The Middle East’s “1919” Moment |
International Affairs
Determining America's Role in the World
The Middle East today is at a juncture seen only twice in the last fifty plus years, after the Yom Kippur and Kuwait wars, with the region now possibly on the cusp of enduring peace, stability, and growth. While the specific outcome of the current U.S./Israeli campaign against Iran cannot be as yet ascertained, no likely outcome would negate the preceding conclusion about the state of the region, but rather possibly strengthen it.
The two primary recent threats to regional security, Islamic Sunni radicals particularly the Islamic State, and Iran and its regional proxies, have been decisively beaten. Russia, at times a serious outside destabilizing factor, has been weakened significantly in the region and preoccupied with Ukraine.
None are finished, and their leaders are seeking comebacks, but their positions are dramatically weaker, and the rest of the region, minus some serious interstate and domestic turbulence, is relatively united and stable. But consolidation of this turn of events into long term success requires an understanding of the moment and the mission.
For the last decade the U.S. and its various partners and allies focused on “the other”—those hostile Sunni and Shia religious and state challenges to the regional order, and to a lesser degree on Russia in Syria.
Now with the 2025 decisive victory over the Iranian regional threat, the task is to forge permanent stabilization working through that victorious alliance, the U.S., Israel, Arab states, Turkey, and a supporting cast of European, international organization and UN actors. The obstacles today do not rest so much with those foes of yesterday, but rather differences within this victorious alliance. The moment thus resembles 1919, when the World War I victors maneuvered to advance individual goals, often at the expense of others. The result was a gradual breakdown of the 1919 order, and a turn within twenty years to renewed world war. The most important task today for the region and these victorious states is to avoid a repeat.
While much of the global public and media attention since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel has focused on the legitimate plight of Gaza civilians and illegitimate accusations of Israeli war crimes, the big story in the Middle East has been the destruction of the Iranian regional proxy and asymmetrical warfare threat. For twenty-five years, beginning with Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program, Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon, and the defeat of Iran’s most feared rival, Saddam Hussein by the U.S. in 2003, the Islamic Republic had expanded........