Regional & Global Order
Updated 2024-07-30
2024-05-07 To Achieve Peace and Stability, the Middle East Needs a Regional Security Framework The broader Middle East needs peace and stability, not more conflict. This will not come through more arms and more hostile posturing. If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that the region’s antagonists will not be defeated. Conflict either emboldens them or results in a metastasizing of their conflicts’ root causes into new and more virulent forms.
During the past century, the U.S. and its Western allies played an extremely negative role. From the Sykes-Picot betrayal and dismemberment of the region, to the fatal partition of Palestine and United Nation’s failure to insist on Israel honoring the terms of its conditional admission in 1948, the West repeatedly turned a blind eye to Israel’s aggressive behaviors and its egregious violations of Palestinian rights. This only served to make a bad situation worse. As a result, the region has been forced to endure repeated wars involving Israel, the Palestinians, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.
Our policies have been no better with regard to Iran. We supported the repressive regime of its Shah and worked to overthrow Iran’s effort to form a democracy in the 1950s—a wound Iranians never forgot. This hostility came into clear focus after the Shah’s pro-Western regime grew more repressive and was overthrown in a popular revolt in 1979. That promising revolution quickly devolved into the aggressive Islamic Republic of Iran with its decidedly anti-Western bent.
During the decade-long war of the 1980s between revolutionary Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the U.S. supplied munitions (including chemical and biological components) to Iraq, while covertly (and illegally) funneling weapons to Iran. The results were devastating to both nations. Then came a decade of crippling U.S.-imposed sanctions on both countries and finally the disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, which led to Iran gaining a foothold in Iraq among its long-oppressed Shi’a majority. Iran was now emboldened to pursue its regional ambitions with its allies in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, all of whom had their own grievances within their countries
2023-12-20 Will Israel’s Gaza Genocide Reshuffle the Regional & Global Order? What does the genocide in Gaza mean for the surrounding Arab states? Do their oppositional responses even matter or is it all just symbolic? How will this impact the Abraham Accords and other normalization efforts? Why won’t the Gulf states use their oil as leverage to pressure the United States? How does the genocide in Gaza impact countries like Jordan and Syria? How is it affecting America’s standing in the world? What does it mean for Russia and China in an emerging multipolar world?
To discuss this and other regional developments, Rania Khalek was joined by Giorgio Cafiero, the CEO of Gulf State Analytics, a Washington, D.C.-based geopolitical risk consultancy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQXWRl12ppc
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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict
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