Six Nation Theory: Reflections on Power Politics in a Changing Middle East

Posted on Sun Dec 17, 2006 at 06:48:59 PM EST

Observers of the Middle East are increasingly troubled by the apparent escalation of sectarian conflict, regional rivalry and internal instability throughout. While it is not likely that the Middle East will erupt into full-scale war, it is certainly a worrisome possibility, the consequences of which trouble local and global observers and continue to stymie American efforts at understanding how best to proceed in Iraq. In this post, I try to meditate on the potentials of power politics, to consider how changed realities affect us all. How has this unstable situation come to pass? Who are the state actors involved, what do they want and fear, and how do they try to achieve their goals?

I propose that we try to understand the contemporary Middle East as the result of six nations very recently, and very traumatically, cut down to five. There were six major powers in the Middle East, who, since the post-colonial era, have competed with one another in order to establish their security and prosperity. Crucially, each of these states has, at one time or another, sought outside, great power support, to remedy its apparent shortcomings with respect to the other powers. The six regional powers never talked to, or cooperated with, one another, in a meaningful sense. They relied upon outside expertise, rentier finances, great power diplomatic support and, most importantly, vast quantities of weaponry, to support their failed policies, rather than deal fairly with the region and promote necessary reform.

The six powers were: Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. The instability currently characterizing the region is the result of the practical disappearance of one of these six: Iraq, which no longer exists as a state that can compete with these powers or even maintain its own relative independence. There is, thus, a vacuum, and the remaining five powers need to fill the vacuum. (Even Israel’s summer war with Hezbollah fits into this dynamic.) But it is not merely the vanishing of Iraq that has changed the picture; it is the means by which this happened and concurrent, interrelated trends, which exacerbate the internal failures of the six states.

These trends are as follows:

Firstly, that the United States intervened, militarily, to overthrow the Iraqi government, but – crucially – was strikingly unable to install a congenial puppet government in the wake of the invasion. In the post-Cold War era, the worldwide revelation that the remaining superpower can be so dramatically incompetent, disorganized and unsure of itself immediately destabilizes a region that had previously been checked by this superpower and dependent, for its policies, on the imagined invulnerability of that superpower.

Secondly, that Israel was unable to pursue a war with Hezbollah to the extent of defeating Hezbollah, but instead was forced to bring the war to a close with minimal achievements and international disquiet. In fact, for all strategic purposes (and that is ultimately what matters), Israel lost and Hezbollah won; for a non-state actor to survive against the Israeli military is the local parallel to America’s inability to organize a successor regime to the Saddam government or contain a widespread insurgency, in a backwards third-world state, able to cause significant damage, in men and material, to what is by far the world's most sophisticated military.

Thirdly, Iran has largely or at least outwardly eschewed “superpower patronage,” from 1979, for a policy of isolated development; with considerable strategy and patience, Iran has managed to develop a formidable military and crucial contacts with powerful state actors (Syria) and non-state actors flush with new confidence (Hezbollah in Lebanon; SCIRI and others in Iraq).

Fourthly, and parallel to Iran’s self-development, the remaining leading Arab powers, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have had the bankruptcy of their foreign policy exposed: Relying entirely on American supremacy, neither Egypt nor Saudi Arabia is certain how to respond to America’s diminished influence in the region. Neither Egypt or Saudi Arabia can compare, industrially or militarily, to Iran; while Egypt is a large state, Saudi Arabia is little more than a bank account managed by a massively unwieldy royal horde.

Fifthly, Turkey has been surprised by the uncertainty of its current status. Though America continues to push for Turkey’s inclusion in the EU, Turkey has distanced itself from America; Turkey’s Islamists are cooling to an EU which seems to have gone productive since failed opposition to the Iraq War, while Turkey's secular elite, in charge of the only military in the Muslim Middle East that can stand toe-to-toe with Iran, is entirely lost: It rejects the EU, yet its secular dictatorship, premised on an idealized National Turkism, has no remaining allies and seems to make little sense in a globalized world, let alone an increasingly conservative region in which Islam becomes a significant marker of identity.

The question now is, which way do the powers go? How will the Middle East develop? I cannot paint a picture of the future, but I can suggest some of the problems and concerns facing the major powers in the aftermath of Iraq’s ongoing implosion. These problems and concerns, in turn, suggest the directions in which current Middle Eastern politics may evolve. Considering the surprises of the past several years, however, take all this with pinches of salt, preferably one pinch per prophesying paragraph.

Iran is ruled a radical but nevertheless republican Shi’i regime that lost many potential friends since the Revolution: Trying to export Islamic messianism was a poor foreign policy that alienated and, indeed, frightened Arab royalty; till now, the Arab governments are, by and large, wary of Iran. Perhaps for this reason, Iran pursues its – so far rather successful – strategy by way of ideological deception. While Iran relies on, and protects Syria, it is making a power grab for Lebanon and for Iraq -- creating a strategic land bridge not only to Israel, but to the Mediterranean, with enormous economic potential. Yes, Iran is hurt by its image of Twelver Radicalism, as well as its potential nuclear-power status, but compensates by emphasizing an extremist pan-Islamic ideology that has found the one thing Sunnis and Shi’i potentially hate more than each other: Israel. By making it an “us” (Islamdom) versus “them” (the West, Israel, and their regional lackeys), Iran is trying to pull the rug out from underneath the main Muslim opposition to its power politics: Saudi Arabia. (Turkey and Egypt cannot present nearly the same challenge.)

Saudi Arabia has bungled one crisis after another; currently flush with cash, Saudi Arabia is potentially more dangerous than even a nuclear Iran. There is nothing scarier than an unmodernized pseudo-nation, with no democratic or republican credentials whatsoever, lorded over by a fabulously wealthy, unformed, cowardly tribe-in-charge; Saudi Arabia's best policy seems to be throwing riyals in the direction of crazy Sunnis and hoping they find Shi'i first. But these Sunni movements often mutate out of their extremist preferences (which is what attracted them to Saudidiocy in the first place) to even more ludicrously extremist positions. Saudi Arabia is scared to death of Iran, but there is nothing Saudi Arabia can do to stop Iran – they can protect Iraq’s Sunnis, and by protect I mean use them as proxies to fight Iranian influence in Imploded Iraq, but this would mean Saudi Arabia funneling billions of dollars in cash and weaponry to movements that might just hate the Saudi royals as much, if not more than, Iran.

Saudi Arabia’s greatest weakness is that it has no real regional foreign policy: Its allies are rentier dictatorships, with no popular support (as opposed to, crucially, the well-armed, well-trained and sophisticated Hezbollah), and it lacks real industrial capacity, economic independence and global influence. The most it can do is threaten to turn off the oil, bankrupt itself, and watch its power slip away, as its population rebels and the ruling family balkanizes and then consumes itself in an orgy paralleled only by what goes on behind palace gates. Quite unnerving.

Egypt once had pretensions to regional leadership, but after 1967, the death of Arab Nationalism and the poor political and economic judgments of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt really is only a poor, poorly-armed country with little more to its name than chairmanship of the Arab League, which is kind of like having advertising rights to the Goodyear Blimp during a Civil War: Nobody cares; at most, you will be shot down, and nobody will bother to figure out who did the shooting because, after all, you were little more than a shell of fabric filled to its shape by hot air. More crucially, Egypt has no real stake in Iraq; while Iran has its Shi’i proxies, and Saudi Arabia will “protect” the Sunnis – the same way they protected Kuwait from Iraq, maybe? – Egypt has no strings it can pull. Not to mention that, lacking a common border with Iraq, Egypt has even less influence. Expect Egypt to remain a pathetic second-tier power among the remaining five. Unless, of course, Egypt’s tremendous intellectual resources are liberated by some degree of democratization; with the Ikhwan in power, Egypt could very quickly, easily and effectively undermine Saudi Arabia’s claim to leadership over Sunni Islam. Egypt has Al-Azhar; Saudi Arabia has oil wells.

Turkey, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, borders Iraq; crucially, it also has an interest in Iraq – namely, dampening the ambitions of the Kurds. However, Turkey is in a bit of a bind: With EU membership increasingly unlikely, Turkey needs to figure out what to do with itself. Its religious movement, democratically popular and supported by an economically energetic middle class, is in favor of a soft secularism, and could present the only model exportable to the rest of the Muslim world – so far. However, the secular elite, which controls the very powerful military, is greatly in favor of a harsh, dictatorial irreligiosity, which would alienate the state from Middle Eastern politics and potentially leave Turkey with absurdly unhelpful allies like Saudi Arabia. (Any enemy of the Kurds, the logic might go, is a pseudo-friend of mine.) So what will Turkey do? If Ak Partisi remains in power, and EU talks go nowhere, Turkey could be a stabilizing influence; it is, after all, the only non-oil-producing Muslim country, besides Malaysia (which is anyway too far away and too heterogenous) that has a large middle-class and serious industrial capacity.

Israel’s interests were badly served by America’s failures in Iraq; compounded by the failures in Lebanon, Israel occupies a very uncertain position. While it is good for Israel to see the Palestinians squabble by way of Kalashnikov, Iran’s increasing influence doesn’t help anything. Not to mention that, in order to challenge Iran’s religious legitimacy, Saudi Arabia would have to be more anti-Semitic than the anti-Semite; Saudi Arabia would have to escalate its own opposition to Israel if it comes to an all-out competition with Iran over influence with the region. In fact, though, Israel most resembles Saudi Arabia; it has no regional allies and has, for years now, pursued a disastrous foreign policy that has relied on power (for Saudi Arabia, that means oil wealth; for Israel, that means the superiority of weaponry) in order to mask the unwillingness to make accommodations to local realities.

The best option for Israel would be Turkey, because Turkey, to compete with Iran, would naturally stress its Muslim moderation (or at least theoretically could); Saudi Arabia has nothing to trumpet other than the fact that holy places happen to be located within its borders. Saudi Arabia has no democratic or economic sophistication to offer as a tantalizing option, rather it could only project stiff Salafism and bucketloads of capital -- even worse, in retrospect, than Iran, which though radical, still has industry, an economy and the national culture and sophistication to present itself as a Huntington-like "core state". But, again, this could not compare to Turkey's more real prosperity, and apparently easier road to further democratic reform and Islamic identity.

By Haroon

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