For a generation, the Middle East has been a byword for state failure. A series of cataclysms buffeted Arab states in this period, weakening institutions, security, and regional governance. The turmoil began with the US invasion of Iraq on false pretenses, which plunged that country into chaos. Then came the Arab Spring, ISIS and its conquest of a swath of Mesopotamia and the Levant, the dissolution of Syria and Libya, serial dysfunction in Lebanon, and the Saudi war in Yemen, among other troubles.
Yet despite ongoing conflict and instability, the Arab state system has made a hard-earned comeback in recent years. Iraq has crafted the foundations of a functional state. In fits and starts, the monarchies in the Persian Gulf region have fashioned modern bureaucracies and a measure of mutual security cooperation. Autocrats spurned popular demands for democracy and good governance. But the same Arab regimes succeeded at rebuilding state capacity — a necessary if insufficient ingredient of regional stability.
Now, however, that glimmer of possibility has come under threat from Israel’s spiraling, maximalist regional war. With a mostly blank check from Washington, the Jewish state has challenged the viability of states across the region, threatening to undermine the Middle East’s only recently rebounding, fragile state order. The Trump administration gets the importance of stable states, but its response is limited to off-the-record or background seething. “Bibi acted like a madman,” a White House official told Axios this week. “He bombs everything all the time. This could undermine what Trump is trying to do.”
Those remarks concerned Israel’s intervention in Syria, ostensibly carried out to protect the country’s Druze minority. The U.S. government has its own concerns about whether Syria’s new leader can control their security forces or want to protect minorities — but Washington does not support Israel’s approach, of bombing government targets, occupying Syrian territory, and arming proxies, supposedly under the guise of a humanitarian aid mission.
These gripes summon memories of Biden advisers leaking that Biden called Netanyahu an “asshole” while doing nothing to limit the Israeli premier’s recklessness. Under Trump, however, Israel’s adventurism has grown more extreme and destabilizing, and Trump has at times directly contradicted leaders in Jerusalem and expressed irritation. On occasion Trump has even reined in Israel. That’s understandable; the present-day tableau is alarming. Israel is causing famine in Gaza, igniting sectarian tensions and attacking the government in Syria (in direct contravention of US interests and policy in that country), and keeping up a steady patter of threats and strikes against Iran, Yemen, and Lebanon.
In a war without limits or clear goals, Israel has directly targeted Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and now Iran, while also undermining the popular credibility of those Arab monarchs in the Gulf who have quietly sided with the Jewish state. These open-ended conflicts could wreak the same kind of generational ruin that America inflicted on Iraq — the kind of unraveling that leaves a trail of hard-to-govern spaces undermined by broken states, institutions, and societies.
Conspiracy theorists in the Middle East have long bemoaned the Israeli and American plots to weaken their governments and fragment their political communities — a Machiavellian divide-and-rule strategy to keep a strategically critical oil-rich region off balance and easier to manipulate. Often, these fevered Arab visions were just that: scaremongering used by Arab elites to fend off domestic challenges to their misrule. But these days, the notion that Western powers, especially Israel, seek chaos for its own sake is hard to dismiss as a conspiracy.
Historians and policymakers often treat the Arab state system as a unit of analysis, because of the shared language and grouping within the Arab League. Today, in assessing the damage to states caused by Israel’s wars since Oct. 7, it’s probably more useful to look at the entire geography of the Middle East and distinguish states by their longevity, unity, and capacity, rather than their language group.
A small cadre of states have operated in their current form for centuries, with political communities that have remained cohesive across multiple eras and regime types. That group includes Iran, Turkey, and Egypt. A second category includes an array of post-colonial states, most of them monarchies, that have acquired some ability to project regional power. These include Gulf Cooperation Council powers like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. The final group includes the rest of the Middle Eastern states, some of them republics and some monarchies, but all vulnerable to destabilizing conflict and general precarity.
To be sure, states in the region, especially the Arab states, have often exemplified brittle personalistic or securitized rule (what Daniel Brumberg calls the “pillared state,” more concerned with regime survival than with good governance). But the answer isn’t to shatter state capacity in such places, but rather to direct that state capacity to serve the interests of the nation rather than the regime.
Some policymakers in the United States have belatedly come to understand that without functional states, the Middle East will never stabilize. Constant conflict, displacement, and human suffering, along with failed governance, have driven decades of perpetual emergency: wars, refugees, and failure to respond to climate change are just a few of the burning crises.
Over the last decade, successive US administrations have, with one hand, encouraged a necessary state revival. They helped mend the rift between the GCC states. They provided economic lifelines to Jordan and Egypt, and helped pay salaries to the Lebanese army when the state went bankrupt. They’ve made critical decisions to support Syria’s transition from Bashar Assad, recognizing the new government and lifting some sanctions. They’ve invested in the problematic, sectarian, but burgeoning Iraqi state, and they’ve negotiated with Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program.
The problem is the other hand, which sometimes undoes the work of the first. In his first administration, Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement and gave space to regime-change enthusiasts. Biden gave Israel a free hand to destroy Gaza and consolidate Israeli steps to annex the West Bank. And in his second term, Trump directly joined Israel’s wars in Iran and Yemen, and backed the Israeli military campaigns that threaten state survival in Syria and Lebanon (even as administration officials grumble about Bibi’s adventurism to the press).
Israel has clearly stated its strategic aim — to keep rival states so weak that they can’t strategically threaten Israel. Recent history makes clear what fool’s errand this approach is. Power vacuums and weak states generate far greater security threats — for everyone involved, including their own populations, Israel, the United States, and the international community. Groups like Islamic State and Al Qaeda thrive in ungoverned hinterlands.
But the Israelis, emboldened by what they see as an unbroken string of military triumphs after the Oct 7 Hamas terror assault, have embraced a strategy that seeks to expand the zones of chaos in the Middle East. Confident that they have coopted or irreversibly weakened their Arab neighbors, they are now cultivating enduring disorder in a wider ring: Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and, most consequentially, Iran. Some of Israel’s leaders, along with a few like-minded American officials, dream of a regime-change war against the Islamic Republic. But they’ve publicly expressed that they’d be equally satisfied to simply hobble the Iranian state, making its people suffer and its government struggle. Publicly Netanyahu has mused about regime change but emphasized that Israeli wanted to make sure Iran would lose its nuclear capacities. “They may be more comfortable with destroying the country than we are,” an American official told Axios, speaking about the Israelis.
So what can or should Washington do in response? The United States is conflicted about how much it wants to get involved in the Middle East. In some instances, American leaders appear determined to stay out of regional disputes and avoid new wars. At the same time, US troops are still deployed in numerous declared and undeclared wars, and Washington continually enables Israel’s regional bombing bonanza.
When the United States intervenes, as Trump did by bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, it resolutely wants to stay at arm’s length — simultaneously in and out. There is no regional hegemon or collective order effective enough to calm the roiling waters. The most powerful states in the region are Israel, Iran, the Gulf monarchies, and Turkey. Egypt is too weak to play much of a stabilizing role. Against this backdrop, America’s paramount interest lies in ensuring stability and balance in this system.
A Middle East at war and chaos is good for nobody, even if leaders in Jerusalem mistakenly believe that such disorder will benefit Israeli security. Another era of regional conflict certainly harms US interests. America’s leaders increasingly tilt populist and isolationist, but as a global superpower, the US government finds time and time again that it cannot ignore global conflicts, especially in the Middle East, which has proven of enduring strategic interest. A succession of US presidents has hopefully insisted that they’re pivoting away from the Middle East, before inevitably turning the lion’s share of their policy bandwidth to the region.
Only functional states can deliver basic governance, uphold rights, and protect their populations — the minimum ingredients of stability. The Middle East needs states with basic competence: functional institutions, some authority over militias, an economic plan, and access to international support. Even bad or ambiguous states with some capabilities are better than chaos and power vacuums.
There are a few hopeful signs. Gulf powers have avoided new fissures, despite their considerable differences over how to deal with Israel, Yemen, and Iran. Notwithstanding internal pressures from militias and external pressure from Israel, Iran, and others, Iraq has maintained its hybrid authoritarian system, built some effective institutions, and cultivated stable relations with Middle Eastern regional powers from whom Baghdad was historically estranged. Lebanon’s new government wants to place Hezbollah’s militia under state control. The Assad dictatorship is gone, and Syria has at least a theoretical prospect of enjoying legitimate national governance.
All those gains are tentative, however. Without enumerating all the many caveats, major risks overshadow every small prospect for good in the region, from the ongoing proxy wars in Yemen and Libya, to the spoiler activities of Iran and its Axis of Resistance network, to the authoritarianism and sectarianism of the region’s leaders.
The biggest threat of all to the region right now, however, comes from Israel’s unfettered and ever-expanding war. Israel’s bombings near and far have no strategic logic beyond sowing disorder and weakening authority. Strikes on Syria might upend the transition there, but can’t possibly engender security or good governance for Syrians. The war on Iran won’t engender a peaceful democracy there, but it already has sabotaged diplomacy — which was working — and appears near certain to accelerate fragmentation and disorder. Terrorism, proxy war, and many of the Middle East’s worst ills are weapons of the weak, spawned by ideologues and accelerated in weak or failing states.
Israel’s gains from the gyre of war are likely to prove illusory or, at best, brief. But the campaign to erode states and the region’s state system will cause enduring harm to the Middle East — and to US interests. The most damning lesson of America’s failed interventions after 9/11 is that it’s far easier to break a state than to build one. And without functioning states, the United States faces another generation of neglecting its own prosperity and security while it manages conflict in the Middle East.
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Author: Thanassis Cambanis
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