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Cracks in the Middle East’s stability grow wider as US influence wanes
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Date: None

The reopening of the US Consulate in East Jerusalem, which reverses one of Trump’s key moves against the Palestinian Authority, was the most significant outcome of the US secretary of state Antony Blinken’s four-state visit to the Middle East this week.

President Joe Biden’s top diplomat also announced immediate support for reconstruction in Gaza, while maintaining strong support for Israel. Yet Blinken has not proposed new peace talks, nor has he engaged with Hamas, which the US and Israel still deem to be a terrorist organisation. Instead, his quick tour through Jerusalem, Ramallah, Cairo and Amman was mainly focused on consolidating the ceasefire. If it helps, good, but it still does nothing to address the underlying issues.

This is part of a wider US reorientation from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific, which may prove to be a long-term shift. It is one of five significant political processes underway, all of them interconnected. The other four involve: Russia and China increasing their influence in the region; Israel becoming less reliant on the US; the success of regional autocracies; and least noticed but most significant, social stirrings across the region that may turn all the other trends on their heads.

Washington’s involvement with Israel will of course continue, more military aid will pour in, US troops will maintain their now-permanent presence in the Negev desert, and arms corporations will continue to reap the rewards. More widely, US military bases will be maintained in Bahrain and Qatar, and there will be forces present in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Oman. Even in Iraq and Syria, minimal forces will be kept on, yet the overall significance of the region, including West Asia, will decrease as the withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan continue.

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End of the oil rush

There is a clear sense that the American public is over the decades-long wars in the region, while veterans have said publicly that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting, and Biden gets that.

It’s also worth noting that when Jimmy Carter focused US policy on the Middle East in the late 1970s, the region’s oil and gas supplies were far more significant for the United States than now. The region simply isn’t as important any more to Washington.

And this diminishment of US dominance is allowing other states in. Russia is already the main winner, with its naval base in the Syrian port city of Tartus and the nearby Khmeimim airbase. Its ubiquitous ‘private’ security outfit, the Wagner Group, has been operating in Libya, while a naval logistics base is being set up at Port Sudan that will provide invaluable support for Russian naval vessels operating east of Suez. It continues to export arms to Iran and Syria, as well as US allies, Egypt and Turkey. Even Saudi Arabia is interested in Russia’s S-400 anti-aircraft/anti-missile system and Su-35 fighter aircrafts.

Although Russia lacks economic prowess, China doesn’t and imports nearly 50% of its oil from the region. In the past decade, it has expanded its naval reach, with frequent deployments to the Gulf and the Red Sea, and in 2017 it opened a naval base in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa.

China has become a major presence at regional arms fairs, of which there are plenty, and while one of its major successes has been the sale of drones in the region, its state-owned shipbuilding group, CSCI, also opened an office in Dubai in 2016, according to the 26 May print edition of Jane’s Defence Weekly.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/cracks-in-the-middle-easts-stability-grow-wider-as-us-influence-wanes/