The Western establishment continues to slowly and torturously come to grips with the hegemonic collapse of America in the Middle East.
The Council on Foreign Relations think tank’s journal has released their latest, penned by Marc Lynch, the man who coined the term Arab Spring:
Its opening sentence tells the whole story:
The American Middle East is finished.
The regional order that has prevailed since 1991 has been one of the many casualties of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. The American and Israeli failure to dislodge the regime in Tehran has proved the bankruptcy of decades of sanctions and violence. The inability of the United States to protect its Gulf allies from Iranian attacks or to keep the Strait of Hormuz open has fatally undermined the core security bargain that justified its network of military bases in the region. And Israel’s increasingly threatening posture and abandonment of any pretense of interest in reaching an accommodation with the Palestinians have ended Washington’s decades-long mission of bringing its Arab allies and Israel together into an enduring security partnership.
In short: Israel’s unalloyed pursuit of accelerationism in regard to its geopolitical plans has destroyed the very fabric that ensured Israeli-American regional dominance.
The piece argues that just like the Suez Crisis of 1956 was the “last gasp” of French and British colonial power in the Mideast, so too will the Iran war be for American hegemony. New alliances are being forged daily, as Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia signed a new defense pact earlier this month, while Turkey began quietly shipping more military arms to Jolani’s New Syria in preparation for a future stage of conflict against Israel; Israel itself has been ‘studying’ whether NATO’s Article Five would be activated by strikes on Turkey.
The article goes on to detail at length the careful balancing act the United States has been attempting to carry out in the Middle East for decades, typically leveraging its own presumed-to-be unrivaled might whilst usually sidelining genuine Arab interests in the region.
…the architects of this war vastly exaggerated what military power could achieve, underestimated the capacity of adversaries to adapt, took for granted that allies would fall in line, and callously disregarded the lives of ordinary people. Washington’s misadventure was not an aberration so much as the ultimate expression of the inherent vice of its Middle East strategy.
But the problem is, the entire system was built on a series of fragile contradictions from the very start, not least of which being Israel’s taboo possession of nuclear weapons, a greatly destabilizing circumstance which virtually ensures Iran’s existential-level pursuit of asymmetrical deterrence in the region.
