A different approach to the Middle East

Recent headlines suggest that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are about to get together to fix the horrific Syrian situation, and maybe much else in the Middle East besides. The assumption seems to be that the major external powers, in this case, Russia and the USA, have the means to “solve” the regional turmoil and restore stability. Deals can be done and great power diplomacy can impose agreed settlements—just as in the past.

The recent Lords enquiry into the transformation of power in the Middle East starts from different assumptions. The picture presented to us by a long list of witnesses, old and young, and from all walks, has been that this is now a totally transformed region. It is a vast zone of shifting alliances, fragmented power centres, seething with rival militias and cells, which is simply no longer amenable to traditional diplomacy, especially western diplomacy, or to moves on the global chessboard of the conventional kind.

Instead the report identifies a mass of strong trends destabilising almost every Middle Eastern country, large or small. This is a region of youth—60 per cent are under thirty. It is a region of digital empowerment and connection with ubiquitous mobile communications energising non-state groups, challenging governments and creating organised alternative power centres on a scale never seen before. It is a region of staggering contrasts between wealth and poverty, of massive youth unemployment and protest, revolt and sectarian conflict. It is also a region whose function and importance as the world’s chief energy source may be closing down. And in contrast to past decades it is a region which looks increasingly to the east, rather than the west for both economic and political connections.

New regional powers have emerged but they face disruptive trends and existential threats. Saudi Arabia still has the oil but it also has internal tensions and social pressures which make it vulnerable. It has the constant challenge of Iranian rivalry. It also has a shattered Yemen on its doorstep.

Egypt, the biggest Arab state by far, sits under military rule but remains dogged by economic breakdown, terrorist violence and jihadist incursions. Turkey, once seemingly a western bastion, is drifting in the authoritarian direction. The Gulf Cooperation Council states have failed to bind or act together. Iran itself stays torn between brutal theocracy and modernisation but continues to export malevolence to the whole area.

Beyond these come the failed entities—Syria, an on-going bloodbath; Iraq, riddled with non-state leaders and militias, and still not rid of Daesh and Daesh sympathisers; Libya, up to now violently split; Yemen in bloody stalemate.

The list of troubles goes on: borders of the past era are becoming perforated or ignored. The poison of jihadi violence and intrusion is spreading down the Horn of Africa—west along the Mahgreb, south of the Sahara—as well as through the sprawling refugee camps of Lebanon and Jordan. The running sore of the Israeli-Palestine impasse adds just one more burden to the waste-tip of policy failures.

The questions for the UK in the face of all this are obvious. But with Trump in the White House and with the Brexit prospect looming they now demand new answers. How do we define and recalibrate our considerable interests in the region? How do we protect our own security? How do we engage with less disastrous ineffectuality and with more prescience than we showed in handling the misjudged—and misnamed—Arab Spring and its outcomes? And how do we fulfil our global responsibilities, in coalition with other powers, in containing, as far as we now can, Middle Eastern turmoil? How do we prevent it further undermining the already shaky international rules-based order on which our safe future rests, or turning to global conflagration?

The answers are neither immediate, nor collective and strategically unified, nor remotely straightforward. The Lords report simply tries to put a new frame round them. We have moved into a digitalised and network-driven age, where persuasion and influence have to be packaged and tailored in countless new forms and directed at countless new audiences. A post-western world is now taking shape, with parallel, Asia-led networks and bodies developing the institutions that have been western-led since World War Two.

The new approach has correspondingly to be global, not purely western. American dominance and leadership in the Middle East can anyway no longer be assumed. On Palestine and on the delicate balance of relations with opaque Iran the UK may well need to carve out its own path more confidently. Fresh partnerships must be forged with willing European neighbours (notably France) in addressing all MENA regional issues, especially just across the Mediterranean.

One of our witnesses, American diplomat Richard Haas, describes the Middle East as posing the greatest challenge to policy-makers of any region in the world. Perhaps the antics of Kim Jong-un present a more immediate danger, but for sheer complexity the Middle East stands out. Somewhere ahead a much more connected and open set of societies may lie, offering the very best in education and life chances in place of present violence and despair.

This may be an area, the report suggests, where in the longer term the UK, with its enormous soft power and the immense resource of its universities and training skills, can offer the region a truly better future. In the meantime, we have to face up to the limits of what we can do, accepting that in a now utterly transformed international landscape old policies, old priorities and old attitudes all need rethinking.