7. The Unravelling of the Middle-East
With so many powerful trends tugging at it, the world order was bound to rip. And it ripped first, fastest, and deepest in the Middle East.
Decades hence, 2011 will be seen as a pivotal year in modern Arab history. A year earlier, the Arab “order” seemed largely stable, with complex but largely predictable power dynamics. Then 2011 happened.
It was as if Arab history was on pause for decades, and then God pressed the “play” button.
The painful story since has been retold countless times. Arab youth shook their regimes in 2011, but by 2013 were left to their own fate as two counter-revolutionary axes tried to roll back the tide — one led by Saudi Arabia and some Gulf states, and another led by Iran and its regional allies. But in their attempts to fight back change, they only managed to break the region.
The Arab Spring was an enormous wasted opportunity — had it had a soft landing, it would have led to a new stability based upon wider popular consent, and perhaps a period of strong economic growth that would have benefited the West’s ailing economies. But instead, by 2014, the Arab Spring had turned into a Jihadist Disneyland.
The Syrian civil war was particularly catastrophic — it gave rise to ISIS, caused an enormous wave of refugees, and exposed a global political failure. Opportunistic players such as Russia found the perfect conflict to exploit to destroy the “liberal world order” — cynically and skilfully using it to erode international norms in the name of “fighting terrorism”. Putin couldn’t throw missiles at Europe — so he threw waves of Syrian refugees at them.
Can we realistically separate the resurgence of authoritarianism in the West from the unravelling of the Middle East? The issues of refugees and terrorism have been among the greatest factors feeding support for the new populists.
The Arab Spring had represented a confluence of undercurrents, many of which were more global than “Arab” — demographic maturation, communications globalization, economic inequality, failing regimes, an ossified political elite, a misguided “war on terror”, a lack of global leadership, and an outdated foreign policy paradigm. The story of its failing captures all these trends combined.
Menu:
Introduction
#1 The Triumph of Globalization
#2 The Loss of Anchors
#3 Economic Transformation
#4 Obsolete Nationalism
#5 Political Failure
#6 Social Media Broke our Public Sphere (Previous Section)
#7 The Unravelling of the Middle-East (You are here)
Conclusion: The Trump Effect
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