Spotlight: The New Middle East

▪ 1995

      Does the normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbours constitute the great change that will allow the Middle East—as the storybooks say—to "live happily ever after"? Probably not. A wider Arab-Israeli peace could be just one of several epochal shifts about to transform the region in years and decades to come. Nor is it clear that the future Middle East will be any more stable than the Middle East to which the world has been accustomed since the end of World War II.

      Important shifts could likely emanate from Iran and Turkey. In late 1994 Iran was being blamed for terrorist attacks on Israeli and Jewish installations in Latin America and Europe. There were also fears that it was trying to acquire a nuclear weapon. Iran thus appeared as a strategic threat to Israel, to its new friends in the Arab world, and to the West. However, that threat could evaporate upon political changes inside Iran itself, where the regime is increasingly weak and unpopular as it tries to satisfy a population that has grown from 35 million during the 1978-79 Iranian revolution to 65 million in 1994.

      Whether it is the availability of hospital beds, the incidence of disease, or the memory of sons killed in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, the revolution has brought hardship to the working poor it promised to uplift. Mosque attendance has dwindled. Tehranis have set up satellite dishes to watch American television shows such as "Baywatch" and the MTV network. Persian Americans have been returning to Iran in increasing numbers. In 1994 Iranian officials admitted that the United States was Iran's fourth biggest trading partner. Unofficially it may be the biggest, since U.S. goods often arrive in Iran by way of third countries. The so-called battle between East and West is being fought inside Iran itself.

      The historical parentheses opened by the Iranian revolution in 1978 may be starting to close. Whatever the specific destiny of Iran's present clerical regime, to think that Iran's diplomatic estrangement from the U.S. (which has adversely affected Iran's ties to other Western countries) will continue indefinitely is to have no regard for history. In 1829 a crowd led by radical clerics stormed and destroyed the Russian embassy in Tehran, killing the ambassador. Russian-Iranian relations were later restored; the incident was forgotten. In the fullness of time, the 1979 siege of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, in which no American diplomats were killed or seriously wounded, will likely be similarly obscured.

      Meanwhile, 1994 saw Turkey engaged in its ultimate crisis of identity as the nation grappled with the ethnic duality of its Anatolian land mass, which is both Turkish and Kurdish. The on-again, off-again war between the Turkish army and Kurdish guerrillas in southeastern Turkey stems ultimately from the inflexible border arrangements of the post-World War I Middle East peace treaties that denied the Kurds a state of their own and split them up among Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Roughly half of the world's 20 million Kurds live in Turkey. Its ability, or inability, to solve the Kurdish problem will determine whether Turkey will be able to release its considerable dynamism—born of industrialization, a large middle class, an 81% literacy rate, and four decades of experience with democracy—upon the adjacent Arab world and Turkic Central Asia.

      Turks led the House of Islam for nearly 850 years, from the Seljuq conquest of Anatolia in 1071 to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. In a world of eroding borders, it goes against both history and geography not to expect Turkey to exert increasing influence upon the Middle East's Arab heartland especially as the one-man dictatorships governing Turkey's Arab neighbours, Iraq and Syria, must ultimately give way to more flexible, even chaotic regimes, whose ability to control the movement of people and ideas will be less.

      Turkey and Iran are in the midst of crises that significant parts of the Arab world have yet to face. Syria, Iraq, and Jordan had their borders drawn by European colonialists. None of these states has ethnic boundaries that configure with official ones. Unlike Turkey or Israel, they have had little or no legitimizing, democratic tradition behind them. Their identity has been largely dependent upon two factors that are disappearing: the struggle with Israel, which created a siege mentality that fortified repressive regimes in Iraq and Syria, and a world of hard state borders controlled by military and economic elites.

      These borders and elites are under slow siege. The Arab population is doubling about once every 22 years. In 1994 more than two-thirds of all Arabs were under the age of 25. Many Arab states have gross national products that are declining relative to population growth. Politicized Islam, which respects no state borders, is, on one very important level, a symptom of the demographic and economic stress that is experienced as it becomes harder for creaky, overly bureaucratized governments in places such as Cairo and Algiers to deliver such basic services as sanitation, electricity, and clean water to their populations. As populations increase yearly, the ability to control them centrally decreases. This is especially true in places where the regime is afforded little respect, whether because it is undemocratic or because it represents a hostile tribe or ethnic group.

      Meanwhile, property prices have soared in Tel Aviv as greater Israel—in the sense of a regional economic magnet—comes into being. Israel, which has experienced just over a dozen democratic elections since its creation in 1948, without any riots or coup attempts, is a credible entity. But what of Jordan after King Hussein? What of Syria after Pres. Hafez al-Assad or Iraq after Pres. Saddam Hussein? What of Algeria and Egypt, whose populations continue to climb and whose secular governments become more repressive in the face of an Islamic resurgence?

      From the standpoint of the period from 1945 to 1994, progress toward Arab-Israeli peace has been dramatic. But from the standpoint of future decades, the meeting in July in Washington, D.C., between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan's King Hussein may symbolize no more than a tidying-up exercise left over from the Cold War—that idyllic time frame when policy-making elites in Washington, Europe, and elsewhere enjoyed more power to influence events than they ever would again.

      Surprises beckon. Just consider: from antiquity through 1978 Iran maintained good ties with Jews in Palestine, using them as a lever against Arabs and others whom Iran always feared. The chances of a tectonic shift in Iran's political orientation appear more logical now than in the mid-1970s, prior to the Iranian revolution. A new Middle East, in which relatively coherent states such as Israel, Iran, and Turkey maintain close ties as a defense against an Arab world threatened by chaos, is easily imagined. So is the dissolution of Iran itself, if its regime collapses without a stable replacement and advantage is taken by Kurds and Turkic ethnics in Iran's border areas. So are other scenarios. The big, unimaginable surprise will be if things stay as they are, and the region lives "happily ever after." That would confound all the rules of history.

      Robert D. Kaplan is a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly and author of The Arabists and Balkan Ghosts.

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