences
on the other camp, will be better positioned to win this strategic
struggle.
THERE’S A STORM COMING
As unpredictable as the Middle East will be over the next few years,
there are a few certainties. First, following a pattern of the last five
decades and increasingly spurred by demographics and the already
palpable cultural trends within the region’s colossal youth segment, the
wave of urbanization, Westernization, and increased liberalism will
prove unstoppable. That will weaken the Islamists, because their
attempts to evolve their rhetoric and political messages to match these
trends will diminish their support among their core constituencies and
gradually detach them from the Islamic frame of reference upon which
their entire movement has been built. Second, because of competitive
deficiencies in educational quality, technological advancement, and
energy costs -- in addition to looming water crises in the Nile and
Jordan River basins -- almost all large countries in the region will
confront socioeconomic turbulence in the next decade. That will weaken
the traditionalist camp, which relies on structured authority.
In a sense, then, both camps could lose. The socioeconomic challenges
that all of these countries will confront could trigger a new youth
rebellion, which, unlike the 2011 uprisings, would not be directed at
the current rulers but at the entire political and economic
establishments that control these countries. Such a movement could
rapidly dilute the powers of entrenched institutions in old Arab
republics as well as in Gulf monarchies. It could also undermine the
prospects of political Islam. No matter what, then, adaptability will be
key for Islamists and traditionalists alike. The camp that adjusts to
these social, political, and economic waves will have better chances of
withstanding the approaching storm.
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