Chapter 2: Profound disorder of the new Middle East
Unravelling of the old Middle East
10.The Middle East is undergoing an “era of transition”: the “post-World War I boundaries and system have crumbled” said Dr Renad Mansour, Asfari Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House.6 Mr Neil Crompton, Director, Middle East and North Africa, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), said the “convulsions” that flowed from the Arab spring and the “overthrow of many of the old systems have changed the sense of certainty”.7 Dr Jon B Alterman, Director Middle East Programme, Centre for Strategic and International Studies (US), saw the region as undergoing “wrenching simultaneous disruptions” and was “struck by the ferocity and seeming hopelessness of its conflicts.”8
11.Dr Richard Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations (US), had a “fairly dark view” of the region” with its “conflicts that are within and between states, direct and indirect”, where “[b]oundaries in many cases count for little” and there is “an odd mixture of strong governments and weak governments [and] a “host of non-state actors”.9 The Middle East encapsulates the broader international fact that power “is more distributed in more hands than at any time in history”.10
12.The region is still in the midst of these upheavals. Dr Haass saw “no glimmers of normalisation”, only “prolonged instability of various sorts along various fault lines”.11
A transformation of power
13.We introduce the seismic changes shaking the region here and explore them in more detail within the report.
14.There has been a rebalancing between Western powers and states of the Middle East. There has been a shift away from Western states as the global centre of economic power; and as economic power has been shifting to the East, countries in the region have been turning their political attention there as well. The role of shale oil in its energy mix has reduced the importance of the Middle East to the US, a trend which is likely to lead, over time to a concomitant diminution of the protection offered by the Western security umbrella to the region.
15.As Western nations have slowly retreated, their authority and influence in the region has waned. The declining role of external states—particularly the US—has helped usher in, and been amplified by, a more multipolar Middle East.12 Regional actors have been taking a more active role and jostling for power. Of particular concern, a virulent competition for regional hegemony between Saudi Arabia and Iran is destabilising the region. Throughout the region political conflicts are being conducted under the auspices of sectarian concerns, with the potential to trigger civil wars with religious dimensions.
16.At the same time, the share of global power held by states is shrinking. Dr Haass noted that:
“Decision-making has come to be more decentralised. Globalization, with its vast, fast flows of just about anything and everything real and imaginable across borders, is a reality that governments often cannot monitor, much less manage … The result is a world in which centrifugal forces are gaining the upper hand”.13
17.The eroding of traditional state borders, drawn a century ago, has fractured the Middle East into semi-autonomous zones and powerful provinces. The centrifugal tendencies and the weakening of state structures has given rise to new non-state actors. The dispersal of power into non-state hands has created a pattern of power and influence which is both complex and controversial.
18.Non-state actors can be both negative and irredeemably disruptive such as terrorist groups, most notably Al-Qaeda and Da’esh, and they can also be positive—such as civil society. There are also sub-state actors, who Dr Mansour explained were groups trying to “institute governments”, working within states—”they are local and trying to develop states”.14 The most prominent examples are the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq. Groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas are non-state actors that have transitioned into either sub-state actors or even become part of legitimate state structures.
19.Across all parties, there is the powerful popularising influence of communication and political interaction, driven by the expansion of technology and the mass move online on a scale never before known. New media and technology fusing with a rising young generation have been both triggering and enabling social change.
20.The MENA is witnessing a youth boom. In most countries in the MENA, young people (15–24 years old) make up more than a quarter of the population. In some countries, the numbers are much larger: 70% of the Jordanian population are under the age of 30 for instance.15 A new generation of young people, the majority of whom are excluded from formal political processes, are now better informed and connected by technology to their peers within their own countries, the region and internationally. The democratisation of information has created a more activist public, who feel empowered and prepared to question, with new intensity, the traditional social contracts and to demand more accountability.
21.Furthermore, they are drawn, as is everyone, into the world of networks, where policies and priorities are formed around different relationships at all levels, including the international level, and changed by connections and information flows on a scale unparalleled in human experience.
22.The new tools of technology and connection have also had darker implications. They have empowered Da’esh, whose use and abuse of the internet is profoundly troubling. Authoritarian regimes have responded adroitly too, exploiting technology to extend their surveillance and suppress disagreement.
Enduring challenges
23.Some of the more depressing facets of the region remain stubbornly resistant to change. Underneath the revolutionary macro-political transformations, the economic and social woes of the region continue. The “underlying causes” of the Arab spring, said Mr Crompton, including “the sense of economic disempowerment” among young people “have not really been addressed by any of the governments in the region”.16
24.The US shale revolution and other supply shocks, explained Dr Bassam Fattouh, Director, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, has “had the effect of reducing the oil price and lowering oil revenues for key Middle East oil producers”.17 As oil revenues fall the oil producing states, long accustomed to unlimited wealth, have had to review their domestic mind-sets and their future sources of economic wealth, in order to support growing younger populations. They are now contemplating a future in which world oil and gas supplies are likely to keep prices subdued, while demand growth for hydrocarbons is curbed by increasing energy efficiency worldwide, plus competitive renewable alternatives like solar and wind energy. Furthermore, plentiful supplies of shale oil and gas are likely to limit any further rise in the oil price.
25.Widening gaps of wealth are present within the borders and between countries of the region. According to a 2014 report by the Institute of International Finance, foreign assets of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)18 rose to $2.27 trillion at the end of 2014. This compares to a decline of foreign assets of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia and Morocco to a deficit of $46.7 billion at the same time.19 Privately-held liquid wealth in the GCC has grown from $1.1 trillion (2010) to $2.2 trillion (2014).20 This is not merely an economic question but essential to understanding the fertile ground for the growth of unrest and sectarianism.
26.The volatility of the politics, and the sense of existential crises permeating the states of the region, constitute a serious challenge to the ability and willingness of states to undertake reforms. In the period immediately ahead, countries in the MENA will find it difficult to break out of the cycle of political patronage, religious tension and authoritarianism. Social, environmental and economic issues will continue to threaten the region’s stability, including an under-employed young population, a decline in revenues from natural energy resources and the effects of climate change.
27.Religious and sectarian differences, incited and exploited by states of the region, often with violent ramifications, will almost certainly continue to be key characteristics of the landscape. There is a risk that the political and religious dimensions of the competition between Saudi Arabia (Sunni) and Iran (Shia) have already spilt over into a full religious civil war, beyond the control of the states. There are tensions within the Sunni Islam camp, between the extreme form of Salafi Islam, represented by Da’esh and al-Qaeda, and the rest of the Sunni schools of Islam.
28.The ongoing conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen have resulted in the massive internal displacement of populations in the Arab world. In the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussain in 2003, four million Iraqis fled to other parts of the country and 2.6 million of them remain displaced. Others left for Jordan and Syria. On 30 March 2017, Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), announced that the number of Syrians who had fled their country in response to the civil war had reached 5 million. These numbers are putting an enormous pressure on neighbouring countries, who have borne the lion’s share of the responsibility of hosting refugees: Turkey (3 million); Lebanon (1.5 million) and Jordan (650.000).21
29.Traditional patterns of hierarchy and power have been challenged throughout the Middle East, leaving a turbulent scene which has failed to meet the expectations and hopes of the Arab spring but is suffering from the aftershocks from that political upheaval.
30.The new Middle East is likely to remain unstable and chaotic with its future evolution uncertain. Surveying the immense challenges of the region, while it is clear that they can be in some degree influenced, the prospect for resolving them are remote.
Contours of a British policy
31.As we survey the region—in the throes of historic turmoil, with a competition for regional hegemony between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which in some instances is taking the form of a Sunni-Shia religious civil war, reflected in the continued stalemate in Syria with its concomitant humanitarian crisis and threats to national boundaries drawn a century ago—two things remain clear to us.
32.First, the UK must continue to engage but on a different basis from the past. The UK as a member of the Permanent Five (P5) of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has a particular responsibility for peace and security. The UK remains vulnerable to interruptions in the supply of oil and gas and to migratory flows. Humanitarian obligations also call on the UK to act. Moreover, in the Middle East, there is a cost to inaction. In this “world of bad options”, as Dr Haass pointed out, “not acting can be every bit as consequential … as acting”.22 Mr Paul Danahar, former BBC Middle East correspondent, warned that in this region “things come back and bite you if you walk away”.23
33.Second, British Government engagement must be realistic and in line with its capacities. There are limits to what can seriously be sought by and legitimately asked of the UK. A distinction must be made between what the UK can do and what it should do. As Mr Rory Stewart OBE MP, Minister of State, Department for International Development (DfID) said, the UK does not have a “moral obligation to do what we cannot do”.24
34.The UK needs a renewed approach to the region, one more responsive to the shifts and changes, which questions the assumptions that have guided British policy for the last century. As the UK enters a new post-EU era, it is timely for the UK to review some long-standing premises and attitudes.
35.The strategic importance of the Middle East region to the West, traditionally centred, in the earlier part of the century, around oil and trade routes to India and the Orient, has now given way to new and different concerns, more connected with global security threats, including from migration, and the contagions of terrorism and sectarian violence.
36.Overall, the new Middle East requires a new mind-set in policy circles. First, it should no longer be seen as an area to exert power in the name of traditional interests. Second, it is not an area where the dependence on American predominance can any longer be assumed. Third, it is no longer a region of purely Western concern. The concerns are global; Russia has returned to the region and China’s involvement is growing.
37.In this continuing period of turmoil and upheaval, the UK can do little to shape the region on its own. British policy, ideally, must still be to foster and pursue its national interests, but also to contain the threat of state conflict, and encourage stability in the region while supporting democratic institutions where they emerge. We consider, in this report, what such a policy might entail, and how to give it shape and momentum.
7 Q 20 (Neil Crompton). The Arab spring wave of revolutionary demonstrations across the region, beginning in Tunisia in 2010, sparked widespread violent and non-violent protests against existing regimes
8 Jon B Alterman, ‘The Storm: The States of the Middle East Confront a Series of Powerful Disruptions’, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 18 November 2016: https://www.csis.org/analysis/storm-states-middle-east-confront-series-powerful-disruptions [accessed 20 April 2017]
10 Richard Haass, A World in Disarray (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), pp 11–12
13 Richard Haass, A World in Disarray (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), pp 11–12
15 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Youth in the MENA: How to bring them in, 2016: http://www.oecd.org/mena/governance/Youth-in-the-MENA-region.pdf [accessed 20 April 2017]
18 The political and economic alliance of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates established in 1981.
19 Institute of International Finance, ‘MENA Region: Recovery Buffeted by Geopolitical Risks’, 8 October 2014: https://www.iif.com/publication/mena-region-recovery-buffeted-geopolitical-risks [accessed 24 April 2017]. The Gulf Cooperation Council refers to the regional organisation of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The constituent emirates of the UAE are Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm al-Quwain.
20 Daniel Diemers and Jihad L Khalil, GCC Private Banking Study 2015: Seizing the opportunities, Strategy&, 2015: https://www.strategyand.pwc.com/media/file/GCC-private-banking-study-2015.pdf [accessed 24 April 2017]
21 ‘Refugees and internally-displaced people in the Arab World’, The Arab Digest, 5 April 2017