BOSTON — As the whirlwind of dozens of major and minor players that interact and battle one another across the Middle East continues unabated, the same players also criss-cross the world to explore new strategic or tactical alliances. The political dynamics of the Middle East have been totally upended. To try and discern what is going on in the region today one has to look first to Russia, Ankara, Tehran, Tel Aviv, and the Dahieh of southern Beirut, with secondary attention to Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Cairo, and Doha, and only occasional fleeting glances to Washington and Brussels.

Immediate issues that once riveted our attention may lose some of their urgency or danger. It is still fascinating but perhaps less ominous than a few years ago to wonder what happens next in the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Syria, what will tens of thousands of takfiri-salafist militants across the region do in the wake of the destruction of the Islamic State, what is the fate of Yemen, Libya, and Palestine? Is the big story this week still the fate of some small towns on the Syrian-Turkish border, or who first reaches and controls the Syrian-Iraqi Lower Euphrates region? How long will the Saudis and Emirates continue their two great failed adventures of the war in Yemen and the siege of Qatar?

We cannot predict which existing or unidentified new major actors will influence events in the coming years, in view of the constantly evolving political relations among the many powers operating throughout the Middle East. This we do know, though: The single momentous dynamic that towers above all others in the Middle East comprises the unknown impact of this unprecedented, ongoing, period of non-stop, multi-year warfare in half a dozen countries, with proxy ideological battles in half a dozen others. Everywhere, it seems, local, regional, and global parties all fight each other militarily, while also exploring new political alliances, mostly with non-Arab powers in Russia, Turkey, and Iran.

All our big questions can no longer be assessed on the basis of predictable interests and expectations of sovereign states in the Middle East, as had been the case since the 1930s. Today, Turkey, Iran, and Russia coordinate their military presence inside Syria to effectively preserve the presidency of Bashar Assad — and after that they will figure out how to handle the U.S. military, the remnants of Islamic State, the dozens of smaller takfiri-salafist militants, tribal coalitions, and Kurdish aspirations.

Simultaneously, the Saudi monarch is in Russia exploring new commercial, military, or tactical political relationships — or perhaps just bluffing. Turkey, the NATO member, is buying advanced missile systems from Russia. The United Arab Emirates and Egypt work together to reconfigure the governance system in Gaza, allowing a former small-time Palestinian ruffian named Mohamad Dahlan to share power in the strip with Hamas, Fateh, and anyone else who will dance for money. Their collective survival is at stake in Palestine, and perhaps they have nobody else to turn to — or they simply do not know what to do in these existential times, other than in panic to seek a strongman, any strongman will do, to save them, with someone else’s cash.

The combined insult and imbecility of American policy on the Palestine-Israel conflict is captured by President Trump’s determination to rely on his apparently clueless son-in-law Jared Kushner, while the American ambassador to Israel keeps making statements that deny the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and sanctifying Israel’s illegal colonization of Arab lands. United Nations agencies meanwhile draw up lists of Israeli companies that exploit the colonized Arab lands, so the world can refrain from dealing with them.

These and other bizarre developments alongside our many ongoing wars indicate that the very nature of national sovereignty based on territorial control in the Arab region continues to fray at many of its edges. The less-than-a-century-long modern legacy of independent states that firmly controlled their land, economies, resources, and means of violence in their armed forces and police is gradually slipping out of modern history’s leaky fingers that never seemed to get a good grip on our area.

So we continue to ask, still with no credible answers: Who is sovereign in northern and eastern Syria this week? How will things develop in the rest of Syria and Iraq, in the Kurdish regions, throughout Yemen and Libya, or among the post-Islamic State militants who supported that short-lived extremist, violent venture? What is the future of Jerusalem?

Sovereignty, authority, legitimacy, and military power in some lands are no longer are vested in the hands of Arab central governments. This peculiarly Arab dysfunction sees us living in a region of sovereign states, semi-states, quasi-states, truncated states, states-within-states, invading foreign states, virtual states, mini-states, ethnic and sectarian states, and hollow, helplessly dependent poor states that will dance for money. They all compete against one another for land, resources, and authority, in a region that has plentiful land and resources, but many fewer credible single national authorities, as a dozen other forms of power, sovereignty, territoriality, and legitimacy continue to spring up and heighten the cacophony.

There is nothing mysterious or unexpected about any of this. Badly mismanaged countries with degraded populations and little hope of change refuse to remain in a state of permanent anguish. Some resist. Some rebel. A few try half-heartedly to reform. Many fragment, to be reborn in a thousand smaller pieces, or a handful of militias, or sub-contractors to foreign powers, or just new gangs with friendly nearby funders.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 October 2017
Word Count: 913
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BOSTON — A new public opinion poll in the Arab Gulf region reminds us again of a cardinal truth about political realities in the Arab region: make sure to listen to what ordinary people feel, more than you listen to what local or foreign governments say.

I was reminded of this while reading the results of a public opinion poll of citizens in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman, by Justin Gengler, professor and head of the Policy Department at the Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI) at Qatar University, and colleagues at the University of Michigan. They sought the public’s views on the leading security threats they perceived, with a special interest in whether citizens viewed Iran as their major security concern and threat — as the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) say is the case.

As Gengler noted in an important article in Foreign Affairs a few days ago (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/persian-gulf/2017-10-02/how-gulf-citizens-view-iran), the results show that, “Iran and its suspected nuclear weapons program is today but one of several competing state and non-state threats to Gulf national security: also figuring in are the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) and other Sunni-dominated terrorist organizations; economic stagnation due to low oil prices; and, from the standpoint of some, continued foreign intrusion by the United States and other Western governments.”

Their survey of five Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states (the UAE did not participate) interviewed more than 4,000 citizens aged 18 and older. The results were important, but not surprising for people who pay attention to ordinary citizen sentiments in the Arab world.

First, they revealed widely varied orientations toward individual security challenges among the five states, alongside differing feelings of security versus insecurity. For example, 46 percent of Omanis said that no country poses a challenge to their stability and security, while 22 percent of Qataris and just two percent of Kuwaitis felt no security threats from other states (no surprise, given Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait decades ago and the current siege and regime change attempts against Qatar by the Saudis and Emiratis).

More significantly perhaps was the finding that, “Iran all but disappears from the picture” when Gulf citizens are asked about threats from transnational terrorism, Western interference, and economic crisis. A majority of all respondents (53-68 percent) except in Bahrain saw terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda as their leading security threat. Iran placed a distant second in Qatar and Kuwait (23 and 21 percent of respondents identified it as their top security concern). Iran took third place in Oman (just15 percent of respondents), where second place was economic issues due to the oil price collapse. In Saudi Arabia, terrorism tops citizen concerns, and Iran comes in second place (25 percent).

Second, I would add, this poll is important for reminding us that the intense anti-Iranian campaigns by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and the US government seem to reflect very narrow political concerns or manipulative ambitions, more than they reflect the human realities or sentiments of people on the ground in the Gulf and the wider Arab region. Thousands of businesses and families in Arab Gulf states have significant commercial or personal links with Iran (including Emiratis and Saudis whose governments trash Iran daily). Such structural human and economic links suggest that Iranians and Gulf Arabs know each other and viscerally understand the importance of maintaining good neighborly relations in all fields of life, for their collective well-being.

Third, the past four decades in the Middle East reflect the catastrophe we have all suffered by basing policies mainly on Arab-Israeli-American government views, without sufficiently taking into consideration the sentiments of ordinary people on the ground in these countries. The Saudi-Emirati-Israeli-American government view of Iran as a dangerous hegemonic threat to the entire Middle East and the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism seems at great odds with the more nuanced views of the people of the Arab Gulf region, who see any threats from Iran within the context of other more pressing, actual, constraints and fears in their lives.

The last four decades have witnessed a slow fraying of Arab state control and legitimacy, and diffusion of sovereignty and power among assorted non-state actors that now often drive history. We are stupid indeed to keep following the violent, fear-laden hysteria policies of governments in assorted Middle Eastern and Western states, and ignore the sentiments and aspirations of ordinary men and women who increasingly shape our societies and their historical arcs. If we persist in this course, we will expand the catastrophes all around us to new heights of reckless irresponsibility by criminal governance.

So this is a timely reminder that we should pay attention to the credible pollsters and analysts who help us hear the views of those ordinary citizens who have been ignored for so long in the Middle East. Those citizens’ views will shape our world to come, or bury us and our children before our time has come.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 October 2017
Word Count: 828
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Donald Trump spent much of his speech to the United Nations asserting that he was elected to defend U.S. sovereignty. He said that every other member state was also seeking to defend its sovereignty. What did he mean by this?

There is probably no other word in the public vocabulary of both political leaders and scholarly analysts that have as many conflicting meanings and usages as “sovereignty.” The only other one that comes close in confusion is “liberalism.” It is therefore useful to trace a little of the history of the term.

One doesn’t find the term used before the creation of the modern world-system in the long sixteenth century. This was the time when heads of certain states (notably England, France, and Spain) proclaimed the doctrine of absolute monarchies. They insisted that the monarch was “absolved” of challenge by any person or institution. This was of course a claim, not a description of reality.

What these monarchs were trying to establish was the sovereignty of their states. Sovereignty for them meant that no power outside their state had the right to interfere in their state’s decisions. It also meant that no power within the state could fail to carry out the decisions of the state. The double orientation (external and internal) was crucial to the concept.

Simply asserting sovereignty was obviously not enough. The state had to implement these claims. No state was then or has ever been fully sovereign, not even the most powerful. But stronger states did and do better than less powerful ones.

When we call some states hegemonic in the modern world-system, we mean in reality that they can indeed interfere in the internal affairs of other states. And they can indeed maintain internal unity. They do not face significant institutional resistances, much less secessionist movements.

The United States was a hegemonic power more or less between 1945 and 1970. It got its way in the world-system 95% of the time on 95% of the issues. Another term to describe this is to say the United States was “imperialist.” Imperialism is a negative term and a hegemonic power can succeed in largely banning its use.

As hegemony declines, imperialism as a term comes into larger use. So does sovereignty. Less powerful countries assert their rights as sovereign powers to fight against imperial powers. So Trump was right in the sense that many, perhaps most, of the members of the United Nations today defend publicly their sovereignty.

When Trump asserts U.S. sovereignty, it is a sign of weakness. It is precisely because the U.S. is a hegemon in acute decline that he has to resort to using the myth of sovereignty and rejecting the idea that supra-national institutions can have any say in U.S. policies. When a Baltic state asserts its sovereignty, it is demanding support against what it sees as Russia’s reassertion of its authority. And when China asserts its sovereignty, it is seeking to expand its decision-making power into new areas.

Secessionist movements force us all to confront our usage. Catalonia is holding a referendum on its right to sovereign independence. Spain says that such a referendum violates Spanish sovereignty. In the situation of directly opposed claims, everyone has to decide which claim is more legitimate. Sometimes this can be settled without violence. This was the case, for example, when Slovakia seceded from Czechoslovakia. And sometimes there is civil war. But since no secession ever eliminates all subcategory differences within a state, the right to secession must stop somewhere.

The point I am trying to make is that sovereignty is a myth, one that we all can use, and one that has very different consequences in different moments of the world-system. Our moral judgment depends on the totality of consequences and not on the myth of sovereignty. When Trump uses the term, it has reactionary implications. When others use it, it may have progressive implications. The term itself tells us nothing.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 October 2017
Word Count: 657
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BEIRUT — The changes that have characterized Saudi Arabia’s domestic and regional policies in the past three years are among the most important developments in the contemporary Arab world — but like most developments in Arab public policy, they are managed in secret by a handful of men, usually with unpredictable outcomes and uncertain motivations.

First came the deep involvement in arming rebels trying to overthrow the Syrian president and regime. Then came the support for Field Marshall-turned-President Sisi in Egypt in his successful overthrow of the elected President Morsi, followed by the collapse of the traditional royal family succession system as King Salman named his son Mohammad bin Salman as Deputy Crown Prince and then Crown Prince. The war on Yemen was then launched with the close cooperation of the United Arab Emirates; both countries flexed their regional muscles in a bid designed to show that they were willing and able to use their resources to defend themselves against what they perceived to be serious security threats from Iran and its surrogates around the Arab region, though it remains unclear if these threats were real or imagined.

The sudden announcement of Saudi Vision 2030 followed soon after that, as Mohammad bin Salman and a thousand hired consultants single-handedly revealed the new trajectory of Saudi Arabia’s national development, with apparently little or no consultation among ordinary Saudis whose lives would be significantly changed by this new national development strategy. A year or so after Vision 2030 was announced, it was quickly revised, either because the American consultants had no idea of what they were doing in a land they perhaps did not fully understand, or because the ambitions of the dynamic young Mohammad bin Salman were way too big in comparison with the economy’s and society’s ability to adjust quickly.

Then Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched the siege of Qatar some three months ago, radically upending decades of attempted integration and cooperation among the six countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council. A hundred years of Saudi diplomatic traditions of working quietly and discreetly were discarded in favor of the Chicago Gangsterism School of using crude and brutal means to convince your friends to fall in line with you, if they know what is good for them. The most recent dramatic moves include a sustained security operation in the Eastern Province, especially the town of Awamiya, which resulted in many deaths and the destruction of some quarters of the town, and this week’s arrest of several dozen activists and clerics who represent both the conservative Islamist and liberal wings of society.

The sheer scope, scale, and severity of these unusual Saudi moves (and some other ones, like withholding $3 billion of promised financial support for the Lebanese armed forces, or drawing close to Shiite leader Muqtada Sadr in Iraq) suggest a historic change that could have shock waves across much of the Arab region and further afield, given Saudi Arabia’s extensive links with Islamic, Islamist, and Salafist groups around the world. Yet the exact extent of the events in Saudi Arabia and their motivations promise to remain elusive, because Saudi policy-making is a secretive process that is not open to either public participation or accountability.

The fact that Saudi Arabia is no longer a sleeping giant but instead has woken up and become a feisty and dynamic giant throwing its weight around the region cannot be judged very easily yet, because the outcomes of Saudi moves remain to be fully revealed. What is clear to date is that new policies that have been initiated in almost all cases have failed badly, especially in Yemen, Syria, Qatar, Lebanon, and against Iran. Saudi statesmanship has proved to be largely unsuccessful to date in its regional dimensions.

The domestic changes will take a longer time to bear fruit. The sudden roundup of individuals from all sides of the ideological spectrum who showed a willingness to speak freely (without necessarily directly opposing or challenging the state) is a troubling sign. The worst to come could see Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman adopt Egyptian Field Marshall-turned-President Abdelfattah Sisi’s manual of governance that simply detains and imprisons thousands of people whose views differ from the state’s ordained truths.

The many Arab countries, media institutions, private companies, and other organizations that depend on Saudi financial support might then have to fall in line. This would be a catastrophe for an Arab world that is already struggling with many challenges, whose solutions need us to expand and tap into the minds and energies of our young people. The current trajectory that we witness is closing Arab minds, restraining cultural and artistic dynamism, reducing the indigenous pluralism that many of our societies enjoy, destroying the last vestiges of a free and deliberative press, fostering greater warfare and sectarian tensions, and shattering the economic potential of our lands by encouraging tens of thousands of our brightest young men and women to emigrate permanently.

Saudi Arabia in the past half a century has played an important role in fostering national development across many Arab lands, but the drastic recent changes in its policies suggest that perhaps this era has ended, and we now venture into the unknown.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 September 2017

Word Count: 866

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Are you confused about what is going on in the world? So am I. So is everyone. This is the underlying and continuing reality of a chaotic world-system.

What we mean by chaos is a situation in which there are constant wild swings in the priorities of all the actors. One day, from the point of view of a given actor, things seem to be going in a way favorable to that actor. The next day the outlook looks very unfavorable.

Furthermore, there seems to be no way in which we can predict what position given actors will take on the next day. We are repeatedly surprised when actors behave in ways that we thought impossible, or at the very least unlikely. But the actors are simply trying to maximize their advantage by changing their stance on an important issue and thereby changing the alliances they will make in order to achieve that advantage.

The world-system has not always been in chaos. Quite the contrary! The modern world-system, like any system, has its rules of operation. These rules enable both outsiders and participants to assess the likely behavior of different actors. We think of this adherence to the rules of behavior as the “normal” operation of the system.

It is only when the system reaches a point in which it cannot return to a (moving) equilibrium that renews its normal operations that it enters into a structural crisis. A central feature of such a structural crisis is chaotic uncertainty.

In early September 2017, there have been three such dramatic swings in priorities and alliances. The one that has attracted most attention has been the announcement by U.S. President Donald Trump that he had reached an agreement with the Democratic leaders in Congress — Senator Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi — to enact a measure for (1) emergency relief for the disaster in Texas and neighboring states without attaching any conditions, combined with (2) raising the debt ceiling for three months.

This agreement was significant for two reasons. First, Trump had been committed not ever to deal with the Democrats. Worse, this deal was seemingly on terms the Democrats had laid down. More important still, Trump made this agreement without informing until the very last minute the Republican leadership in Congress — Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Mitch McConnell — who understandably felt blindsided by this move. Secondly, and still worse, he suspended for six months implementing the end to the DACA program that had been proclaimed by previous Pres. Barack Obama. DACA was designed by Obama to permit the so-called Dreamers to remain in the United States and Trump had promised to cancel the program on day one of his taking office.

How long this agreement will last remains to be seen. But the mere announcement of it has upset, and probably for a very long time, all confidence between Trump and the Republicans in Congress. It was certainly a wild swing.

Less noticed but very important was a proclamation by the government of Indonesia that it had changed the name of the waters immediately to its north to the North Natuna Sea. This seemingly innocuous act can be understood in terms of the history of maritime claims in the waters of east and southeast Asia. China has been asserting for some time now claims over most of these seas and building bases on islands or even rocks located in them.

Chinese claims have been contested by the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam, and also by the United States. Until now, Indonesia has tried to remain neutral in these disputes and even offered itself as a mediator. The act of renaming the waters north of Indonesia is however a proclamation of Indonesian rights to waters claimed by China. Not only is this a claim against China but also Indonesia taking a very “tough” stance by arguing this dispute in public. It may foreshadow an end to neutrality on the other disputes in the region. China immediately indicated her displeasure with this renaming. Indonesia is not backing down.

The third shift in alliances is less dramatic because it has been coming for some time. Nonetheless, it has now taken a dramatic form. Turkey seems to have renounced its obligations as a NATO member by arranging to purchase a Russian surface-to-air military system, one that is not “interoperable” with those of NATO allies.

This act is considered a major pivot away from long-standing Turkish relations with western Europe and the United States. From Turkey’s point of view, it is simply a response to acts by NATO members hostile to her. Still, it has implications not only for geopolitical alliances but for major economic arrangements. It is a way of relegating to the forgettable past Turkish grievances with Russia about Syria and Iran. Here too, how long this will last remains to be seen.

Wild swings are the daily bread and butter of a structural crisis. This means that we shall live in chaotic uncertainty until the structural crisis is resolved in favor of one of the two prongs of the bifurcation. If we concentrate on the presumed “meaning” of the wild and often momentary swings, we are doomed to act irrelevantly. We need to concentrate our analyses and our actions on what makes it more likely that the progressive side of the bifurcation outweighs the reactionary side in the middle-term resolution of the struggle.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 September 2017
Word Count: 898
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BEIRUT — For the past six months or so, twice a week the regional and international media warn about the looming risk of war between some combination of Israel, Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, and Arab- or Iranian-backed popular militias. The stories’ frequency and regularity are striking, and presumably based on some certainties for this war-is-coming mindset.

Equally striking is the depth of details about the enhanced and substantial war-making capabilities of both sides, in particular Israel and Hezbollah. I doubt anyone else will be seriously involved in the next war, whenever it comes. Having lived through the last such battle in 2006, with the sound of Israeli missiles whizzing over our apartment to strike an old communications tower on the Beirut shoreline, I believe the stories that say the ferocity and extent of the fighting to come would cause unprecedented damage in Israel and Lebanon, mostly to civilians.

Having also lived through the last 50 years of Arab-Israeli wars, I also have no doubt that one more war — however barbaric and destructive it would be — would not solve anything, but would only make things worse in the post-war period. One more Hezbollah-Israel war would only pave the way for even worse things ahead, if we do not resolve the core issues that have made our lives a long-running tragedy of destruction and wasted national capabilities on both sides. This has been the case for the past 100 years of the conflict between Arabism and Zionism.

What started early in the 20th Century as occasional local skirmishes between handfuls of fighters for control of a farm, a hilltop, or some village fields, during Palestine’s transition from Ottoman to British control, has always — always — seen every round of fighting give birth in the post-war period to reinvigorated capabilities and will to fight on both sides, because they never resolved the core reasons that pushed them to war in the first place, and often created new issues that had to be resolved.

Those handfuls of rag-tag village and kibbutz fighters a century ago have now become hundreds of thousands of both sides’ armed soldiers, another several hundred thousand missiles and rockets, hundreds of advanced fighter jets, nuclear weapons, assorted banned weapons, significant capabilities in drones and electronic warfare, and perhaps a few million crazed citizens on both sides who are willing to charge at the other and fight to the finish. In the past 60 years the conflict that was left unresolved has given birth to Israeli nuclear weapons, Lebanese resistance movements in the south, Israel’s occupation of Syrian and Palestinian lands, the birth of Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s involvement in Lebanon and Syria, terror attacks against civilians on all sides, and the expanding Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli colonial practices.

The gravity of a new war’s devastating consequences on civilians and national infrastructure has now prompted assorted scenarios to prevent an accidental war from breaking out, or to minimize its extent if it does happen. Those might be useful efforts, but history again suggests that we cannot avoid another round of devastating war that ravages entire countries if we leave the fruits of past conflicts — occupied lands, denied national integrity, settler-colonialism — to ripen and blossom annually with the certainty of the changing seasons.

We would be much better advised to find a way to prod all sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and those who have joined it, like Iran and the United States, to go back to square one and ask some simple questions that can be found in any introductory primer on conflict-resolution: What are the core territorial and political issues in this dispute? Do we know the proven positions of the populations engaged in this battle on terms for accepting a negotiated, permanent peace? Are there proposals on the table that would allow leaders of both sides to agree on a permanent resolution of the conflict’s many dimensions, and thus eliminate once and for all the continued underlying causes of war?

The Arab, Israeli, Iranian, and American leaders who manage war scenarios have acted with astounding and continuing collective incompetence in resolving this conflict, for reasons that I cannot understand. The few potential breakthroughs in the past century — the mid-1970s disengagement agreements, the 1990s Madrid Peace Conference, the bilateral Jordan-Egypt-Israel peace agreements, the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords — all failed to push the parties to a comprehensive, permanent peace.

So the small and big wars continue, alongside regular assassinations, missile attacks, and other limited military actions, after which new organizations and capabilities are always born and prepare to fight the next, more devastating war. It is human nature, probably, that sees the indomitable human will to survive muster its fighting capabilities, in situations where diplomacy and reasonable compromises have failed repeatedly to achieve the satisfactory exercise of mutual national rights.

We know both sides can fight, as they have proven over and over again. We also know neither side will surrender, as they have also proven. Why have we never seen these obviously determined and able leaders put their minds to resolving equitably the underlying issues that keep them fighting and their people suffering?

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 September 2017
Word Count: 853
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Donald Trump is approaching the end of his first year as president of the United States. By now, everyone — supporters, opponents, even indifferents — seem to agree on one thing. His pronouncements and his actions are unpredictable. He ignores precedents and behaves in ways that constantly surprise people. Supporters find this refreshing. Opponents find this terrifying.

Yet very few have remarked upon what is I think his most singular achievement. He has managed the trick of being the most unpredictable actor on the U.S. and world scene, and being at the same time the most predictable actor.

He has deliberately surrounded himself with a panoply of advisors who push him in directly opposite directions. He constantly fires some of them and appoints others. No individual seems to last too long. The result is that he makes it clear to all and sundry that the final decision is his and his alone. He may accede for a while to what some advisors suggest, sometimes undoing their advice the very next day. This is what makes him seem unpredictable.

But in the end he always reverts to what is sometimes called his gut feelings, whether the issue is health care or immigration or tax reductions or military action. This is what makes him so predictable. The bottom line is always the same. Anyone who observes him or works with him or opposes him should therefore be able to predict where he will end up. And for most of the world, where Donald Trump will go is not where they would want a U.S. president to go.

Trump and the United States are faced with a large number of issues about which there are strong and divisive opinions on both sides. These divisions seem to many intractable. Not to Donald Trump. He believes in himself and his ability to complete his national and world agendas. For him nothing is intractable.

In September 2017, the two most urgent foreign policy decisions have to do with North Korea and Iran. In both, the conflict with the United States revolves around one crucial issue, nuclear weapons. North Korea has them. Iran does not, but at least some major internal actors think it essential that Iran acquire them.

The U.S. official position is that North Korea should disband its nuclear weapons and that Iran should cease any and all activities that move in the direction of acquiring such weapons. These positions are not new ones invented by Donald Trump. They have been the public position of the United States under all previous presidents for some time now.

What is different with Trump is that he refuses to admit how difficult it is to achieve these U.S. objectives and how dangerous it would be to pursue them by military action. Previous presidents have therefore sought so-called diplomatic solutions. In the case of Iran, diplomacy seemed to work under President Obama with the accord signed by both countries (and other powers). In contrast, diplomacy has thus far achieved very little in the case of North Korea.

In both situations, President Trump’s gut feelings seem clear. He wants to use military action to force North Korea to disband nuclear weapons. He wishes to withdraw from the accord with Iran and use a military threat to obtain their permanent renunciation of nuclear weapon development. There are two questions about Trump’s foreign policy. Can he in fact arrange to start the military actions? And if he can, will the military actions achieve what he hopes they will?

Donald Trump promised his supporters that he would prove a true friend of the U.S. military by giving military men key positions in his administration and by seeking to expand funds for the military. He has done this. In the latest reshuffle of his staff, he placed a military man, John Kelly, in the position of Chief of Staff with broad powers to change the staff and to serve as a filter to access to the president.

Military men of course appreciate more funds. But curiously, most of his military advisors are relative doves. They do favor expanded funds for the military. They all seem to believe that wars are truly a final resort, one with enormous and unavoidable negative consequences. They have an ally in the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. Whenever Trump has followed their advice and eschewed his harshest rhetoric, he seems to find it very uncomfortable to do so for more than a brief moment. He always reverts to his bottom lines.

The first question is whether Trump can in fact launch serious military action. It will be less easy than he imagines. Military bureaucrats have all sorts of ways of slowing down, even stopping, actions with which they disagree. In Trump’s regime, they are actually encouraged to do so by a further personality quirk of Donald Trump. He likes to take credit for successes but to blame failures on others. So just in case the military actions would be a failure, he is outsourcing the actual decisions to the military. If there were to be a failure he could blame them. In case of a success he would be the first to claim exclusive credit. However, outsourcing necessarily means delay and invites sabotage.

The cases of the two countries are different. North Korea does in fact have bombs, ones that can in fact reach U.S. territory. Furthermore, U.S. intelligence seems to be saying that North Korea is improving its military capacity at a very fast pace. The Trump regime is now talking of “preventive war” — the most wonderful oxymoron ever invented. Should the U.S. launch preventive war, one can be certain that North Korea would respond in a major way.

In contrast, Iran does not yet have nuclear weapons. They publicly insist they have no intention of acquiring them. At least half the authorities seem ready to renounce any effort permanently in return for various kinds of economic benefits. It would be far harder to renounce the accord than Donald Trump believes. For one thing, it has co-signers – Germany, France, Italy, the European Union — who have said they would not go along with such a renunciation.

But let us suspend for the moment the question of whether military action would work and ask what would be its consequences. In the case of Iran, it is very likely that the major world allies of the United States in Europe, not to speak of Russia and China, would increase the distance they take not merely from the Trump regime but from the United States as a country in the future. A non-diplomatic pathway would prove to be a diplomatic disaster.

In North Korea, the consequences would be far greater. Suppose the United States bombed all known nuclear weapon locations in North Korea. Some bombs miss their targets. It seems in addition that the United States does not even have a complete list of locations. North Korea may be able to launch a bomb from a submarine. Let us imagine for a moment that after a U.S. preventive war, North Korea had one bomb left. Whom would they bomb with it?

In any case, the U.S. preventive war bombs and the one North Korean response bomb would result in nuclear fallout of incredible magnitude and geographic spread. It could well be that the results of such bombs would waft across the Pacific Ocean to inflict tremendous damage to U.S. lives. The fact is that Trump’s bottom line cannot be a winner. It can only be a worldwide human disaster.

No doubt, the reader will want to know my prediction of what will actually happen. It is, sad to say, unpredictable.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 September 2017
Word Count: 1281
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — The complex battle over the future of Syria is like something we have never seen before in this region or perhaps anywhere else in the world. An unprecedented array of local, regional, and global political actors, using a wide range of instruments of power and influence, engage each other militarily to achieve dozens of different and usually clashing outcomes.

So most of the analysis about Syria’s future — in both the credible and nonsense forums around the world — are routine and reasonable speculation, wild guesses, or self-serving propaganda. The overwhelming novelty of events in Syria preclude anything else, and the uncertainties of what is to come there, and, as history suggests, in the wider Arab region, are beyond comprehension.

For once, though, history is not a good guide, even though Syria has more documented settled human and political history than almost any other place on earth. Syria repeatedly was a pivotal imperial prize or headquarters in ancient history, and it was central to the post-Ottoman birth (or manufacture) of the modern Arab state system, when, like today, many foreign powers had a hand in the outcome. Yet all this history is of no use to understanding where Syria is heading, because during the past 10 years or so we see for the first time, in Syria in particular, the full consequences of this generation’s six great, historic developments that are rewriting the rules of statehood, identity, community, nationhood, sovereignty, and legitimacy across much of the Arab region. These are:

1. The full consequences of the end of the Cold War around 1990; as the two superpowers pulled back in parts of the region to focus on other priorities, some dependent governments and economies weakened, triggering continuing structural changes in how citizens, societies, and states interact with each (including the birth or re-birth of new states, statelets, and quasi- sovereignties in Kurdistan, South Yemen, South Sudan, Gaza, pockets of Iraq, Lebanon and Sinai, Islamic State, and dozens of similar others).

2. The widespread stagnation of real economic growth as measured by family well-being, alongside widening socio-economic disparities; the non-stop rising economic and political pressures on perhaps 50-60 percent of Arab families since the early 1990s — alongside their almost zero real political rights — has sparked social, economic, and political fragmentation, and shattered the integrity of once stable states like Syria, Libya, Iraq, and others.

3. The weakening and occasional collapse of central government authority and legitimacy inevitably followed; as the world no longer cared when strategically insignificant Arab states occasionally collapsed into a bloody civil war, contracting central governments focused on serving their own supporters, sectarian kin, contractors, business partners, cousins, and guards, leaving large swaths of their populations abandoned and vulnerable.

4. Understandably, to fill the voids created by retreating central governments, powerful new indigenous, non-governmental political and military forces emerged, often based on religion, ethnicity, or tribalism; these included organizations like Hezbollah and half a dozen major Christian, Muslim and Druze organizations in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, Muqta Sadr’s ever-evolving movement in Iraq, Ansarullah (Houthis), Islah and others in Yemen, Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, and hundreds of smaller armed Islamist, tribal, and secular groups fighting and/or governing local principalities in Syria and Iraq.

5. The most recent historic change has been the direct engagement of major and mid-level regional powers (Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Hezbollah, United Arab Emirates [UAE], Qatar) in other states’ affairs, including active military warfare on several fronts simultaneously, e.g., Turkey’s new role in Syria, Qatar, and the Kurdish regions; Iran’s deep strategic involvement in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq; the Saudi-UAE war in Yemen; and many Gulf states direct or indirect militarism in Syria and Libya.

6. This coincides with the direct, long-term military actions of global powers inside Syria and Iraq, mainly Russia and the United States, who coordinate in virtual joint operations centers to allow their respective air forces to bomb away at will inside Syria; this novelty caps the others above, and completes the circle of extreme military and political cacophony that leaves Syria (and other Arab lands) in a condition of total unpredictability as to the future.

These six dramatic phenomena all had low-intensity historical antecedents in the region. But only now have they all reached fruition, and converged into a situation like Syria where thousands of local political and military actors, hundreds of would-be new post-war governance candidates, dozens of regional armed groups and states, and a handful of world powers all simultaneously intervene inside Syria for perfectly normal reasons. They each seek to preserve their interests, support their allies, counter their strategic foes, and carve out permanent footholds for their future involvement strategic well-being.

The most important unanswered question is: Which of the six major developments above is the most significant one that shapes the others, and perhaps holds the key to the future of Syria and other vulnerable Arab lands? We shall know soon enough — and in the vocabulary of Syria’s rich history of statehood and national configuration, “soon enough” means by about 2060 or so.

So my suggestion is, do not spend too much time worrying about what will happen in post-ISIS Raqqa or Deir ez-Zor in the next 3 months. Instead, more usefully try to help identify the critical drivers of the recent historical forces that have brought us all to this difficult situation — so we, and the Syrians in all of us, can have some chance of getting out of this shooting gallery of statehood.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 August 2017
Word Count: 908
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — After the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Bahrain broke ties with Qatar in early June and laid siege to it by blocking its land, sea, and air routes through their territories, an unfortunate aspect of the dispute has been the four siege states turning their mass media into propagandistic attack dogs. Their media assault against Qatar with a wide range of vicious propaganda, exaggerations, distortions, half-truths, fake news, and occasional outright lies has had no impact at all on world public opinion, which mostly rejects their wild accusations against Qatar. If anything, the propaganda attacks have only hurt the reputation of the media of the four siege states, turning once credible institutions of news, analysis, and views into sad shells of their old selves, in some severe cases becoming hysterical embarrassments to the world of credible journalism.

The role of the media is significant in this crisis for two reasons. First, the four siege states have specifically demanded the closure of Al-Jazeera television and other news outlets that Qatar has established, accusing them of promoting terrorism and threatening their security. The Saudi, Emirati, Egyptian, and Bahraini governments reject the open media systems and free flow of news and views that Al-Jazeera represents. They prefer their citizens to live in desolate information landscapes where the government’s opinion shapes what is said or heard in the public sphere.

Al-Jazeera generated the single biggest audience in the history of the Arab media precisely because it respected citizens’ ability to think for themselves, and hold and debate a variety of views, rather than live like unthinking cattle that move with the herd, shuffling along with their feet and minds tethered, their brains operating only according to their master’s wish.

Second, by unleashing the attack dogs of propaganda, hysterical lies, and exaggerations that have tried but failed to discredit Qatar in every possible way, the four siege states have only badly damaged the reputation of their own media — perhaps irreparably. After Al-Jazeera opened the door to professional, open pubic affairs reporting and analysis in the mid-1990s, some Arab media rose to the challenge and vastly improved their professionalism and credibility, especially in Egypt and some Gulf states. Those gains have now been mostly shattered and buried, given the willingness of some of the Saudi, Emirati and Egyptian media to comply with the orders of their thought-control colonels and spread propaganda about Qatar that is reminiscent of the old totalitarian ways of Stalinist Russia, the worst Third World dictators, and the former Soviet states. Arab citizens should not have to suffer such disdain by their own governments.

The most unfortunate example is the Saudi-owned satellite television news network Al-Arabiya, which reached a high level of professionalism and credibility after it was launched to offer a more conservative Arab perspective on the news than Al-Jazeera. I used to watch Al-Arabiya regularly for its news reporting and especially its nightly live, all-news show.

Al-Arabiya has now been savaged by its masters by being forced to broadcast material that is not only unsuccessful and boorish propaganda, but that also calls into question the network’s overall credibility. For example, the website now carries a permanent feature called “TQI-The Qatar Insider”, which is a non-stop flow of only negative news about Qatar that is selective, exaggerated, often wildly distorted, inaccurate, incomplete, one-sided, taken out of context, and perhaps even outright false in some places. It is sub-titled “Putting the pieces together on Qatar Crisis” and “Your comprehensive source of information on Qatar Crisis.” In fact it is a hatchet job that tries only to show that Qatar is sinking under the pressure of the siege, which any visit to Qatar shows to be untrue. It belongs on a North Korean television service, not on the respectable Al-Arabiya, whose dedicated staff of professional journalists and honorable men and women had painstakingly built it up over the years into one of the best public affairs television networks in the Arab world.

Another even more dangerous example is a short video clip that has been running on the front page of the Al-Arabiya website, ostensibly explaining how any country has the right to prevent threatening aircraft from entering its airspace, or shooting them down with missiles if need be. The animation shows a Qatar Airways civilian jet being shadowed and then attacked by a missile from a jet-fighter. The video is chilling, unjustified, and unreasonable, sending the message that people who fly on Qatar Airways could be shot down if their plane strays into the airspace of the siege states.

This is not only belligerent and dangerous escalation of the political conflict, it is intellectual and media terrorism as we have rarely seen it practiced by Arab states.

The bottom line is that when this dispute is resolved one day soon, which it will be, the self-inflicted damage that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain have caused their own media will take many years to dissipate. This is due to their transforming once honorable media professionals and institutions into purveyors of an Arab intellectual and cultural wasteland where lies and media terrorism are acceptable tools, where only the thought-control colonels speak, and everyone else nods, shuffles, closes their mind, and sleeps in shady pastures. What a shame. What a waste. What stupidity by the incompetent thought-control colonels who still plague us across many Arab lands.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 August 2017
Word Count: 898
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — If you were looking for a single moment that captured the peculiar nature of leadership and how history is determined in the Arab region today, it would be the meeting that took place a few weeks ago between the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, and the populist Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada el-Sadr. There are enough fascinating aspects of this meeting to fill a graphic novel. Several pertinent ones that stand out tell us much about how the destiny of this turbulent and still deteriorating region will be determined by some relatively young men operating in the shadows, for the most part.

Moqtada el-Sadr inherited from his assassinated father the leadership of a grassroots movement of Shiites in Iraq that has emerged as a pivotal actor in the ever-changing Iraqi political scene. Mohammad bin Salman vaulted to the Crown Prince position in Saudi Arabia thanks to the decisions of his father the king, and some wily palace machinations that remind us why kings and princes are such popular figures in television series. They are quite young as Middle East leaders go, and both assumed power without any formal training or experience, but thanks only to their fathers.

Like most Arab leaders, they have immense power, are accountable virtually to no one, and can wage war or make peace with former enemies at the drop of a hat, a kefiyyeh, a turban, or any other Middle Eastern head covering. We should take a good, hard look at these two men, because they and others like them will shape the future of the Middle East.

We have to remain both equitable and vigilant towards them and their like — equitable, in not judging them too quickly but rather giving them time to show if they are reckless dangers to us all, or bold and visionary young men who have learned the mistakes of the autocratic leaders of the recent past; but vigilant, in watching them closely to spot any signs of utter foolhardiness and destructive actions that promote sectarianism and warfare in lands that beg for pluralism and calm.

The Saudi crown prince sees himself as perhaps the protector of all Sunni Muslim Arabs, if not all Sunni Muslims in the world. He has spoken harshly of alleged predatory Iranian intentions in Arab societies, and has launched military (Yemen) and diplomatic (Qatar) efforts to stem alleged Iranian inroads into Arab countries that include Shiite Muslim minorities. Whether his fears of Iran are justified, exaggerated, or fully hallucinatory will be determined by history to come.

Moqtada el-Sadr represents the modern phenomenon of a dynamic, charismatic grassroots Shiite Muslim organizer and leader in an Arab country. He has fought the Americans, negotiated politically with other Iraqi political groups, spent time in and out of Iran, spoken harshly of Saudi Arabia in the past, and generally sought to position himself to become the most prominent Iraqi Shiite spiritual and (unofficially) political leader after the imminent death of the leading Iraqi Shiite authority Ayatollah el-Sayyid Ali el-Sistani.

Each in his way represents a break from the past, and both of them have spoken about the need for serious political, economic, and social-cultural reforms within their own countries. Sadr wants a serious anti-corruption effort in Iraq, and Mohammad bin Salman has championed an ambitious national economic reform plan. These are novel and potentially historic developments, if they are sincere and will be translated into action. So we must wait and see if and how these young men’s rhetoric promotes real changes for the better for the people of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which would immensely benefit many others in the Arab region and Iran.

The meeting of these two men raised eyebrows across the region because it was widely assumed that intense Shiite-Sunni rivalries throughout the region precluded such interactions and consultations across sectarian lines. It turns out that this meeting resulted in some bilateral agreements, including a $10 million Saudi donation to meet the needs of Iraqis displaced by war in Mosul. Then the Iraqi government announced that it was asked to mediate to improve relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and a long-closed Iraqi-Saudi border post will be reopened to facilitate the flow of people and goods that will benefit both states.

The big riddle is whether this meeting will pave the way for more normal relations among Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran, or generate more intense political rivalries and sectarian competition for influence. More sinister analysts than myself wonder if these Saudi and Iraqi figures are using each other mainly to strengthen their internal position and also create more troubles for Iran. We will know in the months ahead.

We should not rule out the possibility that even brash, inexperienced, unconstrained, and bold young men who make war at will would one day see the folly of their ways and start to act more sensibly. That would be good news for the entire Middle East, which is why these two fellows are worth watching closely.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 August 2017
Word Count: 833
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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