Geopolitics In The Middle East: Of Power And Principle
A year after the Arab Spring, the Middle East is quickly moving from revolution to war - and international powers begin to realize that their commitment to democracy comes with a large caveat.
The events of the last two years in the Middle East are a reminder of what happened in the same region some forty years ago. Then, as monarchies were toppled one after the other, new leftist leaders assumed office through coups, popular revolts, or simply by taking over the constitutional structures of countries. The emersion of various forms of post-socialist military Arabism (as in the case of Qaddafi or the first incarnation of ba’athism) was hailed by the USSR and by parts of the European Left as the dawn of a new era for the Middle East. In the end, their hopes were unfounded.
Of course, the contemporary turmoil is an expression of popular discontent rather than the result of the lucky bet by power-hungry military leaders. There is reason to believe in the genuine desire for democracy by most of the people who took to the streets from Teheran to Cairo. Yet, as in the case of the Arabism surge in the 1960s and 1970s, hopes of real systemic change are increasingly giving room to big power pragmatism and the pursuit of vested interests.
It is not by chance that the Iranian nuclear question has heated up in the last months; and it is also not by chance that big powers decided to be more active in Somalia and Pakistan. As far back as the Eisenhower administration, a muscular US foreign policy aimed at securing those borders to the “Greater Middle East”. The region has turned into a hotbed of geopolitics: The rebellions do not just represent a moment of political change within single countries but are considered by the US, China, Russia and some European countries as an opportunity to reshape their presence in the region.
The most evident episode played out in Libya. The French-American leadership in toppling Qaddafi had the result of (almost completely) ousting the “Eurasian” coalition from the country: Italy and Russia, who had traditionally been buyers of Libyan oil, will have little to say in the Libyan reconstruction business.
Russia (together with China) had even endorsed the “no fly” zone and now feels to “have been tricked into it”.
The Libyan events also influenced Russia’s position on Syria. Damascus is at the “middle of Middle-East interests”. As Henry Kissinger once said, there cannot be war without Egypt, and there cannot be peace without Syria. It is the connection belt between Iran (the largest Shiite country in the region) and the Shiite population of Lebanon. Above all, Syria hosts the only Russian naval base in the Mediterranean, in Tartus - a happy heritage of Soviet times, and now a strategic investment for Moscow.