It has always been fair to ask what is actually meant by the terms “the Middle East” or “the Near East.” Still today, the architecture of that nebulously defined region has undergone—and is undergoing—a range of transformations that require reconsidering its strategic weight from a clean sheet.
The new defiance, or impermeability, of many regional components of “the Middle East” to external influence has still not been fully accepted by the great power capitals. Different measures apply to Jerusalem, Cairo, Sana’a, Tehran, Rabat, Tripoli/Benghazi, Damascus, Algiers, Addis Ababa, et cetera. This is a watershed change over the past decade.
There is no evidence that the global powers will again be able to reassert dominance at any time in the foreseeable future. However, even that only considers what we have traditionally considered “the Middle East” in purely geographic terms. The region’s “borders” are no longer clearly defined, if they ever were.
The pronounced but sporadic decline in the prestige of the United States on the world stage has contributed disproportionately to this reshaping of what we have called “the Middle East.” It is now a far more complex region or set of regions, unpredictable and more significant to the global balance than it may ever have been.
The tendency has been to look at the region piecemeal and in terms of current events, ignore sub-regions that had been perceived as peripheral to the region, or think of “the Middle East” separately in holistic religious, energy, or geopolitical terms.
Given the transformation of so many factors, it might be time to think of a new name for this emerging bloc, which is increasingly outside the control of any major external powers and entangled in many internal competitions and uncertainties. There is no evidence that any of the traditional major powers—the United States, the UK, France, the European Union, Russia, or China—have any real or valid perspective on the region. Some, such as the United States, rely on a linear continuation of their historical approaches.
Others, such as China, have merely been attempting to smother the region with initiatives to take advantage of the apparent vacuum.
Still, others, such as Russia, have quietly blended deep historical knowledge of the region with their traditional geopolitical needs. Russia, for example, has made significant inroads for the first time since the collapse of the USSR in 1990–91 and has managed this based on low-key engagement. Similarly, Turkey has dramatically but relatively quietly reasserted itself into the region without the sense of respectful and mutual engagement that has characterized Russia’s reassertion.
The primary factor to recognize is that none of the external powers have the prestige—and therefore the influence—they enjoyed in the 19th and 20th centuries, and they are, thus, peripheral to the concerns of the regional states and powers.
The second factor is that many regional states—as with much of the world—have matured their educational bases, political power, and economics (and therefore their self-confidence) to the point at which they reject external paternalism as a matter of course. And given the cost of modern kinetic warfare, external powers seeking to influence or dominate areas of the region must now embrace more nuanced and careful diplomacy than was the case even a decade ago.
Direct physical coercion has been proven more expensive and longer in duration in the 21st century than in the past, partly because of the high cost of major power weapons (and countermeasures) and the low cost of more dispersed defensive and irregular offensive warfare. In other words, who would wish to impose power in the region through military means?
There is little evidence that any of the foreign powers, perhaps except post-Soviet Russia, are taking heed of the requirement to move from kinetic to diplomatic (or total) warfare. This was only because post-Soviet Russia underwent a period of humiliation following the collapse of the USSR, and it necessarily had to rebuild its influence at pre-Soviet levels (for example, the Russian Empire before World War I) with caution and economy.
But these are generalizations. The transformation of the so-called Middle East is now integrated with the overall transformation of the global strategic balance and architecture. The region’s importance—if it can still be regarded as a region—is now more geopolitical than specifically about energy or religion. It is very much about access from one trading zone to another, thus making the Strait of Gibraltar, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, and the Strait of Hormuz critical (as they have always been) in relationship to the overall world trade.
Even looking at the geopolitical linkages, the complexity has extended the region’s boundaries. The world essentially moved from a position where east-west trade was land-bound (the Silk Road) or maritime via the Cape of Good Hope sea route. The global balance of power changed dramatically with the creation of the Suez Canal in the late 19th century (disregarding the Roman-era canal that went from the Red Sea to the Nile in Egypt).
Now, infrastructure for global trade is taking on new dimensions yet again. Firstly, the difficulties of water volume in the Panama Canal, linking the Atlantic with the Pacific, are creating new problems for shipping. As a result, the creation of new canals across the Central American isthmus or rail links across Mexico is under development. Cape Horn sea lanes are again reluctantly and expensively adopted for the short term.
However, the Atlantic-to-Pacific (or Indo-Pacific) trade routes through the Eurasian landmass, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean are multiplying, raising new geostrategic and security considerations.
To some extent, the present conflicts between Ukraine and Russia, between Hamas and Israel and Yemen, and so on, obscure what is occurring and, more particularly, what will emerge when the dust of these conflicts settles. The new strategic routes, the lines of communications, and (most particularly) the internal or protected lines of communications will define future security and wealth and shift the centers of power away from the Western-linked powers of the past few centuries unless steps are taken to address that.
One of the principal new arteries came with the culmination in 2023 of the framework of the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which essentially begins at the gateway to the Atlantic—St. Petersburg, on Russia’s Baltic coast—and culminates at Mumbai, India. This route bypasses the Arabian Peninsula and the Mediterranean, which caused the United States to respond by proposing an alternative network, initially called the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC), from Mumbai to the Persian Gulf Arabian states and then through Israel and the Mediterranean to Greece and beyond.
It is worth bearing in mind that the traditional Red Sea–Suez linkage was expanded dramatically in 2022–23, when the Suez was doubled in capacity, almost solely through Egyptian resources. A far greater expansion of capacity was being contemplated, according to an announcement in Cairo on March 4, 2024. Moreover, the next Red Sea-oriented sea lane was also being reconsidered, with the Eilat to Ashkelon (on the Mediterranean) canal— the Ben Gurion Canal—which could see Red Sea shipping avoiding the Suez and going, instead, up the Gulf of Aqaba to the opening of the Ben Gurion Canal.
The Ben Gurion Canal, should it be completed, would take revenues away from Egypt and may not be developed if Egypt continues developing the Suez in ways that make it easier to use, particularly if Egypt and Israel remain on good terms. Those good terms—which have centered around shared economic development with Cyprus, of the Eastern Mediterranean Basin gas reserves, and other things—became strained by early 2024 over the Israeli insistence on countering the threat from the Gaza-based Hamas terrorist group until that group ceased to be viable.
The Turkish government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has, since the beginning of 2024, been working to restore good relations with Egypt, particularly at the expense of Israel.
A failure by Egypt and Israel to maintain good terms could lead to Israel’s proceeding with the Ben Gurion Canal.
But both of these canals, of course, raise the issue of the vulnerability of shipping through the Red Sea when issues of the stability of the states on either side of that great fissure come into question, as it has presently with the great expression of hostility—ostensibly toward Israel, but really against Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the West—that has now brought civil Red Sea shipping under attack from what is essentially the government of the new and expanded “North Yemen.”
Significantly, in looking at the security of the Red Sea sea-lane security, it has not been the United States or other major trading powers that have determined the accepted approach to “dealing with” Yemen. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has used its influence on the U.S. government (in particular) because of its trade importance to Washington and the West to dictate the Yemen policy. So, far from the superpowers dictating to the regional powers, it is now the reverse.
Even the refusal of the West to talk in terms of “Yemen” and instead talk in terms of the “Houthi rebels” is symptomatic of Riyadh’s determining the terms (the psychology and the language) of engagement that the world has with the 2023–24 Red Sea shipping crisis. This has all been about Saudi Arabia’s being able to finally control the independence of Yemen and to insist that the world regard the “government of Yemen” as the rump and powerless group now defensively based in Aden, the former capital of South Yemen.
The question for most of the foreign “great powers,” then, is how they can deal with the Red Sea crisis if they are afraid to challenge the “buying power” of Saudi Arabia, given that Riyadh—and the UAE—refuse to see Yemen as anything but an enduring threat, even though the Yemenis (North and South) have, arguably, never sought to conquer Saudi or UAE territory. The UAE, however, by contrast, has quietly assumed control of Yemen’s Socotra Archipelago, some 200 nautical miles off the coast of (South) Yemen.
Yemen’s defensive war against Saudi Arabia was extended against Red Sea shipping and Israel to ensure that Riyadh could not benefit from the Abraham Accords and build a normalized relationship with Israel. That would be critical to the proposed evolution of a mutual economic zone in the Arabian Peninsula, including the Levant coastline on the Mediterranean, and the success of the proposed IMEC transport infrastructure.
Despite this, the West has allowed the issue of Yemen (the “Houthis”) to be pushed into an insoluble crisis by Saudi Arabia rather than—even for Saudi Arabia’s ultimate benefit—to approach Sana’a separately with ways to alleviate the security and humanitarian crisis, which was initiated by Riyadh over recent decades, even going back to post-World War II situations.
Moreover, this situation highlights the reality that “the Middle East” now, more than ever, also includes large parts of Africa—and not just the Mediterranean Mashreq region (Egypt to Morocco). One of the world’s largest wars (in terms of casualties) in 2023 was being fought in the Horn of Africa inside Ethiopia. Yet it received no political or media attention outside the country. A new Ethiopia will emerge from this, just as a “new Sudan” will emerge from the fighting underway in that country.
Meanwhile, Somalia’s unresolved crises remain unaddressed by the regional or global community, let alone by the so-called government of Somalia in Mogadishu, which controls little or nothing of the country’s hinterland.
And the regional bodies—the African Union (AU) and the League of Arab States—are reluctant to make any rulings on the legitimate definition of what composes “Somalia” and what composes the separate state of “Somaliland,” and, as a result, the United Nations will not rule on the matter. This is, in fact, an issue critical to the security of the Red Sea-Suez Sea Lane and, therefore, critical to the wealth of Egypt and the global trading community.
Egypt has arguably been to blame for the AU and Arab League not recognizing Somaliland’s historical separation from its brief union with Somalia (Italian Somaliland), out of fear that it would develop relations with Israel. But that is an antiquated argument based on the period when post-monarchy Egypt feared Israel on religious grounds.
So the redefinition of the region needs to be addressed within the regional states and not just by the global community.
But what has emerged in the past few decades, hallmarked by the so-called Arab Spring, which was heavily a religiously and ideologically based movement (Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood), among other events, is the reality that “the Middle East” has begun to be included into the global community because it has become “post-religious” in its identity and certainly, well and truly, no longer “Arab”-dominated. It is a region that is absolutely multi-ethnic and not even predominantly “Arab,” as well as multi-confessional (including multiple Islamic identities, multiple Christian identities, multiple Judaic identities, and secular communities).
The prospect continues to expand for a range of economic zones to emerge around the major new transit corridors (the INSTC, IMEC, and so forth) and the traditional transit routes. Saudi Arabia’s and the UAE’s post-energy economies are particularly geared to these new routes (made feasible by the Abraham Accords, in part) but so, too, is the prospect of a Red Sea community of trading states, initially built around Egypt and Ethiopia, but including others. This was outlined in detail at the 2015 conference on the future of the RedMed (the Red Sea–Mediterranean region) in Washington.
Similarly, the “boundaries” of the new Middle East are clearly moving well into Europe, with the integration of energy lines linking the Eastern Mediterranean gas basins with those of Cyprus, Greece, and westward into the European Union. France’s Mediterranean Basin strategy to find common ground with all of its oceanic neighbors was a significant initiative in recognizing the integrated nature of the region. Still, even France’s view of the region now needs to be upgraded to reflect that, at best, France is only primus inter pares, if that, with its Mediterranean community.
The growing recognition in the EU region that it must develop very separately from the North Atlantic powers (the UK, United States, and Canada)—if only because their economic capabilities and needs no longer fully align—means that it must see the end to its view of itself as “European” or its neighbors as “Middle Eastern.” Indeed, such recognition is critical to the survival of the EU and would entail, in any event, an abandonment of the concept of the EU as a “super-state” and instead recognize the reality that it is part of a patchwork of sovereign states.
This touches on the question of Turkey—which has been excluded from both the INSTC and IMEC—and its role as a transit or pivotal state linking the east-west dimension of Eurasia and the north-south dimension of trade among Eurasia, the Arabian Peninsula/Levant, and Africa.
Under the reshaped “new Middle East,” in fact, Turkey is no longer as geopolitically pivotal as it once was. To combat this, the current Turkish government in Ankara has reasserted its diplomacy along Ottomanist lines, which gives it a sense of historical destiny but can only be sustained if its targets—mainly within the region but also in Africa and South Asia—recognize Ankara’s “right” to promote its historical mission. Nonetheless, it was a historical mission that scarred most of the once-Ottoman-controlled landscape, and it may prove as counterproductive as it is productive to the new Turkish expansionism.
Overall, even without getting into issues of historical rivalries in North Africa, it is clear that we are in conceptually new territory, as yet ill-defined within our term “the Middle East.” Factors such as religion and language are less critical now than a decade ago, partly because of modern communications media that have diminished some aspects of “tribal identity.” On the other hand, sovereign state identity has been revived as being legitimately acceptable to much of the “grassroots.”
Indeed, in this context, it is worth noting that the “Arab–Israel conflict,” in geopolitical terms, has been over, in reality, for a decade. The only recognized regional states that have official policies of conflict based on religious lines are Turkey, Qatar, and Iran.
All the new trading patterns clearly embrace the links to which “the new Middle East” is central, extending to northern Europe, mainland China, and beyond to Australasia and the Far East and encompassing India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. It is time, then, for a reassessment of diplomatic approaches and the arbitrary division, by defense and diplomatic thinkers, of the geopolitical zones that have arbitrarily drawn lines across maps and peoples that defy such descriptions.
