THE NEW IMBALANCE OF POWER IN THE MIDDLE EAST / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

The New Imbalance of Power in the Middle East

The actions of Israel and Iran largely shape regional security, making it difficult for the United States to manage the region. 

By: Kamran Bokhari

The strategic situation in the Middle East is a culmination of Arab states’ decades-long failure to drive regional security. 

The Cold War, non-Arab regional powers, and the emergence of non-state actors have created an imbalance of power. 

The geopolitical struggle is principally between Israel and Iran, while regional players like Saudi Arabia and Turkey as well as the region's primary security guarantor, the United States, tend to react to it. 

The region’s future will be greatly shaped by the outcome of Iran’s efforts to upend the status quo and by Israel’s response.

Since their independence after the two world wars, Arab states have struggled with domestic political upheaval as well as conflicts with one another. 

Initially, the regimes were largely pro-Western monarchies, but they emerged in an era in which Arab nationalist movements were rising. (As were Baathist movements, which advocated secular, one-party systems in what they saw as a new Arab enlightenment.) 

Military officers influenced by these ideologies mounted coups in Egypt (1952), Iraq (1958), Yemen (1962), Syria (1963) and Libya (1969), establishing left-leaning republican autocracies aligned with the Soviet Union. 

These radical Arab states represented a threat to pro-U.S. countries: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Turkey and Iran.

Given its vast energy resources, the Middle East was an important theater during the Cold War. 

All the while, Arab states were deeply at odds with one another. 

The nationalism of individual Arab states proved more durable than the pan-Arabism espoused by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. 

This was most evident in the short-lived unification between Egypt and Syria (1958-61). 

Baathists opposed Nasserists, of course, but they were equally at odds with each other, as evidenced by the rivalry between the Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq.

Meanwhile, the Arab world was also being shaped by its conflict with Israel immediately after its founding in 1948. 

The national interests of individual Arab states – rather than a sense of collective action – drove Egypt, Syria and Jordan to fight a series of wars with their new neighbor. 

The goal of defeating Israel was not to establish a Palestinian state. 

In fact, the vanguard of the Palestinian nationalist struggle, the Palestine Liberation Organization, did not emerge until 1964, just three years before Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, which had two major implications. 

First, it marked the twilight of Arab nationalism as a major political force. It utterly discredited the movement and catalyzed Islamism as religion increasingly replaced identity as the basis of political activism. 

Second, Palestinian nationalism was unmoored to the interests of Arab states and emerged as a major force of its own. Israel's seizure of the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights – as well as the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – fundamentally changed Egypt and Syria’s strategic attitude toward Israel.

Put simply, their posture became much more defensive. 

Retrieving lost territories became about more than liberating Palestine. 

This was the entire purpose behind the 1973 war. 

Though Syria failed to reclaim the Golan Heights, Egypt managed to take back the Sinai Peninsula – if only because of a U.S.-brokered peace treaty in 1979 meant to keep Cairo out of Moscow’s sphere of influence.

For Egypt, the same treaty granted recognition to Israel, and in doing so, it helped to move the center of gravity in the Middle East to the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. 

Meanwhile, political Islam was rapidly gaining steam. 

In February 1979, for example, a revolution in Iran ousted the monarchy and established the Islamic Republic, which has since sought to aggressively exploit divisions within the Arab world to its advantage. 

That same year, Islam’s holiest site in Mecca was seized by ultra-conservative Salafist militants, which together with the threat from Iranian-inspired Islamism forced Saudi Arabia to counter by supporting Sunni radicals. 

Weeks later, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, leading to the empowerment of transnational jihadism.

That same decade, energy-rich Gulf Arab states supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War to counterbalance potential Iranian expansion. 

While engaged in a costly war with Baghdad, Tehran (aided by its ally in Damascus) established its premier regional proxy in Hezbollah after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. 

By the end of the 1980s, the Arab world fell into greater chaos. 

Islamist groups challenging Arab regimes were on the rise. 

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, so it could no longer support its allies in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen.

The most consequential event was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which led to the 1991 Gulf War. 

Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab states faced a major strategic dilemma: They needed Iraq as a bulwark against Iranian expansion, but allowing Baghdad to take Kuwait could put them, especially Saudi Arabia, in a position to be Iraq’s next target. 

They had no choice but to actively support the U.S.-led military coalition. 

As a result of the war, the Sunni Iraqi state was weakened, while the Shiite majority in the south and the Kurdish minority in the north were empowered. 

Both of them held close ties with Iran.

Meanwhile, the 1993 Oslo Accords, which created the Palestinian Authority, and the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty further enabled Israel to consolidate its national security imperatives. 

U.S.-sponsored diplomacy failed to produce a Palestinian state, but it worked to the advantage of those opposed to a peace settlement. 

Hamas and other smaller Palestinian factions emerged as powerful forces largely through a campaign of suicide bombings, which in turn emboldened the Israeli right under the leadership of current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Armed with the experience of cultivating Hezbollah, and with Iraq no longer a major security concern, Iran set out to forge relations with Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Al-Qaida’s attack on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, created an even greater crisis in the Arab world, especially in its de facto leader, Saudi Arabia, which was caught up in Washington’s war on Sunni Islamism. 

The Bush administration’s decision to topple the Iraqi government in 2003 by aligning itself with pro-Iranian factions was the single-most important contribution to Iran achieving its strategic objectives. 

And by giving rise to the Islamic State, it also expanded the threat of transnational jihadism.

The 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the Palestinian civil war in the aftermath of Hamas’ victory in the 2006 elections ended with Hamas in control of Gaza in 2007. 

Iran seized the opportunity to provide greater assistance to Hamas, especially by supplying the rockets that helped Hezbollah in its 2006 war with Israel. 

Iran would further benefit in the 2010s from the Arab Spring uprisings.

The insurgencies in Syria and Yemen greatly aided Iran’s strategic plans for the region. 

Tehran’s support for the Assad regime turned Syria into all but a vassal state. 

Its support for the Houthis, who had come to power when the Yemeni state collapsed and who were the primary antagonist in the 2015 Saudi intervention, similarly benefitted Iran. 

By the 2020s, Iran had established an uninterrupted sphere of influence extending from its western borders to the Eastern Mediterranean and a permanent outpost at the intersection of the Arabian and Red seas.

The Arab strategy to counter Iranian power in the region was to align with Israel, a strategy made manifest by the Abraham Accords. 

The move was risky because Arab states would surely be criticized for forsaking the Palestinian cause. 

This explains why Riyadh struggled in its own negotiations to normalize relations with Israel. 

Just when it seemed Saudi Arabia was at the cusp of a major breakthrough, Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, torpedoing the talks and pushing the region to a nearly unprecedented scale of conflict that is reverberating throughout the world, especially in the United States with the growing student protests against American support for Israel.

As important, the six months since Oct. 7 have led to several notable developments. 

Turkey has been unable to do much to address the crisis; Houthi rebels have attacked international shipping; pro-Iranian militias have repeatedly attacked U.S. targets in Syria, Iraq and Jordan; and Israel conducted airstrikes against Iranian assets in Syria and Lebanon, resulting in Iran’s first-ever direct attack against Israel proper. 

These developments bring home the fact that regional security is dictated largely by Israel and Iran.

Arab states are all the more unable to play an effective role in the security of the Middle East, especially with their historic security guarantor, the U.S., struggling to balance various stakeholders at a time of unrest at home and engagements with its great power competitors, Russia and China.