One of the most important historical markers revealed by communist Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to Arabia in December 2022 was that outside powers no longer control the greater Middle East.
That “greater” region—Pakistan in the East to Morocco in the West and from Turkey, the Balkans, and the northern rim of the Mediterranean Basin to the Maghreb and Horn of Africa states down to the Sahel—has developed to the point of political maturity and sovereignty in the modern context, even if not all its states have matured equally in an economic sense.
There’s no government in that region that doesn’t now value its ability to negotiate with and balance the great external powers with interests in the region. Indeed, a “great power” isn’t a great power unless it has interests in the region, which is the transit zone for global trade (including human movement) and a resource point. It’s a nexus of global power, now that the issue of energy supply has become only one factor of the region.
The visit to the region by Xi in late 2022 came too late for Beijing to become suzerain over some or all of the region in the way that 19th- and 20th-century external great powers dominated the Middle East. Xi knows that but underestimated how difficult it was to persuade regional leaders—now aware that most owe no tribute to the United States, the UK, France, or Russia—to come under Beijing’s aegis. Many leaders have become comfortable dealing with Beijing and viewing Washington as a partner (rather than “a presiding partner”). But they don’t genuflect.
It seemed that, when it first gained office in 2021, the Biden administration thought it was returning to the strategic status quo ante in the Middle East. But since the U.S. midterm congressional elections of November 2022, in particular, it appears that the U.S. State Department has set domestic politics aside to rebuild coherent strategic relationships in the broader Middle East, Africa, the Northern Tier, and Central Asia.
The first two years of the Biden administration seem to have been spent denigrating any Mideast successes of its predecessor, the Trump administration, and it particularly belittled the great boost the United States had received by helping negotiate the Abraham Accords between Israel and regional states Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan, and in attempting to undo the solid U.S.–Israel bond that Trump had built.
That process also led to a renewal of the Obama administration’s hostility toward Saudi Arabia and Israel (in favor of cooperation with the clerical government of Iran). It also saw a Biden State Department favoring the old partner of the Obama administration in Ethiopia, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), even though the TPLF had long been unable to cling to power in Ethiopia.
Late 2022, however, saw a substantial change discreetly coalescing in the State Department.
For a start, the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia began working seriously toward normalizing Saudi–Israeli relations, an extension of the Abraham Accords. And this would also revive the U.S.–Saudi relationship while showing Israel that the special U.S. security support hadn’t been weakened.
This implies that Washington had become aware that the political goal of a revived accord with clerical Iran was unlikely (given Iran’s new shelter in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and its strategic closeness now with Moscow) and, therefore, shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with improved Saudi–U.S. relations.
The appointment on Dec. 29, 2022, of Ron Dermer, one of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most trusted confidantes, as strategic affairs minister seems likely to prove pivotal. He had served for seven years as ambassador to the United States and was instrumental in brokering the Abraham Accords deals with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco.
As well, the Biden State Department appeared by early January 2023 to have ended or reduced its support for the TPLF against the Ethiopian government. Perhaps some of its support for the TPLF had been based on the proposition that helping the party against the Ethiopian government was also comforting Egypt. But the reality was that even Cairo was aware that while Ethiopia was the ideal whipping boy for Egypt’s water problems, the real culprit was Egypt’s own population growth and its failed water policies.
The new greater region offers no smooth or lofty arrangements for any parties. Xi’s visit to Arabia was “two steps forward, one step backward.” Moscow profited from Tehran’s outrage over Beijing’s pandering to Saudi Arabia. Russia then consolidated its relationship with the Iranian mullahs, offering in late December 2022 to send as many as 24 Sukhoi Su-35 advanced combat aircraft to Iran in exchange for Iranian unmanned aerial combat vehicles, including saturation loitering munitions.
On Dec. 28, 2022, the defense ministers of Russia, Turkey, and Syria met for the first time in more than a decade. It dampened Turkey’s need to launch its proposed Operation Claw-Sword to attack Kurdish positions in northern Syria. The meetings included Turkish National Intelligence Organization chief Hakan Fidan and Syrian head of the National Security Bureau of the Ba’ath Party (and special security adviser to President Bashar al-Asad) Ali Mamlouk.
All this allows Turkey a greater hand to look elsewhere to build a strategic diversion as its presidential election nears in June. Apart from its planned escalation against Greece and Cyprus, Ankara was, in December 2022, pouring truckloads of weapons into Pristina, the capital of U.S.-supported Kosovo, as Kosovo authorities and Washington and London—as part of their proxy war against Russia—have been pushing for a showdown with Serbia over Serbian areas of Kosovo. The UK inexplicably also took seven of the Kosovo Security Forces’ personnel to the British South Atlantic territory of the Falkland Islands as part of a “peacekeeping” arrangement.
So the Balkans are in play, with the United States and the UK preparing again to penalize Serbia for trying to balance its relations between Washington and Moscow. Algeria, meanwhile, leverages Moscow to push Morocco. Ethiopia, fresh from defeating the U.S.-backed TPLF, is growing more muscular, and the United States now must work hard to restore its position on the Red Sea. And so on.
China has made modest gains in the greater Middle East; Russia has consolidated its position there; and the United States and the UK have begun their recovery there. But there’s no going back, geopolitically. Regional powers have now emerged. And the region remains critical to the world.
