As part of the US-led rules-based order that has been in place since the end of the Second World War, many countries – including several in the Middle East – have accepted the inevitability of America and its western allies assisting in resolving regional conflicts. The most recent example is Israel's war on Gaza.
However, a series of elections in the West suggest that such expectations from the East and Global South may no longer be realistic for some western countries, particularly those looking inward. It seems western apathy towards the Middle East, and the world in general, is growing by the day.
This is not to say that the US, UK and other powers don't have the capacity to play a constructive role to play in the Middle East. However, the time is right for the region to fine-tune its own processes of internal dialogue to resolve internal problems.
The West has a long history of intervening in the Middle East. In the past, it was in the form of explicit colonialism, whereby certain key powers perceived the Middle East as, for the most part, a resource-rich region with strategically valuable locations.
After the end of the Second World War and the emergence of independent nation states, some western countries frequently intervened in the region to further their foreign policy interests within the post-colonial setup.
Key goals have included maintaining access to fossil fuels, ensuring the safe flow of goods through critical maritime chokepoints, and checking the westward spread of communism. In some cases, most notably those of key Arab powers and Israel, key western countries have been able to pursue their interests in exchange for security guarantees. As a result, many western military personnel have been stationed in the region for decades. This has enabled the US and some of its allies to wield great influence in regional conflicts.
While not every country in the Middle East is pleased with this arrangement, few have been able to ignore it. Accordingly, whenever a conflict erupts or evolves, the region has, by and large, had to accept the large role of western powers in managing it.
One of the more salient illustrations is the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which involved the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, three of which are western nations, plus Germany. The US mediation in the Gaza war is another such example.
An unfortunate corollary of this long-standing arrangement is that it has often tended to undermine internal dialogue in the Middle East.
Usually, no matter how much you disagree with your neighbour, you can’t ignore them, and you must talk to them to resolve conflicts. But when major powers such as the US impose resolutions in a nearly unilateral fashion, it breeds disenchantment and reduces the incentive for neighbours to engage directly with one another.
In the tumultuous world of international relations, however, few arrangements last forever. I have attended a number of regional think-tank events of late, with participants from around the world. The policymakers and experts contributing have delivered two messages that the region’s citizens should take note of as we enter a challenging period.
First, the elections in the EU, France, the UK, and later this year, the US, have important implications for the foreign policy of these governments, especially in terms of their positions towards the rest of the world, most notably the Middle East. Whereas these governments have traditionally been de facto powerbrokers that cannot be ignored, they are embracing a new role that involves apathy and a tacit plea for the region’s powers to resolve their conflicts internally.
This can be seen clearly in the election manifestos of the politicians assuming power via the ballot box that appear to say: we have bigger fish to fry than the Middle East, including a litany of domestic economic and social problems, so our policy bandwidth needs to be redirected away from a region that may seem to the West to be destined for everlasting conflict.
Admittedly, in some cases, this policy stance bears a tinge of xenophobia. Deep divisions within countries such as France and the UK, regarding immigration, have spawned nationalistic sentiment. The result is a desire to distance themselves from a region whose people that don’t look like them, speak their language or share their values. This notion has been reinforced by the difficulties that many Middle Eastern migrants have faced in integrating into most western societies, including an explicit reluctance to embrace certain core principles such as secularism.
With the US's role diminishing in the region, particularly after its invasion of Iraq and its handling of the Gaza war, fewer people in the Middle East are expecting Washington or its European counterparts to help resolve the conflicts in Gaza, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. Indeed, this default assumption of "western intervention" is becoming more tenuous by the day.
The second message emerging from the think-tank circuit is that it is now incumbent upon the Middle Eastern countries to show more initiative in resolving their internal conflicts.
It is the sort of attitude that would raise many an eyebrow in the region, given the history of colonisation and western interference at various points. Nevertheless, the message is loud and clear. Many of the region’s policymakers have already absorbed these lessons.
Relations within the Gulf Co-operation Council have continued to blossom despite understandable differences, as have relations between the GCC countries and other states, such as Iran and Iraq. A number of small groupings with specific objectives have emerged in recent years. The Abraham Accords could be interpreted as a manifestation of this trend, too, though they are yet to include the countries that have the most acute differences with Israel.
However, the sustainability of these initiatives depends critically on them receiving buy-in from the public, too. As the peace treaties between Israel and each of Egypt and Jordan have shown, high-level agreement need not automatically spawn cordial relations between peoples, and so the spectre of conflict could continue to loom large.
Accordingly, citizens of the Middle East who have been raised on a regimen of boycotts, suspended diplomatic relations, demonising geopolitical adversaries, and other maximalist tools of foreign policy, need to develop a new mindset. They need to be open to the idea of having cordial relations with people from across the region, no matter how painful the transgressions that may have been committed in the past.
It took centuries of conflict that culminated in two world wars for the European people to learn this painful lesson. Let us hope the Middle East learns it more peacefully.
