During the holidays, the editorial team continues its reflection on the individual and collective challenges that will shape our world in the coming years from the perspective of solutions, wherever possible. Today: the Middle East and geopolitical changes.
Two American wars darkly inaugurated the 21ste century and prefigured the present state of the world: that of Iraq, launched in March 2003 by George W. Bush and Tony Blair under false reasons; that of Afghanistan, engaged in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001 committed by al-Qaeda.
At the same time, a Israeli peace initiativeArab, presented by Saudi Arabia and adopted by the members of the Arab League at its March 2002 summit, held in Beirut, will barely have pierced the noise of bombs and manipulations. A comprehensive peace offer, however substantial, more ambitious than the Oslo agreements, by which the Arab world finally committed to normalizing its relations with Israel in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state. The government of Ariel Sharon, to whom Benjamin Netanyahu was already close, flatly rejected this political proposal.
Almost a quarter of a century later, and the lure of peace through arms remains strong. Unless they no longer sacrifice their soldiers, what did the United States really learn from Afghanistan, which it abandoned in August 2021 to Taliban obscurantism, in the disorder and the save-who-can that we can? knows? Twenty years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and at the cost of unprecedented violence, Iraq is still far from being the “stable democracy” that the neoconservatives promised to create through military interventionism. And if the Islamic State group has been almost crushed, the causes of its emergence have not been uprooted. Having been carried out in defiance of international law, the Iraq war has permanently discredited the United Nations Security Council. It has damaged the ascendancy of the United States, a nation today considered more pernicious than “indispensable” for many in the countries of the “global South”. And this is how the United States, emptying the drawers of its arms industry – without which it would not be the economic superpower that it is, gets entangled in its democratic credo by taking away from the Ukrainian army who struggles to give, unconditionally, to the Israeli far-right government.
The Middle East is currently tending to recompose itself around a “peace of dictators” promoted by the Saudi Arabia of the ambitious Mohammed ben Salman (MBS). An essentially business-oriented “peace”, with fragilely peaceful relations with Iran leaning on the Chinese model and therefore still allergic to any political liberalization. Deep down, MBS undoubtedly fears the idea of a democratic Palestinian state as much as the political Islamism of Hamas. The 2020 Abraham Accords, articulated under Trump, follow this trend: trade normalization agreements with Israel to which the United Arab Emirates initially joined and which Saudi Arabia considered joining despite the fact that, breaking with the 2002 initiative, they swept the Palestinian cause under the carpet. The October 7 massacres committed by Hamas, followed by the genocidal punishment that Israel inflicted on the Gazans, upset these calculations by reestablishing the centrality of the cause. Question: will this centrality survive the war?
The Israel-Hamas war is also, by extension, an extreme and excessively violent manifestation of the devaluation of democratic freedoms and dialogue on a global scale. Dictatorships and repressive democrats of all kinds, they are the ones who seek to establish themselves as leaders of the global South. That international relations are becoming “multipolarized” is positive, at the same time as their recomposition presents in the current order of things a harmful risk of fragmentation, according to floating alliances or imperious capitals like Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, Ankara and Riyadh, not without drawing inspiration from the historical example of Washington and more precisely that of Donald Trump, act internationally on a case-by-case basis, doing as they please out of interest and opportunism. Whereas the planet would otherwise need solidarity.
In this game, humanity will be exposed in the coming years to growing geopolitical tensions, where arsonists will try to impose themselves against which the firefighters (diplomacy, the UN, civil societies, informed public opinion, etc.) ) will feel even more helpless. This risk, of course, is not inevitable. The fundamental fact is that the world that all these arsonists want is based on a conservative regression. However, their authoritarian and neo-reactionary hibernation projects come up against popular resistance movements everywhere, in the four corners of the world, who never tire of taking to the streets to demand spring. “ There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in », sang Leonard Cohen.