Arab diplomacy stuck in an indefinite holding pattern?

As the old battlelines crumble, no new hegemony has emerged to fill the Middle East’s power vacuums. Gone is a single overarching schism: the regional order today consists of flashpoints and overlapping contradictions.

The geopolitical cleavages which define the modern Middle East have dramatically evolved over time. In the post-colonial period, the Arab-Israeli wars neatly divided the region between an Arab nationalist coalition and Western-backed Zionism. The late 1970s complicated this equation. The Iranian revolution created an Islamic Republic that sought to overthrow the ‘reactionary’ Sunni Arab regimes. Meanwhile, the Arab states split into rival camps whose feuding worsened after the 1979 Camp David accords. The end of the cold war brought new strategic earthquakes, from the Gulf war and the rise of the US in a unipolar world to the Oslo accords, promising a Palestinian two-state solution.

Oslo transformed the Arab-Israeli conflict from a regional rift to a delimited Israeli-Palestinian struggle with competing sovereignties at its heart. This emboldened the Damascus-Tehran axis. Iran took advantage of 9/11 and the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed to mobilise a broader Shia revolutionary front ready to launch attacks across the Middle East. The Arab Spring created space for this Shia coalition to cement itself as a vanguard of resistance against both Israeli Zionism and Western imperialism; it included Hizbullah in Lebanon, Syria’s Assad regime, Shia militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen and, tangentially, Palestinian Hamas. Against it stood a fractious camp of pro-Western Sunni Arab regimes, whose leaders – like their Shia counterparts – paid little attention to Palestine as they struggled to contain popular protests at home.

This set the stage for the momentous consequences of the Gaza war and, almost simultaneously, the collapse of Syria’s Assad regime. From October 2023, Israel ethnically cleansed Gaza and launched devastating strikes into Lebanon. Meanwhile, the December 2024 victory of mostly Islamist rebels in Syria replaced an Iranian proxy regime with a tentative experiment in state-building that could, if successful, (…)

Full article: 3 681 words.

Hicham Alaoui

Hicham Alaoui is the author of Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2022 and a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches political economy.