Throughout its history, the Middle East has been an arena for great power politics. Today, massive upheaval and wars in the region have created new realities on the ground, which foreign powers have sought to exploit. The results of such interventions have varied from the downsizing of American engagement with the region to the rise of China’s role and Russia’s renewed diplomatic activism, to name but a few.

Much of these recent external interventions can be traced back to the regional disorder following the 2010–11 Arab uprisings. Driven to contain the fallout of the post-Arab Spring turbulence, the United States stepped in militarily and diplomatically to curb the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Syria and Iran and intervened militarily alongside several European allies to defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq; the Russian Federation launched an intensive military campaign to prevent the collapse of the Syrian regime; and member states of the European Union organized a coordinated drive to stem the flow of migrants and refugees fleeing the region’s conflicts. In addition, the rising powers of China and India have gradually been swept into the maelstrom by trying to safeguard their interests in the region.

How have these world powers then attempted to adapt themselves to these realities and shape a new regional order? We asked a select group of authors to offer their reflections from the vantage point of their capitals under the theme of “The Middle East from the Outside in.” Jon B. Alterman and Pierre Vimont provide the perspectives from Washington and Brussels in their respective essays, “The Inflection Point” and “Europe: In Search of a Role.” Both present an assessment of the confusion, conflicting priorities, and general lack of policy coherence, a reality also captured by Daniel Levy in his essay on Western foreign policy toward the region. David Wearing offers the view from London, while Marco Pinfari presents that from Rome, and Frédéric Charillon, Paris. In his essay, “Russia’s Sharp Turns,” Dmitry Shlapentokh analyzes the complex interests driving Russia’s renewed activism in the region. Degang Sun and Kabir Taneja write from the standpoints of Beijing and New Delhi in that order. Finally, through the story of the Red Sea fishing village of Suakin, Nanjala Nyabola’s essay offers a fresh perspective on Africa’s often troubled relationship with the region. Nabil Fahmy’s Nile View column focuses on the challenges facing Arab statesman in countering the misperceptions that often drive Western policy toward the region.

Finally, this fall issue of the Cairo Review features a redesign of the journal produced by a talented Cairo-based team of graphic designers and artists. With a fresher, more innovative look, we hope our readers will find our new design to be in keeping with the core mission of the Cairo Review as high-quality journal of opinion and original commentary covering a diverse set of issues that touch upon the Middle East and the Arab World.

Throughout its history, the Middle East has been an arena for great power politics. Today, massive upheaval and wars in the region have created new realities on the ground, which foreign powers have sought to exploit. The results of such interventions have varied from the downsizing of American engagement with the region to the rise of China’s role and Russia’s renewed diplomatic activism, to name but a few.

Much of these recent external interventions can be traced back to the regional disorder following the 2010–11 Arab uprisings. Driven to contain the fallout of the post-Arab Spring turbulence, the United States stepped in militarily and diplomatically to curb the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Syria and Iran and intervened militarily alongside several European allies to defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq; the Russian Federation launched an intensive military campaign to prevent the collapse of the Syrian regime; and member states of the European Union organized a coordinated drive to stem the flow of migrants and refugees fleeing the region’s conflicts. In addition, the rising powers of China and India have gradually been swept into the maelstrom by trying to safeguard their interests in the region.

How have these world powers then attempted to adapt themselves to these realities and shape a new regional order? We asked a select group of authors to offer their reflections from the vantage point of their capitals under the theme of “The Middle East from the Outside in.” Jon B. Alterman and Pierre Vimont provide the perspectives from Washington and Brussels in their respective essays, “The Inflection Point” and “Europe: In Search of a Role.” Both present an assessment of the confusion, conflicting priorities, and general lack of policy coherence, a reality also captured by Daniel Levy in his essay on Western foreign policy toward the region. David Wearing offers the view from London, while Marco Pinfari presents that from Rome, and Frédéric Charillon, Paris. In his essay, “Russia’s Sharp Turns,” Dmitry Shlapentokh analyzes the complex interests driving Russia’s renewed activism in the region. Degang Sun and Kabir Taneja write from the standpoints of Beijing and New Delhi in that order. Finally, through the story of the Red Sea fishing village of Suakin, Nanjala Nyabola’s essay offers a fresh perspective on Africa’s often troubled relationship with the region. Nabil Fahmy’s Nile View column focuses on the challenges facing Arab statesman in countering the misperceptions that often drive Western policy toward the region.

Finally, this fall issue of the Cairo Review features a redesign of the journal produced by a talented Cairo-based team of graphic designers and artists. With a fresher, more innovative look, we hope our readers will find our new design to be in keeping with the core mission of the Cairo Review as high-quality journal of opinion and original commentary covering a diverse set of issues that touch upon the Middle East and the Arab World.

The Editors 

Ten years ago, when Hassan Azzazy, chairman of the Chemistry Department at the American University in Cairo (AUC), began working on a hepatitis C detection system in a newly established university lab, he did not expect that he would be speaking at the United Nations about his work a decade later. In late September, Azzazy presented technology developed at the university to the Solutions Summit organized as part of the 2018 UN General Assembly. D-Kimia, the first AUC biotech spinoff company with which his research team collaborates, was selected as one of ten solutions from over six hundred applications worldwide. The Solutions Summit specifically sought to address UN development targets to be achieved by 2030, called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Azzazy’s automated hepatitis C detection platform was a prime candidate for SDG 3—health.

Azzazy is a multiple award-winning scientist with over twenty-eight years of applied research and teaching experience in the biomedical and chemical fields. At AUC, he heads the Novel Diagnostics and Therapeutics Research Group, a university lab and multidisciplinary research group he founded in 2008. Together with D-Kimia, he has developed innovations at every stage in the process of hepatitis C diagnosis, including extraction, amplification, and detection. When Azzazy and his research team first started working on the disease, they did not expect to produce a complete alternative diagnostic platform but now they can “run a diagnostic from A to Z,” he tells the Cairo Review. Soon enough, they developed an automated system to extract and detect RNA in blood samples, the material that carries the virus’ genetic code—in essence, an advanced detection system that uses robotics instead of manual methods for hepatitis C diagnosis that involve human handling.

An estimated 12 million Egyptians—13 percent of the population—are affected by hepatitis C, the highest prevalence in the world. The virus causes liver damage and can lead to cancer in severe cases. It was spread in the 1950s when needles were reused on people during a nationwide treatment campaign, and continued to infect people en masse until the 1980s. By 2015, forty thousand people were dying of hepatitis C every year. Recently, the Egyptian government has taken steps to ensure treatment is widely available, denying pharmaceutical company Gilead a patent, and allowing competitors to drive the cost of treatment down to one-thousandth of the proposed price. Now that cures are more accessible in Egypt, accurate and affordable diagnosis is a crucial next step.

Blood sampling in itself presents unique barriers to effective diagnosis in Egypt. Azzazy says that Cairo traffic, heat, and technician error can result in an inaccurate diagnosis. “You see all these motorcycles running around Cairo? Some of these actually have blood samples in them and they stay in the heat and for a long time. The RNA degrades while in transport.” He also describes the danger of technicians tainting the samples by using their hands. Even worse, Egyptians may have no way to double-check the accuracy of their results. Only a few labs in Cairo are equipped to diagnose the disease. As a consequence of this, medium- and small-sized labs that advertise hepatitis C diagnosis will outsource analyses to larger labs, which will most likely end up in the same centralized testing center.

Developed with these issues in mind, the genius of Azzazy’s machine is twofold. First is the automated feature: to accurately perform extraction, D-Kimia’s solution purifies and filters blood samples (until only hepatitis C RNA is present). This process happens inside a machine that performs six laboratory functions necessary to purify the sample. In centralized labs without this kind of machine, human error can contaminate and degrade the sample. This adaptable system is built like a “LEGO,” says Azzazy—any of the six laboratory functions can be reordered and tailored via computer programming that would enable detection of other viruses. Another key advantage is the machine’s ability to be transported to faraway towns and villages. This enables RNA to be extracted immediately after blood is drawn, instead of sitting in traffic on a motorcycle for hours until it reaches one of a few testing facilities in Cairo.

Second is detecting all variants of the virus including that which is most prevalent in Egypt. There are over one thousand examples of the U.S. type of hepatitis C and only forty sequences for the type most widely spread in Egypt—genotype 4, which infects over 90 percent of Egyptians. There is a chance that tests developed abroad don’t detect the Egyptian type, or on the other hand, that Egyptians who contract a different genotype would not be diagnosed if tested only for genotype 4 (missing an entire 10 percent who could have hepatitis C). To solve this, Azzazy’s team looks for commonalities among the RNA sequences of all hepatitis C types and develops a system that will amplify and detect all variants, a crucial addition to hepatitis C research in Egypt specifically.

To further their model of decentralized and accessible medicine, the next step for Azzazy is to develop “real-time thermocycler,” a portable and faster version of his device that can be transported to remote communities. D-Kimia just received a grant to build and test the machine, the first in Egypt, the Middle East, and Africa, which Azzazy and his team started developing this month. “Now we have an entire diagnostic platform that can actually be theoretically put in a car and act as a mobile diagnostic station that can go to remote locations”—in many ways, akin to a mobile diagnostic laboratory.

That way, “we are trying to lower the [access] barrier to health,” Azzazy explains. His research group aims to finish the thermocycler within a year. After that, the full diagnostic platform will need to be marketed and produced to reach communities. He plans to sell the solution at a reduced price—20 percent of the cost of current diagnostic procedures. He explains that “this is our way to survive….I don’t think we are out there for profit. We will make some profit definitely in order to be able to grow and continue but at the same time I think we need to lower the cost for communities.”

Numerous organizations recognize this innovative solution and Azzazy’s pivotal role. He won the 2014 Global Innovator Award, presented annually by the Texas Christian University for research with a societal impact. In 2015, a joint application from AUC and D-Kimia won first place in the industry category of the Arab Innovation and Entrepreneurship Award competition, organized by the Arab Science and Technology Foundation.

Most recently, at the Solutions Summit, Azzazy built connections with funders and innovators in order to open up his product to the market. For some researchers, inclusion of the private sector allows for additional funding opportunities. Although Azzazy has been very successful at getting research grants, he views market acceptance as the ultimate test of the value of his solution. He believes that “the market will not pay you a penny unless you are worth a penny.”

While Azzazy remains optimistic, whether D-Kimia can balance their need to function as a business while providing affordable products to communities has yet to be seen. When reflecting on the summit, he states, “It was an eye opener. We scientists focus on science and technology and we forget the market.” As the researchers of D-Kimia prepare to step into the market, they will be faced with new challenges that nanoparticles cannot solve. In a way, developing a sophisticated robotic biomedical diagnostic system was the easy part.

William B. Quandt was privy to many turning points in U.S. foreign policy: he served on the National Security Council under the Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter administrations and played an active role in the negotiations that led to the Camp David accords and the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty. And yet, he cannot pin down Donald Trump’s plans for the Middle East.

Elected for his non-conventionalism, attitude of irreverence, and not much else, Trump has a personal brand that informs his “distinctive” foreign policy in the Middle East, argued Quandt in a talk he gave this fall at the American University in Cairo. Trump’s ultimate goal to get the best deal possible—rooted in his real estate credentials and background— has severe implications for international diplomacy and trade relations. For example, his perspective on international negotiations is zero-sum: “You either win or lose. You’re either strong or weak,” Quandt said.

This certainly explains Trump’s skepticism of multilateral institutions and agreements. Trump discredited the United Nations and NATO, promised he would withdraw from the World Trade Organization, renegotiated multilateral trade deals like NAFTA, and pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, all of which tie the hands of the United States, Quandt said. More than international cooperation, Trump values bilateralism and believes one-on-one agreements are far more effective than multilateral deals.

The art of deal-making is the backbone of Trump’s policy regarding the Israeli– Palestinian dispute. Trump made an infamous campaign promise to “make the deal of the century,” but took missteps to accomplish it: first, he appointed his son-in-law Jared Kushner and two other close associates, known to be sympathetic to hardliners in Israel, and second, cut funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and closed PLO offices in Washington. “We have yet seen nothing but retreat from anything like a credible peace process in my mind”—a process which Quandt told the Cairo Review is “dead in the water.” Plans to reveal the deal have been delayed for months, their provisions rumored to be unacceptable to the Palestinians.

Quandt nonetheless agrees with Trump on two main points: he believes the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 under the tutelage of George W. Bush was a mistake, and faults Barack Obama for prematurely pulling out of the country and creating a power vacuum that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) filled. “The United States is not particularly good at the goal of imperialism,” Quandt quipped, adding that he supports Trump’s skepticism about remaking the world.

The United States’s involvement in Iraq fifteen years ago has exacerbated the humanitarian crisis within the country. Quandt thinks Trump’s instinct to withdraw American military forces from countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria is a good one—even if it does not happen quickly due to entrenched bureaucracy in those countries. Regardless of whether American troops remain in the Middle East, it is likely that the United States will no longer play a large role in determining the future of Arab countries. In Syria, for example, Quandt notes that the Russians, Turks, Iranians, and the Syrian regime have a deepening role in the conflict, but “nobody thinks that the United States is a major player in that game.”

Trump’s isolationist foreign policy stands in contrast to that of Obama because of its comparable heavy-handedness. Trump has pulled back from a strong global presence politically and economically, leaving power in the region up for grabs.

While signs point to Russia becoming the next powerhouse in the region, it is telling that the current U.S. administration has embraced three key players in the region: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel. Mainly, Quandt argued, these new alliances are meant to guard against Iranian expansionism. Trump himself has even floated the idea of sponsoring an Arab NATO, a body composed of Arab troops to stand against the Persian threat.

Ironically enough, despite Trump’s overuse of slogans like “America First” and “Make America Great Again,” he has stepped back from previous administrations’ efforts to shape the Middle East and seems content to let other countries pick up the slack. This break from the past has made it difficult for scholars and observers to anticipate his next move. How does Quandt recommend we make our predictions then? “It’s probably best to just flip a coin.”

A recent Pew Research Center study found that in 2016, assaults on Muslims in America surpassed incidents reported after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Members of seven different U.S. state legislatures introduced anti-Sharia legislation in 2018. The Washington Post reported thirty-six separate incidents between 2011 and 2017 where Donald Trump used anti-Muslim rhetoric, delivering such lines as “I think Islam hates us,” and reading the lyrics to “The Snake,” an Al Wilson song about a woman who is attacked by a snake she nurses, in connection to immigrants and Syrian refugees.

How is it possible, then, that the attitudes of the American public toward Islam and Muslims have steadily improved from the 2016 presidential campaign to the end of Trump’s first year in office? Conducting six polls over this period, public opinion expert and political scientist Shibley Telhami found that American perceptions about Islam and Muslims have become “more and more positive.” Telhami is the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and has a record of conducting public opinion polls in the United States and the Arab World since 1989. He interprets the increase in positivity as a reaction against the spike in anti-Muslim feelings. As Telhami explained at a talk he delivered at the American University in Cairo, the sentiment is, “Donald Trump says it’s bad, so I’m going to rally behind the Muslims and protect them.”

As statistics about Islamophobia in America show, not all Americans hold this sentiment. Opinions on Muslims and Islam remained negative among Republicans throughout the polling period. Favorable views among Democrats increased, however, in some cases by 18 percentage points. Telhami dismissed the idea that Democrats and independents suddenly became more educated about and tolerant of Islam. Instead, he pointed to an increase in identity politics among Americans that is spurred by deeper divisions. “It’s identity politics on both sides,” Telhami explained at AUC. “It’s people who are shifting their views on issues, not because they’re objectively analyzing the issues, or taking some analytical position relating to the issues, but because you’re either with this camp or you’re with that camp.”

A similar trend is visible in U.S. public opinion toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Before Trump, Telhami found that two-thirds of Americans have consistently wanted the United States to be evenhanded in the conflict. But there is a growing division over political support for Palestine. In his most recent poll, Telhami found that a lopsided majority of Republicans want U.S. policy to openly lean toward Israel. While 90 percent of Democrats still want the United States to be unbiased in the conflict, some are now beginning to tilt toward supporting Palestinians. Even more surprising, he found that a majority of Democrats support sanctioning or boycotting Israel for continued settlement expansion.

Telhami was cautious about whether this shift in public opinion could lead to a shift in U.S. foreign policy. Incidentally, his interest in polling was sparked years ago by the realization that American foreign policy does not align with public opinion. Although the majority of Americans wanted an impartial U.S. policy toward the Palestinian– Israeli conflict when he began polling, those who advocated for a pro-Israel stance ranked the issue higher in their priorities than the average American, which thus had an outsized effect on policy. Today, members of Congress still largely support Israel and are seeking to pass a law to criminalize boycotts of the country. Even Democrats who are beginning to lean toward the Palestinian side are not motivated by their passion for the cause. “The Arab–Israeli issue is seen not simply as an issue in and of itself, meaning about Arabs or Palestinians. It is seen as a prototype of justice, as a prototype of human rights, as a prototype of international law,” Telhami told the Cairo Review.

Even so, upholding liberal values has emboldened Democratic politicians to challenge the common narrative. Bernie Sanders energized his base by criticizing Israel, and in recent months, several candidates for Congress have also taken a more critical position on Israel and still succeeded in elections. But can a divided America really cause a meaningful change in U.S. policy toward the Palestinian–Israeli conflict? According to Telhami, only time will tell, but right now, “it’s much easier to stay with the status quo and not rock the boat.”

The last decade has been, by any and all standards, chaotic and challenging for the Middle East, especially for the Arab World. This has raised serious concerns about how the world perceives the region. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in United States, and a decade later, the Arab awakenings of 2010 and 2011, fueled foreign perceptions that the Arab World was violent and in complete turmoil. The tug of war between fundamentalists and modernists, liberals and conservatives, democracy promoters and authoritarians has had dire consequences for the region’s image abroad and the world’s perception of our people.

Many of my Arab diplomatic colleagues in Washington, where I served as ambassador from 1998 to 2008, and my Egyptian peers and national constituency back home strongly asserted that post-2011 perceptions of Arabs and the region were unfair, false, and tainted with bias. The argument put forth at the time was that Arabs should completely disregard and refrain from reacting to them. For me, however, apathy or complacency were not the correct response, even when claims made against us were wrong or unjustified. Left unchallenged, repeated false perceptions can create a damaging semblance of truth, especially for the layperson. After September 11, I remember conveying our sincerest condolences to the American administration and strongly condemning the terrorist acts, but at the same time as “Egypt’s” ambassador in Washington cautioned against labeling the U.S. response as a war against Islam.

As a diplomat, I have dedicated over three decades of my life to Egypt’s foreign service. The most crucial task lying before me throughout my career has been to defend and promote Egypt’s interests abroad, and that’s why a significant component of my work dealt with managing foreign perceptions of Egypt and the Middle East. When perceptions were ill-conceived or critical, my efforts would focus on correcting or countering them. In most cases, these perceptions were imprecise, either because they were overly optimistic or unjustifiably critical. An equally important challenge was explaining these foreign perceptions—however “true” or “false” they may be—to both my own superiors and constituents.

Monitoring perceptions abroad was essential because of their possible influence on foreign and national decision-makers. I always recommended managing our reactions to negative views even in futile situations. This can be a delicate process because what is convincing to a Western society, for example, may not be so for people in other parts of the world and may even have negative ramifications for them. In a connected world, one must never ignore how explanations given to a foreign audience would appear to those back home, or the unexpected ways in which they could resonate.

Because the Middle East and the Arab World are part of the international community, perceptions do matter. Nevertheless, national interests, which most likely determine the policies we pursue, in general tend to be multidimensional and long-term, and thus should not and cannot be overly defined by foreign or domestic public perceptions, or opinion polls that often focus on short-term issues.
Herein lies the crux of the problem and the response to it: the Arab Middle East is too dependent on foreign stakeholders and thus is oftentimes regrettably ineffective in dealing with its regional affairs, especially in comparison to the non-Arab members of the region like Turkey and Israel for example. Consequently, the region’s national interests are disproportionately hurt by foreign perceptions. Arab reactions tend to either over-emphasize the importance of foreign perceptions by reacting defensively to criticism from abroad or hype up and boast flattering foreign perceptions (even though the reason behind them is, more often than not, us catering to foreign interests rather than our own). Arab newspapers frequently designate front-page stories to recount flattering or refute negative foreign press articles.

Proactive domestic and regional policy-making, within the context of a well-planned strategic vision by each Arab country, will enhance its interests and those of the Arab region as a whole. This should be our new focus. We, as Arabs, must attempt to determine our own future if our complaints about foreign interference or influence are to be heard. We must have well-thought-out strategic objectives in order to properly ascertain the degree and nature of over response to outside perceptions of the Middle East. Otherwise, we will continue to be described by commentators such as Thomas Friedman in one of his rather acerbic op-eds as “Crazy Poor Middle Easterners,” which sadly I must admit is testimony to foreign perceptions of the Middle East taking hold.

Nabil Fahmy, a former foreign minister of Egypt, is the dean of the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo. He served as Egypt’s ambassador to the United States from 1999–2008, and as envoy to Japan between 1997 and 1999. On Twitter: @mnabilfahmy.

The sole candidate elected on a civil society platform in Lebanon’s May parliamentary elections, Paula Yacoubian, 42, is out to accomplish what many have tried and failed to do in Lebanese politics: end the confessional system. Her strategy? Unite the people first on their common interests and encourage them to join “the movement of the brave.”

Yacoubian ran in Beirut as a member of a new civil society alliance, Kulluna Watani (we are all my homeland), which fielded sixty-six candidates in nine voting districts. Established under a complex new electoral law, the alliance roused support for a platform addressing social ills—corruption first among them. It faced massive headwinds securing votes in May, as an unknown, leap-of-faith party for voters used to going with their sect. Yacoubian is one of its most well-known members.

Formerly a journalist, Yacoubian hosted interviews on Lebanon’s pro-Saad Hariri network Future TV. She resigned from the program—which had aired for ten years— in January, to run for parliament. A media personality, Yacoubian is one of only six women members of parliament elected in this year’s polls, out of a 128-member parliament.

Cairo Review Associate Editor Leslie Cohen spoke with Yacoubian on October 21, 2018.

CR: You told The National in March that you were giving up journalism for politics when you decided to run for parliament regardless of the election results. Why do you feel that your mandate—or calling—changed?
PY: I’ve been a journalist for twenty-five years in Lebanon and I’ve tried to bring some change to the Lebanese scene, to push human rights issues, women’s empowerment, and environmental issues. And it was hopeless. No one wanted to listen, mainly because
Lebanon is extremely corrupt. For me, the turning point was the garbage crisis in 2015: this is when I decided that I had to do something, though it was brewing for some time. I decided to join the civil society movement because they’re the real opposition— the only opposition in Lebanon. All the rest of the parties want to take a share in the government, a share of the cake. Then they shut up; they don’t want to get the business done. And the people of Lebanon are the ones paying the price for the corruption and mismanagement.

We [Kulluna Watani] are anti-sectarian and anti-establishment, in a country which is very sectarian, which helps the old political caste get re-elected. I think we are the only ones who can bring real change because we’re a grassroots movement that is growing every day and we come from all walks of life, all regions, all sects. This is a major game changer in Lebanon.

CR: You were the only candidate elected on the civil society platform for the East Beirut district. Was that discouraging?
PY: No! It wasn’t discouraging. You have to know the facts in Lebanon. First, the election is sectarian, extremely sectarian. Second, people do not vote for the unknown. I was the famous figure of Kulluna Watani, and I think I campaigned on a different agenda than the rest. I also think that my region [Achrafieh, an old and upper-class district of Beirut] is the region that can bring change to Lebanon. Its residents are both highly educated and liberal… which is why it was easier for us to make it there. And I think two of us won, but in Lebanon you know, everything has its fraud, and you know the election results were rigged.

CR: You’re speaking about Joumana Haddad—the other civil society candidate who appeared to have won the night before election results were announced, but discovered in the morning that she had lost by a slight margin?
PY: I think Joumana was elected, and that three hundred votes were taken from her list in the final count. Now she has appealed the results, and I have high hopes she will succeed if they don’t interfere with it in the Conseil Constitutionnel, the Supreme Court.

CR: So barring interference, the government may conduct a genuine recount?
PY: It’s not only about a recount. For the first time in Lebanon we had the expats vote. That vote happened one week before the elections and we didn’t have anyone overseeing the results. We didn’t have the capacity to be in the embassies and consulates all over the world. I’m afraid this might be a place where they could have removed some of our votes. The public sector employees also vote before the general elections and we have real concerns that here too the numbers could have been rigged.

CR: What are the unique challenges and opportunities you face as the only civil society candidate elected?
PY: I have one challenge and one aim, which is to make people believe that they can join the movement of the brave. I call them this because these are the people who are going against the sectarian current, the segregation in Lebanon. The [sectarian] camp works on fearmongering, because this is all they have: “You are threatened; you are a Christian minority and the Muslims are coming to take your place.” The Sunnis say the same about the Shia; the Shia have the same rhetoric. At the end they stick all of them together in one government and corruption continues. They’re eating the mountains and drinking the rivers. Our sea is polluted like never before and twenty-eight years after the civil war, we don’t have electricity in Lebanon. Can you believe it? So I’m telling you, they don’t want to give anything back. They just sell the same message about belonging and about the good of the sect. I don’t think there’s any good for any sect if we don’t have a country.

CR: What, if anything, can you do in your position to change this?
PY: I’m working on awareness. The first thing I realized when I was elected was how much awareness we need in Lebanon. To talk to people, to convince them they are much better with qualified people, not merely those [seats in parliament] who belong to the same sects that they do. I’m reaching out on social media as much as I can because I’m boycotted on most Lebanese television networks, which are owned by the parties. You don’t even see my face or my name there, except if they have an attack against me. I am covered by some Lebanese independent networks, but again there are all kinds of pressure on them not to cover me the way they should. I get less coverage than any other MP [member of parliament].

CR: Meanwhile, are you being courted by other MPs to try to win your vote for their policies?
PY: Yes, sometimes they try. And we do try to get together on some issues, but it’s not something that happens a lot. Because they agree on everything and come as one side, on one team, so I’m the black sheep in parliament, who’s always opposing. Take for instance the solid waste law [passed in September, which allows the incineration of trash]. It was a real disaster, but I didn’t find many MPs next to me, and those that were, opposed it for different reasons; I opposed [trash] incineration. But sometimes it does happen, this crossing of camps.

CR: Much of your activism, as you said, has focused on the environment.
PY: May I tell you why? Lebanon is a catastrophe when it comes to its environment. Our air is polluted; we don’t have rivers anymore; we have sewage that reminds us there was once a river here. If we don’t have a viable place—if we cannot fix our
environment—everything else is useless. That’s why this is my aim, to unite the Lebanese around their beautiful country, to make them believe that they can make it beautiful and green again.

The rest of these things, like Hezbollah’s arms, sovereignty, these big headlines…they are very important. But honestly, I don’t think we can do any change right now. You have to be on the right side of history, but this is a wasted war already—some battles are not imaginable, or ones we’re able to win, which is why I’m more focused on things that are a priority for the Lebanese: electricity, the environment. Then, once we are united as one people, we can do so much.

CR: Prime Minister designate Saad Hariri said in mid-October that he is very close to forming a government—something long overdue since May. Do you see a solution for this impasse?
PY: Honestly, I don’t care about forming the government at all, because I think they’re going to come and do more deals and more harm than good. You’re asking the corrupt camp to fight corruption, and it’s crazy. I think the Lebanese people should go to the polls and say “Enough. We don’t want you anymore.” This is the only time when the parties would change their behavior, begin to fear accountability—that people can vote for change, without being afraid of their “belonging.” This is the challenge for me. So [this debate over forming a government], I really believe is a waste of time.

CR: How do you start broadening Kulluna Watani’s base? Say into poorer neighborhoods, or communities that always vote sectarian?
PY: Let me tell you something about Lebanese politics and the way they deal with their own people. I come from the Armenian “sect,” if you want. We arrived more than one hundred years ago to Lebanon as refugees and we have seats in parliament assigned for us as Armenians. I had concerns that Armenians would not vote for an anti-establishment, anti-sectarian MP to represent them—that they would be afraid like all the others. What happened was astonishing; most of my votes came from Armenians.

They voted for an Armenian, but also for one who doesn’t fearmonger, or push this populist agenda that the others do. And that was very important, because we [Armenians] are seen as a ghetto that is always afraid. I think they surprised everyone with the vote, and I would have failed without it. I have my base, I am securing my base, and I think this should be an example for all the others, to vote for Lebanon, and not for the sect.

CR: Is there an independent path for Lebanon to chart, where it is not held hostage to foreign interests?
PY: We can only be independent when we are united. As long as a small country like ours is divided in this way, we cannot have any strength. We cannot have any foreign policy agenda. We just follow the others. We follow other countries according to our sect and religion—the Shia following Iran, the Sunni following Saudi Arabia, and the Christians don’t know what to do. That’s not a country. That’s not even a federation. That can’t survive. We need to be united, and then we’ll have a strong foreign policy.

When the events giving rise to what has been commonly termed the “Arab Spring” started to unfold in 2011, the European Union and its member states were genuinely convinced that their moment had come. As a self-proclaimed normative power and a constant champion of liberal democracy and the free market economy, Europe seized these events in the Mediterranean region as a unique opportunity to promote its long-held political and economic philosophy. After many years of wandering from dogma to unavoidable compromise with the regimes of the Arab World, European nations could reasonably hope that the words and deeds of Middle Eastern leaders might finally match.

Yet, reality very soon put an end to this hope. As unpredictable developments occurred after 2011 in the region, the European Union (EU) was rapidly reduced to an observatory player. While other global and regional powers interfered more and more in the turmoil engulfing the Middle East, Europe looked sidelined and stripped of its traditional influence. Granted, Europe did provide massive humanitarian assistance and significant financial and economic cooperation to the countries of the region. The EU also maintained a steady course in supporting all efforts to bring back peace and stability to the area.

Yet, we must admit that the EU has had a mixed foreign policy record in the Middle East in recent years. In the context of an evermore complex interplay between global powers and local actors, why has the EU been perceived as lagging behind? Misperception about the transformative nature of the discontent spreading over the whole region, failure to define the appropriate answers, and divisions between EU members are some of the reasons for Europe’s poor diplomatic performance.

But beyond these explanations, a more fundamental interrogation is warranted regarding the nature of EU foreign policy itself. When confronted with high-intensity crises like the ones destabilizing the Middle East, Europe has appeared to be reaching its limits as long as it remains locked in a fundamental dilemma between its aspirations to assume a role as a potential global power and a chronic inability to deliver on the requirements for such a role.

A History of Sustained Involvement
The events unfolding within the Arab World from 2011 onward caught the EU by surprise as they did with other major powers involved in the region. Yet, few of the countries outside of the region had the depth of partnership which the EU had developed over the course of the last fifty years. From the first bilateral programs agreed upon in the 1970s with individual Mediterranean countries to the Barcelona Process in 1995 (establishing for the first time a multilateral frame for Euro–Mediterranean partnership) and finally the European Neighborhood Policy, launched in 2003, with countries of the southern Mediterranean, Europeans acquired experience in the region. The EU set up precise objectives for its southern neighborhood, to be achieved with specific toolkits intended to promote trade, investment, and economic cooperation, while also complementing this agenda with a security dialogue between the two sides.

Prior to 2011, building up a “ring of friends” was the name of the game. This strategic objective seized imaginations on both sides of the Mediterranean and appeared as a sensible objective that could satisfy the mutual interests of the Middle East and the EU. Europeans were looking for stability and security on their southern borders. Leaders of the Maghreb and Mashreq were asking for support to stir the economic development of their still newly independent nations.

However, this rosy picture was not the whole truth. The colonial past between some of the European partners and their Middle Eastern and North African counterparts had left scars which sometimes affected the tone and substance of EU–Middle East cooperation. The EU also nourished its own vision of trade relations that was too often shaped to benefit or protect European interests. A tendency on the European side to lecture rather than genuinely listen to its Mediterranean partners’ needs slowly crept into EU policy as conflicting interests grew between the two sides.

Furthermore, the EU’s enlargement to include central and eastern European members soon brought a new dimension to the priorities of the neighborhood policy. The EU’s newly admitted members insisted on extending European assistance to eastern European countries and the countries of the southern Caucasus, while southern European member states such as France, Italy, Spain, and Greece wanted to maintain the focus on outreach to the “Southern Neighborhood.” Insidiously, this new eastern partnership became a permanent source of competition inside the EU between eastern and southern European member states for the allocation of financial resources dedicated to the European Neighborhood Policy. The efforts initiated by France in 2008 to rekindle the Southern Neighborhood through a revamped version branded as the “Union for the Mediterranean” represented an attempt at striking a new balance in favor of the southern partners. But the somewhat clumsy handling of this initiative did not bring the expected results and, on the contrary, seemed to slow down the whole process.

Lastly, the emphasis placed by the Lisbon Treaty on the missions conferred to EU foreign policy led to more complicated relations with the strongman regimes prevailing in most Mediterranean countries. Embodied in Article 21 of the treaty and reaffirmed afterward in all association agreements negotiated with EU southern partners, the political guidelines for EU action on the international scene insisted on the principles “which have inspired its own creation, development and enlargement and which it seeks to advance in the wider world” from democracy to the rule of law, human rights, fundamental freedoms, and respect of international law. The priority given to values over interests was nothing new for the EU. It was part of the European creed since the start of the EU project and was often branded by the Brussels institutions as their original trademark which was seen to stand in contrast to the more self-centered—not to say cynical—foreign policies of the individual member states. If European diplomats found ways of favoring a realistic implementation of these principles (the most recent EU global strategy introduced the concept of “principled pragmatism”), this renewed emphasis on values nevertheless did strain Europe’s partnership with its southern neighbors.

The Arab Spring: A Missed Opportunity for Europe
It is against this European backdrop that the Arab Spring unfolded. Perceived as an overwhelming push for democracy inside the Arab World, it caught the imagination of both European member states and EU institutions as these developments seemed at first to offer a solution to the inherent contradictions of European foreign policy. As the Arab uprisings appeared to embrace the philosophy embodied in EU fundamental rights, a mutually agreed-upon path was taking shape. Around 2011 and 2012 the hope was that Europeans could from now on overcome their contradictions and leave behind the ambiguous attitude they had adopted, willingly or not, for convenient reasons in their relationship with the Arab World. In early 2011, the then-EU commissioner in charge of the neighborhood policy, Štefan Füle, declared that the EU had fallen prey in the past to authoritarian regimes perceived as guarantors of stability and that moving forward this short-term approach should be definitively rectified. For her part, Lady Catherine Ashton as the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy went on to underline that Europe had the experience and tools to help the countries in the Middle East region make the journey to “deep democracy.”

Yet, this new enthusiasm for the southern partnership did not deliver much. Indeed, it slowly petered out and looked increasingly like a missed opportunity. The cause of this poor record rests largely upon the unfolding of events perceived at the start as a revolutionary movement but progressively understood as a confrontation between diverging political forces. In this confused context where—with the exception of Tunisia—most EU Arab partners fell victim to civil war, diverse government changes, or simply a return to the past, the EU was at pains to draw up new plans. Not that the Brussels institutions did not try. On the contrary in early 2011, soon after the first uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, the EU released two communications devoted to a comprehensive and new Middle East strategy.

The first of these two papers, entitled “A New Partnership for Democracy and Shared Prosperity with the Southern Mediterranean,” sought to give a first quick response to the developments occurring in Tunisia and Egypt. The second document had a more ambitious scope as it proposed “a new response to a changing neighborhood” with the goal of revising the overall neighborhood policy in order to capitalize on the new reality introduced by the Middle East upheavals. The emphasis was on what the Brussels institutions called the “3 Ms,” namely money, markets, and mobility. Yet, in spite of its effort to show solidarity and support to the Arab partners, the EU mobilization gradually appeared for what it actually was: old wine in new bottles.

Financial commitments came predominantly in the form of loans with a limited addition of reallocated budgetary funds; the remaining economic assistance relied heavily upon private investors who were enticed by Brussels to go to the Middle East but preferred to wait for more stable times. The market dimension implied a new tailor-made approach to bilateral trade to fit the specificities of the EU’s regional partners. However, the EU proposition was merely the latest version of free trade agreements designed for a full integration into the EU single market and shaped along the requirements of the accession process. This was not the perfect match for Middle East partners, who were not candidates for EU membership and were only looking for concessions in tune with their more immediate needs. As for mobility, improved labor visas to allow young unemployed workers from the Mediterranean region to come to Europe could have been the genuine prize of the renewed engagement embodied in these discussions. Unfortunately, however, with the effects of the 2008 financial crisis being felt throughout the continent, such a demand could only fall on deaf ears in Brussels.

Comprehending the Region’s Turbulent Dynamics
What the Europeans missed at that time was the profound ongoing transformation of Middle Eastern societies and the need for an innovative EU response to this changing reality. Instead, Europe looked unable to move from its traditional thinking and to adapt to its partners’ needs.

Its trade proposals have been based on commercial patterns which favor exclusive relations with Europe at a time when more openness toward African partners in the south is becoming a feature of the Mediterranean economy, particularly with the Maghreb. This lack of EU flexibility has also been illustrated by the limits of European reaction to the unemployment situation in the Mediterranean area, which is characterized by a youth population whose qualifications often do not match the job requirements. More tailor-made assistance in education and vocational training should have been the natural ground for a mutually beneficial partnership. However, Europe has not been agile enough to adapt its assistance to the changing social and political realities produced by the Arab Spring.

The same inability prevailed when dealing with the changing geopolitical reality in the region. Here again Europeans appeared to struggle with developments they could neither shape nor significantly influence. Undoubtedly Europe was not alone in failing to exert leadership and most of the external actors involved with the many conflicts inside the region experienced mixed success in their own diplomatic endeavors. In fact, all players did face a combination of intertwined factors that have haunted the Middle East for some time. Increased militarization of the different local conflicts, growing sectarianism, particularly in the Mashreq, and interference by outside players leading to extended proxy wars all collided to form a highly volatile background, where the past status quo gave way to a confused and unstable present.

As they faced these uncertain circumstances, Europeans were particularly helpless and vulnerable to this unsettled environment. The EU sees itself as a soft power. It walks on safe ground when joining efforts on conflict prevention or peacekeeping operations. However, its policy becomes shaky when Europe confronts high-intensity conflicts where military hard power makes the difference. In such cases, EU institutions tend to leave it to the member states to take the lead in such militarized situations. Indeed, inside the coalitions of Western allies that intervened in Syria and Iraq, it is the individual member states which were involved, not the EU. And even there, individual members’ involvement was mainly focused on providing support to the U.S. military intervention, not by any desire to take the lead.

Interestingly enough, despite the long history of Europe’s economic and diplomatic relations with the Middle East, and its investment in cultivating a significant political network across the region, European influence in these days of upheaval and war seems to have lost its clout. Even European member states like the United Kingdom, Germany, or France—traditionally considered the ones with the most credible assets to lead a robust diplomatic engagement— have failed to do so, choosing instead to rally behind American leadership in their mobilization against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Conversely, when President Barack Obama decided in August 2013 not to launch U.S. airstrikes against the Syrian military in retaliation for the chemical attacks against the opposition in Ghouta, European nations supported American inaction and did not take any military or diplomatic action of their own. As a result, Russia moved to fill the vacuum by brokering an international agreement to dismantle of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, thus opening the way to an increasingly important role for the Russian military and Russian diplomacy in Syria, and later on, in the region as a whole.

This waning of European influence in the region is not without precedence. The aborted Anglo–French Suez intervention in 1956 or the constant grip since 1967 of American diplomacy over the Middle East peace process—not to mention the 2003 intervention in Iraq—all remind Europe of its limited room for maneuver in the region. Yet, the striking feature this time is precisely that the Middle East during the Obama administration had witnessed a steady reduction of U.S. presence, leading to a massive disruption of the status quo prevailing in the region. This shift has induced a sharp confrontation between global actors and local players over the redefinition of the new regional balance of power.

With the increased unpredictability of U.S. foreign policy, new features are morphing the political and diplomatic climate in the region. A complex strategic reality is emerging out of the many individual positions taken by the different players: the renewed interest of Russia in the Middle East, the silent presence of China, the hidden networking of Israel, and the growing confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran (leading to the polarization of all relations in the region around this Iran–Saudi division line).

Amid this quest for a new Middle East status quo, Europe would have been justified in fighting for its own interests and would have been perceived as one of the significant diplomatic players in the region. However, so far, the EU has largely chosen not to jump into the escalating competition for regional influence with the sole but significant exception of Libya. Not that Europe has drawn a better record in Libya but it has demonstrated a willingness to be more politically and militarily involved there. It may be that Europe perceived Libya as a close neighbor with specific cross interests, particularly with the increasing number of migrants moving across the central Mediterranean. As such, European nations did act in the early months of the Libyan upheaval. France and the UK, with the cooperation of Arab nations and the support of the rest of the EU members, led in the spring of 2011 a diplomatic offensive at the UN, which was then followed by the military intervention in Libya. And when the fragile political consensus built up with the different Libyan parties fell apart, Europe remained present on the Libyan stage. This active role has not gone without divisions and even competition between the EU members. However, the EU still maintains today a leading role in support of the UN special envoy’s efforts.

The EU’s Role: Dysfunctional, Prudent, or Structurally Flawed?
The EU’s presence in Libya nonetheless pales in comparison to the perception of Europe’s overall inability to regain some influence in the current diplomatic machinations around Syria, Iraq, or Yemen. From that viewpoint, the ongoing confrontation with the U.S. administration over the nuclear agreement with Iran (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or the JCPOA) and the sanctions regime imposed by the U.S. government is another illustration of Europe’s limited range of action on an issue that the EU could rightly present as one of its genuine diplomatic achievements.

Is this attitude a deliberate European choice to play for time? Is it on the contrary the consequence of a dysfunctional Europe unable to adapt its Mediterranean policy to the ongoing transformation of the Arab World? Or could it reflect a more structural flaw inherent in the nature of the EU foreign policy itself? The answer probably follows from a combination of these three factors.

The sense of EU powerlessness on the Middle Eastern stage stems first from the shortcomings of its own system. Faced with the unprecedented challenge of a complex Arab Spring blending together social, economic, and political claims, Europe resorted to old policy recipes rather than new formulas. It relied on its toolbox of deep and comprehensive free trade agreements, mobility partnerships, and preferential loans to accommodate the changing realities of the Arab World. The resulting credibility gap was one from which the EU would never completely recover.

Where a new vision of Mediterranean partnership based on mutual interests and a more sophisticated assessment of the economic regional trends was urgently required, the EU maintained its adherence to its past conception, while the members themselves remained entrenched in defending a zero-sum game approach. In addition to this lack of vision, the internal divisions of the EU have taken their toll. Discussions have been left unresolved between members attached to favoring eastern European partners and those dedicated to the Southern Neighborhood, thus preventing a more ambitious Middle East policy from emerging. Lastly, the EU had the additional pressure of tackling at least three major domestic challenges with the 2008 financial crisis, the growing inflow of migrants and refugees, and a marked increase of terrorist attacks. As these problems have grown in importance, they have enhanced the EU’s tendency to focus on its own inward continental challenges playing into a narrative of an encircled Europe, all of which is rarely propitious to a more open policy.

Equally counterproductive, procrastination—a tradition in EU circles—found fertile ground in the crises during and after the Arab Spring. For the EU it was a matter of being repeatedly caught in the dilemma of following its member states’ political preferences or sticking to a more non-controversial position. Hesitation and delays naturally followed. Under pressure from some members proposing in the early stages of the Syrian conflict a public call for President Bashar Al-Assad to resign, EU diplomats agonized over the legitimacy of seemingly endorsing the regime change rationale. The call for Al-Assad to go came out finally but divisions never disappeared. Problems surfaced again when decisions had to be made on several occasions about supporting the Syrian opposition or suspending the EU delegation activities in Damascus.

At the heart of this controversy was the question of how the EU should respond to sensitive matters and the division of labor between EU member states. EU institutions pleaded that the EU’s Middle East foreign policy be the voice for a long-term vision which would then leave the short-term foreign policy responses up to individual member states—at least those choosing to do so. Unsurprisingly, on most of these sensitive issues, the EU progressively adopted a low-profile attitude and refrained from taking any bold move likely to stir more divisions among EU members. Europe remained vocal but with little impact on events. In the end, this self-imposed powerlessness confined Europe’s role to a provider of humanitarian assistance to the victims in the areas stricken by conflicts and to the displaced populations across the region. In this field, Europe acted diligently and generously. But this inclination only further reinforced the perception of the EU as a payer and not a player. And this reputation still remains today as the Russian leadership presses Europeans to participate in the reconstruction of Syria without giving them much of a say in the ongoing political discussions. Similarly, in Yemen or Libya, the EU is mostly restricted to a support role for the UN special envoys, avoiding any initiative that might complicate their efforts, in stark contrast to the global powers’ attitude, which is usually much less scrupulous when it comes to the UN system.

Yet, does Europe have the will to act as a global power? One of the reasons for the constant misunderstanding—and the cause of so many criticisms addressed to the EU—lies precisely in the confusion over the nature of European integration. As a gathering of twenty-eight member states, several of which have exerted substantial diplomatic influence in the past and still retain some leverage of power, the EU looks to the average observer like the natural successor in the foreign policy field to these individual EU members. But to reach that point, Europe needs to be more than the mere sum of its members. It requires a common understanding about what its foreign policy missions should be, the responsibilities it can carry on its own, and the necessary autonomous means for that purpose.

It cannot just behave as an additional member competing with the other EU members. In the foreign policy field as in all the other sectors of the EU, it requires a clear subsidiarity pact between the EU and its members over the allocation of competences and the division of labor. Today, Europeans disagree on the vision of a common foreign policy. Between those like France who support the concept of Europe as a power (“L’Europe puissance”) and those favoring a looser form of European cooperation, the gap remains wide. In the absence of any consensus between its members, it should come as no surprise that the EU had so little impact on Middle East events. Only when it possesses the necessary assertiveness of a genuine global player will Europe be able to display an efficient foreign policy.

A Roadmap for Europe in a Troubled Region
Arguably one can doubt whether the EU will soon be able to bridge this capability gap. But Europeans are not doomed to impotence. With all its inherent limitations, Europe could still deliver a more impressive performance than it has done so far.

Amidst the intricacies of the Middle East turmoil, what has been missing for a significant European contribution is a vision of the future of EU relations with Middle East partners. A more self-assertive EU could define a roadmap capable of ensuring prosperity and security and defining the role of Europe for these purposes. Assembling previously scattered efforts into a more structured plan away from the piecemeal approach adopted so far would put Europe in a more relevant place. For this improvement to take place, Europeans will have to focus their actions on a few priorities and sharpen their means to act more efficiently. Fundamentally, Europeans need to overcome their divisions and agree on common foreign policy objectives.

From that perspective, some obvious choices cannot be discarded. The promotion of democratic rights and the support for more resilient civil societies will remain part of this agenda as intrinsic components of the EU philosophy. However, two other priorities may stand out as even more relevant, both to be elaborated jointly with Mediterranean partners and both shaping a more original role for Europe.

Regional security could be one of these topics as warfare in the area never seems to end. But rather than jumping into the conflicts with one more military contribution, Europe should take the long view. More specifically, it should work for the promotion of a security pact open to all countries of the region and based upon agreements ranging from practical confidence-building measures, to more principled provisions inspired by the UN Charter. Mutual non¬aggression, non-recourse to the use of force, respect of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and many other principles recognized by international law could be patiently discussed to settle current confrontations and build for the Middle East a regional framework similar to the 1975 Helsinki agreements in Europe. No one can dispute the difficulties of this objective and the patience required to achieve these goals. Yet, this challenging ambition is probably where Europe can use, at best, its resources and experience.

In the same vein, engaging with its Mediterranean partners through dialogue to shape a more mutually beneficial model of economic development in line with local specificities, could also represent for Europe a platform more attuned to its natural diplomatic disposition. With renewed efforts to avoid past errors, Europeans in tandem with their regional partners could investigate ways of accommodating more South–South trade patterns, promoting industrial transport or energy cooperation, and encouraging circular migration between Europe, the Maghreb countries, and Africa. The same can be done subsequently with the countries of the Mashreq taking into consideration their particular economic circumstances. By tackling more long-term challenges—which is more suited to what Europe can offer—this approach would let the EU off the hook in dealing with warfare and hot conflicts and move it into less controversial policies.

Europe did not show its most engaging face in confronting the turmoil that has been shaking the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern region since 2011. It hesitated, procrastinated, and too often stuck to parochial views. Its inner divisions made any ambitious goal an unrealistic objective. The EU’s structural flaws proved too overwhelming to perform in the same league as other global powers. Yet, in spite of its reduced influence, the EU found some role.

Though limited, its action nonetheless alleviated some of the suffering from war and economic hardship. Today, the Arab upheavals look to be moving gradually to a new stage where the high-intensity conflicts give way to a search for fragile stability. It is high time then for Europe to reinvest in the Middle East arena. It must do so with an agenda that fits its own capabilities and promotes resilience for the sake of improved security and prosperity. This is how Europe can make a difference and leave its footprint in the Middle East.

Pierre Vimont is a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe. From March 2016 to January 2017, he served as France’s special envoy for the Middle East peace process, and was nominated to be the personal envoy of the president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, to lead preparations for the Valletta Conference. From December 2010 to March 2015, he served as first executive secretary-general of the European External Action Service. He also served as ambassador to the United States and the European Union, and chief of staff to three former French foreign ministers.

In 1967, the Middle East was transformed, but the impending drama wasn’t clear when the year began. In fact, at the beginning of 1967, the political climate seemed sustainable and unlikely to change. Cold War tensions that divided the Middle East were nothing new, and monarchies and republics continued their quiet sparring to seize the region’s future. As part of that struggle, Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had become mired in a war in Yemen that was depleting his military and draining his treasury.

Undeterred by events in Yemen, Nasser led the Arabs into a war against Israel, which resulted in Israel’s swift capture of the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. With his defeat in the June 1967 war, Nasser’s Arab socialism died, and so did the dream of revolutionary republics leading the Arab World out from the shadow of colonialism and onto the world’s center stage. Nasser had been a rising star in the Middle East for more than a decade. He succeeded in pushing the British out of Egypt and resisting the Tripartite Aggression of 1956. His Voice of the Arabs radio station had become the soundtrack for news and culture throughout the Arab World. However, suddenly, Nasser was no longer the harbinger of the future. After 1967, Arab monarchies steadied, political Islam gained steam, and the Soviet Union began to lose its Arab footholds. The events of 1967 created a new reality and a new dynamic, and this reality persisted for a half-century.

The rulers of today’s Middle East see the region at a similar tipping point, and they see the stakes are as high as they were in 1967. The fact that Arab leaders see their world changing before their eyes is the only explanation for a series of actions, especially from the Gulf, that would be utterly confounding in any other context. The future of the Middle East hinges in part on these leaders’ ability to accurately diagnose their countries’ challenges, on the adequacy of their actions, and on the degree of partnership they can build with the United States. It also depends in significant measure on their citizens’ responses. All of these variables are presently uncertain.

Breaking with the Past
The region is at a tipping point for several reasons. The most obvious is that it is currently enmeshed in three active civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. These conflicts and their resultant refugee flows evoke an enduring sense of crisis in the region and heighten feelings of vulnerability on the part of regional states. They are a steady reminder that even the most authoritarian Arab government is susceptible to an insurrection that could smolder for years. The billions of dollars that these governments have poured into their domestic intelligence services proved inadequate to tamp down rebellion, and the fate of the ancien regimes there—and also in places like Iraq, which remains shattered fifteen years after the United States deposed Saddam Hussein—continues to be uncertain and often dire.

These ongoing wars have also heightened fears of Iranian aggression and expansion. Iran has supported its own allies throughout the region, and sustained instability provides it with opportunities to expand its influence at a low cost. The region’s wars appear to have embedded Iranian-supported groups more deeply in local politics, and it is hard to expunge this influence once it is established, as Lebanon has demonstrated.

For the region’s governments, civil wars are not all bad news. While they provoke regime anxiety, they also have a chilling effect on the populace, helping persuade previously restive populations throughout the Arab World that an unhappy present is preferable to a catastrophically unstable future. Even brutal dictatorships have a certain predictability, and they tend to provide security for most people who abide by their rules. The lasting turmoil in the region’s warzones has engendered acquiescence (or perhaps even grudging public support) for existing governments, because many find misrule preferable to chaos.

Nonetheless, three constants of the past suddenly seem in flux, provoking anxiety for regional governments. The first is that rulers understand that their economic future must be different from their past. State-centered economies and vast public sectors—in republics and monarchies alike—worked when populations were smaller and revenues were growing. Now, the math is catching up to them. States cannot create government jobs nearly fast enough, and their private sectors are much too weak to create adequate jobs for the citizens who flood the job market every year. The prospect of a world in which Middle Eastern oil and gas are less central to the global economy is distressing for countries that export hydrocarbons as well as for countries that export workers for hydrocarbon-driven economies. That encompasses most of the Arab World.

Second, the United States appears less committed to Arab countries’ security than at any time in three-quarters of a century. Alienated by the events of September 11, 2001, fatigued by seemingly endless wars in the Middle East, and excited by the prospect of domestic oil and gas freeing the United States from the region, the American public is increasingly skeptical of U.S. commitments in the Middle East. The Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations’ approaches to Syria are clear signs that restraint will characterize U.S. engagement with the Middle East going forward. President Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy said little about supporting vulnerable allies, and the National Defense Strategy clearly signaled a pivot away from Middle Eastern commitments and toward “great power” competition. Yet, virtually every Arab state has a national security strategy that relies on a strong U.S. security commitment. That commitment is less certain now than at any time in the last seventy years.

Finally, the events of 2011 continued to unnerve Arab leaders who once thought they understood their publics and how to manage them. There is no consensus on what caused the Arab uprisings of that year, and therefore no consensus exists on how to prevent them from recurring. Several of the wealthier Arab states concluded that the uprisings were about material deprivation, but constrained budgets make it hard to continue down the path of increased subsidies. The information and communications revolution certainly played a role, but exactly what role remains unclear. Governments struggle internally to decide what combination of liberty and control, mobilization and repression, largesse and austerity, will secure their future. Too little or too much of any could backfire.

Understanding this context of uncertainty helps explain why Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are engaged in an unprecedented set of military operations in Yemen, intended to beat back Iranian adventurism. It also helps explain why those countries are leading a small Arab coalition against Qatar, which has sought opportunities to align with new regional political forces. It explains the broader Arab outreach to Israel, long a taboo but now seen as an important bulwark against Iran. And it explains increasingly aggressive efforts to control domestic politics.

Middle Eastern governments are commonly described as conservative and cautious, but conservatism and caution are unlikely to suffice in an era in which the stakes are so high and the future is so unclear. A younger generation of leaders, unscarred by the rivalries of the past and stung by the uncertainties of the present, is likely to continue to strike out in new ways. As they tell it themselves, they cannot let up on their enemies because their enemies will not let up on them. These leaders foresee a fight to the finish. Volatility will increase.

Arab publics don’t have many choices. For the most part, they can rise up or hunker down. While the potential costs of rising up are clear, many Arabs lack the patience to hunker down. An unprecedented number of Arab nationals are attempting to flee—to nearby countries, or to Europe. Many of them are not only among the most talented individuals in their countries, but also the beneficiaries of decades of government investment in their education and skills. Their departure relieves some immediate pressure, but it is a severe setback to longer-term prospects for stability and prosperity. Uncertainty over how governments will manage their publics, and how publics will seek to shape their governments, is what makes the current moment so unpredictable.

The U.S. Response, Past, and Future
The United States has more options before it. It can act directly, it can assist, or it can stand by while its friends take their chances—and learn new lessons. Since World War II, the United States has had a strong predilection for the first two options, and it has led international action in the region. From Eisenhower’s efforts to beat back the aggressors in the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis, to Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy” of the 1970s, to negotiations with Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Kuwait, to the Madrid Peace Conference and the Oslo Process in the 1990s, and continuing through the multilateral negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program in the mid-2010s, U.S. diplomacy has been at the center of regional politics.

Militarily, the United States has twice fought wars with Iraq, and deployed tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and sailors to the region for decades. A network of U.S. facilities is scattered throughout the Middle East with the largest contingent in the Gulf. Especially since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has worked closely with Arab partners on counterterrorism, sharing information and directly carrying out attacks on terrorist targets from bases in the region. While the outcomes have been mixed on matters of war and peace, the United States has been a central player trying to craft a regional order and protecting friendly states from all manner of threats from beyond their borders.

The United States has also sought to use assistance to protect allies against internal threats. The Middle East was a major front in the Cold War and the U.S. approach from the Harry Truman administration onward was to “inoculate” the region from the temptations of communism by fostering good government and economic justice. Long after the fear of communism faded from the scene, funding for activities that fall under the rubric of “democracy and governance” has been a consistent feature of U.S. aid.

On the human capital side, U.S. government scholarships have brought thousands of Arab students and educators to the United States, and U.S. government funding—to say nothing of philanthropic efforts—has flowed to American universities in the region. USAID projects, especially in Egypt, have poured more than $1 billion into creating more resilient public health systems, improving child and maternal health, and stamping out endemic disease. Tens of billions more dollars have flowed into economic support activities, infrastructure construction, and technical training. Thousands of military officers from the region have received advanced training in the United States, and thousands of U.S. military advisers have sought to build the skills of their Arab counterparts.

Skeptics in the Arab World argue that U.S. assistance has been in its own narrow self-interest, making Arabs pawns in U.S. adventures and recycling U.S. funds into U.S. businesses and institutions. Not only has the region not benefited, they argue, but sustained poverty and instability have also created the pretext for a sustained U.S. presence. Skeptics in the United States take a similarly dim view of what more than a half-century of assistance has yielded, pointing not only to widespread hostility to the United States in the region, but a record of violence and repression perpetrated by regional allies against their peoples.

Arguably, today’s Arab leaders are fighting the biggest battle of their lives, as they seek to navigate through greater uncertainty than any time in the last half-century. Arguably, too, U.S. fatigue with the Middle East is higher than at any point in the past. In previous years, the U.S. public could be rallied against Soviet aggression or Iranian hostility, but today’s public looks at more than a trillion dollars devoted to fighting wars in the Middle East since 9/11 and wonders what has been won.

The United States has not turned its back on the Middle East. It is likely to engage selectively in the coming years, but the depth of that engagement will almost certainly be less than it has been in living memory. While not necessarily intended, the diminution of U.S. engagement will create vacuums, many of which will be filled by local actors, international powers, or both, and that will create new dynamics. The United States should be cautious.

For rulers facing greater uncertainty than they have known at any other time in their lives, the prospect of this new environment must be daunting. If their analysis is correct and the region is at an inflection point, how Arab leaders navigate the next five years will lay the groundwork for the next half-century, for better and for worse.

This essay is adapted from commentary published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Jon B. Alterman is the senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and director of its Middle East program since 2002. He is also the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy. As a Council on Foreign Relations fellow early in the George W. Bush administration, he was member of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, and special assistant to the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. In 2006, he served as an expert adviser to the Iraq Study Group, known as the Baker-Hamilton Commission. Before that, he was a scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace and at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. From 1993 to 1997, he was an award-winning teacher at Harvard University. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and other major publications. He is a member of the editorial advisory board of Arab Media and Society. Recently, he coauthored a CSIS report entitled “Citizens in Training: Conscription and Nation-building in the United Arab Emirates.”

The last decade of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first might be described as an attempt at peace-driven, then war-driven American-led approaches to the region. In effect, this was nothing new, Western policy was American policy, and America’s allies in the West dutifully fulfilled the role of mostly ornamental accessories, who on occasion brought significant dowries to the table. This was most on display during the defining moment of the era, Operation Iraqi Freedom. Then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair actively supported the United States hoping to give Britain a seat at the table. And yet, Blair’s pretensions were given short shrift by American leaders. On the flip side, French attempts to prevent the Iraq war were just as easily dismissed by the George W. Bush administration. 

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is most certainly better off when faced with shrunken Western ambitions. However, Western leaders have failed to define and agree on a realistic and manageable set of objectives vis-à-vis the region. This confusion is occurring at a moment of enhanced geopolitical contestation in the MENA region (whether in the shape of militarized Russian re-engagement or Chinese-led plans for a Eurasian-led future with the Middle East central to the far-reaching Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The lack of clear Western leadership in the region gives Middle Eastern leaders themselves more space to play the angles between global powers and to navigate these competing ambitions in ways which could benefit the region’s interests. Or at least that would be the case were not so many of the region’s leaders locked in their own internal and external zero-sum struggles that appear to be condemning the region to further conflict and lost opportunity. 

If Europeans, or at least a coalition of leading Western Europeans made up of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom could get their act together, then they might form an axis around which ad hoc but meaningful coalitions could be formed with the advancement of two particular goals in mind. First, how to work with the MENA region in pursuing the vital aspects of broader human security in the twenty-first century—environmental protection, prevention of human trafficking, as well as economic, health, food, and political security. Second, how to prevent, contain, and ultimately de-escalate the conflicts metastasizing in the region with devastating effects on the hopes and lives of millions of inhabitants and with spillover effects for Europe and elsewhere. 

Pax Americana Is Past
To grasp the outsized influence that Western powers have had on the Middle East in the contemporary era, one has only to pause for a moment to consider the nomenclature of the region itself. The “Middle East” is a part of the world that in the most accurate geographical sense is Western Asia. In fact, the “Middle East” is only the Middle East when looked at through the lens of Western Europe and more particularly from the perspective of the two leading colonial powers, Britain and France, who most defined the lines of state division in the MENA region as we know them today. 

As the sun set on the colonial era, the focus of Western power itself migrated to the United States, made clear during the Suez crisis of 1956. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the Middle East as a Western interest was assessed primarily in the context of the Cold War and the competition for influence, allies, resources, and power-projection capacity between the United States and the Soviet Union. 

The post-Cold War era for the West in the Middle East can perhaps best be divided into two phases. The first can be defined as a new Pax Americana (1990–2001) built on a peace dividend. The first Gulf War in 1991 captured this unipolar American moment. The United States pushed Iraq out of Kuwait having secured international legal cover, assembling an unprecedented regional Arab military coalition while compelling Israel to sit on the sidelines, even after Israel was struck by Iraqi Scud missiles. America then pursued a policy known as “dual containment” toward Iran and Iraq, themselves exhausted from just having fought a prolonged war from 1980 until 1988 with estimates of over 1.5 million war and war-related casualties. 

Within months of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker convened a regional peace conference that was to solidify a new Pax Americana peace dividend. America wanted to create a new Middle Eastern political architecture which would embrace America’s traditional ally Israel and a broader array of Arab actors together under one roof (including Syria, the Gulf, and North African states). Ultimately holding the Madrid Peace Conference in the fall of 1991 under the co-sponsorship of the Russian Federation was an act of theater. The Russians in 1991 under Boris Yeltsin were a shadow of their former Soviet selves. No one was confused as to the supposed “equality” of the co-sponsors’ power relations. The Madrid conference was a direct display of Pax Americana power. There were no “junior” power brokers. There was only America. 

The rest of the decade saw an on-again, off-again American-led effort to embed peace deals between Israel and all of its neighbors—Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians—in a regional American system. Israel and Jordan did sign a peace treaty in October of 1994, following fast on the heels of the 1993 Oslo breakthrough with the Palestine Liberation Organization and in May of 2000 the Israeli military finally withdrew from southern Lebanon after an eighteen-year occupation. Nevertheless, Israeli–Syrian and Israeli–Palestinian negotiations ended in acrimony and Israeli–Lebanese talks never got off the ground in the absence of a breakthrough on those other two fronts. 

Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Egypt had already shifted to the Western camp following the American-brokered peace deal with Israel in 1978 and became the second-largest recipient of U.S. military aid, a position Egypt held for over three decades. 

The 1990s were also a time of continued stagnation in the Arab World, as witnessed by the findings of the first Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) published in 2002. The report highlighted the endemic lack of freedom and human rights, empowerment of women, and knowledge acquisition as obstacles to development in the region. As such, the peace dividend-driven Pax Americana effort never took root. It was decisively unravelling when in late 2000 Israeli–Palestinian relations descended into the deadly cycle of the Second Intifada. However, a much greater shock to the system was to come a year later with the Al-Qaeda attack on the American homeland on September 11, 2001. This ushered in an approach that might be thought of as an attempt to impose a war dividend Pax Americana on the Middle East. 

The ostensible reasons given for launching the Iraq war in 2003 were all proven to be spurious, and for many observers that was already clear when Bush administration officials were marketing their public pleas for the war in 2002. Rather, the plans for the Iraqi invasion and the dynamic its architects hoped to set in motion in the region harked back to ideas that had been promoted for several years by neoconservatives in the United States and their Likud allies in Israel. This would be a Pax Americana forced into place through regime change and submission. Neocons assumed these regimes would be favorable to Israel, to American commercial—and especially energy—interests, and to a more expansive definition of American global pre-eminence and military forward-deployment for the post-Cold War and post-9/11 era. Many of these ideas were included in a paper entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” published in 1996 and prepared by pro-Likud neoconservative circles in the United States when Benjamin Netanyahu first became prime minister of Israel. 

Predictably enough, the consequences were disastrous—although not for the American neoconservative protagonists themselves who continue to be treated as serious individuals in media, consultancy, and governmental circles. The domestic American fallout from the ill-conceived Iraq war was sufficiently chastising so that when the events of the so-called Arab uprisings exploded onto the scene at the start of this century’s second decade, Americans were already busy recalibrating and downsizing their ambitious for the region. 

Managing the Fallout
Those two decades of post-Cold War experience provide the backdrop to today’s Western approaches to the region. Both the Barack Obama and now Donald Trump administrations, with stark differences, have attempted to manage the post Second Iraq War fallout. 

Obama’s attempt to reduce American exposure in the Middle East in the context of shifting global power and to distill core American interests came up against constant pushback from both inside and outside his government— from what he eventually termed the “Washington foreign policy blob.” Obama never fully took on, let alone vanquished, that blob and never fully presented a more realistic articulation of American regional interests—something that often appeared to lie just beneath the surface of Obama administration initiatives but was never spelled out. As regional crises proliferated, Obama mostly avoided the knee-jerk American predilection toward military interventions and owning solutions. It was an approach that also conspicuously failed to produce effective diplomatic and coalition-building alternatives (the Iran nuclear deal being an exception). This approach also oversaw the weaponization of the U.S. Treasury as a tool of coercive power to an unprecedented degree. 

The Trump presidency’s policy toward the Middle East and North Africa seems to veer between a more libertarian America first, hands-off approach and a return to neoconservative fantasies of reshaping the region, often, confusingly, in the same day or even in the same speech. One main and ongoing problem of American foreign policy is how to manage and cajole U.S. allies in the region to more closely align with American interests. This has apparently morphed under Trump into an American willingness to be wholly deferential to key allies (think Israel and Saudi Arabia) and to abandon any attempt to independently define U.S. interests. 

At the same time, the Trump administration is redefining the notion of the “West” by taking an overtly adversarial approach to Western allies. The U.S. National Security Strategy report published in December 2017 defines Europe as a competitor. This is at a time when Russia’s re-emergence as a significant regional powerbroker has been cemented and when Chinese commercial and financing power is coming to the fore in the Middle East alongside the initial and tentative staking out of a Chinese security presence with naval patrols off the Somali coast and the establishment of a military base in Djibouti. Add to the mix Europe’s internal problems and divisions and it becomes clear that to talk of a Western policy in the Middle East is increasingly a misnomer. 

Non-Convergence in the MENA Region
It is hard in 2018 to think of important policy areas where there is a strong convergence of both thinking and action between Washington and Brussels, or separate European governments. There are clear European differences with the White House on Iran, Israel–Palestine and the intra-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) split. There are also differences of emphasis on Syria and Libya, and how to handle Egypt. Even where there was agreement, for instance on being more supportive of the new leadership in Saudi Arabia, this had mostly translated into competition for the expected economic opportunities of contracts and investments. It might be helpful to think in terms of three categories of problems relating to Western convergence on the MENA region: issues on which there is a disagreement, not only on policy to be pursued but also on whether the specific issue is even a priority; areas in which there is a shared approach and prioritization but also competition for the spoils; and areas in which the priority and the goal are shared but not the means for achieving them. 

For example, migration would fall into the first category. For many European governments handling the refugee and asylum-seeker crisis generated in large measure from, or through, the Middle East has become a preeminent policy challenge. That is simply not the case for America. But it goes further, in key European capitals such as Berlin and Paris, there is an apparently well-founded suspicion that Washington is keen to sow internal European division over the migration crisis and is doing little to help solve it at its source. If the United States sees Europe through a competitor zero-sum lens, then the debilitating effect that the migration debate is having on European cohesion is a net positive. 

While it is true that at the crux of this issue is a need for Europeans to get their own house in order (on national and collective levels) and that the challenge of migration will continue beyond the immediate Middle East-generated crises, it is also the case that Europe is in a far weaker position to effectively respond when alone in terms of the key conflicts and third parties driving the refugee phenomenon. Europe is hamstrung when there is no ability to work in effective alliance with the United States and little European appetite to work constructively beyond the circle of traditional allies or to prioritize in its relations with Russia (for instance, prioritize Syria and migration or Ukraine). 

Regarding the second category, Western actors certainly share a keen interest in enhancing economic ties with much of the MENA region, but for obvious commercial reasons they often seek to do so in competition; that is unlikely to change. As Gulf actors have become increasingly active in inward investments internationally, in spreading the asset portfolios of their sovereign wealth funds, and recently in significantly ramping up their military purchases, competition for those spoils between the United States, France, and the UK, for instance, has intensified. When Saudi Arabia started discussing an IPO flotation for part of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, also known as ARAMCO, there was a queue of international stock market suitors backed by their respective governments. Following visits to both London and Washington D.C. earlier this year, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman unlocked 65 billion pounds sterling in mutual trade and investment opportunities with the UK as well as announcing that the Kingdom is considering $400 billion in U.S. investments over the coming period. 

Energy remains a principal driver of Western interests in the region and goes a long way to explaining positions taken by Western leaders and companies in Libya and Algeria, in Iraq and the Kurdish regional areas and elsewhere. Also, we see some of the divisions over Iran and the overall desire to avoid being entangled in the intra-GCC crises being born from Western leaders’ desire for Middle Eastern energy and other spoils. This is not just about the energy reserves but, often just as important, the transportation networks. So, one should be clear-eyed on the political policy carryover of economic interests. Western leaders’ attempts to coordinate pushback, for instance vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia on the Yemen war, frequently will crash on the rocks of protecting commercial interests vis-à-vis Riyadh.

The security challenges posed by the region, not least in terms of the spillover threats emanating from the Middle East and North Africa to Western homeland security, represent the third arena in which there is a consensus on the importance and the basics but not on best policy practices. As the threat of both organized and atomized Middle East-related terror has become a consistent and prominent feature on the homeland security scene across Western nations, cooperation and coordination between intelligence agencies have intensified to an unprecedented degree. This holds true both among Western intelligence agencies and between them and allied states in the region. 

The joint efforts that have gone into tracking foreign Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters is a case in point. In the pushback against ISIS and Al-Qaeda affiliates, a number of Western and regional security agencies and militaries are several years now into conducting an array of joint actions across significant swathes of the Middle East that include parts of Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, and also occasionally further afield in the Sahel. However, the ability to maintain practical cooperation belies substantive policy differences over how to understand and impact broader trends and trajectories, how to achieve sustainable de-escalation, and address root causes. Some of those differences, especially between Americans and Europeans, have been exacerbated under the Trump administration. Trump has demonstrated a delight and enthusiasm in cooperating most closely with neo-authoritarians. While Europeans hardly have a great track record in that regard, there is an underlying assumption in many European capitals that domestic repression breeds the conditions for recruiting and advancing the agenda of violent extremists. That argument fails to resonate within the Trump White House. 

As conflicts permeate so much of the regional landscape, gaps in Western responses have become visible across a wide range of regional dilemmas. European and American leadership are at odds as to the way in which to interpret a variety of issues, including: how to interpret and indeed whether to meddle in Iranian domestic politics as well as the prospects for downsizing Iranian influence in Iraqi politics; how far to align with Saudi Arabia over the Yemen war or the intra-GCC split with Qatar; whether to discreetly re-engage the Bashar Al-Assad regime; how far to alienate Turkey; whether to view Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as an asset or a liability; how to approach Israel’s ever-hardening line against the Palestinians; and the relative merits of cooperating with Libya’s competing factions, not least General Khalifa Haftar. 

Some differences have of course always existed. Part of the discord currently on display is also the result of the number and complexity of crises happening in parallel. Yet, there is also something new at play that is likely to be more long-lasting and could lead to a recalibration in important aspects of where the region fits into global geopolitics and geostrategy. Europe itself is experiencing massive internal ruptures and divisions. It is hard to think of a period of such Western incoherence. At stake is the entire Western project, or mission, for the world. 

After the Liberal International Order
Western policy has always been transactional and rooted in self-interest. That is legitimate. Western attention and a more significant degree of unified and coherent ambition have not exactly been a harbinger of endless happiness and joy for the peoples of the region. From colonial administrations to the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority; the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programmes to the military pre-eminence of the U.S. Central Command; and the ubiquity today of unmanned aerial vehicles operated from afar patrolling the region’s skies, Western domination and denial of local agency has been more of a curse than a blessing. The shortcomings highlighted in the series of United Nations AHDRs speaks to local failings but also to this legacy and continued prevalence of Western (and other) external interference. 

And yet, there has also been an overarching story to tell, an attempt at a grand narrative portrayed by Western governments to their people and the greater world. Mostly this story has revolved around promoting something called the “liberal international order.” Partly, the liberal international order constituted a post-colonial continuation of the colonial mindset. This mindset stressed the so-called civilizing mission under the guise of which, in practice, colonized people were invariably exploited and their colonizers enriched. Despite its inherent imperialist flaws, the liberal international order was also in part a sincere attempt to absorb the lessons of the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century (especially in Europe) and to establish an international set of rules and conventions to be universally respected. Partly too, the establishment of the liberal international order became indistinguishable from what is known as American exceptionalism—an attempt to rebrand American hegemony as something more warm, fuzzy, and altogether altruistic. 

The merits and failings of the liberal international order paradigm as it pertains to the Middle East can be debated ad infinitum. The key point for our purposes is that it is over. Vestiges remain, attempts at rehabilitation will no doubt be periodically pursued, but a combination of America and Europe no longer retains enough capacity, ambition, mutual comity, or domestic political legitimacy to revive the project. In electing Trump, America definitively killed the brand. The pertinent question is what could, and perhaps should, replace the liberal international order. The current White House apparently has something more transparently brutish and self-serving in mind. American defense contractors, lobbyists and consultancies will double down on enjoying the fruits of this harvest, possibly along with members of the Trump family itself. Saudi and Israeli leadership will be encouraged and supported to further accelerate down their current self-destructive paths. Palestinians and Yemenis among others will bear the brunt of the direct consequences. As long as the U.S. administration is acting primarily as a spoiler in the region, Europeans will have to tease out their own ideas and impact-generating policies. 

Cowering or Crossing the Abyss
This final eclipse of the Western model has coincided with a period of dramatic change for the region, at both the local and geopolitical levels. The features of local disruption are well known—an Iraq in its second decade of post-Saddam implosion, a collapsed Syria, a self-absorbed and brittle Egypt, a Saudi Arabia where the reform agenda has been eclipsed by astonishingly brazen crackdowns at home and adventurism abroad, an Israel seemingly unaware of limitations on its grandiose ambitions, alongside a Turkey now coming to grips with having over-extended its reach, and an Iran that has mostly benefited from ill-conceived U.S. interventions but now must proceed cautiously. Domestically MENA region states continue to face challenges of consensus-based and publicly legitimized governance, agreed and respected rules of the political, economic and, legal game, and space for civil society. Initial glimpses of progress in some places, following the 2011 uprisings, have gone into retreat (Tunisia being a notable exception). This combustible current regional mix can either be encouraged over the abyss or walked back from the brink. Western leaders can encourage and work toward one or the other of those paths—the choice should be clear. 

At the same time, China’s footprint in the MENA region is being felt in new and still emerging ways, principally at the level of financing, infrastructure, and trade as part of its BRI. The BRI simply cannot become the consequential support ballast for a Chinese-driven Eurasian future without at least elements of functionality, governability, and predictability in the Middle East. While those considerations, alongside energy dependency, have pushed the region up the list of Chinese interests and priorities, the predominant approach from Beijing currently appears to be a continued avoidance of extending significant equities into the hard-security and conflict prevention/management/resolution realm. China, understandably, feels happy for that to continue to be primarily the headache of Americans and others. 

The other significant geopolitical shift, as has been mentioned, is that of Russia’s re-emergence. Obviously, this process has been most visible in the Syrian arena, but one should not underestimate Russia’s stepped-up diplomatic activity, military cooperation, and economic activity. Russia has an ability now to intensify its ties across the multiple regional divides and fractures. As such, Russia maintains strong and proven working ties, not only with Iran, the Syrian government, Hezbollah, and Iraq, but also with Israel, Turkey, the Saudis, and Emiratis, alongside Qatar, as well as Egypt, Algeria, competing Libyan factions, and more. This is not a strategy with a hegemonic aspiration. Yet, these activities make Russia an unavoidable and noteworthy player in the region today. 

This is the local and geopolitical backdrop against which any attempt at forging a new Western policy will need to be configured. Undoubtedly, there will be many areas in which it is impossible to forge effective working alliances even if in certain places where Western leadership looks to work beyond the level of national governments and to build alliances at the civil society, sub-state local or regional level. Prospects perhaps look most bleak when it comes to promoting enfranchised citizens or open societies in the Middle East. At this point, the diplomatic toolbox is limited. America has, for now, taken a pass in this realm of human rights and open societies. International allies are few and far between and do not include Russia or China, and there is weighty historical baggage of selective engagement and damning inconsistency. 

In two main areas, however, the prospects for doing a better job of constructive Western engagement with the MENA region are less bleak: that is in conflict de-escalation and overall human security issues. 

Not all of the conflicts with which the region is beset lend themselves to short or even medium-term resolution, but across the board, openings exist for improvement, for de-escalation, to put pieces in place for eventual resolutions or even, in some instances, to freeze a conflict, which may be a vastly better reality than that which currently prevails. Elements of each can be pursued, whether in Yemen, Libya, Syria or the occupied Palestinian territories. 

Likewise, there are common interests between Westerners and the peoples of the Middle East in pursuing improved human security. That would include Western leaders working with their Middle Eastern counterparts in the realms of environmental, personal, and food security, as well as climate devastation, human trafficking and criminal networks, and public health crises. The West and the MENA region have much to mutually gain from guaranteeing essential global navigation routes that are dependent on movement through Middle Eastern waterways. 

While much of this is known, the question is whether Western actors will take the necessary measures to operate more effectively. American partnership in much of this agenda is unfortunately unlikely under the Trump administration, but allies exist in niches of that administration, and in Congress, and some of the groundwork can be laid for a possible post-2020 change. If Europeans are to take a lead, there are other prerequisites, not least that European leaders will have to get their own house in order, including developing greater independent defense and security capacities and a more ambitious forward-leaning diplomacy. 

Overlapping interests vis-à-vis the MENA region do exist between the West, Russia, China, and other international actors. Those should be seen as building blocks rather than discordant sideshows in relationships otherwise characterized by hostility. Most importantly, the fracture lines within the region should be eased rather than rent further asunder. Creating ad hoc external contact groups and interventions on specific conflicts and crises can advance that de-escalation agenda. That could also help empower the UN mechanisms and envoys whose tasks have been well-nigh impossible under the current circumstances. 

It is inevitable that the Middle East will remain a globally contested space. However, it is unnecessary and unacceptable that this region should be the source of convulsions which ultimately undermine the interests of and create debilitating and devastating consequences for all the actors involved.  

Daniel Levy is president of the U.S./Middle East Project, an independent policy institute based in London and New York. He is also a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and served as its Middle East and North Africa program director from 2012 until 2016. Previously, he was senior fellow and director of the Middle East Task Force at The New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., and worked at the Century Foundation in New York. Levy was a member of the Israeli delegation to the 2001 Taba Summit and of the negotiating team for the Oslo II agreement in 1995. He served as special adviser to Ehud Barak’s office and was head of the Jerusalem Affairs unit from 1999 until 2000. He is also a founder of J Street and founding editor of the Middle East Channel at Foreign Policy, as well as a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF).

In 2015, a senior-serving general in the British military told the Sunday Times that there could be “a mutiny” if the Labour Party were to win power under its newly chosen leader, Jeremy Corbyn. “The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardize the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul, to prevent that. You can’t put a maverick in charge of a country’s security,” said the general. 

At the time, few envisaged that Corbyn—a veteran socialist, anti-militarist, and supporter of Global South liberation struggles like that of the Palestinians— had any serious chance of moving into 10 Downing Street, and the general’s remarks were quickly forgotten. But in 2017, when Prime Minister Theresa May called an election fully expecting to crush Corbyn’s Labour and secure herself an unassailable mandate, the opposition confounded expert predictions. Labour surged from the mid-20s to poll 40 percent in the final vote, winning more individual votes than former Prime Minister Tony Blair had in two of his three election wins, and leaving May clinging to power by her fingertips, a permanently diminished figure. One year on, Labour and the Conservatives are polling neck and neck, the government is deeply divided over Brexit, and Corbyn becoming prime minister—the general’s nightmare scenario—is an entirely realistic prospect. 

The coming departure from the European Union, in other words, is not the only major change on the horizon for British foreign relations. British politics have shifted decisively from a long period of consensus to one of sharp contestation, with two very different visions of the country and Britain’s foreign policy poised on a knife edge. Whichever one of these visions prevails over the short or long term will take the United Kingdom’s (UK) place in the world into uncharted territory, a development which should be understood in the historical context of Britain’s long-term decline as a global power and its struggles to adapt to that reality.

This matters for international relations with the Middle East. The fact that Britain has lost its empire and does not have the sheer stature and structural power of the United States does not mean that it is an insignificant player. Far from it. The UK has a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, is one of a tiny elite of nuclear armed states, and one of an even smaller elite capable of projecting military power on an intercontinental basis. It also ranks as a major international arms dealer, especially to the Middle East, where it trains and supports many of the region’s security forces. It is difficult to think of a single armed conflict in the region’s recent history where the UK was not either involved itself or a major material supporter of one of the belligerents. 

Additionally, Britain has the world’s fifth-largest economy, is home to the world’s leading financial center, and is a leading source of, and destination for, capital investment to and from the Middle East. Two of Britain’s (and the world’s) largest corporations, British Petroleum (BP) and Shell, have a long history of involvement in the region’s hydrocarbon industry. Diplomatically, militarily, and economically, the UK is deeply involved in the Middle East, where the outcome of its current political impasse, and resulting choice of future direction, is bound to have important knock-on effects. 

Britain’s relations with the Middle East are best understood (primarily if not exclusively) as an outgrowth of its former role in the region as an imperial power for a century and a half, and with particular reference to the Gulf Arab monarchies. The UK has a strategic and commercial interest in Gulf hydrocarbons, an economic interest in various forms of petrodollar recycling (from financial inflows to arms sales), and a consequent diplomatic and military commitment to upholding the wider conservative regional order. Given the domestic political situation in Britain, UK–Middle East relations now sit at a crossroads, making this a particularly interesting juncture from which to survey the situation. 

Empire’s Long Decline
Britain’s involvement in the Middle East substantively began in the early nineteenth century as it attempted to establish a buffer zone protecting its empire in India from rival powers. A network of protectorates was established in the Gulf, which developed into the subregional state system that we know today. Once oil was discovered, quickly becoming the lifeblood of the industrialized world economy, the value of the region—both as an economic prize and as a source of geostrategic power—was impossible to miss. Winston Churchill’s decision in 1914 to take a controlling stake for the British government in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (the firm which later became BP) was the earliest expression of this new reality. 

Victory in World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire allowed Britain, alongside France, to extend its reach deeper into the region, acting as imperial godfather in the formative years of the Iraqi and Jordanian states, while maintaining its grip on Egypt and the strategically vital Suez Canal, which now linked the UK not only to the Indian subcontinent but also to the oil reserves of Iran, Iraq, and the Gulf. The exertions of World War II, however, served final notice on the UK’s status as a global empire, with the United States now dominating as the clear leader of the capitalist bloc. By the 1950s, with India lost, and a worldwide anti-colonial movement in the ascendency, the long process of imperial decline had begun. 

New circumstances dictated a new set of priorities. From here on, London would support U.S. global leadership, and attempt to hold on to as much of its political and economic power and status as possible, under that umbrella. These principles applied particularly to the Middle East, now a key site of geopolitical competition where Britain also had its own specific interests to attend to. Its control over Gulf oil made a significant, positive contribution to its precarious postwar balance of payments, in turn upholding the value and prestige of the pound sterling. It is these concerns that primarily explain the panic in Whitehall that led to the tripartite aggression of 1956 over the Suez Canal, through which so much of Britain’s oil imports flowed at the time. 

Independent nationalism, whether of the Nasserite variety or that found elsewhere in Iran, Iraq, Oman, and Yemen, was now the principal threat to Britain’s standing in the region, as it successively lost military footholds in Egypt, Iraq, and Aden. Further currency crises in the 1960s led the then-Labour government of Harold Wilson to conclude that the issue of imperial overstretch would have to be confronted. The permanent military presence “east of Suez” would be relinquished as of January 1971, to the dismay of both the United States, which was too preoccupied with Vietnam to take on any additional geostrategic responsibilities on behalf of the capitalist West, and the Gulf states who were driven into a state of near-panic at the prospect of losing their protector from the nationalist tide. 

The subsequent oil shocks of the 1970s transformed the standing of the Gulf oil producers, who now controlled their own oil industries and revenues, and set the scene for the establishment of the modern relationship between those monarchies and the UK. Britain would continue to arm and train the military and security forces that kept these regimes in place, and stand ready to intervene directly against larger threats, as it did under U.S. leadership when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. Britain’s capacity to play this role was supported in part by massive arms contracts with the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, which helped to sustain its domestic military industry. Petrodollars also flowed freely into the UK banking system as the neoliberal turn under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her successors tipped the balance of the British economy toward financial services and away from industrial exports. 

This then is where Britain’s relationship with the Middle East has stood in recent decades: focused primarily on the Gulf Arab monarchies, prioritizing the recycling of petrodollars into the British economy and military industry, and providing the arms, training, and support necessary to help preserve a conservative regional order both within the Gulf and in the wider regional state system, under U.S. leadership. 

Britain and the Middle East in an Age of Crisis
With the Soviet Union gone, Saddam Hussein’s regime crippled, and Iran forced into isolation, the start of the twenty-first century looked promising for Anglo-American power in the Middle East. The last forces of independent nationalism were as weak as they had ever been, and the field was clear of any serious geopolitical rival. Now, looking back with almost two decades of hindsight, it is evident that the current state of uncertainty in British foreign relations owes a great deal to the way in which Washington and London spectacularly botched the unipolar moment in the Middle East at the turn of the millennium, starting with the invasion of Iraq. 

The prize was clear: a client government and a permanent military presence at the heart of the world’s energy-producing region, Iraq’s oil reserves back into circulation on terms favorable to the United States and the UK (rather than Russia, China, and France), and perhaps above all, a demonstration of Washington’s geopolitical omnipotence heralding the start of a “new American century.” In the end, however, what was demonstrated was not the extent of Anglo- American power but its limits, and this was particularly true in the British case. Tasked with securing Basra province, the British singularly failed to impose themselves on the situation, just as they failed to discharge their allotted duties in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Britain was trusted with delivering a part of the American strategy in both cases, and in both cases proved to be a military disappointment to its American allies.

The subsequent failure to secure a stable post-Gaddafi order in Libya after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention of 2011 meant that Washington and London had been unsuccessful in securing their objectives in three consecutive foreign interventions. The instability and violence left in the wake of these interventions—particularly in Iraq where the group that became the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) gestated in the post-Saddam state of chaos—only accentuated the loss of prestige and credibility for Anglo-American military power, generating public disquiet at home and thus raising the political cost of, and resistance to, any future interventions. 

The impact on domestic politics was not only due to the experience of defeat, but the loss of moral authority suffered by Washington and London as a result of the way these interventions had been undertaken. From the palpable dishonesty over Iraq’s supposed “weapons of mass destruction” to the gruesome revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib, the image of Western power as a benign force for good in the world was coming under serious strain. In London, well over a million people had protested the invasion of Iraq in February 2003, and subsequent events proved devastating to Blair’s reputation. In 2015, Corbyn was able to win and secure the Labour leadership in part due to the credibility he had gained among party members for his prominent opposition to the conduct of the entire “War on Terror,” in contrast to the record of a party establishment now discredited in members’ eyes. 

The bill came due in August 2013, when David Cameron’s government lost a House of Commons vote on taking direct military action against the Bashar Al-Assad regime in Syria, a significant event in a chain that led to Barack Obama ultimately rejecting the option to intervene in that case. There had been no prospect of the United States and the UK effecting a regime change in any event, or even of substantively altering the balance of forces in the conflict, and yet the Commons vote prompted an outpouring of existential angst from many within the British political class. The Labour opposition’s vote against the war under the then-leader Ed Miliband, and the rebellion within the ranks of the Cameron government, had been prompted by the new mood of public skepticism over military endeavors in the Middle East. This, it was said, was a rejection of “internationalism” (which is what western imperialism looks like from a liberal point of view) and a turn to “isolationism.” 

This is the context within which we should understand the general’s threat to mutiny against a future Prime Minister Corbyn. The policies which he asserted “the army just wouldn’t stand for” included the scrapping of nuclear weapons, withdrawal from NATO, and (employing a word choice which will fascinate specialists in gender studies) “any plans to emasculate and shrink the size of the armed forces.” The anxiety, expressed regularly by senior figures in and around the armed forces as well as their ideological bedfellows in Parliament, is that Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya have proven to be not only military but political disasters, turning significant numbers of the public decisively against Britain’s longstanding role of helping to police a global political and economic order conducive to the interests of the British state and British capitalism. 

This anxiety is probably justified. The substantive rebooting of the British Labour Party, from the version led by Blair to the different version now contending for power, is in part a product of the military and foreign policy experiences of the past two decades. Yet, the domestic situation is perhaps the major factor behind both this and the polarized state of UK politics today. 

The Polarization of British Politics
Four decades after Thatcher oversaw the abandonment of the postwar social democratic economic model and its replacement with the modern neoliberal settlement, the long-term effects of that shift, intensified by a tough period of fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crash, are driving a transformation in the British political scene. The current left-right polarization of British politics and the deadlock between two sharply opposed visions arises from a combination of this economic legacy, a generational change in social attitudes, and an intense debate about Britain’s place in the world covering—but by no means limited to—Brexit. 

In economic terms, Britain is divided between those who own residential property and those with next to no chance of ever doing so; between those with secure employment and those without; and between those more and those less affected by stringent cutbacks in public spending. Because the effects on society of neoliberalism and then austerity deepen over time, the people most negatively affected by those policies tend to be the young, meaning that the economic divide maps on to a generational divide. Property owners in secure employment tend to be older, while those employed precariously and living in expensive, poor-quality rented properties tend to be younger. Furthermore, as social attitudes liberalize over time, we find that the younger and economically more insecure tend toward social liberalism while the older and economically better-off tend to retain more conservative attitudes. 

These, speaking very broadly, are the defining features of Britain’s divided political landscape. Both income and age are extremely strong predictors of whether or not one votes Conservative or Labour, and those two parties have both achieved hegemony over their sides of the political spectrum. The seminal miscalculation made by the Liberal Democrats Party to go into coalition with the Conservative government in 2010 destroyed their credibility among their liberal-left base, while the United Kingdom Independence Party ironically lost its raison d’être after the 2016 Brexit referendum. 

Corbyn and May have seized the opportunities presented by these developments, and returned British politics to a two-party system, with Labour representing the youth and the younger middle-aged, the socially liberal and the economically insecure, and the Conservatives representing the older middle-aged and the elderly, the socially conservative and the economically comfortable. The current result is electoral deadlock, with the question being who can keep their coalition together and maximize their vote. The long term plainly favors Labour, but the crucial short term is up for grabs. 

Foreign affairs and Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world raise questions that also map on to these key domestic dividing lines. Conservative attacks on Corbyn essentially calling him an extremist and a traitor play well in the eyes of older and more conservative nationalistic voters, while Corbyn’s anti-militarism and left-internationalism play better amongst the younger and more socially liberal. In terms of Brexit, while Labour has been hamstrung in its response by the fact that a substantial minority of its supporters in the country voted “Leave,” the Brexit vote was overwhelmingly a vote from the political right. The clear majority of Brexit voters were middle-class property owners, predominantly in the south, and right-wing social attitudes such as opposition to multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, and LGBT rights were strongly correlated with the choice to vote Leave. 

Membership of the European Union was always resented by the more chauvinistic nationalists of the right, representing as it did the loss of empire and a reorientation toward dealing with neighbors as peers, rather than acting as a dominant power. The urge to break from Europe and somehow reassert Britain’s status as a freewheeling economic power—privately scorned by civil servants as “Empire 2.0”—is symptomatic of the British right’s inability to cope with the UK’s loss of status in the late twentieth century, just as “Make America Great Again” speaks to a domestic and nationalistic chauvinist backlash on the other side of the Atlantic. Corbyn’s Labour, in contrast, represents another side of Britain—unencumbered by post-imperial status anxiety and happy to reject the military adventurism of the Blair years. 

Alternative Trajectories
Where then might this all lead? No expert would make any predictions confidently after the experiences of the past few years. That being said, in the short term at least—and depending on which way the deadlock breaks between now and the next election—two possible trajectories present themselves. 

The first possible trajectory entails a Conservative government effecting a relatively “hard” Brexit in economic and diplomatic terms. This would in turn prompt a deepening of ties with the United States. Demands from Washington that Britain increase military spending (above already high levels) would be difficult to resist, as would the temptation to join any military actions in the Middle East or elsewhere so as to prove the enduring worth of the Anglo-American alliance. The ongoing and profound instability in the region—with the intense political–economic pressures that led to the uprisings in 2011 still very much present—means that opportunities to undertake such interventions are likely to be in ready supply. And if recent history is anything to go by, further failures will only intensify the drive to get it right next time and restore credibility (likely leading to further failure and further destabilization). 

Meanwhile, any impediment to trade with the European Union is likely to have a severely detrimental impact on Britain’s balance of payments. Also, the Conservative government’s energetic efforts to deepen ties with the Gulf Arab monarchies reflects the fact that, in the Global South, serious foreign investment opportunities are not abundant beyond the BRICS states (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the Gulf. Although Britain’s relationship with Gulf monarchies can be described as unbalanced interdependence, with the majority of power sitting rather more on the British side, Brexit would tie Britain closer to its Gulf allies which in turn would strengthen the hand of those monarchies, leading to a deepening of British support over issues such as the Yemen conflict. 

That being said, if the world gets serious about climate change and makes moves to ensure that a sizeable chunk of global hydrocarbon reserves are left in the ground, the well of petrodollars will soon dry up, and Brexit Britain will find itself running out of options. Similarly, if Donald Trump wins a second term and the hard-right turn in U.S. politics solidifies, close relations with Washington will become even more politically toxic for May and her successors than they were for Blair. The Tory “hard Brexit” path is likely to be both more interventionist militarily and more unstable. 

Under an alternative scenario, a Labour government—taking power either in a few months’ time if the May administration falls, or in a few years—undertakes a “softer” Brexit, formally leaving the European Union but staying closely linked with it in economic and diplomatic terms. This would give a Corbyn government space to maintain distance with any Republican administration in Washington and to wean itself off the need for Gulf petrodollar inflows to finance the trade deficit. The catastrophic war in Yemen has horrified many on the left, strengthening Corbyn’s hand in terms of his clear preference to cut arms exports to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchs. He would have to move carefully here since those regimes have the means to retaliate, not least by pulling their investments from the UK. 

Military interventions in the region, needless to say, will be off the table entirely in a Corbyn government, though certain situations, such as those pertaining to Syria, could place Corbyn under severe political pressure to act militarily in defense of human rights. Notwithstanding this, and if Britain’s long-term socioeconomic trends continue to favor Labour, we might see the beginning here of a rather different relationship with the world. This new British relationship would be shorn of much of the familiar post-imperial baggage. The replacement of President Trump with a President Sanders or Warren would certainly make that process much easier. 

These then are the broad contours of the present moment in British politics and foreign relations, with clear implications for its role in the Middle East over the coming years. Any writer even slightly resistant to cliché must strive, when writing about Britain’s place in the world, to avoid reaching for that famous quote from Dean Acheson, in which Harry Truman’s secretary of state said the UK has “lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.” 

And yet, almost seven decades on from Acheson’s pithy observation, his quip continues to be prescient. We will learn in the coming years whether Britain is ready to move on from its post-imperial crisis of status anxiety and find a new way to relate to the global community, or whether that long and undignified process has some ways yet to run. 

David Wearing is teaching fellow in international relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. Prior to that, he was a researcher at the School of Oriental and AfricanStudies. He has contributed commentary and analysis to the BBC, Guardian, CNN, Independent, and others. His is the author of AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain.

Energy security, migration, the promotion of private and public investment, and the fight against jihadism; at least for the past twenty years, these have been Italy’s main areas of concern in its foreign policy toward the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The new government sworn in on June 1, 2018—built on the uneasy alliance between Matteo Salvini’s right-wing League Party and the anti-establishment Five-Star Movement—is unlikely to upset these priorities. All indications point nevertheless to the management of migration and the development of preferential relations with all regional actors involved in these flows—especially as transit countries—being by far the most prominent item on the Mediterranean agenda of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and, especially, of Salvini, the new minister of interior and deputy prime minister. 

Italy’s foreign policy priorities are a reflection of the country: a middle power with a limited ability to shape its southern neighborhood and the wider region to its liking and yet still commanding a vast network of economic, political, and cultural links. Its foreign policy is a projection of its own internal political and social concerns rather being driven by a truly strategic vision for the region. In particular, the increased unease of the Italian population toward the flow of migrants to its southern shores—which began in earnest in the early 1990s in parallel with the demise of the Cold War system and of Italy’s so-called First Republic—has led since the early 2000s to the development of reactive policies and ad hoc alliances often driven by the need to respond to the short-term worries of the Italian electorate. This contrasts with the larger, strategic, and oftentimes normative regional outlook, that had characterized Italy’s “Levantine” policy during the 1980s as well as the ambitious present-day regional policy and industrial ventures pursued by Italy’s oil giant Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI). 

Italy’s new coalition government has been widely described as the first populist government in a major European country and, as a result, both its internal and external policies are closely watched as a potential indication of how other cognate parties and movements in Europe might behave if in power. Its coalition agreement is based on an inward-looking and Eurosceptic political agenda in which foreign policy is relegated to a somewhat marginal position. However, the first official state visit by a member of Conte’s government—Salvini’s visit to Libya on June 25, 2018—already signaled the importance attached to cooperating with Libyan authorities to manage the southern migration route, even if the price is neglecting Libya’s poor human rights record in dealing with transit migrants. 

Italy has also repeatedly attempted to take the lead in bringing together the main actors in the Libyan crisis for talks. The fight against jihadist terrorism and the eventual resolution of the Syrian crisis are also part of the regional policy of Conte’s government, but so far no coherent strategic vision has been developed to coordinate its activities on these fronts. In parallel with the pursuit of these agendas, the promotion of Italy’s economic interests and energy policy (largely driven by ENI and its subsidiaries) is likely to continue. In this, Italy’s energy policy for the Middle East and North Africa region seems to be caught in a hard place between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s attempts to act as the gatekeeper for the energy resources of the eastern Mediterranean and the opportunities posed by the looming conclusion of the Syrian civil war. 

The substantial continuity that can be expected in Italy’s regional policy therefore echoes the oft-quoted line proffered in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s famed historical novel The Leopard: “If we want everything to stay the same, everything has to change.” Despite the hype, the regional outlook of Conte’s government and the main items on his agenda do not signal any qualitative break with the recent past. 

The Rise and Fall of Italy’s “Levantine Policy”
Italy’s foreign policy in the Mediterranean region has traditionally been played out at several levels—including not only bilateral relations but also a significant contribution to UN-led peacekeeping forces and, more recently, the support for EU-wide initiatives—and by a vast array of state and non-state actors, such as private and state-owned companies and NGOs. Italy’s relations with North Africa, the Levant, and the Gulf are, in fact, influenced by centuries of political, social, and economic exchanges, culminating in the first half of the twentieth century with the colonial occupation of Libya. In the second half of the century, and especially after the 1973 oil embargo, energy security figured high among the priorities of successive Italian governments. These governments actively supported the infrastructural projects and joint ventures that ENI had been pursuing in the region since the 1950s, under the shrewd leadership of its visionary and charismatic founder Enrico Mattei. 

At the bilateral level, Italy developed a distinctive foreign policy approach toward the Middle East especially in the 1980s, during the tenure of Foreign Affairs Minister Giulio Andreotti (1983–1989). Despite his commitment to maintaining good working relations with the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Andreotti’s “Levantine” foreign policy was designed to delink Italy’s foreign policy from that of Italy’s traditional transatlantic allies and establish closer relations with the Arab World by directly supporting the Palestinian cause. Italy’s refusal to hand over to the United States the mastermind allegedly behind the hijacking of the MS Achille Lauro, a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operative called Abu Abbas, during the 1985 incident in Sigonella, Sicily, was considered one of the few major diplomatic crises between Italy and the United States, and greatly enhanced Italy’s reputation in the Arab World. Andreotti was later keen to portray his strategic choices as driven by principled concerns and a genuine sympathy toward the plight of the Palestinian people. In 2005, Andreotti famously claimed, “had I been born in a refugee camp in Lebanon, perhaps I would have become a terrorist myself.” The realpolitik lesson of price hikes in Italy during the 1973 oil crisis, however, must have also played a role in Andreotti’s showing a less adversarial face to the Arab World than several of Italy’s transatlantic allies. 

The end of the Cold War—and of the political and ideological alignments that had contributed to it—coincided with the first substantive wave of illegal immigration reaching Italy’s shores, originating mostly from Albania and the lower Balkans. In August 1991, after a long standoff with the Italian authorities, the merchant ship Vlora docked in Bari with more than ten thousand Albanian migrants on board. Thousands more refugees and migrants reached Italy’s southeastern beaches and harbors through the late 1990s. As such, the management of migration never left the top of the political agenda of Italy’s Second Republic despite the new political setting that followed the fragmentation of two of Italy’s strongest parties during the Cold War years—the Christian Democrats and the Italian Socialist Party—and the rebranding of the Italian Communist Party. 

At the heart of the political landscape of the Second Republic lay Silvio Berlusconi, the business tycoon who founded the center-right party Forza Italia in January 1994 and, a few months later, won Italy’s general elections. His attitude toward migration was, at least originally, ambivalent. Despite being allied with the right-wing party Alleanza Nazionale and the Northern League (a political movement born in the early 1990s to voice the grievances of Italy’s northern regions), Berlusconi’s own party tried to attract part of the Catholic electorate after the fragmentation of the Christian Democrats and, therefore, expressed more moderate views on several key issues, including migration itself. 

In 1997, for instance, Berlusconi shed public tears for the death at sea of eighty Albanian migrants and added that “58 million wealthy Italians cannot turn away poor people who are coming here seeking a taste of freedom.” While migration from Albania fizzled out, however, his second cabinet cracked down on illegal migrants with a draconian law adopted in 2002 under the leadership of his two main allies. Berlusconi also made no secret of his support for Israel, repeatedly taking the latter’s side during its attacks on the Gaza Strip and later admitting that he had a “dream” of Israel joining the European Union. 

In the early 2000s, the migration route from Tunisia and Libya to Italy’s southernmost islands, Lampedusa and the other islands of the Pelagie archipelago, began being exploited systematically by migrants from North Africa. Berlusconi agreed with Libya starting in 2003 on a series of measures to halt this new wave, which proved to be largely ineffective. After the 2006 crisis between Russia and Ukraine, which affected gas supplies to West Europe and exposed Italy’s heavy dependence on foreign imports of oil and natural gas, Berlusconi engaged directly with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and negotiated a comprehensive treaty in Benghazi in August 2008. 

The agreement included Libya’s commitment to curb the migration flows to Italy and set the stage for ENI and other major Italian companies to further expand their activities in the North African country—which is connected with Italy via the Greenstream natural gas pipeline, operative since 2004—in exchange for several major investment projects in Libya to be financed directly by the Italian government. The agreement also allowed for Gaddafi’s first state visit to Italy in 2009, during which he sported on his military uniform a photograph of the Libya’s national hero Omar Mukhtar after his capture by the Italian colonial authorities in 1931. 

The Arab Revolts and Italy’s Own Political Crisis
The Treaty of Benghazi led to a momentary slowing down of migration flows through the Libyan route. The events of the Arab Spring in early 2011, however, dramatically changed the nature of Italy’s relations with Libya, with Berlusconi’s fourth government reluctantly agreeing to the NATO-led airstrikes. As a result, the stream of migrants has gradually risen since 2013, peaking at more than 180,000 arrivals on Italian shores in 2016—twenty times the number in 2009. 

Similar to the rest of Europe and most international powers, Italy was caught by surprise by the Arab Spring and was essentially unable to formulate a coherent strategic vision to deal not only with challenges but also the opportunities posed by the events that have unfolded in the region since 2010. This lack of strategic depth was partly due to the political and economic crises that led to the downfall of Berlusconi’s government in late 2011, and its replacement by a technocratic government led by Mario Monti until 2013 and then, after an indecisive general election, by three successive cabinets supported by a grand coalition led by the center-left Democratic Party. As a result, between 2011 and 2018, six different prime ministers and seven ministers of foreign affairs held office. In the process, Monti included in his cabinet Andrea Riccardi (the founder and leader of the influential Catholic NGO Comunità di Sant’Egidio) as junior minister for international cooperation—a position that was designed to capitalize on Riccardi’s high international profile but did not live up to expectations, and was eventually reabsorbed into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by the following government. 

The severity of the deadlock that followed the 2013 election, and the prospect of a recrudescence of the 2008–2009 crisis that had hit Italy more harshly than other major European countries, also led Italy’s President Giorgio Napolitano to take the unusual decision of running for a second term in office when his first term ended in 2013—a move that is formally allowed by the Italian constitution but which had never been taken by any of his predecessors since 1948. Napolitano—a former Communist Party member whose forceful leadership style often acted as a counterbalance to Berlusconi’s—was probably instrumental in convincing the latter to support the airstrikes on Libya in 2011. His eventual resignation in 2015 made way for the election of Sergio Mattarella, a longtime member of the Christian Democrats who had left active politics in 2008. 

This unsettled political environment made the approach of successive Italian governments to the region increasingly erratic. Franco Frattini—the foreign minister of Berlusconi’s fourth government who was at the helm of Italy’s diplomacy until November 2011—timidly attempted to develop a normative pitch by repeatedly encouraging Europe to be “braver” in supporting democratization in the Middle East and prioritizing the protection of Christian communities in the region in Italy’s foreign policy. Similarly, during his brief tenure as minister for international cooperation, Riccardi voiced his hope that the Mediterranean would become “the sea of democracy.” The zenith of Italy’s normative commitment to the region was probably reached by Enrico Letta’s government, the first of the three successive governments led by center-left prime ministers between 2013 and 2018. Letta’s executive set in place a major naval and air operation called “Mare Nostrum”—the Latin expression (translated as “our sea”) used by the Romans to refer to the Mediterranean—whose search-andrescue component is usually credited with saving thousands of lives at sea. 

On the other hand, Matteo Renzi’s government (February 2014–December 2016) prioritized immediate foreign policy interests, including the promotion of foreign investment and control of the Libyan migration route. Despite hailing from the same center-left party as Letta, he did not renew Operation Mare Nostrum when it reached the end of its one-year mandate, partly because it had become increasingly unpopular among the Italian electorate as it inevitably led to a rise in the number of migrant arrivals. 

Renzi was also the first Western leader to meet with Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in Cairo in August 2014; on that occasion, he glossed over the concerns of several prominent members of his own party about the human rights record of El-Sisi’s regime, calling instead for Egypt to play a “strong role” in the Mediterranean region and later describing El-Sisi as a “great leader.” The increased fragmentation of Libya and the rise of General Khalifa Haftar’s militias in Cyrenaica since early 2014 were also at the heart of Renzi’s early attempt to develop a privileged relationship with El-Sisi; while Italy put its weight behind Fayez Al-Sarraj and what would later become known as the Government of National Accord, El-Sisi was then—as he is to this day—one of Haftar’s stronger backers. 

Later, however, the discovery of Cambridge doctoral student Giulio Regeni’s disfigured body on February 3, 2016 (while Renzi’s Minister for Economic Development Federica Guidi was in Cairo for a business mission) created enormous pressure on Renzi to take a harsher stance against the Egyptian government, especially since Egyptian state security members were widely believed to have been involved in Regeni’s disappearance and death. Soon after these tragic events, Italy recalled its ambassador and Renzi repeatedly stated that he would not accept an “artificial or hastily gathered truth” on the circumstances of Regeni’s death. Despite the absence of any significant progress in the investigations, political and economic relations between Italy and Egypt continued to develop and were later normalized in September 2017 during the tenure of Renzi’s successor Paolo Gentiloni, who was serving as Renzi’s foreign minister at the time of Regeni’s murder. 

In the same month in which Regeni’s body was found, ENI decided to develop the Shorouk Block with its Zohr gas field—the largest in the Mediterranean Sea. ENI had discovered the Zohr gas field in Egyptian territorial waters off Port Said. In June 2015, with a move that has few precedents in the recent history of Italy’s diplomacy, Deputy Foreign Minister Lapo Pistelli resigned both from government and parliament in order to join ENI as senior vice president for strategic analysis for business development support and be promoted to executive vice president of international affairs less than two years later. ENI’s aggressive recruitment strategy was reflected in an equally ambitious expansion of its business interests in the eastern Mediterranean, which included the development of the EastMed gas pipeline to connect the gas fields that ENI controls in Egypt, Israel, and Lebanon to Italy via Cyprus and Greece. The Eastmed pipeline is expected to go into service in 2025. 

Self-reflection . . . Or A New Beginning?
The government led by Renzi’s latest foreign minister, Gentiloni, filled the gap between the resignation of Renzi’s government in December 2016 and the general elections due in Spring 2018. During Gentiloni’s tenure as prime minister, while center-right politician Angelino Alfano was serving as minister of foreign affairs, an explicit attempt was made by the foreign ministry to pull the strings of Italy’s policy toward the Mediterranean region—and the Middle East at large—which took shape in a document titled “The Italian Strategy in the Mediterranean,” issued in November 2017. 

This document identified six main priorities for Italy’s engagement in the Mediterranean—security, migration, economy, energy, culture and science, and cooperation. While the exact scope and nature of these six priorities remains unclear, this fifty-two-page document provides several interesting insights. Unsurprisingly, the longest and most detailed section on regional security is devoted to the Libyan crisis, wherein the document highlights the importance of “find[ing] a political solution.” It also states how Italy has supported both “the institutions validated by the Libyan Political Agreement” and “the UN actions to promote an inclusive process of national reconciliation with respect to Libyan ownership,” repeatedly stressing the importance of a direct and inclusive dialogue between Libyan stakeholders. 

Most interestingly, however, the section on security opened with a (short) paragraph on the Syrian crisis, which is described as “a top priority in Italy’s foreign and security policy.” For the solution of this crisis, engagement with Russia—to be “inspired by the values of dialogue and realism”—is presented as essential. Other paragraphs in these sections present the role played by Italian armed forces in training Iraqi military units engaged in the war against Daesh, otherwise known as ISIS, and Italy’s substantial contribution to several peacekeeping forces, especially the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). 

With the exception of some widely covered interventions for securing the liberation of Italian hostages in the first part of the war, and despite the appointment in 2014 of one of its most seasoned diplomats, Staffan de Mistura as United Nations and Arab League envoy to Syria, Italy’s diplomatic interventions on the Syrian crisis have been few and cautious. Nevertheless, Italy’s interest in remarking its contribution to the fight against Daesh (its largest international mission in the Mediterranean region, with almost 1,400 units involved) can be seen as instrumental to positioning Italy among Syria’s main partners in the post-conflict phase, also in light of the long history of close economic and political relations between Italy and the Levant. 

The following sections in the document provide an overview of several strategic themes related especially to the management of migration and to energy security. One of the most distinctive policies of Gentiloni’s government was to develop a strict protocol for the activities of rescue boats run by NGOs in the Strait of Sicily, spearheaded by his Minister of Interior Marco Minniti, which was expected to substantially reduce the arrivals of migrants through the Libyan route by making it riskier for migrants and human traffickers. However, in this report the emphasis is put on Italy’s efforts in developing a “dialogue with transit countries” and in stimulating economic development in sub-Saharan Africa and Africa as a whole—an ambitious vision that is regularly mentioned in Italian politics as the true antidote to mass migration to Europe, but that has never been adequately funded. In relation to energy security, it identifies Italy’s two main strategic goals as diversifying supply routes and sources and gradually transitioning to natural gas, placing specific emphasis on the exploitation of the “enormous potential of offshore deposits in the eastern Mediterranean.” 

Several items in this strategic document prefigured the policy changes that would become effective after the 2018 general election and the inauguration of Conte’s government in June 2018. In the fifty-eight- page coalition agreement, less than a page is devoted to foreign policy. A section begins by stating explicitly that the foreign policy of the coalition government will be based “on the centrality of national interest”—a remark that pays lip service to the souverainiste vision of Salvini’s League but which, as amply discussed above, does not seem to contradict the trends that emerged in Italy’s main foreign policy engagements at least since the 1990s, especially in the Mediterranean region. The following paragraphs confirm Italy’s alliance with the United States as its “privileged ally” but also—echoing the tones of the strategy document issued under Gentiloni’s government—prefigure an “opening” toward Russia. The removal of the trade sanctions against Russia, which this document commits the coalition government to pursue, is stated explicitly as a programmatic objective of Conte’s government and had been part of Salvini’s positioning throughout the electoral campaign. 

While the plan to improve Italy’s relations toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia is also connected in the coalition’s agreement with Russia’s role in “resolving regional crises” in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, the main reasons for this move appear eminently economic. Russia is described primarily as an important “economic partner” for Italy and, since the imposition of the sanctions in 2013, the value of Italy’s exports to Russia declined by one-fourth with an annual loss of approximately 3 billion euros. This loss mostly hit businesses based in Italy’s northern regions—the traditional electoral ground of Salvini’s Northern League Party. 

The following sections of the coalition agreement highlight how, especially if Russia is not considered a military threat, Italy should instead see its southern neighbors and the Mediterranean as the source of most “instability factors.” These factors are “Islamic extremism” and “migration flows that are out of control.” The document therefore states that it is to this region that Italy should “refocus its attention,” by intensifying its cooperation with countries that are “committed to fighting terrorism.” 

The approach of Conte’s government to migration has been so far, at least when taken at face value, draconian and uncompromising. The change in policies already initiated by Gentiloni’s government for making third-party search-andrescue missions more difficult have been further accelerated, with NGO boats being regularly denied access to Italian harbors. An agreement with the Libyan authorities for the provision of twelve patrol boats was also finalized in early August. 

On the other hand, except for a flurry of state visits to Egypt by Salvini himself, the Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Five-Star Movement Luigi Di Maio, and Foreign Minister Enzo Moavero Milanesi, Italy’s commitment to supporting countries involved in fighting “Islamic extremism” remains mostly confined to Operation Prima Parthica (Inherent Resolve) in support of Iraqi security forces fighting against Daesh operatives. The fact that Italy, in contrast to most other major European partners, has never been the target of major jihadist operations makes the fight against such movements less electorally salient in Italy than in its European neighbors—an aspect of which two politically savvy leaders like Salvini and Di Maio are well aware. 

Open Questions
At the end of the first hundred days of Conte’s coalition government, apart from Salvini’s high-pitched anti-migrant rhetoric, Italy’s approach to the Mediterranean and the Middle East remains in flux. 

What is clear, however, is that Italy’s regional policy for the coming years will depend primarily on the evolution of the Libyan crisis. As Haftar’s power and influence seem to be on the rise, Italy’s foreign ministry is increasingly keen on engaging with him directly, even if this may worsen its relations with Al-Sarraj’s government. An important question if these efforts are successful is whether the tone and content of Italy’s relations with other regional actors will also be affected. 

Italy’s renewed relationship with Egypt seems to be a key case in point. If Egypt ceases to be Haftar’s gatekeeper, the political urge that has already led three senior members of Conte’s government to travel to Egypt may fizzle out, and other items on Italy’s agenda—including the lack of progress in the search for Regeni’s killers—may be pursued more decisively. ENI’s energy investments in Egypt are also in a much safer position now than at the time of Regeni’s death—a fact that further reduces the negotiating power of the Egyptian regime vis-à-vis its Italian counterparts. The development schedule of the Zohr field was sped up so that it began producing natural gas in early 2018 (one year ahead of schedule) and ENI has already cashed in on the Shorouk Block by selling 50 percent of its stakes to other non-Egyptian energy corporations. 

As the regional scenario, especially in the Levant and the Gulf, is also expected to evolve rapidly over the coming year, Turkey’s power struggle in the eastern Mediterranean is being followed closely by the Italian authorities. In February 2018, Erdoğan, on a state visit in Rome, described the bilateral relations between Italy and Turkey as excellent and Italy as a friend with whom Turkey shares “a common vision for the problems of the region.” Furthermore, even if Italy is not a final destination point of the eastern Mediterranean migration route to Europe, Turkey’s role as the key buffer state of this route remains the elephant in the room in its foreign relations with all European countries. One may wonder, however, how far Italy would be willing to go—and whether it would be ready to potentially lose some of its lucrative economic interests in Turkey—if Erdoğan’s positioning stood in the way of the implementation of major infrastructural projects like the EastMed gas pipeline. In February 2018, Erdoğan warned the European companies involved in offshore gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean not to “step out of line.” Bellicose statements like this, added to the open Turkish–Cypriot dispute over the demarcation of maritime borders, inevitably call into question the future viability of projects like EastMed upon on which much of Italy’s energy security will depend. 

Finally, the internal dynamics within Conte’s government also leads onlookers and pundits to speculate whether Salvini’s right-wing policies, including his emphasis on fighting migration, will eventually face explicit opposition at least from some sections of the Five-Star Movement. This challenge within the government could result in either a remodulation of Italy’s regional policy or, more likely, in other foreign policy issues being introduced in Conte’s agenda, perhaps with a stronger normative focus. In particular, Roberto Fico—the current speaker of the Lower House and a former member of the policy directorate of the Movement—has repeatedly and publicly challenged Salvini’s positions, for instance by expressing his concerns on the human rights conditions of migrant camps in Libya. 

While foreign policy has never been among priorities of the Movement, its position on the Palestinian issue—including its support for Palestinian statehood—has repeatedly stood out, as opposed to Salvini’s explicit support for Israel and its policies. In 2014, Alessandro Di Battista—one of the most vocal members of the Movement and widely popular among its activists— described the attacks on Gaza as “genocide” and asked the Italian government to recall its ambassador to Israel. In 2016, a high-profile political delegation led by the future leader Di Maio (then deputy speaker of the Lower House) was denied access to the Gaza Strip and promised that a future government led by the Movement would have pushed for the official recognition of the state of Palestine and for the implementation of a two-state solution that would have also included Israel’s withdrawal from the Golan Heights. 

Time will tell if these promises will lead to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—now notably far from the top of Italy’s foreign policy agenda—regaining a central position in Italy’s strategic vision of the region. For the time being, what is clear is that the times of Operation Mare Nostrum—and the short-lived hope that Italy would lead the efforts for a more humane management of migration influx, and possibly for a new phase of norm-driven cooperation across the two shores of the Mediterranean—are only a distant memory. The political views of Salvini and Di Maio make new normative openings extremely unlikely, and Italy’s now well-established reluctance to engage in proactive and forward-looking policies toward the Mediterranean and Middle East seems to be confirmed by the marginal role assigned to foreign policy in the coalition agreement currently in force. As a result, no major reorientation of Italy’s regional outlook seems to be in sight; if anything, it will be the domestic concerns of the Italian electorate that will continue to drive Italy’s foreign and European policy for the months and years to come. 

Marco Pinfari is assistant professor of international relations at the American University in Cairo and associate dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences there. His papers have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and Terrorism and Political Violence, among others. His latest book, Terrorists as Monsters: The Unmanageable Other from the French Revolution to the Islamic State, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

As a former colonial power, an important member state of the European Union, and a Mediterranean country itself, France rightly considers the Middle East a case study for its foreign policy and global influence. Yet, its recent diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa have usually shown a fading of France’s political clout in the region. The last two presidential mandates of Nicolas Sarkozy (2007–12) and François Hollande (2012–17) have been marked by several political and diplomatic setbacks. Soon after his election in 2017, Emmanuel Macron tried to take lessons from the past disappointments of his predecessors, mostly by taking new small-scale initiatives in Lebanon and Libya and planning a more ambitious regional stance. Yet, as the French republic is not in a position to impose region-wide transformational policies alone, France needs partners to propose a new agenda. 

Diplomatic Setbacks
France has had only a moderately successful diplomatic history in the Mediterranean over the past half-century. The end of the colonial war in Algeria (1962) paved the way for a new “Arab policy,” whose heyday occurred after the Six-Day War (1967), when Charles de Gaulle supported the Arabs after Israel’s attack. French support of Arab leaders in the 1973 October War while not a defeat was at best only a stalemate. The succeeding 1970s and 1980s were characterized by a more mercantile approach, as France developed new partnerships in arms sales—including with Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—while obtaining privileged conditions after the two oil shocks of 1973 and 1979. François Mitterrand’s presidency (1981–95) maintained broadly the same political line, in spite of better personal and political ties with Israel (especially due to Mitterrand’s belonging to the Socialist International, along with the Israeli Labor Party).

Elected in 1995, Jacques Chirac tried to revive De Gaulle’s legacy and called for a new Arab policy in a speech at Cairo University in April 1996. His closeness with several Arab rulers was widely known (namely with King Hassan II of Morocco, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, Palestine’s Yasser Arafat and especially Lebanon’s Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, a personal friend). Still, the results of Chirac’s Mediterranean policy were mixed. Chirac as an individual was popular in the Arab World, especially after 1996 footage surfaced on Arab television screens of Chirac’s famous fight with Israeli security in the Old City of Jerusalem. However, Chirac’s concrete diplomatic achievements were few and far between. In 1996, Paris participated (with the United States) in imposing a ceasefire in Lebanon after the Israeli bombing of the city of Cana (Lebanon), but the stability that followed proved temporary. 

Years later Chirac led a coalition to oppose the neoconservative George W. Bush administration’s war in Iraq in 2002 and 2003. Yet in leading this opposition, France managed only to voice its disapproval without being able to block the American invasion. Meanwhile, Chirac’s good relationship with Arafat could not save the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. Also, his personal friendship with Hariri could not stop Lebanon being bombed in 2006 during the Israel– Hezbollah War. Finally, Chirac’s goal to create a new friendship treaty with Algeria (based on the model of the French–German relationship) remained unsuccessful. 

Chirac’s successors met with the same difficulties attempting to turn goodwill into political breakthroughs. Just like the 1995 Barcelona process (largely a French initiative) was ruined by dramatic regional events, Sarkozy’s 2008 project of a union for the Mediterranean collapsed after Israel’s war on Gaza in 2008–2009 and the Arab uprisings of 2011. As such, France’s initiatives post-Chirac in 2007 were brave but unsurprisingly met many obstacles. 

The Arab Spring deprived France of long-term allies such as Ben Ali and Mubarak and caught Paris off guard. France’s attempt to take the initiative during the Arab uprisings led to its strike against Gaddafi in 2011, which was at first considered a success because of the operational military know-how and the last-minute rescue of Benghazi. However, the resulting regime change and Gaddafi’s demise created a collapsed state, infuriated many emerging powers, and spread weapons and fighters throughout the Sahel. The operation is now considered a strategic mistake by Macron and by Barack Obama. 

The biggest French trauma in recent times, though, remains the Syrian civil war. After the outbreak of the war in 2011, Paris quickly adopted a tough tone and made the demise of Bashar Al-Assad a sine qua non or essential condition for any resolution of the conflict. However, Iran’s support for Damascus, Washington’s reluctance to strike the Al-Assad regime in 2013 after the use of chemical weapons against civilians, then the Russian intervention in 2015, were crucial game changers. As the civil war dragged on, the French position began to appear somewhat naive. Finally, with the advent of the Astana process—led by Russia, Iran, and Turkey—Western and Arab diplomatic efforts featuring the removal of Al-Assad were pushed aside. 

Macron’s Ambitions and Obstacles
During his campaign, Macron had pleaded for an “independent, humanist and European power.” Shortly after he was sworn in, the new president issued several key speeches on France’s international priorities, including one at the United Nations in New York, on September 19, 2017. Globally, the new French discourse would defend Europe, multilateralism, and a liberal agenda on the world stage. 

The Middle East issue quickly came to the fore, since Macron hinted in an interview to Le Point in August 2017 that he would “put an end to ten years of importation of neoconservative ideas in France.” His criticism against the French 2011 operation in Libya had been harsh. When receiving Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in Paris in October 2017, Macron refused to talk down to and lecture his Egyptian counterpart on democracy and human rights. The fact that Macron would not impose French democratic mores on El-Sisi or other non-Western leaders triggered bitter reactions by some of the “French neoconservative” sect and displayed Macron’s contempt for the French neocons. 

All of this set off a debate regarding the existence of a specific “French neoconservatism.” According to some scholars and essayists such as B. Badie, France’s diplomacy had in recent years begun to evolve toward a more Atlanticist or “Occidentalist” stance—meaning a harder line, closer to the American hawks, more favorable to Israel and more hostile to the South. 

Hints of such an evolution, pundits argued, could be found in Paris’s insistence on toughening the initial version of the Iranian nuclear deal, or its support of Israel after Israeli bombings of Gaza in the summer of 2014. The main reason for the neocon tilt, media onlookers argued, was the coming of age of a new generation of diplomats, mostly educated in schools like “Sciences Po” (Paris Institute of Political Studies), and influenced by Anglo-Saxon trends, norms, and think tanks. However, before Macron’s presidency it was hard to measure the real influence of a group of “hardline” French diplomats who supported rightist international stances as well as military intervention abroad. Whether or not these hardliners were influential before Macron, it is clear that French neocons’ basic tenets hardly ever match Macron’s vision of multilateral dialogue with all actors, or with his support of the 2015 Iranian deal. 

Macron continued his resistance against conservatives in his open contempt of the Donald Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Macron said in March 2018 about Trump’s decision that he believed it was unfortunate and contravened international law. He has gone on to call the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran deal a mistake and refused to side with Saudi Arabia or Qatar when relations soured between the two countries in 2017. Meanwhile, Macron tried to be a deal-broker when Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri was apparently held captive in Saudi Arabia in November 2017. 

In the Libyan powder keg, Macron has increased French visibility as an arbiter between warring factions convening two meetings in Paris, the first one in July 2017 with Libyan Prime Minister Fayez Al-Sarraj, General Khalifa Haftar, President of the Libyan House of Representatives Aguila Saleh, and Khaled al-Mishri, head of the High Council of State. The second meeting was held in May 2018 which led to a fragile agreement over the planning of elections in December 2018. These were important initiatives that showed a French will to remain an actor in the Mediterranean region. These two Libyan meetings were not enough, however, to bring France back into the two most complex diplomatic processes of the moment: Syria and the Palestinian conflict. 

Macron’s diplomatic team, including Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian and the Elysée diplomatic cell (headed by a seasoned diplomat, Philippe Etienne) had to cope with an impossible equation in Syria. The challenge facing French diplomats now is how to come back into the region post-Astana, while taking into account the new balance of power, and the likely political survival of Bashar Al-Assad without repudiating the ethical approach that once led Paris to deny the legitimacy of a mass murderer like Al-Assad? So far, and despite a substantial military presence in Syria and Iraq against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), France has yet to solve the equation. Its diplomacy has to take Al-Assad’s political survival into account, while continuing to state that Al-Assad cannot be the future of Syria. 

Regarding Palestine and the moribund peace process, Paris can do little but pay lip service to its official support of the Palestinian cause and the two-state solution. Before the end of its term, Hollande’s government had organized two conferences on the Palestine–Israel peace process in Paris (June 2016 and January 2017), with no results, and in the absence of the main protagonists. With a U.S. administration now siding clearly with Benjamin Netanyahu and European partners unwilling to get involved in a viper’s nest, Paris’s room to maneuver remains narrow. Were Macron’s administration to propose a third international conference—probably without Israel and the United States— such a conference would be completely counterproductive. Simply criticizing Washington’s unilateral decisions while reaffirming its support for the two-state solution remains Paris’s only option for the time being. 

Scenarios and Limits
Can Macron provide France with more diplomatic clout in the Middle East just because of his personal political voluntarism? Maybe, but three obstacles remain: relations with Turkey, Israel, and Iran. Interestingly there has been an absence of strong regional Arab partners in recent years following the demise of leading Arab foreign policy voices. As a result, Turkey, Israel, and Iran now have the upper hand across the region. 

Each of the three leading Middle Eastern powers has complex relations with France. Turkey, because France was among the most skeptical countries about its application to become a European Union member, now worries about conflicts with France connected to Ankara’s alleged support of radical Islamic elements in Europe. Israel, because France’s former De Gaulle-ian policy (often deemed pro-Arab in Tel Aviv) harbors uncertainty about France’s ambitions in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. And Iran, because, as has been stated, Paris and Tehran have remained at bitter odds as far as the situation in Lebanon is concerned. 

At the same time the Macron government must now deal with a foreign policy reality in which France’s traditional allies have grown weaker. In Lebanon, France supports the 14th March camp (Hariri’s allies), yet Iran effectively balances the equation and remains the main proponent of Hezbollah. Paris’s Arab traditional partners in the Middle East are too small to play a structural role (like Lebanon), have been weakened by recent turmoil (Egypt), undermined by a bad international image (Saudi Arabia), or are now more isolated than some years ago (Qatar). Importantly, one of France’s solid trade partners in the region, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has of late developed a new and distinct diplomatic agenda apart from Paris. 

The European and Atlantic context is hardly better. Among France’s more valuable partners in the region is Germany. Yet, Germany has a different strategic culture, remains cautious when it comes to the Middle East, and wary of military interventions abroad. Britain, by far the best partner for France as far as defense and military interventions are concerned, is trapped in the Brexit debate and as such is hardly ready to get involved in Macron’s Middle East agenda. The ambition of a common European Union foreign policy has stalled, and the EEAS, or the European External Action Service (the European Union’s diplomatic service) remains embryonic. The Washington–London–Paris axis (or “triumvirate,” as once hoped for by De Gaulle) is not operating anymore in the Middle East. With Washington abandoning its traditional role as peace-broker (to grant unconditional support to Israel) and threatening to withdraw from the Syrian issue, France is now looking in vain for regional interests that could bring the old partners together again. 

What Grand Strategy?
Major terrorist attacks carried out on French soil and supervised from the Middle East have overshadowed other foreign policy considerations since 2015. The efforts to rethink French relations with the Middle East after the Arab revolts have also been largely thwarted by the refugee crisis triggered by the Syrian civil war. Many European leaders now associate the region with domestic security issues more than with international strategic considerations. Paris is, unfortunately, no exception to this trend. Yet, despite the hardships ahead, the Middle East remains a key test for France’s international influence and political capacity to defuse crises at its Mediterranean border. Also, there continues to be French vulnerability in connection with Middle Eastern upheavals, such as the Palestinian conflict and the Syrian civil war, all of which cause conflict in France with its migrant population. 

Moving forward, crucial strategic questions remain unanswered. Does France have to stick to a two-state solution for the Palestinian issue, and how can France promote the two-state solution in a hopeless international context? With Egypt on an authoritarian course, Saudi Arabia and the UAE harboring unsavory views toward Iran or the war in Yemen, who could be France’s allies or partners for a new regional agenda? Is it worth trying to revive the project of a Euro-Mediterranean framework, after two failures in 1995 and 2008? Should North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) be dealt with in a global Mediterranean and “Arab” context, or should they be addressed as a distinct Maghrebi entity, in order not to associate them with the turmoil in the Middle East, specifically in the Levant and the Arab Peninsula? 

Macron will have to propose new answers to these dilemmas if he wants to restore France’s Mediterranean regional policy. Although France remains one of the most pro-active European Union member states in the region, its political clout—akin to the West’s clout in general in the Middle East—has faded. Any new regional strategy will need a coalition of the willing, probably with new associations between partners. France will probably be eager to participate, but first it has to find its navigation chart. 

Frédéric Charillon is professor of international relations and Coordinator for International Studies at the National School of Administration. He also teaches at the Clermont Auvergne University and Sciences Po Paris. He has recently published Manuel De Diplomatie, and is the author of the following latest book chapters: “Public Policy and Foreign Policy Analysis” and “Hollande and Sarkozy’s Foreign Policy Legacy.” He is a regular contributor for the French edition of the Conversation and l’Opinion. On Twitter: @charillon.

In the early 1990s, India was at an impasse. The economy was nearing bankruptcy and New Delhi was staring down the barrel of defaulting on loans provided by the International Monetary Fund and other international agencies. The government of then-Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh was preparing to dip into the country’s gold reserve to pay the debt. The situation forced a play of hand, with Rao and Singh orchestrating an opening up of the economy to global markets, moving away from the traditional socialist leanings of the state, and doubling down that consumerism and big trade would bail the nation out. 

Fast forward into the 2000s and India’s economy was booming on the back of its services sector led by the Information and Technology (IT) revolution. The success of economic liberalization ten or fifteen years after Rao’s and Singh’s opening of the economy had fundamentally altered India, and by association the domestic politics of the country. These changes were directly reflected in almost every aspect of governance, which of course included foreign policy. As India grew, its economic might was capable of giving it a stronger standing in global politics, adding more teeth to vital arteries that govern issues of global trade, security, counterterrorism, and the creation of a just and even playing field with democracy remaining the core political ideology. 

Yet in some ways, India’s resulting newfound soft power in global affairs is at odds with what came before. In the early decades after Indian independence from Britain, the post-colonial foreign policy of India was an idealistic outreach to the world based on mutual coexistence. By the early 2000s, these ideals had started to change given the country’s economic growth and the geopolitical aspirations of its people as more than 1.2 billion people demanded both better economic benefits and greater respect from traditional global powers. 

Following India’s independence from British rule in 1947, the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, handled the nation’s foreign affairs until his death in 1964. At the time, the Middle East was an immensely important region for post-independence India and initially relations between India and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region had little to do with trade or oil, but instead consensus building in a world polarized between two competing blocs, the Soviet East and the United States’s West. The counterbalance that Nehru supported was the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a third bloc that maintained autonomy by not picking sides between Washington or Moscow. 

NAM was the result of the “Initiative of Five,” a moniker given to the founding fathers of the movement, namely Nehru; Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia; Sukarno, the first serving president of Indonesia; Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister and president of independent Ghana; and finally, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the second president of Egypt. The NAM grouping was formalized in 1956, with the term “non-aligned movement” only making an appearance in 1976 as the Cold War peaked, and countries such as India remained committed to dodging pressures to officially take sides between the communists and the capitalists. 

While it can be argued that with 127 members today (120 active and seven observing), NAM has lost its way with too many voices, yet the ideals and ideations of NAM have persevered insofar as India’s approach to the Middle East is concerned. From having good relations with Nasser to going against the larger narratives surrounding Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the First Gulf War, New Delhi displayed its idea of “strategic autonomy.” Interestingly this term, strategic autonomy, did not command space in the lexicon of international studies till the idea of NAM 2.0 developed in India’s twenty-first century foreign policy. 

Strategic autonomy says that a nation will maintain an independent foreign policy posture while focusing on its core strategic goals. In this case India’s primary strategic goal is economic. NAM 2.0 is itself a reinvention of NAM, taking the NAM ideals of Nasser and Nehru and rebranding them using the concept of strategic autonomy to help India shape and lead a stable, multipolar world order in the future. 

As India’s economy grows so too does its geopolitical clout, which has forced Indian policy thinkers to reimagine India’s foreign policy. NAM was an outdated model; however, its core concept, that of not taking sides, has worked in favor of India around the world and especially in the Middle East. New developments in migration, the global economy, and global security have pushed India to develop a different approach to the world, that is, the concept of “strategic autonomy.” While still is too fresh a concept to have an exact definition for, over the next years as India develops its place in the world, strategic autonomy will grow in import as India’s place in the new global order solidifies. India’s reimagining of its foreign policy relationship vis-à-vis strategic autonomy is seen clearest in India’s relations with the Middle East. 

Birth of NAM 2.0
Analysts often ask why India does not play larger roles in global disputes. New Delhi has often come close to answering such questions directly, specifically regarding the Middle East. In 2003, then-Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee warded off rumors that within his administration that were supporters of the call made by George W. Bush for India to send troops to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration was expecting India to send up to seventeen thousand troops to be deployed around the Kurdish region of Mosul, the second-largest city of Iraq, today better known as the place from where Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the emir of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), used the Great Mosque of Al-Nuri to announce the so-called Islamic State, or the launch of the caliphate. 

At the time there was, perhaps surprisingly when we look back, much public support for the idea of sending Indian troops into Iraq. Noted analysts such as C Raja Mohan and Sanjay Baru wrote in favor of such a deployment. In a piece titled “India’s decision time on Iraq” published in May 2003 in the prominent The Hindu newspaper, Mohan argued that an Indian deployment in northern Iraq would “signal to the world that New Delhi has finally broken out of the traditionally limiting political confines of the subcontinent.” However, after weighing the pros and cons, Vajpayee took a decision not to send the Indian military to join the United States and Britain in being part of the “war on terror.” Had Vajpayee gotten India involved in Iraq, it would have been a departure from India’s traditional non-interventionist and non-aligned posture and would have derailed one of the most successful diplomatic balancing acts undertaken by a state in the Middle East region. This diplomatic status quo that Vajpayee managed to protect was responsible for the successful evacuation of more than 110,000 Indians during the First Gulf War via the Jordanian capital Amman.

Over ten years before Vajpayee’s support of neutrality, another example of India’s positioning itself as a supporter of a multipolar political order in the Middle East was when New Delhi in January 1992 established official diplomatic relations with Israel. At the time this was a long-overdue policy correction that had been held hostage to an obsolete outlook toward the Israel–Palestine issue by Indian foreign policy. The formalization of ties with Israel—which already in 1992 had been developing strongly despite a lack of formal diplomatic outreach—gave New Delhi a third pole of power to navigate in the region, a pole whose very existence was cause for much of the region’s turmoil. 

As such, India continues to this day to walk a tightrope in its diplomacy with the MENA region. This tightrope walking is not for the faint-of-heart, as managing full diplomatic relations with the contesting three poles of power in the region— namely Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel—can be challenging. All the same, the outcomes of such political maneuvering have been largely rewarding for New Delhi. Today, India thoughtfully engages with Middle Eastern actors while at the same time maintaining distance from regional fractures and conflicts, all of which has allowed India to have not just cordial relations across the region, but also fledging trade and migration. 

NAM 2.0 Growing Pains
While relations with Israel are relatively new, ties with the Gulf are deeply entrenched in Indian society. The Indian citizens in the region—largely concentrated in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Qatar— are responsible for a majority of the over $60 billion in remittances sent into the Indian economy annually. This makes the Gulf region indirectly integrated into the Indian economy and society, which in turn makes the Persian Gulf a prime region of interest for New Delhi’s foreign policy. 

One of the main hindrances to India setting up diplomatic relations with one of the region’s leading powers, Israel, was New Delhi’s longstanding stance on Palestine. Through Nehru’s consensus on NAM and India’s NAM partners, New Delhi for many years provided a safe diplomatic and often personal space for the Palestinian cause. This support often went beyond the call of duty as India backed the Palestinians against both interventionist Western policies and heavy- handedness toward the West Bank by the Israeli state. In fact, erstwhile leader and chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Yasser Arafat made numerous visits to India during his life, often using the Indian capital as a second home. 

The comfort and safety Arafat found in the land of ahmisavadi (or pacifist) Mahatma Gandhi was made possible by the views of Gandhi himself. Regarding the Palestine–Israel conundrum, Gandhi wrote in an op-ed published in November 1938 that “My sympathies are all with the Jews, but my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. Why should they not, like other peoples of the Earth, make that country their home where they’re born and where they earn their livelihood? Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.” 

This approach toward Palestine kept Israel–India ties from coming to fruition even after official diplomatic relations were achieved in 1992. The historic import of the Palestinian cause to Arab leaders and partners cannot be underscored enough. Some Arab nations used the Palestine issue to make a case for pan-Arab nationalism, with the likes of Egypt’s Nasser leading the charge both as part of the Gulf unity approach and as a founding ideologue of NAM. As such, Nehru’s outreach toward the Arab World vis-à-vis Nasser and NAM in the 1950s and 1960s informed and continues to inform India’s reactions to today’s geopolitics and today’s conflicts with Israel, in the region, and the greater world. 

To that end, the Indian stance on the Syrian civil war has been for a dialogue-based end to hostilities between the various warring sides. In January 2014, India’s then-minister of external affairs Salman Khurshid represented India at the Geneva II conference, now a fossil of the multiple failed attempts by the global community to bring a consensus between the various interest groups in Syria. Nonetheless, Khurshid’s words on Syria are informative to better understand India’s relationship with the Middle East. Khurshid said, “India has important stakes in the Syrian conflict. It shares deep historical and civilizational bonds with the wider West Asia and Gulf region. We have substantial interests in the field of trade and investment, diaspora, remittances, energy, and security. Any spillover from the Syrian conflict has the potential of impacting negatively on our larger interests.” Behind Khurshid’s stoic and balancing diplomatic language lingered a fear of protecting millions of Indians if the destabilizing outcomes of the Arab Spring were to spread to other parts of the Middle East. 

Despite the narrative of dialogue, New Delhi subtly supported the legitimacy of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Damascus, continuing diplomatic ties throughout the conflict and being one of the few countries to keep its embassy operational. High-level delegation visits from Syria to India continued, with the Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Shri M.J. Akbar visiting Damascus in 2016 and Syria’s Grand Mufti Ahmed Adib Hassoun, the highest Islamic authority in Syria, visiting New Delhi a year later. 

India’s support for the Al-Assad regime came from three main arguments. First, New Delhi believed that unplanned, disorganized, and reckless decapitation of regimes in the region would look like what happened in Libya following the execution of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The result of such uprisings was that MENA countries could be—in the view of New Delhi—left at the mercy of warring tribal groups and affiliates of global jihadist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and even ISIS. Secondly, India and Syria had a long history of good relations. India had good relations with the Al-Assad family, beginning with Bashar Al-Assad’s father and former president of Syria Hafez Al-Assad, who served as the head of the Syrian state from 1971 until his death in 2000. Even before the Al-Assad family came to power, relations between India and Syria were strong. When Nehru visited Syria in 1957 and then again in 1960, he was welcomed in Damascus by then-Syrian leader Shukri Al-Quwatli along with tens of thousands of people at the airport chanting, “Welcome to the hero of world peace” and “Long live the leader of Asia.” 

These good relations have continued. Earlier this year, India’s then-secretary East at the Ministry of External Affairs, Anil Wadhwa, had said that the “Indian position on Russia’s military intervention to help to the Syrian regime was to halt the advances of the Islamic State,” in effect throwing weight behind Moscow’s policies in the region. Yet, interestingly there does appear to be some conflict among ruling circles in New Delhi over India’s relationship with Syria. While there may be soft support for the Al-Assad state and the Russian support of Al-Assad, there is also conflict as was illustrated when the Indian External Affairs Ministry itself issued a statement saying that “there could be no military solution to this conflict.” 

Earlier in 2016, Syria’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Walid Muallem visited New Delhi in his capacity as the country’s foreign minister to hold talks with Swaraj and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval. Both sides found common ground regarding their poor relationship with the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The OIC has criticized India over its alleged human rights violations in Kashmir and the body also suspended Syria in 2012 for Al-Assad’s suppression of the Syrian uprising. Goodwill between the two states was on display in 2017 when India held a cultural week in Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs. This feeling of cultural amity has continued into 2018 as well, with Syria’s Higher Education Minister Atef Naddaf’s trip to India in April securing one thousand scholarships for Syrian students to study in India. Seeing India as a friend, the Syrian envoy in New Delhi in 2018 Riad Kamel Abbas backed India in Kashmir, justifying India’s actions as fighting the “first step of terrorism” and stressing that India should be able to act in Kashmir as India sees fit. Such backing on the Kashmir issue in the international community is viewed as critical by India in its attempts to build a consensus against Pakistan. 

It is valuable to note that New Delhi has made next to no statements on issues relating to Iran’s role in the Syrian crisis including U.S. and Saudi concerns over Tehran’s alleged strategy of Shia expansionism, its sheltering of Al-Qaeda operatives, and so on. The recent visits to India by Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani have coincided with increased bilateral and strategic cooperation between India and Saudi Arabia, UAE, and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). India’s strong relations across the Persian Gulf only continue to improve. For example, it would have been unfathomable to imagine an Indian Air Force fleet conducting a staging visit to Saudi Arabia in 2015 or the UAE deporting terror suspects wanted by New Delhi at regular intervals over the past two years. 

In the Interest of Nationals
Interestingly, in the Middle East, Indian political and economic interests sometimes collide with the interests of its own nationals living in the MENA region. Today 7.5 million Indian immigrants live across the Middle East and have been pivotal in, for example, the building of Dubai and the construction industries of Saudi Arabia as well as the oil industries of Iran and the water irrigation systems in Egypt. As such, the reality remains that even as India prospers economically from relations with the region, one of its main mandates remains protecting the 7.5 million-person Indian diaspora scattered around possibly the most volatile region on Earth. 

One of the prime examples of Indian diplomacy of having good relations with all the poles of power in the region was exemplified during the start of the Yemen crisis, when New Delhi evacuated more than four thousand people, including foreigners, from Yemen by both sea and air. This was India’s second-largest such evacuation from the region, following the massive evacuation during the first Gulf War. 

During the Yemen crisis, India, operating via Sanaa’s airport, managed to create windows for relief flights by talking to both the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and the Saudi-led Arab coalition to maintain hours of ceasefire for the relief flights to operate. In simple words, New Delhi managed to convince both Houthis and the Saudis to halt hostilities for it to get its people out. It is safe to say that not many countries would have been able to orchestrate such an effort. 

The fact that today Saudi Arabia and Iran are competing in a voracious manner for supremacy in the region also provides a good example of how India manages good relations with both Riyadh and Tehran without either, at least publicly, questioning India about its relationship with the other side. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia view India as an important partner, specifically today when it is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. In Iran, India has initiated major developmental investments such as the massive Farzad B gas field and the Chabahar port project, which is liberally seen as a strategic home run for New Delhi as Chabahar port is pivotal to the International North South Transportation Corridor connecting India to Eurasia and giving landlocked Afghanistan access to new trading routes. Interestingly, Chabahar looks to free Kabul’s overbearing reliance on the Pakistani port of Karachi. 

Amidst all this, Israel is still a relatively new comer. However, it also offers the most direct and no-strings-attached relationship among the other two poles of power. Under the current Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his nationalist pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India finds many commonalities with Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach toward combating terrorism from Hamas, Hezbollah, and others. However, as noted, India has not waded into Israel’s claims of Iranian transgressions in Syria and the threat of Shia militias capturing territory in Syria. Even with an increase of $1 billion annually in Indo–Israel defense ties and a recent visit by Netanyahu to India and Modi to Israel, India’s idea of strategic autonomy remains prominent and visible. 

The Future of NAM 2.0
As India’s economic and political clout grows, so too will its diplomacy aims and requirements. Despite the ideas supporting strategic autonomy, it may become harder than ever before for New Delhi to remain neutral in international politics. While not taking sides in conflicts has served Indian foreign policy well until today, such fence-sitting is contrary to India’s vision of becoming an economic and political heavyweight in the international arena. No country has ever become a power without upsetting other powers. As such, the fear of being caught on the wrong side of history should not wholly dictate India’s foreign policy goals in the future. Ultimately these foreign policy goals must align with India’s ambitions of being a world superpower.

While the role of the more than 7.5 million Indians living in the MENA region is still undoubtedly one driving factor of Indian diplomatic engagement in the larger Middle East region, it is the Indian economy that is coming out as the main catalyst of expanding relationships between the Middle East and the subcontinent. The future of the Gulf economies and perhaps even their security architectures will look toward India, and it is inevitable that New Delhi’s emerging strategic autonomy foreign policy initiative will remold India’s existing balance between the three poles of Saudi–Iranian–Israeli power. A new day then is dawning, and India’s NAM 2.0 foreign policy will seek a more result-oriented posture in the Middle East’s politics, society, and most importantly, economy. 

 

Kabir Taneja is associate fellow at the Observer Research Foundation’s Strategic Studies program in New Delhi, India. He was the 2016 Medienbotschafter Fellow in Germany and before that was guest scholar at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Norway. He has written extensively for the New York Times, Huffington Post, The Diplomat, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Politico, among others. He is also the author of many seminal reports, the latest being the monograph, The ISIS Phenomenon: South Asia and Beyond. On Twitter: @KabirTaneja.

Although not always apparent to those closely watching the Middle East, Russia’s recent foray into the region and in Syria came in response to domestic challenges at home, especially in the North Caucasus. As the insurgency in the Russian North Caucasus evolved from a nationalistic uprising to an Islamist movement—which became connected, at least indirectly, with the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS)—Moscow found a perfect excuse to become directly involved in the Syrian conflict in the fall of 2015. 

To the world, Moscow presented its engagement in Syria as a way to deal with North Caucasian jihadists and halt the threat of them traveling back to Russia, but in reality, Russia had strategic hopes to return to the Middle East as a superpower and preserve its military bases in Syria. Ultimately, the Kremlin decided on a pragmatic approach: it took no one Arab state involved in the Syrian conflict as an ally and maintained a noncommittal stance with regards to making strategic alliances, ignoring the fragile geopolitical order that critically governs inter-state relations in the region. 

For example, despite choosing to militarily collaborate with Iran in Syria, Russia never was committed to Iran as a full-fledged ally. Russia also had dealings with Israel and Turkey and engaged with them on several occasions during the conflict. As a matter of fact, it increasingly turned to Ankara, mostly because of Turkey’s importance for Moscow’s gas line projects, including the latest “TurkStream,” the first direct gas pipeline to be built between Russia and Turkey. Perhaps, Moscow’s success lay in its opportunism, flexibility in switching allies depending on the circumstances, and on the fact that no one power exercises complete dominance in the Middle East. 

The North Caucasus–ISIS Connection
Russia’s involvement with the Middle East cannot be separated from the country’s internal problems, especially with regards to its considerable Muslim population. Since the early 1990s, the Kremlin has been engaged in a protracted war in the North Caucasus against Chechnya. At first inspired by nationalism, Chechens sought to create an independent state. Islam was merely an ingredient that fueled their nationalistic ideology. Nonetheless, as the movement progressed over time, Chechen resistance increasingly took an internationalist jihadist turn and eventually demonstrated a peculiar pattern. Moscow took advantage of this evolution. 

The First Chechen War (1994–96) was a disaster for Moscow: Russian troops were utterly defeated in Grozny, the Chechen capital, and Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president at that time, was compelled to sign the humiliating 1996 Khasavyurt agreement, which acknowledged Chechnya’s independence. Still, the war resumed after Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 1999 prompted by the infamous apartment buildings’ bombing during the same year that killed hundreds of Muscovites. There is evidence to suggest that this terrorist action was organized by the Kremlin to create an image of Putin as the country’s only savior. The Kremlin attributed the terrorist actions to Chechens and launched the Second Chechen War. 

Russian troops soon after that took Grozny, and the Chechen war settled into a protracted conflict against guerillas. It was during the fighting against Russian troops that the guerilla movement took hold within the Chechen resistance. More non-Chechens joined the fight, including Muslims from the North Caucasus and other Muslims from what Russians usually referred to as the “distant abroad.” There were also a number of Russian Muslim converts. For all of them, the nationalistic animus of the early Chechen resistance was basically irrelevant. What united them was not nationalism but Islam which, in this jihadist form, played the same role of a unifying ideology as radical Marxism. Indeed, instead of the slogan “proletariats of the world, unite!” jihadists promulgated a similar slogan: “Muslims of all countries, unite!” There was also explicit emphasis on socioeconomic equality. As a result of these changes, the so-called Chechen state had been transformed into what would later turn out to be a phantom “Caucasian Emirate,” led by Dokka Umarov in 2007. When the Arab Spring erupted in the Middle East, Umarov noted that Islam did not recognize “revolution” or “democracy,” but claimed he would support the events of the Arab Spring should they lead to the spread of true Islam. 

Yet one bleak outcome of the Arab Spring was the rise of Islamists, who eventually coalesced into ISIS. Umarov was heartened by these developments, and not just for ideological reasons; he assumed that fellow Islamists would provide him with financial assistance and would possibly send fighters. However, Umarov and the subsequent leaders of the emirate did not receive any tangible support from the leaders of ISIS. At the same time, those fighters who moved to the Middle East rarely came back, and those who did were easily apprehended by Russian authorities. Consequently, the Kremlin often did not bother to prevent the jihadists’ departure and, in some cases, even encouraged it. For example, it is alleged that Russian law enforcement contacted jihadists through intermediaries and promised them free passage to the Middle East. 

ISIS, so to speak, split the emirate’s fighters, even those who remained in Russia. Some swore allegiance to Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader; others remained faithful to the emirate and became bogged down in bitter internal disputes with splinter groups. The split helped destroy the “emirate,” which lost even the semblance of unity. Indeed, there was no “emir” for several years. But the major benefit that came out of the collapse of the emirate was that it enabled Moscow to understand its new role in the fight against global terrorism. 

Moscow saw the emergence of ISIS as an opportunity to become involved in the Syrian war and to regain some of the influence that Russia had lost after the collapse of the USSR. Moscow saw the opportunity to emerge as a fighter of revolutionaries and terrorists, whereas the Russians viewed the United States in the post-Arab Spring Middle East as a force which helped revolutionaries/ terrorists. The engagement in Syria was due to the fear that the collapse of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime would lead to the loss of the Russian naval facility in Tartus and air base at Hmeimim. At the same time, the Kremlin assumed that Russia would be spared a North Caucasian-type or Afghan-type conflict. To achieve this endgame, Moscow had to re-engage with an old economic partner, Tehran. The importance of Moscow’s engagement with Tehran dates back to the beginning of the post-Soviet era. 

Why Tehran?
After the collapse of the USSR, Moscow was left practically without allies, and hungered for foreign currencies. The economy was in a freefall. Iran was among the few states that were from the start interested in Russian hardware, especially weapons. Until 2015, however, Russia’s own civilizational quagmire hindered it from developing a consistent and full partnership with Iran. The situation in Syria provided the perfect moment for Moscow to finally realize a long-drawn foreign policy plan based on the 1990s version of “Eurasianism” which favored building alliances between Russia and Asian countries. 

In the 1920s, “Eurasianism”—a Russian ideology and intellectual movement— became popular among the country’s émigrés. The proponents of the creed rejected two major ideological trends which dominated most of Russia’s modern history: Slavophilism and Westernism. Slavophilics regarded Russia as a part of the Slavic world while Westernizers believed that Russia belonged to the West, at least since the time of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century. 

Eurasianists, however, rejected both prevalent visions. In their view, Russia was neither part of the Western nor the Slavic world. Russia was a civilization in its own right, based on the symbiotic relationship between Russians and other Slavs in the Russian empire, or the USSR—all of whom were historically Orthodox—and minorities, mostly Turkic by their ethnic origin. 

Eurasianists, at least in their classical pre-revolutionary version, did not regard Russia as an Asian country. Still, pre-Second World War Eurasianists believed that Russia is closer to Asian countries than to European ones. Eurasianism reemerged in the USSR during the late Soviet era and became especially popular in the 1990s. This version of Eurasianism was governed by contradictory views prevailing among the Russian populace: on the one hand, Russians viewed the republics of the former USSR as a burden which prevented Russia from thriving, and on the other hand, they increasingly felt nostalgic for the USSR and older times of comparative economic well-being and stability. Eurasianists insisted that parting with Eastern Europeans made sense—they were not “Slavic brothers” but rather considered an alien geopolitical body. It was a different story for countries such as Iran and other Asian powers. An alliance with these countries seemed natural because of cultural and geopolitical similarities. 

In the long run, however, the Eurasianists’ proposal for this model of foreign policy did not come to fruition. Yeltsin’s elite was slavishly acquiescent to the West, and the Russian state was weakened throughout the 1990s by privatization. In the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period, a series of reforms spearheaded by an emerging class of the super-rich drove the privatization of many Soviet industries and natural resources. Instead of allowing a centralized state to act as proprietor over land and country assets and resources, this class promoted a version of democracy which in its practical application translated into oligarchical rule, managed by a dysfunctional head of state. In addition, the emerging super-rich sent their money abroad, believing that it could only be safe in the West. They also assumed that the West was where they would escape to in case of a massive nationalization drive, which was not completely off the table throughout most of Yeltsin’s tenure. Moscow had no desire to agitate the West, viewed during the 1990s as a unified entity with the United States as its unquestioned leader. 

Consequently, the pivot toward the West killed “Eurasianist” dreams of engaging with Asian powers, at least in dealing with Iran. Under pressure from Washington—which pushed the claim that Russian technology was advancing Iran’s ballistic missile programs—Moscow signed the Gore–Chernomyrdin agreement in 1995 to end Russian weapon sales to Tehran and sever any civil nuclear ties. Thus, Russia was acquiescent to the United States despite the popularity of Eurasianism. 

By the end of Yeltsin’s term, privatization had become too widespread and elites gradually stopped being opposed to increased state power, especially when Putin proclaimed that nationalization was out of the question. Putin capitalized on this proclamation and centralized the Russian state. Meanwhile, the United States continued to project its power in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of President George W. Bush’s global war on terror. A more assertive Russia responded accordingly. In Putin’s early years of rule, the Gore– Chernomyrdin agreement was scrapped and the construction of the Bushehr nuclear plant resumed. Moreover, Moscow signed an agreement with Tehran to sell the advanced S-300 air defense system, which would complicate considerably U.S./Israeli strikes. Still, even at that time of increasing tensions with the United States, Moscow hardly saw Iran in the context of “Eurasian” geopolitical “symbiosis” and tried to find a way to accommodate the West at Iran’s expense. 

Consequently, using the United Nations resolutions calling for Iran to curb its nuclear activities as an excuse, Moscow, formally under President Dmitry Medvedev, in 2010, scrapped the agreement with Iran to deliver the S-300s. Iran was outraged and filed a $4 billion lawsuit against Russia’s defense export agency. The construction of the Bushehr plant was also delayed under various pretexts, which further soured Russian–Iranian relations. Still, neither side severed the relationship, for a variety of reasons. Then the events of 2014 in Syria reignited the seemingly moribund marriage between Tehran and Moscow. 

In Syria, Russia was expected to mostly contribute its air power while Iran provided the manpower. This division of labor seemed to work, and the Al-Assad regime—which had seemed to be in its death throes—began to move from one success to another with Tehran and Moscow’s backing. Meanwhile, Washington was increasingly unable to prevent Al-Assad from standing his ground and from beginning to win the war. 

Still, bolstering and securing Al-Assad’s victory and cooperating with Iran did not mean that the Tehran–Moscow relationship was built around the “Eurasian” model of mutual geopolitical loyalty or that the Russians and the Iranians have become complete allies. Both sides have kept wary eyes on each other. Russia’s relationship with Israel in particular was worrisome for Iran, which since the time of the 1979 Islamic Revolution had regarded Israel as its “mortal enemy.” 

A Thaw in Relations with Israel
The relationship that Russia presently has with Israel is a break from what it had been for the past sixty years—that is, from the beginning of the establishment of Israel. The USSR supported the founding of the Jewish state, and the Soviet-sponsored delivery of arms to Israel—for example, through proxies such as Czechoslovakia helped Israel survive the 1948 War with its Arab neighbors. Yet, soon enough, relations between the USSR and Israel took a negative turn. Israel, especially after the 1956 Suez Crisis, became allies with the United States. After the Six-Day War, Moscow broke off diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv. 

The rise of officially sponsored anti-Semitism followed, which had centuries-long roots in Russia. Jews had lived in the territory of the Russian empire for centuries and were victims of discrimination and violent pogroms. Although during the early Soviet era, Jews—referred to here exclusively by their ethnicity— experienced a peculiar renaissance and occupied important positions in the Soviet state after the Second World War, anti-Semitism became increasingly prominent and was supported by the Soviet leadership. 

During the Nixon–Brezhnev era, Russian Jews became a bargaining chip between the superpowers. The United States raised the issue of emigration for Russian Jews. Permissions were officially granted to some Jews to be “reunited” with their families in Israel. Millions left. Whereas many went to the West, mostly the United States, others went to Israel, where Russian-speaking Jews constituted a considerable part of the country’s population. 

Often well-educated and politically active, the Russian Jews who arrived in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s played a substantial role in Israel’s society and politics. Some of them became cabinet ministers. Avigdor Liberman, a Soviet Jew from the former Soviet republic of Moldova, is currently the minister of defense in Israel, the position second to the prime minister. Many of these Jews had bitter memories about Soviet life and usually were anti-Soviet or anti-Russian and pro-American. These conditions only reinforced negative relations between Israel and the USSR. 

However, after the collapse of the USSR and especially after Putin came to power, the situation changed dramatically. Not only did official anti-Semitism disappear, but a museum of tolerance dedicated to the history of Russian Jews opened in Moscow as a testament to the state’s changing relationship with Soviet Jews. All of this changed not just the attitudes of Jews in Russia to Putin, but those Russian or former Soviet Jews who lived in Israel. Anti-Russian feelings subsided and some Israelis developed pro-Putin sentiments. This changed the Israeli elite’s views of Russia and led some Israelis to make attempts to coordinate their posture toward Syria and Iran. 

Moscow eventually became attentive to Israelis’ demand to eliminate or at least dramatically reduce the Iranian presence in Syria, which Tehran would use as a springboard for attacking Israel. Yet, it was not just the relationship with Israel which complicated Moscow’s relationship with Tehran. Recently, Turkey– Russia relations also became a problem for both Moscow and Tehran. 

Ankara Complicates Things
The tension between Ankara and Moscow could be traced to the distant past. As a matter of fact, Crimean Tatars were the vassals of the Ottoman Sultans for hundreds of years. They had been engaged in wars with Russia since the fifteenth century. Since World War II, the Republic of Turkey has continued the Ottomans’ historically acrimonious relationship with Russia. As a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally, Turkey was viewed with suspicion and hostility in the USSR and in modern-day Russia. 

The relationship between Ankara and Moscow reached a breaking point when a Turkish jet shot down a Russian military plane in November 24, 2015. Ankara claimed that the Russian jet had crossed Turkish airspace. Still, the problem was not the incident per se; Ankara was strongly opposed to Moscow’s and Tehran’s attempts to save Al-Assad. In the conflict with Turkey, Russia and Iran were on the same page since Iran vied with Turkey for geopolitical power in the region. 

However, following the jet plane incident, Moscow buried the hatchet with the Turks and began to gravitate toward Turkey, even at the expense of Iran, supposedly Moscow’s major ally in Syria and the Middle East. One reason that could explain Moscow’s abrupt change in its approach to Ankara is Turkey’s role in operating the pipeline, TurkStream. Launched in May 2017, TurkStream has been crucial for Russia primarily because it has bypassed Ukraine in sending natural gas to Europe. 

Moscow’s goodwill toward Turkey was manifested in several ways: firstly, Moscow provided Turkey with carte blanche to attack Syrian Kurds, despite Russia’s historical ties with the Kurds, and secondly, Moscow closed its eyes to Turkey’s invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan. In both cases, Iran protested and implicitly asked Russia to exert pressure on Turkey to compel it to withdraw troops. Moscow did nothing. 

In addition, Ankara has made arrangements with Russia to acquire its advanced S-400 air defense missiles, which it signed a deal to purchase last September. One should remember that Tehran waited for the delivery of the less advanced S-300s for a decade. 

In the current situation, Moscow leans more toward Ankara than Tehran. First, Moscow wants both lines of TurkStream built. Second, Iran wants Russia to engage in a full-fledged war, and to make Iran a dominant force in Syria. Moscow does not want this, and is ready to accommodate other players, including Turkey, Israel, and even the United States in shaping Syria’s future. 

Moscow’s Overall Engagement
The emergence of ISIS was a convenient excuse for Moscow to interfere in the region. Moscow claimed that ISIS fighters, many of whom from Russia, could return to the country. In reality, Moscow wanted to maintain its opportunistic footprint in the Middle East, which will help the Russians maintain their imperialist visions for the region, albeit in a limited and cautious manner. With that, Moscow tries to maintain a relationship with all players, including Iran, Turkey, and Israel. Moscow also tries to pivot to this or that player depending on its perceived interests, without compromising its relationship with the other players and notwithstanding the players’ hostility to one another. 

At the beginning of the Syrian conflict, Moscow decided to cooperate with Tehran to safeguard its bases in Syria and protect Al-Assad’s regime. At the same time, it refused to do Iran’s bidding, which wanted a resolute victory for the Syrian regime and to push aside other players, including the United States and Israel. In fact, Russia did not want to antagonize Israel, despite Moscow’s recent accusation that it was responsible for shooting down a Russian plane by Syrian missiles. It also avoided a direct confrontation with Turkey, which competes with Iran and increasingly with the United States for the leading role in the region. Moscow’s recent tilt to Ankara and readiness to accommodate its interests are due to the desire to lay down two gas lines through Turkey, which would make it possible to cut its dependence on Ukraine. To summarize: Russian engagement in the Middle East is convoluted and, in a way, limited, but Moscow is ready to accommodate the interests of other powers if its own interests are taken into account. 

Dmitry Shlapentokh is associate professor of history at Indiana University South Bend. He is the author of more than a hundred publications, including articles, book chapters, and several books including, most recently, The Protototalitarian State: Punishment and Control in Absolutist Regimes and The French Revolution and the Russian Anti-Democratic Tradition: A Case of False Consciousness.

Suakin sits along Sudan’s Red Sea coast, a small grouping of faded buildings and historical ruins containing a proud fishing community. The town is a coastal village and the main attraction is the ancient ruins—some dating back to the fifteenth century—as well as the outer shell of a British fort that persists as a symbol of Sudan’s colonial past. In its prime, Suakin was a key transit point for African Muslims on the pilgrimage to Mecca, but with the advent of air travel the town has fallen from prominence, an abandonment only made worse by the collapse of Sudan’s tourist industry. 

Yet in January 2018, Suakin was at the center of a rapid deterioration of diplomatic relations between Sudan and its northern neighbor Egypt, triggering talk of possible war between the two nations. In December 2017 Turkish President Recep Erdoğan visited Suakin ostensibly to inspect the large-scale restoration of the historical town financed by the Turkish government. Then a few weeks later, in January 2018, Erdoğan returned to Sudan to sign among many other agreements, a deal to hand over Suakin to Turkey altogether—just for tourism, both governments maintain—which Sudan’s neighbors have interpreted as an act of aggression. 

The situation in Suakin is emblematic of increasingly complicated geopolitical relations in Africa’s northeast corner. From Egypt to Tanzania, decades of political ambivalence around unsettled borders, access to the sea, and ambiguous agreements about the waters of the Nile are flaring up. Much of this tension is left over from Britain’s colonial history in the region, but some is entirely new, aggravated by simmering conflicts in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. There are also centuries of connection between the various states as well as internal realignments that complicate the situation further.

Since 2017, the nations of the GCC and their allies have been embroiled in a diplomatic crisis whose impact is being felt far beyond the region. In Northeast Africa, including Egypt, shifting allegiances in the Middle East have triggered unprecedented geopolitical transformations—with both conflict and peace emerging in unexpected places. The conflict over Suakin shows how connections with the Gulf crisis have exacerbated tensions in Northeast Africa, while the unexpected peace between Eritrea and Ethiopia stands as a rare example of a positive outcome of the GCC crisis. Both these situations underscore the strong economic and political connections between the regions, and the significant influence that wealthy Gulf states wield in the area. Yet, African countries are not simply following the will of their wealthy benefactors—there have also been notable demonstrations of independence and agency in containing the impact of the crisis. Whether or not these demonstrations of agency will triumph over the deepening tension in the Gulf and the growing economic crisis in Northeast Africa remains to be seen. 

The year 2018, with its seismic shifts and unprecedented developments, is an excellent moment to examine a handful of the connections between the Gulf and Northeast Africa. Beneath geographical boundaries, there are layers of live wires connecting these regions, many of which are about water. 

A Game of Tit for Tat: Halayeb and Suakin
By 2018, every country in continental Africa’s northeast—defined here as the countries with capitals east of 20 degrees longitude, and north of the Equator— had a disputed border. Since independence, Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya, Uganda, and Somalia have all fought border wars of varying intensity, many of which were not resolved but simply allowed to cool as other geostrategic priorities superseded them. Today, these border disputes present easy focal points or excuses for other faces of conflict. For example, current tension between Egypt and Sudan over Suakin is just the latest phase of a convoluted relationship that has often centered on their shared border, and specifically, the Halayeb Triangle. 

Indeed, the Halayeb Triangle is a 20,000 square foot region that has been the subject of a border dispute between Cairo and Khartoum since Sudan gained independence from Britain in 1956. Unlike Suakin—where the geostrategic influence far outweighs any immediate commercial value—the Halayeb Triangle is a resource-rich territory and both countries have attempted to offer international companies the rights to explore the area for oil and minerals. 

By the 2000s the Halayeb conflict had cooled, particularly when former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi appeared open to renegotiating the status of the territory. But in 2016, Egypt and Saudi Arabia entered an agreement that seemed to reignite the unresolved row, Egypt apparently ceding two islands in the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia, much to the ire of Sudan. According to Sudanese officials, the fine print of the deal also claimed that Sudan had ceded Halayeb to Egypt. Meanwhile, Sudan was not a party to the agreement, and in December 2017, President Omar Al-Bashir wrote to the United Nations to condemn the Saudi–Egyptian deal while recalling the Sudanese ambassador to Cairo in January 2018. 

Arguably, Sudan’s 2017 agreement with Turkey was a response to Egypt’s 2016 commitment to the Saudi–Egyptian deal. Cairo has interpreted the possibility of a permanent Turkish presence at its doorstep as a subtle act of aggression given that Erdoğan continues to provide sanctuary to members of the Muslim Brotherhood fleeing the Abdel Fattah El-Sisi regime. Erdoğan has also been openly supportive of jailed former Egyptian president Morsi and with Turkey’s influence growing on the East African coast stretching down to Somalia, the possible ceding of Suakin is a major concern for Egypt. 

Choosing Sides in the GCC Crisis
The struggle over Suakin is also the latest phase of a spillover of GCC tensions onto the East African coast, as countries like Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and lately Sudan have experienced pressure to take sides in the standoff between Qatar on one side and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on the other. This crisis also implicates Iran and Saudi Arabia, and is complicated by the ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen. Turkey has allied itself with Qatar and Iran, while Saudi Arabia counts Egypt among its allies, and both axes have invested greatly in courting African allies like Sudan and Ethiopia. 

Part of the reason why the GCC is able to exert such influence in Northeast Africa—including Egypt—is that most of the countries in the region are broke after nearly a decade of illusory growth and borrowing for large-scale infrastructure projects. Qatari and Saudi Arabian corporations have purchased large tracts of arable land in Sudan for agriculture, a key source of revenue for the financially and increasingly politically hamstrung Al-Bashir regime. Environmental activists within Sudan have criticized this relationship, particularly as much of the land that has been acquired is in the fertile Nile Basin, which accounts for a significant amount of Sudan’s agricultural output. While Qatar is not the only GCC country with significant land purchases in Sudan, it is certainly one of the most influential as in 2009 the Sudanese government signed a $1 billion deal allowing a Qatari corporation to develop up to 20,000 hectares of arable land.

Egypt also faces major economic challenges and has cast its lot with Saudi Arabia, including the aforementioned cessation of territory, despite a complicated diplomatic history. In June 2018, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi reaffirmed that Egypt’s relationship with Saudi Arabia was one of its key strategic partnerships. And in 2017, Egypt was one of the first countries to cut ties with Qatar at the behest of Saudi Arabia, subsequently entering numerous bilateral agreements with Riyadh, notably the Red Sea islands deal offering the promise of increased economic support for Egypt. 

Taken together, these events largely explain why the crisis around a small, nearly derelict fishing village threatens to escalate into a significant issue. Suakin is symbolic of shifting allegiances between African countries that have never fully resolved their diplomatic relations, as well as the increasing ability of Middle Eastern states to use money to influence domestic policy within those countries, often to an absurd degree. Certainly, the wilful cessation of territory to both Turkey and Saudi Arabia was unprecedented in African diplomatic history, where autonomous control of land by indigenous people was the crux of independence movements across the continent. From outside the countries involved, the actions of Sudan and Egypt seem like a significant backward step in the long-running struggle for independence. 

Yet, the unrest in Africa’s northeast is not just about outside interests. In fact, what presents as opportunistic alignment with GCC countries are arguably defensive measures in the context of heightened regional tensions—primarily over water. 

Climate scientists have long warned that scarcity of water may trigger the next world war, and the increasingly fraught relationships in Africa’s northeast suggest that this prediction is a little too close for comfort. Egypt, Sudan, and other countries along the River Nile have had clashes in the past regarding the use of the river—indeed it was the motivation for much of Britain’s colonial enterprise in the region. But access to fishing and trade routes in the Red Sea has also been a point of contention, and when layered with the GCC crisis, what we are witnessing is the escalation of unresolved sore spots between nations. Where tension over water has been almost a constant, foreign interests and funding have arrived to complicate the picture. 

Securing Water in the Sahara
The most significant face of this is the escalating stress around the use of Nile waters. The two main tributaries of the world’s longest river rise in South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Uganda (and by extension Kenya and Tanzania) before meeting in Khartoum and flowing through Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea. While the longest section of the river is in Egypt, the southern countries dispute Cairo’s claims to rights of use, many of which were established by colonial-era agreements to serve British occupation. Egypt relies completely on the river for its freshwater but countries upstream are increasingly damming the tributaries that feed into the Nile for their electricity. 

Specifically, Egypt has taken issue with Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Located in northwest Ethiopia, close to its border with Sudan, the GERD dams the Blue Nile tributary, which contributes up to 86 percent of the total volume of the Nile during the rainy season. When completed, the GERD will be the single largest infrastructure project in Africa and the largest dam on the continent with a volume of over 10 million cubic meters and a maximum capacity of 6.45 gigawatts. 

The GERD is one of many dam projects that the Ethiopian government has undertaken over the last ten years as part of a broader investment in the country’s infrastructure—and part of the reason why the country is running out of money. After decades of conflict, Africa’s second most populous country settled into a pattern of state violence and repression that stagnated the economy. While socialism remains the official economic approach, since the turn of the millennium state policy changed to embrace selective capitalism— similar to China. The vast infrastructure developments are meant to stimulate economic growth and create opportunities for the country’s mostly rural and poor population.  

Ethiopia’s dams present environmental and political challenges for its neighbors. Logically therefore, Sudan should be at the forefront of challenging Ethiopia’s dam building, and initially the Khartoum government did oppose the GERD. But recently the Al-Bashir regime has been enthusiastic about the project in part because of agreements with Ethiopia to purchase surplus electricity generated by the projects. At current rates of population and economic growth, Ethiopia is unable to absorb the excess energy generated by the projects while both Kenya and Sudan suffer from relatively high energy prices. This is a strategic long-term gamble by the Ethiopian administration to secure its energy future at significant political cost in the short term. 

Tension over the GERD in part explains why Sudan and Egypt are currently at odds, but Sudan and Ethiopia are not natural allies either, forced by domestic and regional developments into an expedient if uncomfortable relationship. For both countries, the compromise is necessary. Both are in the throes of significant economic crises, which have triggered seismic political upheavals that both governments are struggling to contain. For Ethiopia, an unlikely alliance with Sudan not only wills the GERD into existence, but also offers the promise of a new route to the sea. For Sudan, it brings in a much-needed source of energy as the oil wells of South Sudan remain choked by civil war and simmering tension between the two countries over the Abyei oilfields. 

Ethiopia’s Quest for a Port
Access to the sea is another facet of the role of water in geopolitics in Northeast Africa. In 1994, Eritrea seceded from Ethiopia and since the 1998 war between the two, Ethiopia—the largest economy in the region—has been landlocked and reliant on Djibouti for access to the sea: up to 90 percent of Ethiopia’s imports enter the country through Djibouti’s ports. At the same time, as part of the GCC crisis, the UAE has been investing significantly in ports along the East African coast, notably in Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, and Somaliland. Of these countries, only Djibouti has openly taken sides in the GCC crisis, leaving Ethiopia vulnerable to the vacillations of a conflict which does not concern it. 

Nonetheless, for cash-strapped countries like Ethiopia, the GCC crisis has presented an unexpected boon. The Gulf nations and their allies are scrambling to build new allegiances in the region in the most predictable way possible, by using the promise of aid and foreign direct investment. And traditional donor countries like the United States and the UK are increasingly facing inwards to their own domestic challenges, leaving a major geopolitical gap. This creates a new lever that is clearly being used to force realignments in the region and to create coalitions of unnatural bedfellows that can be relied upon for geostrategic support as the situation in the Gulf remains fraught. 

In Ethiopia, while the details remain shrouded in diplomatic secrecy, the fact that the prime minister Dr. Abiy Ahmed and his Eritrean counterpart, Isaias Afwerki, signed the same peace agreement three times this past summer—in Asmara, Abu Dhabi, and finally in Riyadh—and not in traditional diplomatic centers like Geneva, New York, or even Nairobi, indicates that both the UAE and Saudi Arabia played significant roles in brokering an unexpected rapprochement between the two, effectively ending a twenty-year war. 

The move has been hailed as the most significant diplomatic development in Africa, ending a seemingly senseless conflict and leading to a drawdown along Africa’s most militarized border. In August 2018 after the agreement was signed, men and women gathered at the border and openly wept in each other’s arms; family members that had not seen each other since the beginning of the war in 1998 were finally reunited. The causes of Ethiopia and Eritrea’s unexpected peace are complicated, but analysts suggest that it has everything to do with pressure coming from the UAE as part of a broader effort to increase its influence in the region.

The Ethiopia–Eritrea peace caught Horn of Africa analysts by surprise as both nations looked to have settled comfortably into the routines of a war that has fundamentally altered both societies, not just militarily. Other countries and institutions like the African Union and the United Nations had several times attempted to broker peace between the neighbors to no avail. It may not have been a single thing—it was more likely a confluence of circumstances that gave the UAE and Saudi Arabia the leverage they needed to push the neighbors together. The first and most obvious of these is money. 

One of the worst-kept economic secrets in the region was that Ethiopia’s centralized economy had been struggling with diminishing foreign exchange reserves and was facing imminent collapse even while the state borrowed heavily—from China especially—to finance large-scale infrastructure projects. Officially Ethiopia’s economy has been growing at up to 11 percent per annum, but economic experts had long doubted the veracity of these statistics given that most ordinary Ethiopians remained visibly poor. Meanwhile, protests and violent reprisals triggered by state plans to expand Addis Ababa in 2016 snowballed into the threat of national disintegration. 

Facing a compounding domestic crisis and in desperate need of foreign exchange to sustain the illusion of economic growth, Ethiopia’s government allegedly found little sympathy in traditional partners like the United States and China. Increasing political repression had recently dried the aid taps from the West, while the government was already too significantly indebted to Beijing. This, according to experts, is why following an abrupt change of prime minister, the Ethiopian government reached out to Saudi Arabia. For the Saudis, facing increasing criticism over the war in Yemen and domestic issues like the mass arrests of women’s rights activists in 2018, this would be a major diplomatic victory. But it would also bring Ethiopia, a powerful and influential African country, into their sphere of influence while securing their presence on the Red Sea—one of the world’s most lucrative sea routes. 

From an Ethiopian standpoint, the risk of Djibouti becoming embroiled in the Gulf crisis would have been significant and alarming—a lesson the region learnt during Kenya’s 2007–2008 post-election crisis when imports to Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Rwanda were significantly disrupted by a crisis they could not control. A menu of options for access to the sea—again in the context of a general economic crisis—would have been well worth pursuing. 

According to insiders, the Ethiopia–Eritrea peace deal came on the heels of a diplomatic summit between Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia in May 2018. At the summit, Ahmed promised to abide by the terms of the Algiers Agreement on peace between the two countries if Afwerki agreed to meet Ahmed and discuss other issues of import. Ahmed went as far as calling Afwerki at the summit, but the call was spurned perhaps out of a habit of frosty relations. Yet by July, Ahmed was in Asmara for a face-to-face meeting with Afwerki. 

What has followed is a flurry of increasingly unbelievable diplomatic efforts aimed at normalizing relations between the two countries at hyper-speed. In June 2018, no Ethiopian official had set foot in Eritrea since 1998. By August, both countries had reopened diplomatic missions in each other’s capitals and reduced military presence along the border. By September of the same year, Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers were dancing alongside each other in celebration. Whereas in January 2018, Ethiopia relied on only one choice of port, in September 2018 it has four possible options. And in September 2018, Ahmed and Afwerki met in Riyadh to sign a peace agreement for the third time this year, cementing Saudi Arabia’s footprint on the process. 

The Allure of Northeast Africa
There are of course more layers and intricacies to the geopolitics of Northeast Africa, but just by focusing on the issue of water—either access to the sea or to the Nile—we see how pathologies and conflict economies travel into and across the region. The four countries discussed here—Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea—are not the only ones affected by shifts in the Gulf but they have come closest to absorbing the entropy from that region into their domestic and regional politics. 

These major developments in the relationship between Northeast Africa and the Middle East also obscure several less visible but equally significant developments. Notably, Turkey has made significant diplomatic inroads in Northeast Africa, particularly as a key international partner for Somalia as the war-torn nation seeks to rebuild. In 2011, President Erdoğan became the first non-African leader to visit Mogadishu since the onset of war in 1991. Subsequently, Turkey has funded numerous key reconstruction projects in Somalia, notably the main international airport—which doubles as the hub for international diplomacy in the context of Mogadishu’s insecurity—and training and reforming Somalia’s hitherto celebrated military. 

Turkey is also implicated in the struggle to control the waters of the Red Sea. Since 2017, Turkey has maintained a military base in Somalia, giving it a major presence on the East African coastline. Meanwhile, Djibouti continues to host foreign military bases from more countries than any other on the continent. Militaries from the United States, France, Italy, China, and Japan all operate from the country. These countries continue to expand their military presence in the region through aggressive base and port building. Today, the United States has a seemingly permanent presence in Kenya and Uganda, while China has established a military presence in Sudan and South Sudan to protect its oil interests in the latter, as well as its first overseas military base in Djibouti. The militarization of Northeast Africa by foreign powers shows no signs of abating. 

As it stands, most of the countries in Northeast Africa have opted to stay neutral in the GCC crisis, with the notable exception of Djibouti. But the pressure persists. Somalia has, for example, found itself sandwiched between the interests of key traditional partners. Experts at the Crisis Group argue that tensions in the Gulf have exacerbated hostilities between factions angling for control over the still-fragile government in Mogadishu, as well as between the various semi-autonomous and autonomous regions in the country. And as demonstrated above, they have made unlikely allies of countries like Sudan and Ethiopia, while exacerbating pre-existing regional disputes over land and water. 

Wealth disparities have cast Gulf countries primarily in the role of donor nations and African countries in the role of aid recipients, giving the former significant sway over the domestic and regional politics of the latter as demonstrated by the recent experiences of Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, and others. At the same time, perhaps having witnessed the devastation geopolitical maneuvering in the Gulf has caused in Syria and Yemen, African countries like Ethiopia are increasingly unwilling to allow their survival to remain predicated on what happens in other parts of the world. There have been demonstrations of agency that may escalate in response to regional realities. For example, in the fact of its cash crisis, Sudan is taking an aggressive lead in supporting peace efforts in South Sudan, even when the Al-Bashir regime faces international sanction. 

Overall, political changes in the Gulf present both opportunities and new constraints for African countries, including Egypt. A new source of aid and foreign direct investment also means a new patron to please, a new set of conditions to negotiate, a new series of hoops to jump through. Major outcomes of the past year have included the so far relatively peaceful transition in Ethiopia, and the unexpected peace in Eritrea. Money is entering economies like Egypt and Sudan after years of debilitating cash drought. However, Africa has long experience with the problems that conditional assistance can cause, and one has the sense that at some point the nations in the Gulf will call in these favors. The demonstrations of agency by African countries are encouraging, but it is unclear if they are braced for the coming impact. 

Remember Suakin, once a point of engagement for African and Middle Eastern countries, now a symbol of the complex tensions that bind them. 

Nanjala Nyabola is a writer and political analyst based in Nairobi, Kenya. She is the author of the forthcoming Digital Democracy, Analogue Politicsand a co-editor of Where Women Are: Gender and the 2017 Kenyan Election. Her articles have appeared in Foreign Policy, New Internationalist, Al-Jazeera, and Project Syndicate, among others. On Twitter: @Nanjala1.

Russia’s Middle East Policy: from Lenin to Putin. By Alexey Vasiliev. Routledge, London,  2018. 554 pp. 

The value of Alexey Vasiliev’s Russia’s Middle East Policy: from Lenin to Putin is evident to advanced scholars of the region, whose interests lie in the history of ideas and institutions, if only for the reason that this is one of those texts translated from both another language and from another set of academic expectations. 

As a researcher of Arab politics within archival records of Soviet jurisdictions since 1988, I pay close attention to developments in the field of Russian/Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East. I read Vasiliev’s book in search of fresh observations on earlier Soviet–Middle East history works such as Yaacov Ro’i’s 1974 book From Encroachment to Involvement, A.I. and Karen Dawisha’s 1982 Soviet Union in the Middle East, Galia Golan’s 1988 Soviet Policies in the Middle East, and Talal Nizameddin’s Russia and the Middle East, published in 1999.

In many ways, Vasiliev has been a contemporary for Ro’i, the Dawishas, Golan, and Nizameddin. Vasiliev entered the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) the year of the Suez War, and spent a year at Cairo University (1960–61) writing a thesis on the Arabian Peninsula during the eighteenth century. Assigned to Pravda as assistant political commentator (1962), he became the paper’s correspondent responsible for Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and the countries of the Arabian Peninsula from Ankara (1971–75). He reported on the Arab–Israeli war while in Syria during 1973, returning to Cairo to cover Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and Ethiopia for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s official newspaper (1975– 79). He was then appointed deputy director of the Institute for African Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1983, and subsequently elected director in 1992, then honorary president of the African Studies institute in 2015. This illustrious career in Moscow’s information and academic institutions granted Vasiliev access to diplomats’ personal observations, and informs his analysis.

While Vasiliev sets out to cover Russia’s policy in the region, the variances of political and historical change experienced by local Middle Eastern actors lie outside this monograph’s scope. In its structure, Russia’s Middle East Policy shifts from establishing a conceptual vocabulary, to narrating chronologies of events, to addressing the specificities of Russia’s policy in given geopolitical areas. Vasiliev characterizes the Soviet Union’s foreign policy ideology as “messianism” (which he defines in chapter 1 as “a Messianic concept of salvation, of God’s kingdom on earth”), which rose during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, fell during the Mikhail Gorbachev administration in the early nineties, and may indeed have returned to prominence in recent years. It is this theoretical approach which distinguishes Vasiliev’s interpretation from Ro’i’s collection of documents, the Dawishas’ emphasis on “personalized leadership,” Golan’s assertion that “the Soviet entry into the Third World began with the death of Stalin in 1953,” and finally, Nizameddin’s emphasis on Boris Yeltsin’s leadership. 

The originality of Vasiliev’s analysis is clear in the field of foreign affairs. With that said, “messianism” is also a concept derived from the history of religions. This term found its way into commentaries on Soviet affairs via Nikolai Berdyaev’s Origin of Russian Communism, with its assertion that, “The Russian people have not realized their Messianic idea of Moscow the Third Rome,” and Tibor Szamuely’s Russian Tradition, with its claim that the “proletariat” took the place of the “people,” and two varieties of messianism, Russian, and Marxist, coalesced. The concept of “messianism” is developed in the introductory and concluding chapters of Vasiliev’s book. Vasiliev discusses messianism during the Khrushchev period via such slogans as “the non-capitalist path of development,” “revolutionary democracy,” and “national democracy.” In discussing the Leonid Brezhnev period’s employment of messianism, the author states, “The behavior of Soviet leaders was still imbued with Messianic ideas” and that assistance to Afghan Marxists was “an attempt to realize one last time the Messianic idea embodied in the foundation of the Soviet state.” 

When narrating events, Vasiliev discusses the “Rise and Fall of N.S. Khrushchev,” with valuable original material like an extended interview with Soviet politician and previous Minister of Foreign Affairs D.T. Shepilov on the Suez War, and references original documents from British Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s and American Ambassador Douglas Dillak’s correspondence. For readers committed to Egypt’s role in the region, however, shortcomings are evident in the text: Gamal Abdel Nasser’s presence at Bandung is not addressed; reasons are not offered for the three aggressors’ 1956 withdrawal from Suez; and an assertion once made by Malcolm Kerr, who served as president of the American University in Beirut, that rivals Egypt and Iraq sought to lead the region in opposite directions passes without note. Engaging with a new generation of scholarship on the Suez War— dating from Diane Kunz’s Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis—would have been a helpful contribution to Vasiliev’s analysis.

Interspersed with such chronological accounts, Vasiliev addresses specific geopolitical areas. In “An Exotic Flower of Arabia,” he analyzes the USSR’s agreement to build a port at Al Hudaydah in the context of Soviet–Yemeni cooperation between the two World Wars and after World War II. In this, he returns to the conceptual theme of “messianism” with deputy chief of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (International Department) K.N. Brutents’s quoted assertion that, “the Soviet policy, viewed as quite natural and logical within the scheme of ‘advances of socialism and support of natural allies’ turned out to be inadequate and, one might even say, utopian.” Statements such as “nobody troubled the Soviet citizens living in South Yemen” imply that Vasiliev may have been an eyewitness to some of these events. 

While translated into the English language in its entirety, this text does not live up to the expectations of the Anglophone academy. While the introduction highlights the author’s extraordinary access within the region—that is, an interview with the Russian ambassador to Syria surrounded by Russian special forces in black uniforms in crowded cafeterias near the bus-stop to Raqqa—the concept of “messianism” is incompletely articulated either as a metaphor for the cult of Soviet laïcité (secularism), or an in-depth guide to post-colonial populations’ changing place in Communist Party policies. With this said, the references to compilations such as Documents of the Foreign Policy of the USSR that contain texts of treaties and The USSR and the Countries of Africa, 1946-1962, a rare collection of primary sources (which may themselves both deserve more attention than other scholars have paid them) as well as interviews with academics and diplomats, make the book a worthwhile read indeed. 

Elizabeth Bishop is associate professor in the Department of History at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX. She is also the recipient of two U.S. Scholar Fulbright awards, at the University of Algiers (2007) and at the University of Oran (2018). Bishop is the author of many scholarly articles and has recently co-edited a book titled Soviet Student Dormitories: Structures and Legacies.

In 2013, when Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the “Belt and Road” initiative, China and the Middle East rediscovered their common historic legacies and shared memories of the ancient lands and maritime Silk Roads linking Imperial China and the Arab World. Because of policies arising from the Belt and Road initiative, China has taken a deliberate turn to “look west,” designating Eurasia and Africa as its priorities for international cooperation and deal-making.

Today, Middle Eastern oil, natural gas, and markets are crucial revenue sources affecting daily life in China. In 2017, China imported about 200 million tons of oil from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which was close to half of its total crude oil imports. With its domestic manufacturing market becoming increasingly saturated, China has pinned high expectations on exporting to the MENA region, which boasts 450 million consumers.

By 2017 China had become the largest overseas investor in the Middle East and signed contracts with states across the Arab World that amounted to $33 billion. Sino–Arab trade reached $191 billion that same year while Sino–Iranian trade hit $37 billion. Also in 2017, Israeli trade with China witnessed an increase of 19 percent to reach $12 billion and trade with Turkey hit $26 billion.

Ultimately, many economic and cultural partnerships have been spurred between China and the Middle East. In contrast to Western and Russian heavy-handed military involvement in the Middle East, China has built a substantial economic presence in the region, ranging from construction of seaports, highways, and railways to nuclear power plants, industrial parks, and oil refineries. Chinese banks have also opened branches across the region. While traditional powers perceive the region as a “battleground,” rising powers like China and India regard the MENA region as an untapped market. That’s why the Chinese government has generally sought to practice political neutrality and avoid getting mired in regional politics and conflicts, concerning itself more with possible security threats to its overseas projects and expatriates. Overall, China adheres to a business-oriented and pragmatic foreign policy in the Middle East, in which communist ideology or political advocacy are largely downplayed.

In particular, China has been increasingly creative and innovative in implementing its traditional diplomatic dogmas of the “Four-No” policies with regards to the region: non-interference in others countries’ internal affairs; non-alignment between aligned powers; no construction of foreign military bases; and no political strings attached in offering foreign aid. However, as Beijing’s involvement becomes more far-reaching and intensive in the years to come, China will likely face unpredictable situations where it will be required to slightly bend its four dogmas.

Although China adheres to a “zero-enemy” policy with regards to the Middle East, in recent years it has attempted to engage with Middle Eastern powers militarily in an incremental manner. Yet, while inching toward military engagement, Chinese leaders have kept in sight the goal of enhancing Beijing’s capacity to provide public good to locals in the region in five key ways.

China sent convoy fleets to the Gulf of Aden. From 2009 to August 2018, China has dispatched thirty convoy fleets to the Gulf of Aden and the Somali waters at large. These fleets have visited Port Djibouti, Mombasa of Kenya, Port Sultan Qaboos of Oman, Jeddah of Saudi Arabia, Port Abbas of Iran, Karachi of Pakistan, and other seaports adjacent to the Red Sea and the Western Indian Ocean. The fleets were used to serve the UN World Food Programme ships and help the international commercial ships against pirates, as well as rescue Chinese and other nationals.

China’s military engagement in the Middle East, albeit insignificant and non- institutionalized, indicates that China has an interest in participating in Middle East security governance. Although it has shied away from military affairs due to its non-interference principle, Beijing is exploring feasible and legitimate ways for its military to play a positive role, a breakthrough of its “Four-No” policies.

China has built a logistics base in Djibouti. For a long time, Beijing was opposed to building foreign military bases in the Middle East, claiming that the bases’ presence may worsen the security dilemma and even invite proxy wars among Arab countries. In May 2015, however, Djibouti President Ismail Omar Guelleh announced that China was in talks regarding the establishment of a military base in the northern Obock region of the country, implying that the new Chinese base is to overlook U.S. military installations there. The base was officially opened in August 2017 by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy.

Yet, to provide a favorable political environment for Beijing’s first overseas logistics base—which in essence goes against China’s anti-foreign military base policy—China has actively participated in the construction of Djibouti’s free trade zone, which covers 48 square kilometers. The initial investment for the project was around $340 million. As of August 2018, the China-funded free trade zone of Djibouti was completed.

Also, along with the construction of the base, China built the Port of Doraleh, a multipurpose port with a total investment of over $590 million. The port was financed by the Hong Kong conglomerate China Merchants with a total of $185 million and by the Export-Import Bank of China.

China is increasing interest for arms sales to the MENA region. Compared to the United States, the European Union, and Russia, China’s arms sales to the Middle East are not significant. In 2012 for instance, China’s arms sales to the region only reached $753 million, while those of the Barack Obama administration were as high as $28.5 billion, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. However, there have been signs of increasing minor arms sales between China and the region despite China’s zero-enemy policy. Turkey, for example, declared in September 2013 that it would purchase China’s FD-2000 missile defense system, which defeated other arms manufacturers in a bid, with a sale price of only $4 billion. The Turkish government finally had to suspend the transaction due to U.S. opposition. The United States opposed this planned purchase because were Turkey to buy from China, the new purchase would put an end to the monopoly of Western arms dealers’ selling to the NATO member. Besides Turkey, in recent years, the Gulf countries, such as the United Arab Emirates and Iraq, were interested in China’s “Pterosaurs-1,” an unmanned aerial vehicle capable of carrying BA-7 and YZ-212 missiles.

China is performing joint military rehearsals in the region. In recent years, China has sent more and more military delegations to the Middle East and carried out several joint military rehearsals. For instance, China held joint military rehearsals with Turkey in 2010, with Saudi Arabia in 2016, and with Iran in 2017. Moreover, China and Russia had several military exercises in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Despite China’s inability to project hard military power in the area, the exercises are signs of Beijing’s soft military footprints in the MENA region.

China is participating in the UN peacekeeping operations in the Middle East. In September 2015, President Xi attended the UN peacekeeping summit in New York, declaring that China would build eight thousand UN standby peacekeeping forces, representing about 20 percent of the world’s total. He also stated that China would donate $1 billion to the UN for its Peace and Development Fund and that China would train two thousand peacekeeping troops for other UN member states. As of April 2018, China has contributed over eighteen hundred soldiers and police to the UN peacekeeping missions in or near the MENA region. China’s police and troops have taken part in five UN peacekeeping missions in the area: Western Sahara (MINURSO, ten persons), Darfur of Sudan (UNAMID, 371 persons), Lebanon (UNIFIL, 418 persons), South Sudan (UNMISS, 1,056 persons) and Palestine-Israel (UNTSO, five persons). China wants to show the world that Beijing is willing to fully embrace multilateralism and do its duty as a responsible power, which forms a sharp contrast to the U.S. government’s unilateralism and populism.

China’s New View

The Middle East and North Africa is at the converging points of modern-day silk roads connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa. The MENA countries are China’s natural business and political partners. China has never colonized any part of the Middle East, nor has China any historical burdens in developing friendly and mutually beneficial relations with MENA countries. Beijing’s “non-alignment,” “no sphere of influence,” and “no proxy” policy will give China an upper hand in its rivalry with other global powers active in the region. That said, rising from a regional to a global power, China will inevitably encounter its “growing pains” regarding its engagement with the area.

For example, China’s non-alignment policy cannot bring it authentic friends. Also, China’s huge investment in the region may add fiscal burden to the countries that accept this investment. China finds it hard to implement its mediation diplomacy between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and between Palestine and Israel. China lacks clear-cut proposals for conflict resolution in Syria, Yemen, and Libya.

However, China’s economic, political, diplomatic, military, and cultural engagements with MENA will enhance Beijing’s capacity to participate in the region’s governance. Ultimately, China and Middle East countries will establish a closer partnership, linked by the Belt and Road initiative.

It is a remarkable fact that fewer women work in the Arab World than anywhere else. Logically, this state of affairs doesn’t make sense. Education, for one, is not the issue. Women in the region outnumber men in pursuing university degrees by a ratio of 108 to 100. Nor is achievement the problem. Standardized test results show that young Arab women and girls outperform their male classmates across different levels of education. And yet, gender differences in economic activity are larger than anywhere else. Looking at technology companies in the Middle East gives some perspective into this dilemma.

Thirty-five percent of internet companies in Arab countries have a female founder, compared to a global average of just 10 percent. According to Flat6Labs, a startup accelerator active in six major Arab cities, the percentage of companies with at least one female founder ranges from a low 30 percent in Cairo to a high 46 percent in Jeddah.

Is this a harbinger of greater economic inclusion of Arab women? The technology sector can play an important role in the economic activity of Arab women, and as tech grows, so does the potential for more economic power in the hands of women.

An increase in Arab women’s employment in the tech world will depend on whether the sector can attract more female talent. The value for women can come from the creation of fairer job opportunities in tech companies, especially as women have proven to be adept at math and science. Increasing Arab women’s economic power will also depend on whether technology companies can provide more large-scale marketplaces where women as merchants can sell their products and time and face less discrimination.

Let’s Play Ball
Technology companies can certainly provide fairer job opportunities. These are companies in the traditional information, communication, and technology sectors, as well as clean technology or technology-enabled companies. What they all have in common is the need for a technical skill-heavy workforce with technical knowhow. The fact that this knowhow can be tested without regard to gender, makes the tech industry a place in which women can work on a more level playing field.

However, for tech companies to really benefit from women’s economic activity, more women will have to translate doing well in math and science, to acquiring highly-demanded skills and this opportunity exists in the Arab World. At the University of Jordan, the country’s largest, women score higher grades in math, engineering, and computer information than men. Women made up 34 to 57 percent of graduates in science, engineering and agriculture across ten Arab countries. The 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment, which tests science and math knowledge application and skills at age 15, found that girls outperformed boys in Jordan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and Algeria; boys did so in Lebanon and Tunisia. Wider differences are even more visible in earlier grades. The 2015 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study shows that girls in grade 4 outperform boys in science and math in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Jordan, and Morocco. Add Egypt to the list when evaluating test scores for eighth graders. Across all of these tests, Arab girls outperformed boys, often by the largest margins globally. When boys did better, differences were relatively small.

So why then do women have trouble translating better education to the development of in-demand tech skills? Given the cultural and other practical daily constraints that women face—some of which are more entrenched in the Arab World—there is still not yet a broad understanding among women that jobs in this sector are compatible with their daily lives. In addition, the resources to be able to translate their education into market demanded skills in tech have only recently become more accessible.

Clearly some Arab women realize the importance of skill transfer for employment in tech. Founded by two Egyptian female entrepreneurs in their twenties, AlMakinah, for example, offers hands-on supplemental coding and programming courses. All AlMakinah graduates from the last training cycle have found jobs. Besides startups like AlMakinah, Arab women follow and utilize websites such as Lynda.com, which offer online self-study courses for a range of tech skills.

An issue for women in tech is confidence, a problem not unique to the Arab World. For the first time in 2013, the International Computer and Information Literacy Study tested grade 8 girls and boys in fourteen countries in computer and information literacy. Girls always outscored boys, mostly by sizable margins. However, in every country, boys outscored girls in how they perceived their own skills. Negative perceptions can strongly influence career aspirations.

Highlighting female tech business leaders as role models can shape perceptions of a woman’s chances at success—not only affecting whether women view the sector as welcoming to their talents, but also how society does as well. For the tech sector to attract this vast amount of female talent in the region, it will have to compete with other sectors by providing jobs that fit within the cultural constraints women face. But since tech industry jobs are oftentimes done remotely within flexible working hours  the industry has gained credibility in creating and sustaining profitable jobs for Arab women.

Fair(er) Marketplaces

Technology companies facilitate market transactions, reaching large numbers of customers and suppliers at low cost and even anonymously. Women benefit from marketplaces where gender can be irrelevant to transactions. Souq.com, the region’s leading e-commerce platform, for example, creates a space for market competition less influenced by gender. Like with products, tech companies have fundamentally changed the sale of a worker’s time. Take for instance ride-hailing apps like Careem and Uber, which are leading examples of tech’s power to create value from under- and unutilized labor. Despite the fact that few drivers in Arab states are female, these companies have been hugely disruptive in allowing women to compete on an even footing with men, with the additional safety and security provided by tech platforms. Hopefully with time and perhaps with more female business leaders in the sector, tech companies will be able to harness even larger amounts of underutilized female labor.

Technology companies have much to offer women in Arab countries and Arab women have much to offer technology companies. More and more technology companies are disrupting environments that have effectively excluded Arab women from economic activity. As tech opens doors for women, the force of change will be inexorable. Perhaps the real question is not who will support an economic force of talented Arab women, but who can stop it.

Ahmed El-Alfi is the chairman of Sawari Ventures, a leading MENA venture capital firm, The Greek Campus; a tech StartUp Hub in Cairo, Assiut and Nafham, an Arabic Education platform. He also co-founded Flat6Labs, a startup accelerator in 6 MENA countries, and is a supporter of entrepreneurship in the MENA region.

Iris Boutros is an economist, strategist and opinion writer focusing on growth, impact investing, small enterprise development, the business environment, and the economic opportunity gaps women and youth face. She previously had a weekly opinion column in the Daily News Egypt and has written for business and current affairs publications.