World Order (19 page)

The kingdom’s strategy of principled ambiguity worked so long as the Sunni states were largely governed by military regimes. But once al-Qaeda appeared on the scene, the ayatollahs’ Iran established its leadership over a militant revolutionary camp across the region, and the Muslim Brotherhood threatened to take power in Egypt and
elsewhere, Saudi Arabia found itself facing two forms of civil war in the Middle East, which its own proselytizing efforts had (however inadvertently) helped to inflame: one between Muslim regimes that were members of the Westphalian state system and Islamists who considered statehood and the prevailing institutions of international order an abomination to the Quran; and another between Shias and Sunnis across the region, with Iran and Saudi Arabia seen as leaders of the two opposing sides.

This contest would unfold against the backdrop of two others, each posing its own tests for regional order: American military actions to oust the odious dictatorships in Iraq and Libya, accompanied by U.S. political pressures to bring about “the transformation of the Greater Middle East”; and the resurgence of Sunni-Shia rivalry, most devastatingly during the Iraq War and the Syrian conflict. In each of these, the parallel interests of Saudi Arabia and the United States have proved difficult to distill.

As a matter of regional leadership, balance of power, and doctrinal contention, Saudi Arabia considers itself threatened by Shia Iran, as both a religious and an imperial phenomenon. Saudi Arabia sees a Tehran-led archipelago of rising Shia power and influence running from Iran’s Afghan border through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to the Mediterranean in confrontation with a Saudi-led Sunni order composed of Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states, and the Arabian Peninsula, all in a wary partnership with Turkey.

The American attitude toward Iran and Saudi Arabia therefore cannot be simply a balance-of-power calculation or a democratization issue; it must be shaped in the context of what is above all a religious struggle, already lasting a millennium, between two wings of Islam. The United States and its allies have to calibrate their conduct with care. For pressures unleashed in the region will affect the delicate latticework of relationships underpinning the kingdom at its heart and
administering Islam’s holiest places. An upheaval in Saudi Arabia would carry profound repercussions for the world economy, the future of the Muslim world, and world peace. In light of the experience with revolutions elsewhere in the Arab world, the United States cannot assume that a democratic opposition is waiting in the wings to govern Saudi Arabia by principles more congenial to Western sensibilities. America must distill a common understanding with a country that is the central eventual prize targeted by both the Sunni and the Shia versions of jihad and whose efforts, however circuitous, will be essential in fostering a constructive regional evolution.

To Saudi Arabia, the conflict with Iran is existential. It involves the survival of the monarchy, the legitimacy of the state, and indeed the future of Islam. To the extent that Iran continues to emerge as a potentially dominant power, Saudi Arabia at a minimum will seek to enhance its own power position to maintain the balance. Given the elemental issues involved, verbal reassurances will not suffice. Depending on the outcome of the Iranian nuclear negotiations, Saudi Arabia is likely to seek access to its own nuclear capability in some form—either by acquiring warheads from an existing nuclear power, preferably Islamic (like Pakistan), or by financing their development in some other country as an insurance policy. To the extent that Saudi Arabia judges America to be withdrawing from the region, it may well seek a regional order involving another outside power, perhaps China, India, or even Russia. The tensions, turmoil, and violence wracking the Middle East in the first two decades of the twenty-first century should therefore be understood as layers of civil and religious strife carried out in a contest to determine whether and how the region will relate to any larger concept of world order. Much depends on the United States’ capacity, skill, and will to help shape an outcome that fulfills American interests and that Saudi Arabia and its allies consider compatible with their security and their principles.

Syria and Iraq—once beacons of nationalism for Arab countries—may lose their capacity to reconstitute themselves as unified Westphalian states. As their warring factions seek support from affiliated communities across the region and beyond, their strife jeopardizes the coherence of all neighboring countries. If multiple contiguous states at the heart of the Arab world are unable to establish legitimate governance and consistent control over their territories, the post–World War I Middle East territorial settlement will have reached a terminal phase.

The conflict in Syria and Iraq and the surrounding areas has thus become the symbol of an ominous new trend: the disintegration of statehood into tribal and sectarian units, some of them cutting across existing borders, in violent conflict with each other or manipulated by competing outside factions, observing no common rules other than the law of superior force—what Hobbes might have called the state of nature.

In the wake of revolution or regime change, absent the establishment of a new authority accepted as legitimate by a decisive majority of the population, a multiplicity of disparate factions will continue to engage in open conflicts with perceived rivals for power; portions of the state may drift into anarchy or permanent rebellion, or merge with parts of another disintegrating state. The existing central government may prove unwilling or unable to reestablish authority over border regions or non-state entities such as Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, ISIL, and the Taliban. This has happened in Iraq, Libya, and, to a dangerous extent, Pakistan.

Some states as presently constituted may not be governable in full except through methods of governance or social cohesion that Americans reject as illegitimate. These limitations can be overcome, in some cases, through evolutions toward a more liberal domestic system. Yet where factions within a state adhere to different concepts of world
order or consider themselves in an existential struggle for survival, American demands to call off the fight and assemble a democratic coalition government tend either to paralyze the incumbent government (as in the Shah’s Iran) or to fall on deaf ears (the Egyptian government led by General Sisi—now heeding the lessons of its predecessors’ overthrow by tacking away from a historic American alliance in favor of greater freedom of maneuver). In such conditions, America has to make the decision on the basis of what achieves the best combination of security and morality, recognizing that both will be imperfect.

In Iraq, the dissolution of Saddam Hussein’s brutal Sunni-dominated dictatorship generated pressures less for democracy than for revenge—which the various factions sought through the consolidation of their disparate forms of religion into autonomous units in effect at war with each other. In Libya, a vast country relatively thinly populated and riven by sectarian divisions and feuding tribal groups—with no common history except Italian colonialism—the overthrow of the murderous dictator Qaddafi has had the practical effect of removing any semblance of national governance. Tribes and regions have armed themselves to secure self-rule or domination via autonomous militias. A provisional government in Tripoli has gained international recognition but cannot exercise practical authority beyond city limits, if even that. Extremist groups have proliferated, propelling jihad into neighboring states—especially in Africa—armed with weapons from Qaddafi’s arsenals.

When states are not governed
in their entirety, the international or regional order itself begins to disintegrate. Blank spaces denoting lawlessness come to dominate parts of the map. The collapse of a state may turn its territory into a base for terrorism, arms supply, or sectarian agitation against neighbors. Zones of non-governance or jihad now stretch across the Muslim world, affecting Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mali, Sudan,
and Somalia. When one also takes into account the agonies of Central Africa—where a generations-long Congolese civil war has drawn in all neighboring states, and conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan threaten to metastasize similarly—a significant portion of the world’s territory and population is on the verge of effectively falling out of the international state system altogether.

As this void looms, the Middle East is caught in a confrontation akin to—but broader than—Europe’s pre-Westphalian wars of religion. Domestic and international conflicts reinforce each other. Political, sectarian, tribal, territorial, ideological, and traditional national-interest disputes merge. Religion is “weaponized” in the service of geopolitical objectives; civilians are marked for extermination based on their sectarian affiliation. Where states are able to preserve their authority, they consider their authority without limits, justified by the necessities of survival; where states disintegrate, they become fields for the contests of surrounding powers in which authority too often is achieved through total disregard for human well-being and dignity.

The conflict now unfolding is both religious and geopolitical. A Sunni bloc consisting of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and to some extent Egypt and Turkey confronts a bloc led by Shia Iran, which backs Bashar al-Assad’s portion of Syria, Nuri al-Maliki’s central and southern Iraq, and the militias of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. The Sunni bloc supports uprisings in Syria against Assad and in Iraq against Maliki; Iran aims for regional dominance by employing non-state actors tied to Tehran ideologically in order to undermine the domestic legitimacy of its regional rivals.

Participants in the contests search for outside support, particularly from Russia and the United States, in turn shaping the relations between them. Russia’s goals are largely strategic, at a minimum to prevent Syrian and Iraqi jihadist groups from spreading into its Muslim territories and, on the larger global scale, to enhance its
position vis-à-vis the United States (thereby reversing the results of the 1973 war described earlier in this chapter). America’s quandary is that it condemns Assad on moral grounds—correctly—but the largest contingent of his opponents are al-Qaeda and more extreme groups, which the United States needs to oppose strategically. Neither Russia nor the United States has been able to decide whether to cooperate or to maneuver against each other—though events in Ukraine may resolve this ambivalence in the direction of Cold War attitudes. Iraq is contested between multiple camps—this time Iran, the West, and a variety of revanchist Sunni factions—as it has been many times in its history, with the same script played by different actors.

After America’s bitter experiences and under conditions so inhospitable to pluralism, it is tempting to let these upheavals run their course and concentrate on dealing with the successor states. But several of the potential successors have declared America and the Westphalian world order as principal enemies.

In an era of suicide terrorism and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, the drift toward pan-regional sectarian confrontations must be deemed a threat to world stability warranting cooperative effort by all responsible powers, expressed in some acceptable definition of at least regional order. If order cannot be established, vast areas risk being opened to anarchy and to forms of extremism that will spread organically into other regions. From this stark pattern the world awaits the distillation of a new regional order by America and other countries in a position to take a global view.

I
N THE SPRING OF 2013,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran—the figure then and now outranking all Iranian government ministers, including Iran’s President and Foreign Minister—delivered a speech to an international conference of Muslim clerics, lauding the onset of a new global revolution. What elsewhere was called the “Arab Spring,” he declared, was in fact an “Islamic Awakening” of world-spanning consequence. The West erred in assessing that the crowds of demonstrators represented the triumph of liberal democracy, Khamenei explained. The demonstrators would reject the “bitter and horrifying experience of following the West in politics, behavior and lifestyle” because they embodied the “miraculous fulfillment of divine promises”:

Today what lies in front of our eyes
and cannot be denied by any informed and intelligent individual is that the world of Islam has now emerged out of the sidelines of social and political equations of the world, that it has found a prominent and outstanding position at the center of decisive global
events, and that it offers a fresh outlook on life, politics, government and social developments.