Emerging Middle East: A new regional definition?

The region known as the Middle East has experienced seismic shifts since 2003. The tremors continue to reverberate today. Nowhere are these trends clearer than from the vantage-point of the UAE, the calm, steady and unblinking eye of the regional storm.

Over the next decade, the baseline expectation is for further upheavals to convulse and further reshape the region. Contributing to the regional reshaping is an uncertain re-pricing phase for the region’s most vital commodity — oil. Amid internal and external power shifts, the region’s nations have to negotiate a precarious double rebalancing: Of internal state-society relations and external relations.

The UAE has led the way in building a strong foundation of stability and offering a safe haven amid regional storms. Beyond this regional success story, as major global and regional powers struggle to master the region’s complex and chaotic strategic environment, do grounds for optimism exist? Is it possible to rewrite the dominant narrative of chronic despair and pessimism about the region’s future?

A key obstacle is the fixed perceptions about the region. Therefore, a useful first step is to reframe our perspective of the region. Our mental maps may require re-setting. A new lens may help us find overlooked details and tease out fresh possibilities.

First, the definition and naming of the region is constraining and most certainly outdated. As the Lebanese scholar Waleed Hazbun observes, unlike the relatively clear geographic terms such as America, Asia, Europe or Africa, the “Middle East” has been defined by the West as a region in opposition to its own outlook and identity. Hazbun contends that in defining the Middle East without a precise location or clear boundaries, the West has attached clear labels to the region. These portray a region of chronic conflict and upheaval. And one is only precariously connected to the other.

Second, the term “Middle East” itself was popularised by an American naval officer, Alfred Mahan. An expert on strategic affairs and sea power, he developed the term in his 1902 article titled The Gulf and International Relations. A mash-up of the Near East and the Far East, Mahan’s Middle East spanned the area guarding parts of the crucial sea route from the Suez to Singapore. So Singapore was originally the Eastern-most end of the Middle East. The elastic term has morphed according to the strategic needs and concerns of western planners and according to shifts in global political geography.

Third, the Middle East was coined just as the centre of economic gravity of the West shifted from the Mediterranean to the mid-Atlantic. The starting-point today is a little different. Powered by China’s rise and India’s growth, the centre of world economic and strategic gravity has been steadily shifting eastwards. The economic turn is towards Asia and the Pacific and away from the Atlantic seaboard. And it is shifting as the 70-year-old US-shaped global political and economic order faces a possible transformation.

To be sure, the United States remains dominant on many indices of national power. Asia’s rise has also been on the back of a generally benign US led-order, including protection of sea lanes and supply-chain security as well as market access based on a wider alliance system. Our international environment today, however, is ambiguous and unpredictable, what the Singaporean Ambassador-at-Large Bilahari Kausikan has called “An age without definition’. Amid fluid realignments of power, our world is also one of proliferating connectivity. Of networks that can change a nation’s nature and outlook, one of new roads and railways, of pipelines and ports, of constant data and people flows. All these variables of constantly moving, connecting parts that make settled definitions of political geography elusive.

Global players in the region

China’s New Silk Road strategy is an effort to apprehend the complex new reality. Announced in late 2013 during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Indonesia and Kazakhstan, the New Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road — collectively the “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) initiative — offers a new prism for economic development and connectivity. The Silk Road Economic Belt runs from the Middle Kingdom through Central Asia and on to Europe. And the 21st Maritime Silk Road extends from the Middle Kingdom with maritime Southeast Asia as a key hinge. Together, the Belt and Road will connect Asia, Europe and Africa along at least six economic corridors.

India has long strategically viewed the Middle East as West Asia. What is clear is that a rising China and a growing India are asserting themselves as global players in the region. Both are beginning to define their own surrounding geopolitical space and doing so according to their respective, sovereign concepts of order and security. Asians of course no longer see themselves as geopolitical objects and certainly not as mere adjuncts to western strategic thinking.

The Indo-Pacific region is a key locus where contradictions between these contrasting visions and interests will have to be managed. While the future economic and geopolitical centre of gravity may be in the Indo-Pacific, the region to its West, known as the Middle East, remains home to the geopolitically consequential Abrahamic religions.

New pathways of trade and industry, fossil fuels, finance and faith have emerged, running from the East of Asia to its West and vice versa. This momentum is driving relations between Asia’s East and its West. From the prism of the new emerging centre of gravity, the region known as the Middle East may need to be reconceived in our mental and actual maps.

From the security and economic perspectives of a rising Asia, of China, India and Southeast Asia, what the West has termed the Middle East is thus truly “Middle West Asia”. A western part of Asia, it lies in the middle of global politics and security. And it is central to the global economy, a key provider of energy and of new markets, guarding crucial sea lanes and gateways.

The story of East Asia’s rise also offers a basic vision of order for restabilising its critical Middle West. East Asia in particular has succeeded economically because it prioritised the sequencing of economic development over politics. It is a region that struggled and then succeeded in achieving economic development before wealth. In comparison, politics may have been prioritised over economic development in many population-rich parts of Asia’s Middle West. Its oil-rich parts have suffered the resource curse of wealth before development.

The UAE and its Gulf neighbours form the vanguard of the economically globalised part of Middle West Asia. But the entire region is politically globalised in the sense that its instability is exported along with its key commodities. As a key energy source for a rising Asia, the Gulf’s energy routes run through vulnerable spaces and chokepoints. The rise of East and South Asia therefore require regional stability in its Middle West, and make both regions stakeholders in each others’ development.

In this context, the growing interdependence between Asia’s East and West requires thinking on how to better structure the relationship between these two new centres of gravity.

Some work has been done. The Asia-Middle East Dialogue (Amed) was mooted by Singapore Emeritus Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong. Amed was envisaged as a new partnership of Asian and Middle Eastern countries working together to overcome trans-boundary challenges like energy security, climate change, religious conflict, international terrorism, maritime security and pandemics.

The Asia Cooperation Dialogue (ACD) was founded earlier in 2002. It was first broached by former Thai foreign minister Dr Surakiart Sathirathai. Since the first ACD Ministerial hosted by Thailand in 2002, the ACD’s membership has grown from 18 to 34 countries and comprises the five different geographical areas of Asia: Central Asia, West Asia, East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia. There have been 14 annual ministerial meetings to-date, with the UAE hosting the next meeting in January 2017.

Cross-regional collaboration

Such platforms have begun the process of dialogue and cooperation and focus minds on the benefits of enhanced cross-regional collaboration and coordination.

China’s proposed economic corridors could also contribute to regional peace and security, crucial also for its more globalised part of the Gulf. Even in the de-globalised but strategically crucial parts of the Silk Road puzzle, these initiatives can play a positive role. China’s special envoy to the Middle East has stated his belief that the One Belt One Road project could be a key to the region’s problems in maintaining peace.

India for its part is developing unprecedented security relationships with defence-minded security partners in the Gulf, who are also reaching out to partners in Asia and beyond the West. All this as the US and Europe, the region’s traditional western partners, remain preoccupied by domestic politics and mired in economic crises.

A new and still plastic reality is taking shape in the strategic space of Middle West Asia. It behoves us to keep watching this space and monitor its evolving shape amid a thickening web of connections — a geopolitical space with a new starting point, one that lies east of its traditional locus of strategic shaping. This is a Middle West Asia that will determine future global stability and growth. A region whose security and economic future hang in the balance and one that awaits further definition.