The story of the contemporary Middle East is one of a succession of rifts, each new one sitting atop its precursors, some taking momentary precedence over others, none ever truly or fully resolved. Today, the three most important rifts—between Israel and its foes, between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and between competing Sunni blocs—intersect in dangerous and potentially explosive ways.
Israel’s current adversaries are chiefly represented by the so-called axis of resistance: Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and, although presently otherwise occupied, Syria. The struggle is playing out in the traditional arenas of the West Bank and Gaza but also in Syria, where Israel routinely strikes Iranian forces and Iranian-affiliated groups; in cyberspace; in Lebanon, where Israel faces the heavily armed, Iranian-backed Hezbollah; and even in Iraq, where Israel has reportedly begun to target Iranian allies. The absence of most Arab states from this frontline makes it less prominent but no less dangerous.
or those Arab states, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been nudged to the sidelines by the two other battles. Saudi Arabia prioritizes its rivalry with Iran. Both countries exploit the Shiite-Sunni rift to mobilize their respective constituencies but are in reality moved by power politics, a tug of war for regional influence unfolding in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and the Gulf states.
Finally, there is the Sunni-Sunni rift, with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE vying with Qatar and Turkey. As Hussein Agha and I wrote in The New Yorker in March, this is the more momentous, if least covered, of the divides, with both supremacy over the Sunni world and the role of political Islam at stake. Whether in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, or as far afield as Sudan, this competition will largely define the region’s future.
Together with the region’s polarization is a lack of effective communication, which makes things ever more perilous. There is no meaningful channel between Iran and Israel, no official one between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and little real diplomacy beyond rhetorical jousting between the rival Sunni blocs.
With these fault lines intersecting in complex ways, various groupings at times join forces and at other times compete. When it came to seeking to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were on the same side as Qatar and Turkey, backing Syrian rebels—albeit different ones, reflecting their divergent views on the Islamists’ proper role. But those states took opposite stances on Egypt, with Doha and Ankara investing heavily to shore up a Muslim Brotherhood–led government that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were trying to help bring down (the government fell in 2013, to be replaced by the authoritarian rule of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi). Qatar and Turkey fear Iran but fear Saudi Arabia even more. Hamas stands with Syria in opposition to Israel but stood with the Syrian opposition and other Islamists against Assad. The geometry of the Middle East’s internal schisms may fluctuate, yet one struggles to think of another region whose dynamics are as thoroughly defined by a discrete number of identifiable and all-encompassing fault lines.
One also struggles to think of a region that is as integrated, which is the second source of its precarious status. This may strike many as odd. Economically, it ranks among the least integrated areas of the world; institutionally, the Arab League is less coherent than the European Union, less effective than the African Union, and more dysfunctional than the Organization of American States. Nor is there any regional entity to which Arab countries and the three most active non-Arab players (Iran, Israel, and Turkey) belong.
Yet in so many other ways, the Middle East functions as a unified space. Ideologies and movements spread across borders: in times past, Arabism and Nasserism; today, political Islam and jihadism. The Muslim Brotherhood has active branches in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Syria, Turkey, the Gulf states, and North Africa. Jihadi movements such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State, or ISIS, espouse a transnational agenda that rejects the nation-state and national boundaries altogether. Iran’s Shiite coreligionists are present in varying numbers in the Levant and the Gulf, often organized as armed militias that look to Tehran for inspiration or support. Saudi Arabia has sought to export Wahhabism, a puritanical strain of Islam, and funds politicians and movements across the region. Media outlets backed by one side or another of the Sunni-Sunni rift—Qatar’s Al Jazeera, Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya—have regional reach. The Palestinian cause, damaged as it may now seem, still resonates across the region and can mobilize its citizens in a way that arguably has no equivalent worldwide. Even subnational movements, such as Kurdish nationalism, which spreads across four countries, promote transnational objectives.
Accordingly, local struggles quickly take on regional significance—and thus attract weapons, money, and political support from the outside. The Houthis may view their fight as being primarily about Yemen, Hezbollah may be focused on power and politics in Lebanon, Hamas may be a Palestinian movement advancing a Palestinian cause, and Syria’s various opposition groups may be pursuing national goals. But in a region that is both polarized and integrated, those local drivers inevitably become subsumed by larger forces.
The fate of the Arab uprisings that began in late 2010 illustrates the dynamic well, with Tunisia, where it all began, being the lone exception. The toppling of the regime there happened too swiftly, too unexpectedly, and in a country that was too much on the margins of regional politics for other states to react in time. But they soon found their bearings. Every subsequent rebellion almost instantaneously became a regional and then international affair. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s fortunes and the future of political Islam were at stake, and so Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the UAE dove in. The same was true in Libya, where Egypt, once Sisi had prevailed and the Brotherhood had been pushed out, joined the fray. Likewise for Syria, where the civil war drew in all three regional battles: Israel’s confrontation with the “axis of resistance,” the Iranian-Saudi struggle, and the intra-Sunni competition. A similar scenario has played out in Yemen, too.
STATES OF CHAOS
Along with the Middle East’s polarization and integration, its dysfunctional state structures present another risk factor. Some states are more akin to nonstate actors: the central governments in Libya, Syria, and Yemen lack control over large swaths of their territories and populations. Conversely, several nonstate actors operate as virtual states, including Hamas, the Houthis, the Kurds, and the Islamic State before it was toppled. And these nonstate actors often must contend with nonstate spoilers of their own: in Gaza, Hamas vies with jihadi groups that sometimes behave in ways that undermine its rule or contradict its goals. Even in more functional states, it is not always clear where the ultimate policymaking authority lies. Shiite militias in Iraq and Hezbollah in Lebanon, for example, engage in activities that their titular sovereigns don’t control, let alone condone.
Weak states cohabiting with powerful nonstate actors creates the ideal circumstances for external interference. It’s a two-way street—foreign states exploit armed groups to advance their interests, and armed groups turn to foreign states to promote their own causes—that is all too open to misinterpretation. Iran almost certainly helps the Houthis and Iraqi Shiite militias, but does it control them? The People’s Protection Units, a movement of Kurdish fighters in Syria, are affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey, but do they follow its command?
لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
