Chaos In The Waters

      Houthis dancing on a captured Israeli ship in the Red Sea.

The Middle East is a region without law, without order, and without a hegemon. This chaotic situation has created a historic military and political opening, giving small actors like Israel, Qatar, U.A.E, and the Houthis of Yemen the confidence to assert themselves to the detriment of regional peace and international security.

In the nonsensical “global war on terror” that was waged for the last two decades it was terror that won.

And terror was winning prior to 9/11 as well, above all in the Israeli-Palestinian theater. 

The core problem with Israel’s decades-long belligerence against the Palestinians is that it is not strong enough to fight fair and square and win the war outright. 

And so it resorts to industrial terrorism and the mass slaughter of innocents to intimidate the Palestinians into submission. This dumb way of waging war naturally creates resentment, hatred, and a cycle of never ending revenge. 

America could get away with destroying German and Japanese cities during WWII alongside Russia and Britain because they were superpowers. And Washington acted quickly to rebuild both nations economically to avoid any future hostilities.

Israel is not a superpower nor even a regional hegemon, and it is not capable of rebuilding what it destroys, so any comparisons to WWII that are being made by Israeli and American politicians are ridiculous. 

It also does not matter that the Jewish people have a biblical and a divine claim to the Holy Land. So what if the ancient maps of the lands of Israel had Hebrew names on them? What matters is power.

Current demographic realities and regional political opposition dictate that Israel needs to share the land in the 21st century and negotiate a just and fair settlement. It does not have the power to do otherwise.

The other factor as to why Israel has been able to cause so much havoc during its brief existence is that the West and Islam have never been weaker as civilizations. 

The Muslims are militarily weak, culturally retarded, and politically fractured. And the West lacks the moral vision and political intelligence to call a spade a spade. 

Europe is basically a non-factor on the international stage but especially in the Middle East, and America is irrational on this issue, contributing nothing to the resolution of the conflict but arms.

The Western powers also don’t have the military strength to push the different sides around as they once did. After a hundred years of imperial rule, Europe and America left the Middle East as they found it – a chaotic mess. 

The Anglo-American empire came like an arrogant ass, took a big sky dump on the region, and left in a hurry with shit still hanging down their legs. That’s their historical legacy. Not even the Mongols are as hated as them, and they wiped out entire cities for fun.

China can step into this massive vacuum of power without all the emotional and cultural baggage of the Judaic-Christian world and its younger Islamic kin. It can approach the historical situation rationally and it also has the economic and political clout to bring all sides to their senses.

But will it?

II. 

An excerpt from, “The Fadeout Of The Pax Americana In The Middle East” By Chas Freeman, Responsible Statecraft, June 8, 2021:

The Middle East is where Africa, Asia, and Europe meet, where the three Abrahamic religions were born, and where their holiest places are.  It’s where the planet’s hydrocarbon resources are most abundant and accessible, and where the strategic lines of communication that connect Asia to Europe can most easily be severed.  Not surprisingly, the region has been a major focus of great power contention and military intervention.  But that is now changing.  After centuries of domination by foreigners – most recently by the United States – the Middle East is now being reshaped primarily by interactions between countries within it.

Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt marked the opening round of a traumatic Western assault on the West Asian and North African heartland of Islamic civilization.  As in other proud cultures also brought low by European imperialism like China and India, much of the Middle East’s political dynamics are now driven by nationalist reactions to the indignities of a humiliating encounter with the West.  But while China and India, like Japan before them, are recovering their self-confidence, the Middle East has yet to find a cure for its post-colonial hangover.

There is broad agreement in the region that such a cure lies in some sort of revamp of Islamic traditions and patterns of governance.  But Islam is as schismatic as Judaism and Christianity, and there is no consensus about what Islamic governance should be.  Are the values and policies of Muslim societies to be defined and enforced by the consultative practices of shura, by a virtuous emir acting in concert with an `ulama, or by a religious scholar acting under wilayat al-faqih?  If parliamentary democracy is adopted, is there a role for Islamist versions of the Christian Democratic parties of Europe?  If Islam is the answer, will it be the same in both Shia and Sunni societies?  If Islam is not the answer, is the secular militarism of countries like Egypt a viable substitute?

The Middle East is a region divided more than most by the geopolitical calculations of assertive nation states, diverse religious traditions, discordant levels of tolerance, contrasting systems of governance, uneven endowments of natural resources and wealth, differing levels of technological competence, and distinctive historical experiences.  Is such a region capable of crafting the peaceable order it needs to regain its lost civilizational pride and cultural eminence?  How will the contests between religiosity and secularism, autocratic traditions and democratic aspirations, rentier and knowledge-based political economies, patriarchy and feminism, and Salafism and more relaxed forms of Islam turn out?  Where will the rivalries between the Gulf Arabs and Iran, Israel, Iran, and Turkey, or Israel, the Palestinians, and other Arabs take the region?   The Middle East kaleidoscope has yet to stop turning.

. . .Persian Gulf energy supplies remain essential to global prosperity, but the American economy no longer directly depends on them.  Fracking has made the United States the de facto swing producer in the global oil and gas market.  Americans now show little interest in any prosperity other than their own.  As a result, few abroad still see the United States as a reliable guardian of global access to Middle Eastern energy supplies or a dependable guarantor of the region’s political stability.

The primary mission of the U.S. naval presence in the Gulf and Arabian Sea was once to protect global access to the region’s energy supplies.  Now it is to target Iran.  The failure of American military intervention in Afghanistan to overpower Islamist resistance and the catastrophic results of U.S. intervention in Iraq have devalued American military protection for the countries of the region.  The Biden administration’s decision to call it a day in Afghanistan is taken as confirmation of an ongoing American retreat.

. . .Today’s Israel can no longer credibly claim to share the values or moral aspirations of Americans or Europeans.  If Israel does not return to Western norms, it will, in time, find itself as estranged from the West as it already is from most of the rest of the world.  Having been created by Zionism, Israel is now faced with the need to transcend it.

. . .The Saudi attempt to overthrow the Iranian-supported Asad government in Syria – like the parallel attempts of Israel, Turkey, the United States, and others – helped destroy Syria as an organized society but failed to oust Asad.  The main result to date of the futile but devastating Saudi war on Iranian-backed insurgents in Yemen has been to further tarnish the Kingdom’s international reputation.

. . .The reappearance of Russia and increased Chinese engagement in regional diplomacy does not make the Middle East an arena of the “great power rivalry” that American militarists insist should define current affairs.  The Middle East’s bilateral contests and diplomatic dynamics are now generated in the region itself.  The Pax Americana is receding into history, along with the era when any external great power could supervise interactions between Arabs, Iranians, Israelis, Kurds, and Turks.  The Middle East is now nobody’s sphere of influence but its own.