Irrespective of whether Russia or China immediately overtake and replace the US as the dominant Middle Eastern power in the area known as the “Middle East” (i.e. the Arab/Persian/Turkish world), it is clear that the trend of diminishing US influence in the Middle East is only going to hasten in the coming years.
Does this mean that Israel ends up fighting Iran and Syria? Do Saudi Arabia and Gulf States join the fracas as a partner, if not an ally, with Israel? What does this mean for the American and Western economies?
I think of it like dominoes falling - but dominoes that are arranged in extremely tricky ways, so that depending how hard they’re pushed and where the push comes from, the results will change drastically, and may appear to make no sense.
Yeah, color me skeptical that you (or anyone) has a crystal ball to accurately predict what will happen in the Middle East in the coming years. It’s fair to guess that “the trend of diminishing US influence … is only going to hasten”, but it’s just a guess.
I don’t see how we can permanently lose influence in the Middle East unless we choose to withdraw. The ongoing reality of the Middle East is it’s full of rivalries and conflict. So it doesn’t matter if the Russians and the Chinese form alliances with some of the powers in the region. There will always be rivals to those powers who will seek an alliance with America to support its own ambitions.
I don’t see that the US is losing influence. It’s just one data point, but consider the recent Gaza conference. 20 countries convened for a meeting last month at the White House that included (what I think is) the first direct official discussions with Israel by nations such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman. Granted, the Palestinians were not there, but the meeting went forward with everyone else, and it wasn’t convened in Moscow or Beijing.
The level of Saudi-Israel cooperation against Iran is kind of an open secret at this point. Far from seeing it as a rejection of its own influence, I think the US deems it encouraging.
How can you say the US is losing influence??
With the destruction of Iraq, Lybia and Syria, the US has clearly actually gained influence.
There are US military bases in Syria for Pete’s sake.
Russia. Russia is how one can say that the US is losing influence.
If you view influence in the Middle East as a zero sum game, that fact that Putin is in Syria to stay, and the US has been less hands on in the Middle East over the last decade means that the US is losing some of the influence it once had in the region.
Russia had a navy facility in Tarsus since 1971. So they aren’t exactly new on the scene.
As to the greater point of the US losing influence in the ME, it seems to me that if that turns out to be true with respect to Turkey, it can only be good news for Israel because it’s America’s closest and most reliable ally in the region. So I find it hard to believe that Israel will be left to its own devices to fight Syria/Iran/etc.
You will get a continuation of the three way proxy war between Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel. Turkey will continue to be destabilized and radical terrorism will continue to pop up and destabilize nations. This is why invading Iraq was such a catastrophically bad idea.
Russia had a port / base there since the 1970’s, but with the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s though 2008 or 2009 the base was in disrepair and was frequently not used. It was only in 2008-2009 that the Russians came back, largely due to a power vacuum caused by the United States lack of interest I’d argue. Others would disagree on that last point.
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Not part of this discussion, but when I first joined the military in the last 1980’s a accompanied a fairly senior military group on a 2-3 week tour of Africa, where there was largely only a British influence that I could detect. I was there on a similar tour a few months ago, and China is absolutely everywhere. If people don’t think that American influence is on the wane (rightly or wrongly) throughout the world, they aren’t paying attention. China and Russia are on the move.
Yes, Russia is viewed as an increasingly credible player in the Middle East, while the US is simultaneously being viewed as a bumbling, destablizing, disastrous influence on the region. So now Russia may be filling a vacuum, as they are in Syria for example. But in the longer term, the safer bet is that if any outside global player rises to challenge our role in Middle Eastern affairs, that player would be China. Take a look at how they’re quietly establishing a stronghold in neighboring Africa and you get the sense that China’s ambitions go well beyond just normalizing trade.
Even if our disastrous foreign policy doesn’t push us out of the Middle East, I don’t see how our now monumentally irresponsible budget policy, racking up trillion dollar deficits, with no foreseeable end in sight allows us to play global cop much longer.
We’ve viewed the world differently in the past asahi, but I can’t take issue with a thing you’ve written here.
The West, at some point in the near future, will have to come to grips that there is a time soon where they no longer dictate to the world. It may be for the better or the worse, but that day in coming and as is frequently the case, sooner than one might think.
I have considerable doubts about Russias staying power. They have neither the political stability nor the economic power to last long-term.
China is a totally different issue. The only question is how much they want to commit to the middle east where investments in influence can turn out to have been built on sand.
But how long is middle eastern oil going to be a hot commodity?
But how long is middle eastern oil going to be a hot commodity?[/QUOTE]
Irrelevant. The ME is the geographical tieup which links the three major old war regions, Africa, Europe and Asia together. As Russia and China grow in influece thats going to become even more important.
If we would just concentrate on renewable energy sources like the sun and wind, for example, the Middle East would lose a lot of its economic importance. Unfortunately, however, the rich, corporate fueled Plutocracy that actually runs this country can’t put a meter on the sun and charge for it, so making that happen is going to be a very difficult proposition.
I read an interesting article a couple of years ago that illustrated how fighting wars for the control of natural resources has become counterproductive in terms of cost versus gain and in terms of lost and damaged resources due to the wars themselves. We’ve spent TRILLIONS in the Middle East on warfare. What we’ve gained in return in natural resources (oil/gas) simply doesn’t justify that enormous cost. Add to that the fact that terrorism has weaned itself on the hatred created because of our involvement there. How do you measure that?
The Kamtchatka is the intersection between Asia and North America. I don’t see any rush towards it. Being the geographical intersection between Africa, Asia and Europe is neat, but it does not justify infinite costs. The Middle East has been very important geostrategically due to the oil reserves. When that changes, I wonder how much its worth in resources for just the location.
Russian influence is a short-term problem, until they crump again, in my inexpert opinion.
Putin’s also playing a potentially lethal game by involving himself in what could be (and I think ultimately will be) viewed as a larger conflict between Sunni and Shia Islam. Putin can call it protecting a head of state against American aggression if he wants, but that’s not necessarily how everyone in the Muslim world, including the many Muslims who live throughout the Russian Federation, may come to view it. The danger isn’t necessarily obvious at the moment, but once Saudi Arabia and the King’s allies finally throw down with Iran and Syria…all bets are off. The situation could explode like a dormant volcano, and I suspect that’s also partly why China isn’t necessarily asserting itself in the region at the moment, which is the smart move. Much safer to just sit back with a glass of Tsingdao and watch the US and Russia fuck up one right after the other.
It’s not just an issue of the US losing influence in the Middle East, the US is losing influence globally. It’s akin to the end of Pax Britannia which ushered in an era of increased regional conflicts as global order reset.
It’s not really clear to me that this is a fact. At least not as a long range trend. I don’t see either the premise that the US is losing influence in the region or that this trend is hastening or accelerating. I also don’t see Russia as a viable replacement in the region…quite the opposite in fact. The only place I see Russia gaining a lot of influence is in Syria, and only with Assad and his teetering government.
As for China, I could see them gaining some influence in the region as part of their one belt one road initiative and the fact that they are very neutral wrt loaning money to countries regardless of said countries human rights record. The Chinese don’t care, basically, what a given countries human rights record is. However, there are several hooks in the bait wrt taking money from the Chinese. First off, know that if the Chinese invest heavily in some mega-infrastructure project in your country, it will be Chinese companies and, more importantly Chinese labor that will build it. Also, while they might not care about your human rights record, they are going to want something from you, probably some sort of tacit political support for China. Lastly, if you can’t pay them back, well, that’s ok…they will get something else out of you, be it control of whatever it is they built or, maybe, that nice port they helped you build up. In the long term, I’m unsure whether this model will shift influence towards China in any meaningful way (there is also the issue of how China treats it’s own Muslim population that might not make them so popular in the region…this, of course, goes for Russia as well).
I don’t see any great shifts as you mention in the second paragraph. Saudi is pretty well tied to the US, so I don’t see them dropping that for some alliance with Israel or even closer ties to China or Russia (China is securing it’s own access to oil by investing heavily in Venezuela, though it isn’t clear this is a good move on their part). As to a possible fight between Saudi and Iran, there isn’t a really clear way for them to fight directly, so it would almost certainly be the same sorts of proxy wars we’ve already seen. I also don’t see the US losing so much influence that Saudi basically feels they are cut off and all alone, or that the US would ever back so far out of the region that we basically just say ‘you guys are on your own’. If we did, I’d guess it would be the EU that would have to step in, since they are the ones most reliant on ME oil.