The New Middle East (43 page)

Morsi’s speech in Tehran went down swimmingly with the Americans, the Israelis and the Saudis. It was not a harbinger of things to come though, and Ahmadinejad was invited and received a warm welcome, from the Egyptian government anyway, on a state visit the following February. But during his August trip to Tehran Morsi did show America that the Muslim Brotherhood, while being firmly Islamist, was not blindly Islamist.

The reality of the Muslim Brotherhood running Egypt required some adjustment in Washington. Their period in the Egyptian presidency, at the time, left US allies incredulous.

‘For the time being [Morsi] is clever enough to understand that in order to deal with the country’s economic difficulties he needs the United States,’ a senior defence official in Israel had told me.

The Muslim Brothers were established in 1928. Most people at the age of eighty-four are retiring; they are in a renaissance. This is a golden era in front of them. The Muslim Brothers will never change their ideology but they have flexibility. They are waiting for some crisis [to exert their power]. They want to grip the opportunity. Until now they have surprised everybody, including the Egyptian army and intelligences and all the states in the West. They are doing it with a speed that is unbelievable. With us they will be very cautious, because of the US, because of the West. But we are living in a strategic early warning period ahead of dramatic changes in the Middle East around Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Ask the Saudis [about the Brotherhood]. They hate their guts.

That is true, and it was a legacy of the Nasser years. He’d done his best to destabilise the kingdom during his time because it was on the other side of the Cold War divide. Nasser’s regional power play still remains the closest the House of Saud has come to losing control. When the Arab uprisings began to sweep the region in 2011 the Saudis looked back at the Nasser era and concluded that this new leaderless phenomenon was much more manageable. Because the Saudis saw Nasser as their enemy they offered comfort and shelter during that period to his enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood. ‘The Saudis rightly feel that they gave asylum to the Muslim Brotherhood from the 1950s onwards and protected the Muslim Brotherhood,’ Professor Haykel said.

Then when a moment of decision came as to the loyalty of the Muslim Brotherhood in August 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Muslim Brotherhood both internationally and very often in its different regional and domestic offices decided to choose Saddam with his Ba’athist Arab nationalistic credentials over Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis and the Kuwaitis saw this as a betrayal and have never forgiven the Muslim Brotherhood. The other thing that the Saudis feel about the Muslim Brotherhood, is that the Brotherhood came to Saudi Arabia and indoctrinated one if not two generations of Saudis in a political ideology that ultimately came to challenge the Saudi royal family and its role. So they were traitors both domestically and internationally.

‘We’ve been trying to reassure our brothers in the Gulf states that we are not after exporting the revolution,’ the Muslim Brotherhood’s Amr Darrag, who chaired the Freedom and Justice Party’s Foreign Relations Committee, told me while the Ikhwan were still in power.

We believe security in the Gulf is in our national interests. We have a lot of Egyptians working in this area, so we are keen on their wellbeing. And we’d like to attract investment from the Gulf. So there is no reason whatsoever for us to do anything to destabilise the Gulf area at all, and we are trying to convince them of that, but it seems that they are still not convinced. Hopefully with time they will change their position.

But perhaps not any time soon, because as we were speaking the United Arab Emirates were preparing to put ninety-four people on trial, who they said were linked to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and had been plotting to overthrow the UAE government.
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I asked Amr Darrag whether the new Egypt felt it had a role to be more assertive in the region. ‘We tried that before, during Nasser’s time, but it didn’t work.’

As it tries to manage the likely squabbling among its regional allies, the US will also have to deal with others competing for those countries’ attention. After the first revolution in Egypt in 1952 the US had to deal with the Soviets; after the Egyptian revolution in 2011 it will have to deal with the Chinese. Beijing was the first non-Arab capital that the newly sworn-in President Morsi visited. Beijing now sees an opportunity to exploit America’s predisposition towards Israel. ‘China has worked equally on its relations between Israel and the Arab countries. That is the difference between China and America,’ Zhu Weili, the director of Middle East Studies at Shanghai International University, told me. Mr Zhu is one of China’s leading Middle East specialists and has strong links to the ruling Communist Party. ‘Under President Obama America’s basic Middle East policy has changed very little. Many of the Middle East countries, especially the Islamic countries, have many doubts about the United States. Whether America can continue to keep its dominance and impact in the Middle East will be decided by how it changes its policies.’

It was clear to me from the period I lived in Beijing that the Chinese Communist Party officials, like the Saudis, set great store by personal relationships. At first glance it might seem like an old-fashioned way to run foreign policy, until you remember that that is exactly the way America ran its foreign policy in the Arab world. It dealt on very personal terms with the ruling family elite. Some of those key relationships have gone. As Mr Zhu points out, for the first time parts of the Arab world are a level playing field for China: ‘Now that many of the Arab countries have had a government reorganisation, there is an opportunity to reinforce mutual exchanges. There are new leaders and new officials, so personal relations need to be remade along with new mutual understandings.’

What the Chinese realised, after breaking with Gaddafi far too late, is that their diplomacy is not yet very agile. Its constant vetos in the UN over Syria aren’t endearing them to the revolutionaries there either. But what China does have is something the US does not. Like the newly energetic Qatar it has huge amounts of cash that it can spend without needing the approval of either a Congress or an electorate. China will also be able to buy its friends in the Middle East, which fits quite snugly with a foreign policy, outside the Far East, based almost entirely around shopping. China just wants to purchase what it needs to keep things working at home. No questions asked. They don’t seek to interfere. There is no tiresome small print on the bill of sale about human rights. History suggests that China isn’t likely to consider nurturing the region’s young democracies as a key plank of their policies. As America looks for a new foreign policy China is quite happy to adopt the old one, which was about stability and oil, not democracy promotion.

And China isn’t just building bridges in the Arab world. There is some mutual wooing going on with Israel, which has laid out the red carpet and the helicopter rides to induce China’s business elite to invest in its hi-tech industries. The contrast between how Israel has dealt with small spats with China and huge rows with America is striking. Israel knows China doesn’t need it at all, and so it is much more willing to bend to Beijing’s sensitivities. When a few minor members of the Knesset touched a Chinese nerve by signing a relatively unimportant petition over claims that Beijing allowed the harvesting of internal organs from death row prisoners, the government intervened to get the men to back down.
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Yet when senior Israeli politicians have run amok attacking the president of Israel’s closest ally there has been a deafening silence from the government, which rarely made an attempt to rein them in.

The next few years are going to be difficult in the Middle East, and America must keep its nerve. It must do better than it did in the aftermath of the murder of its ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, at the US consulate in Benghazi on 11 September 2012. It was a terrible blow for the nation, but it was chiefly due to badly run security in a still dangerous place. It was not the start of the collapse of the region into the arms of Islamist terrorists. That may be hard to believe after the boost that the chaotic post-Arab Spring era has given to Islamist extremists in North Africa, as events in Mali have shown. But it is completely unrealistic not to expect there to be pockets of murderous resistance to the democratic promise of the New Middle East from those who stand to lose the most from it.

‘The violent demonstrations . . . have convinced many in the United States and Europe that the Arab revolutions . . . are now over and that the democratic project has failed. Bitterness and a sense of impending catastrophe are replacing the enthusiasm that followed the toppling of dictators in Tunisia and Egypt,’ said the Tunisian president Moncef Marzouki. He was writing at the time of Muslim protests against the film
Innocence of Muslims
in a slightly irritated op-ed piece in the
New York Times
. ‘Now there is ominous talk of an “Islamist Fall” and “Salafi Winter” after a supposedly failed Arab Spring,’ he added. ‘The Arab revolutions have not turned anti-Western. Nor are they pro-Western. They are simply not about the West.’
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What he forgot to say is that they may not be over.

The Gulf states have been largely buying their way out of trouble since 2011. Where that doesn’t work the US turns a blind eye while they sort it out with brute force instead. Neither of those may be the case in the not too distant future. If hydraulic fracturing, ‘fracking’, does lead to greater or full energy independence for North America it will transform the US relationship with the Gulf in general and with Saudi Arabia in particular.

Analysts working for the financial institution Citibank were excited enough about it in 2012 to produce a study called
North America, the New Middle East?
Not far into the document the question mark at the end of its title disappeared. The economists said that the trend ‘points to North America effectively becoming the new Middle East by the next decade’. They concluded their report with the words:

It is unclear what the political consequences of this might be in terms of American attitudes to continuing to play the various roles adopted since World War II – guarantor of supply lanes globally, protector of main producer countries in the Middle East and elsewhere . . . But with such a turnaround in its energy dependence, it is questionable how arduously the US government might want to play those traditional roles.

But if it happens it won’t be President Obama who breaks the union. Even if the extraction of shale gas and tight oil reaches the heady heights of its proponents’ claims, there will have to be a radical overhaul of transport and infrastructure to exploit the new resource. Cars will have to move from normal oil to electricity generated by shale gas. Ways will have to be found to adapt the aviation industry and industry nationwide to this new energy resource. Engineers will often want to drill under people’s homes to get to the gas and oil underneath, and that will spark public opposition. But with China, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, Australia, Canada, Libya, Algeria, Brazil, Poland and France all thought to have large shale-gas resources, the impact on the Gulf is likely to be profound.

The first Gulf state this will impact on will be Qatar. It derives most of its income from gas, and that commodity’s global price will drop long before oil’s. The money Qatar gets from its gas fields has already started going down and may steeply decline within a decade. It is probably not a coincidence that there has been a rush in recent years by Qatar, as gas ‘fracking’ proved successful, to exploit the faltering European economies and snap up good investments at cheap prices. Qatar, which has a local population of only 300,000, is estimated to have invested more than $30 billion overseas in 2012 alone. Its spending spree over recent years has included everything from European football clubs to airports and the luxury jeweller Tiffany. It has also used the post-Arab Spring era to make big investments in the Middle East. The Qataris are preparing themselves for a world where they have to earn their living rather than let some foreigner pump it out of the ground for them. The number of the expats who presently make up more than 70 per cent of the population will gradually reduce as Qataris absorb the skills needed to run their portfolios. The expats who remain will just be the ones doing the jobs that still require people to get their hands dirty.

Things will not be so easy for Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have been the most important oil-producing nation because, unlike the rest, they do not need to pump at their full capacity. Because they can turn the flow up or down they can influence the price more than anyone else. Contrary to popular perception, America does not buy most of its oil directly from the Saudis, but as this is a globally valued commodity, in a global market, it has a global price that impacts directly on what Americans pay at the pump at home.

Oil had its first surge in price after the supply shock of 1973. It doubled in price, but was still below $10 a barrel in 1974. It had a huge surge after the Iranian revolution in 1979, then drifted down through the 1980s and stayed largely stable until 2001. After the 9/11 attacks and the uncertainty of the years that followed, the price went crazy, climbing in July 2008 to its record peak of over $145 a barrel. Even if the figures are adjusted for inflation, in 1998 the price was still under $20 a barrel. The Gulf states in ten years got a staggering windfall. That meant when the Arab revolts broke out King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia could dip into the state’s bulging piggy bank and drop $130 billion on the table to create jobs, cheap housing and incentives for Saudi-based companies to employ members of the woefully underskilled young people in its workforce, a quarter of whom were unemployed.
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