![]() In sum, you must make do with the allies you have rather than the ones you would like to have, and the Gulf states were certainly a useful bulwark for the US in countering Russian, Islamist and jihadist influence in the Middle East while isolating revolutionary Iran. Moreover, this security assistance could be used as leverage to ensure a plentiful supply of oil to the Western industrial countries at cheap prices. Yet the tensions in the Middle East also fuelled massive arms sales by the US and the United Kingdom, France and Germany to Israel and the Gulf countries. These relationships could be an occasional embarrassment for the West, as when Israel refused to move on its peace process with the Palestinians and Saudi Arabia refused to grant its women equal rights and cracked down hard on the regime’s internal critics. Like Cold War-Europe, the Middle East seemed to be divided into two hostile ideological and armed camps: one side firmly siding with Washington, while the other was more under the influence of Tehran and Moscow. These major power rivalries might increase tensions in the region, but they also gave the US and those European powers with interests in the Middle East a clear sense of friend and foe. Back in 2010, when Wikileaks published hundreds of US diplomatic cables supplied by whistle-blower Chelsea Manning, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was quoted pleading with the US to “cut off the head of the snake”, referring to Riyadh’s archenemy, Iran. Until recently, Qatar was both ostracised and largely economically boycotted by its fellow Gulf states in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) after being accused of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist extremists across the Middle East and North Africa.Īrab leaders may pretend to maintain a semblance of diplomatic restraint in their public discourse, but in private, they are frequently scathing about each other. Iran and Saudi Arabia have fought a proxy war in Yemen. Turkey and Qatar have supported the transitional government in Tripoli, Libya, while the sympathies of Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Saudis have sided more with its rival based in Benghazi in the east. Israel has tried, albeit with limited success, to shore up a buffer zone in southern Lebanon against the pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia or to disrupt Iranian activities in Syria. Turkey has supported the anti-Assad opposition in Syria since the civil war broke out there in 2011 and Iran has become a central pillar of Assad’s survival in power. As a result, the protagonists in these conflicts have become increasingly the third columns or proxies of the major powers as they manoeuvre for advantage against each other. However, they have been exacerbated by the region’s major powers who have consistently interfered in these conflicts or occasionally intervened in support of either governments or oppositions. ![]() Many of the semi-permanent conflicts in the Middle East have their origins in local factors. So, no wonder that many TV viewers – presented with images of riots on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Iranian women demonstrators being beaten and pushed into police vans or panoramas of bombed out streets in Aleppo and Palmyra – tend to switch off in despair at a Middle East that seems incapable of developing a more positive vision of its future. Even the few diplomatic agreements as between Israel and its neighbours, Egypt and Jordan, have been more of a ‘cold peace’ than a true reconciliation along the lines of France and Germany in Europe. Of course, the long enduring Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been at the centre of the region’s chronic instability but in recent times, we have also witnessed war between Iraq and Iran, two wars of the United States and its coalition partners against Iraq, civil wars in Syria and Yemen, repeated Israeli incursions into Syria and Lebanon, and repeated Turkish incursions into Syria and Iraq to fight Kurdish militia groups. Virtually every news report on the Middle East is about violence, the suffering of ordinary people caught in the middle of the violent political struggles and leaders vociferously blaming others for the extremist policies and lack of compromise that bedevil Middle Eastern politics. The Middle East is a region that has long been known more for its ancestral antagonisms and bitter geopolitical rivalries than for European-style cooperation.
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