September 25, 2013

The Middle East Power Vacuum

Featuring Marc Lynch

Source: Foreign Policy

Despite the surface froth, the Middle East has been frozen in place for the last few months. Nothing of consequence has happened in Egypt since General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's military coup and the blood clearing of the Rabaa sit-in.  Syria's civil war remains the grinding, destructive stalemate which was inevitable the moment the revolution morphed into an insurgency. Iran and the United States have made some tantalizing diplomatic moves, but nothing tangible has changed. When Foreign Policy is dominated by gawking at a Twitter troll's downfall and parsing an impotent tantrum by Saudi Arabia's Bandar bin Cheney, it's probably a good time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

The key structural feature shaping today's Middle East, it seems to me, is the dissolution of power.  During the early days of the Arab uprising, this could be seen in the fall of long-ruling leaders and the surge of popular protests against the old order. But those uprisings have failed to create any enduring new regimes, and the power of popular movements has dissipated into sectarianism, political polarization, and -- in the worst cases, such as Egypt -- capture by the state.

This power fade can be seen at every level, though: the international system, where American struggles have not been matched by the rise of any competing power; the regional system, which lacks even a single serious great power; domestic politics, where almost all states suffer from institutional incompetence;  political movements, where old organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood are on their heels but no new alternatives have emerge. The diffusion of power to do anything constructive lies behind the political paralysis which seems to beset every Arab country today and the strategic floundering of almost every regional player.   

The diffusion of power isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course. Arab states for decades had far too much power, which they used to ruthlessly repress and control their citizens and to maintain a highly unpopular regional order. Nobody should seriously mourn the problems these states now face in controlling the flow of information or ideas. More people in the region will celebrate declining American power than will mourn it. But, as Libya and Yemen so painfully demonstrate today, a basic functional state which provides security, predictability, and legitimate governance is a necessary condition for politics. The absence of power also means that endemic problems will not be solved -- from unemployment to sectarian violence to the Syrian civil war.

Start at the global level. For all the brave talk about continuing American potential, it's pretty obvious that Washington has vastly reduced capability -- and not only willingness -- to engage deeply in the problems of the Middle East.  The refusal to intervene in Syria is not simply a matter of President Obama's gum-chewing indifference.  It is rooted in a deeply and widely held, bipartisan public opposition to any new military adventures in the region, grim opposition from an exhausted and wary Pentagon, the growing internalization of Iraq's painful lessons, and disillusionment with the failures of the Arab uprisings and the Libya intervention. Invocations of the need for bolder leadership by the administration's critics ring hollow in the absence of any serious alternative policies to back up the louder words. A United States that can't even keep its own government open is going to retrench in the Middle East because it has little choice to do otherwise.

This does not mean, however, that American unipolarity has given way to some other familiar balance of power.  There is no rising power poised to grab the throne. Russia's more active diplomacy in the region is a mirage, backed by no economic, military, political, or cultural appeal. China has shown no interest or ability in playing a more active role beyond securing energy supplies from anyone and everyone.. Europe remains largely irrelevant, whether on its own or as its constituent countries, and is hardly rising.  America's necessary retrenchment is not matched by any real loss in relative power, then, which is why it has not been produced anything like the declinist panics which used to erupt during the Cold War.  The American-constructed and American-backed regional architecture is rusty and creaking, but nobody is stepping up to try to build a new one.

Moving to the regional level, the power vacuum is even more obvious.  There is arguably not a single great power remaining in the region.  The states traditionally at the core of Arab power politics -- Egypt, Syria, and Iraq -- are all flat on their backs, torn by political failure and societal division and unable to play any kind of meaningful role. Qatar learned the limits of buying loyalty through unlimited cash, influencing mass publics through al-Jazeera and working with Islamist networks. It  suffered a fierce regional backlash from competitors in the Gulf and resentful forces in the targeted countries which probably contributed to the deposing of the emir and his foreign policy mastermind. Saudi Arabia wants to lead a reinvigorated alliance of Gulf Cooperation Council states and weak, dependent allies such as Jordan and Egypt. But its failures in Syria have already shown the limits of its money and sectarian incitement, and its bid for regional leadership is likely to follow the same trajectory as Qatar's.

Nor are the non-Arab states in the region looking much more like real great powers. Turkey's bid for regional leadership, which seemed so promising (at least in Ankara) a few years ago, crashed and burned over Syria and domestic discontent.  Iran's economic crisis and diplomatic isolation have taken their toll; the "resistance" identity it deployed so effectively in the mid-2000s has evaporated and few Arabs today look to Tehran for leadership. Israel exercises little influence or appeal, huddled behind its real and virtual security walls as it eyes Iran and the United States suspiciously and passively watches the prospect of a two-state solution with the Palestinians fade away.  

The power failure is even more graphically clear at the level of domestic politics.  Almost every state in the region is suffering from some degree of debilitating state incapacity, political gridlock, and governance failure.  The most obvious examples are the countries which struggle to stand up any state at all.  In Libya, militias gleefully kidnap the prime minister to prove the state has no monopoly on the legitimate means of violence. Yemen's state, always weak, has largely ceased functioning for much of the country, and rising southern separatism puts its territorial integrity at risk.   No Syrian government, whether Assad or a post-Assad transitional government, is likely to be able to reassert any serious state control over a shattered country dominated by increasingly entrenched local armed groups.

These pathologies impose real limits the ability of leaders who want to reinstate semi-authoritarian regimes.  Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has demonstrated profoundly autocratic instincts and a desire to centralize control during his seven years in power.  But the Iraqi state has never recovered from Saddam's predation or the destructive shock of American occupation and civil war. Maliki now confronts not only the de facto separation of the Kurdish areas, but the rapid deterioration of state control -- or even presence -- in large parts of the Sunni-dominated western provinces and the steady efforts of the al-Qaeda linked Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) to erase its border with Syria.

In Egypt, Gen. el-Sisi sought to re-impose state control through a military coup, which he now hopes to legitimate abroad with a carefully stage-managed show of democratic transition.  But nobody should be fooled. Sisi's genius was to turn the restless rage of the frustrated Egyptian public against an internal enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood, instead of against the state (any scapegoat -- Communists, Shiites, Jews -- would have done for such a role had the Brothers not made themselves such a tempting target).  But this isn't likely to work over the longer term, not for a state utterly incapable of providing for economic growth, political consensus, or personal security.  Sisi's Egypt will suffer from the same grinding economic, governance and institutional failings which undid Hosni Mubarak and Mohamed Morsy.

The region's non-transitional states may look better off, but this is only a matter of degree.  Jordan's and Morocco's monarchs are just hanging on.  Even the most secure Gulf leaders are so shaken that they have to jail poets and Twitter jokers. The most insecure, such as Bahrain's, are orderingmore canisters of tear gas than they have citizens. And Saudi Arabia is projecting regional power from an increasingly shaky internal position and an impending leadership transition.  Even the most robust of the remaining Arab states are unable to stop their citizens from protesting.  The return to repression is a sign of their deep weakness and lack of legitimacy, not a sign of new power.

But once again, the power lost by states has not flowed in any meaningful way towards societal or alternative political forces.  The Muslim Brotherhood, traditionally the strongest and best organized opposition force in most Arab countries, has been battered by the Egyptian disaster and faces its most serious existential crisis in half a century.  There is no obvious single alternative force to capture Islamist-leaning citizens.  Salafi movements seem to be growing in vigor and public presence, but tend to be disorganized and internally divided, and to struggle to expand beyond their base or to reassure non-Islamists.  Meanwhile, the variety of al Qaeda-inspired movements have staged something of a comeback thanks to the Syrian jihad, state weakness, and struggling Islamist competitors.  But this, too, should not be exaggerated: such movements remain marginal and only loosely connected.  

Meanwhile, new popular movements have proven themselves far better at protest than at politics.  There are vanishingly few examples of these protest movements making an effective transition to political parties, robust civil society or sustainable models of positive political engagement. Egypt's Tamarod represents the worst possible trajectory, depoliticizing and neutering popular movements by harnessing them to the interests of the state. 

This power diffusion permeates almost every available diplomatic initiative.  The Geneva 2 conference for Syria, if it even happens, is handicapped by the long-standing difficulty of pulling together any representation for the Syrian opposition which could actually negotiate in their name and enforce any subsequent deal.  The struggling, weak Palestinian Authority would be hard-pressed to deliver on its end even if a deal could against the odds be reached in the current talks with Israel.  Yemen's National Dialogue seems disconnected from developments across the country.  This may explain the relative enthusiasm for the diplomacy with Iran, where there is at least the possibility of a competent government which might be able to make and deliver a deal.

What, if anything, can be done about the pathologies associated with this diffusion of power at all levels? For one, the response should most assuredly not be the passive acceptance of renewed authoritarianism in the name of stability.  Whatever the conditions which might have in the past made dictators stable, they no longer exist -- and Washington backing them will be a losing bet, whether in Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, or Riyadh. At the same time, the United States is going to have to work with local partners to pool scarce resources if it hopes to get anything done on security, diplomacy, or political reforms.  The problem of alliance management which this tension creates is likely to only get worse as we move towards difficult periods in almost every key regional crisis zone.  


  • Marc Lynch