The Middle East Problem

What will be the role of the Middle East in this second “Cold War” that we are beginning to experience, which is designed by the U.S. in its face-off with the emerging superpower China?

The U.S. is seeking immediate solutions to calm down the Arab wasps’ nest. In the first place, the Middle East is no longer its main energy supplier; therefore, this area is no longer a priority as an energy supplier. Hillary Clinton said, “The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not in Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action.”

The American plan for the Middle East is very clear. It is looking for a strategic balance between the Shiite and Sunni worlds. Neither of these branches should be powerful enough to prevail over the other. A divided Islam, whose poles ensure equilibrium and mutually neutralize each other, is what the U.S. and Israel want. It is the old strategy of divide and conquer, which historically has yielded good results.

The plan on paper is one thing, but reality is another, as we are seeing in the latest developments in Iraq with the appearance of the ISIL movement. This movement seeks the creation of a vast Sunni Islamic caliphate between the Mediterranean Sea and the old Mesopotamia, which would include the Iraqi, Palestinian, Israeli, Syrian, Lebanese and Jordanian territories.

The U.S. indirectly supported this Sunni jihadi movement that is active in Iraq and Syria, while Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf emirates among others, who finance and arm it, supported it directly. It is clear that the U.S. has not learned the lesson from the conflict in Afghanistan with bin Laden and is making the same mistake again. Today, it is beginning to realize the risk this movement poses for it and its plans: a much greater risk than the Syrian al-Assad might have thought.

Iran plays a key role right now and therefore will reach an agreement on nuclear weapons with the United States. Its role as leader of the Shiite world will be strengthened, leading the Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Palestine bloc, and it will be allowed to create this bloc in exchange for no longer being a threat to the existence of Israel, the country that defends American interests in the region.

It is evident that al-Assad will win the war in Syria, while the Western international community will remain silent and turn its attention elsewhere, as usual. Al-Assad will make small improvements and cosmetic concessions in his regime and will be a guarantor of the peace on the border with Israel.

The Jewish-Palestinian problem will be very difficult to solve as long as the ultraconservative authorities that lead Israel remain in power. Minor agreements are being sought that are acceptable to both the Jewish and Palestinian parties in order to bring a minimum of stability to the region.

Although it has gone mostly un-noticed, the recent agreement between Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority to convey water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea that will provide 1.2 billion cubic meters of potable water is aimed at that. The inherent process of desalinizing seawater is an important step because it means improving the terrible hydrological situation in this area, which was one of the problems that prevented progress in other agreements. There is no life without water.

Saudi Arabia will consolidate itself as a regional power and will be the leader of the Sunni world; it will no longer have the importance it once did because it won’t have the key to oil. Furthermore, its energy role will gradually diminish.

In spite of all the American attempts to pacify the region, this will be very difficult because we must add the problem of the Kurds, the largest population in the world without a state, to the well-known Jewish-Palestinian problem. Kurdistan is an issue that has been awaiting a solution for 100 years, when the Western powers betrayed the Kurdish people by failing to comply with the accords they signed after World War I.

To all that, we must add the overt American and Western support of dictatorships, such as the one in Egypt, as well as the support to monarchical theocracies in the Gulf, which are more fitting to the Middle Ages than the 21st century, and strongly oppress their peoples.

As we can already see, the American desire is to pacify the zone, so that it will stop being a source of headache in the face of the new strategic challenges that China already poses.

Besides its brazen support of the Jewish world, which makes the U.S. an unreliable agent, this difficulty in solving the problems of the Middle East is due to America’s practical longstanding inaction. It will have a difficult time, and as we have seen throughout history with other great powers in their day, like Spain, France and England, all this commotion in the Middle East will favor the political, economic and military decay of the United States. We are witnessing the end of hegemony.

The U.S. is planning a second “Cold War” as a strategy to prevent its decay as a hegemonic power and to coalesce around it the Western countries in defense of the world it has led during the last 100 years, but its difficulties in the Middle East are great, and this will be one of the regions of the world where it will foreseeably fail.