“War,” said the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, is the “father of all things.”
In view of the bloody — indeed barbaric — events in the Middle East (and in Iraq and Syria in particular), one may be tempted to agree, even though such ideas no longer seem to have a place in the post-modern worldview of today’s Europe.
Daesh’s (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) military triumphs in Iraq and Syria are not only fuelling a humanitarian catastrophe; they are also throwing the region’s existing alliances into disarray and even calling into question national borders.
A new Middle East is emerging, one that already differs from the old order in two significant ways: An enhanced role for the Kurds and Iran; and a diminished influence for the region’s Sunni powers.
The Middle East is not just facing the possible triumph of a force that seeks to achieve its strategic goals by mass murder and enslavement (for example, of Yazidi women and girls).
Collapse of old order
What is also becoming apparent is the collapse of the region’s old order, which had existed more or less unchanged since the end of the First World War and with it, the decline of the region’s traditional stabilising powers.
The political weakness of those powers — whether global actors like the US or regional players like Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia — has led to a remarkable role reversal in the region’s power dynamics.
Although the US and the European Union still classify the pro-independence Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as a terrorist organisation (whose founder Abdullah Ocalan has been in prison in Turkey since 1999), only the PKK’s fighters, it seems, are willing and able to stop Daesh’s further advance. As a result, the Kurds’ fate has become a burning question in Turkey.
Turkey is a Nato member and any violation of its territorial integrity can easily trigger the North Atlantic Treaty’s mutual-defence clause. And the Kurdish question entails a potential for a much wider conflict, because statehood would also threaten the territorial integrity of Syria, Iraq and probably Iran.
And yet, in fighting for their lives against Daesh, the Kurds have won new legitimacy. Once the fighting has ended, they will not simply forget their national ambitions — or the mortal threat they faced.
And it is not just the Kurds’ unity and bravery that have raised their prestige; they have increasingly become an anchor of stability and a reliable pro-western partner in a region that is short on both.
Dilemma
That presents the West with a dilemma: Given its reluctance to commit its own ground forces to a war it knows it must win, it will have to arm the Kurds — not just the Kurdish Peshmerga militia of northern Iraq, but also other Kurdish groups — with more advanced weaponry.
That will not sit well with Turkey — or, most likely, with Iran — which is why resolving the Kurdish question will require a large investment of diplomatic skill and commitment by the West, the international community, and the countries in question.
However, the biggest regional winner could prove to be Iran, whose influence in Iraq and Afghanistan gained a substantial boost from US policy under former US president George W. Bush.
Iranian cooperation is essential to stable solutions in Iraq and Syria and the country plays an important role in the Israel-Palestine conflict and in Lebanon. It is impossible to bypass Iran in the search for solutions to the region’s myriad crises.
In fact, in the fight against Daesh, even limited military cooperation between the US and Iran no longer seems to be off the table.
Key question
The key strategic question, however, will not be resolved on the region’s battlefields, but in the various negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme. If compromise (or even a short-term extension of the current interim agreement, with a realistic prospect for a final accord) is achieved, Iran’s broader regional role will become both stronger and more constructive, but that outcome remains highly uncertain.
The nuclear issue implicates another important hidden question, namely Iran’s relationship with Israel, at whose northern border in Lebanon stands Hezbollah, Iran’s closest partner in the region.
Hezbollah remains committed to Israel’s destruction and Iran supplies it with powerful weapons. And here, unfortunately, no major change should be expected.
This much is clear about the new Middle East: It will be both more Shiite and Iranian and more Kurdish, which will also make it a good deal more complicated.
Old alliances (and conflicts) will no longer be as self-evident as in the past — even if they continue.
Beyond that, one can only say that the Middle East will remain the powder keg of world politics in the 21st century. Its stabilisation, while of global interest, will be difficult to achieve — and only by a complicated mixture of military and diplomatic means. No single global power is likely to manage that alone.
— Project Syndicate/Institute for Human Sciences, 2014
Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005, was a leader of the German Green Party for almost 20 years.
