The Ruins of Empire in the Middle East

Imperialism may have fallen out of fashion, but

history shows that the only other option is the
kind of chaos we see today.

BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN-MAY 25, 2015

Though imperialism is now held in disrepute, empire has been the default means of
governance for most of recorded history, and the collapse of empires has always been
messy business, whether in China and India from antiquity through the early 20th
century or in Europe following World War I.
The meltdown we see in the Arab world today, with chaos in parts of North Africa, the
Arabian Peninsula, and the Levant, is really about the final end of imperialism. The
Islamic States capture of Palmyra, an ancient caravan city and one of the most
visually stunning archaeological sites in the Near East, only punctuates this point.
Palmyra represents how the region historically has been determined by trade routes
rather than fixed borders. Its seizure by the barbarians only manifests how the world is
returning to that fluid reality.

It is actually three imperial systems whose collapse we are now witnessing in the
Middle East.
First, Middle Eastern chaos demonstrates that the region has still not found a solution
to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. For hundreds of years,
Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Jews, Muslims and Christians, in Greater Syria and
Mesopotamia had few territorial disputes. All fell under the rule of an imperial
sovereign in Istanbul, who protected them from each other. That system collapsed in
1918, unleashing the demon of national, ethnic, and sectarian disputes over who
controls which territory at what border precisely.
Second, the implosion of Iraq in the wake of the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the
implosion of Syria in the wake of the Arab Spring, and the rise of the Islamic State has
brought to an end the borders erected by European imperialism, British and French, in
the Levant.
Third, the demonstrably hands-off approach to these developments by President
Barack Obama manifests the end of Americas great power role in organizing and
stabilizing the region. And the United States, remember, since the end of World War II,
has been a world empire in all but name. (Nobody, perhaps, makes this uncomfortable
point more comprehensively than Oxford historian John Darwin in his 2007 book After
Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000.)
And it is not just imperial forces that have declined and left chaos in their wake. The
fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, and the reduction of
Bashar al-Assads regime in Syria to that of an embattled statelet has ended the era of
post-colonial strongmen, whose rule was organically connected to the legacy of
imperialism. After all, those dictators ruled according to the borders erected by the
Europeans. And because those imperial borders did not often configure with ethnic or
sectarian ones, those dictatorial regimes required secular identities in order to span
communal divides. All this has been brutally swept away.
Alas, the so-called Arab Spring has not been about the birth of freedom but about the
collapse of central authority, which says nothing about the readiness of these states,
artificial and otherwise, for the rigors of democracy.
Among the states affected by the current upset, two kinds have been discernible. First,
there are the age-old clusters of civilization. These are places that have been states in
one form or another going back as far as antiquity, and thus have evolved sturdy forms
of secular identity that have risen above ethnicity and religious sect. Morocco, Tunisia,
and Egypt are the most striking in this category. If one looks at a map of Roman sites
along the North African coast, one will see that the map is crowded with settlements
where these countries are located, and relatively absent of settlements in the vast
stretches in-between of Algeria and Libya. In other words, Morocco, Tunisia, and
Egypt are historically definable. Whatever tumult and regime changes they have
experienced in the course of the Arab Spring, their identities as states have never
been in question. And so the issues in these countries have been about who rules and
what kind of government there should be, not about whether or not a state or central

government is even possible.

The second group of Middle Eastern states is even more unstable. These take the
form of vague geographical expressions and they are places with much weaker
identities and, in fact, many have identities that were invented by European
imperialists. Libya, Syria, and Iraq fall most prominently into this category. Because
identity in these cases was fragile, the most suffocating forms of authoritarianism were
required to merely hold these states together. This is the root cause for the extreme
nature of the Qaddafi, Assad, and Hussein regimes, which practiced levels of
repressions far more severe than those of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Zine el-Abidine
Ben Ali in Tunisia. Algeria, also an artificial state, essentially invented by the French,
has experienced remote and sterile authoritarian rule, and now faces an uncertain
transition given the declining health of its ruler, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who has been in
power since 1999. Jordan, too, is a vague geographical expression, but has enjoyed
moderate governance through the genius of its ruling Hashemites and the
overwhelming economic and security support this small country has received from the
United States and Israel. Yemen may also be an age-old cluster of civilization, but one
always divided among many different kingdoms due to its rugged topography, thus
ruling the territory as one unit has always been nearly impossible.
Only suffocating totalitarian regimes could control these artificial countries formed from
vague geographical expressions. When these regimes collapsed they left behind an
utter void. For between the regime at the top and the tribe and extended family at the
bottom, all intermediary forms of social and political organization were eviscerated
long before by such regimes. Totalitarianism was the only answer to the end of
Western imperialism in these artificial states, and totalitarianisms collapse is now the
root cause of Middle East chaos.
Overlaying this meltdown of vague geographical expressions and the less severe
weakening of age-old clusters of civilization has been the rise of indigenous regional
powers such as Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Iran is a great, old-world civilization on
one hand and a ruthless and radicalized sub-state on the other. This is what accounts
for its dynamic effectiveness around the region. A Persian empire has been based in
one form or another on the Iranian Plateau since antiquity. Thus, rather than face
political identity problems like the Arabs, Iranians are blessed with a cultural selfcertainty comparable to that of the Indians and Chinese.
At the same time, however, the narrow assemblage of radical mullahs running the
government of Tehran represent a sub-state akin to jihadi groups like the Islamic State,
Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and the former Mahdi Army. Thus Iran is able to operate with
unconventional flair. Iran has mastered the nuclear fuel cycle, trained radical and
militarized proxy forces in the Levant, and brilliantly conducted negotiations with its
principal adversary, the United States. Thus does Iran partially inherit the void left by
the disappearance of Ottoman, European, and American empires.
Whereas Iran is the Shiite node of power in the newly sectarian Middle East, Saudi
Arabia is the Sunni node. Saudi Arabia, compared to Iran, is the artificial creation of a

single extended family. The country the Saudi family governs does not territorially
configure with the Arabian Peninsula to the extent that Iran configures with the Iranian
Plateau. Nevertheless, the House of Saud has impressively navigated its way over the
decades through immense social transformation at home and a tumultuous security
situation abroad. And the recent high-level personnel changes engineered by the new
king, Salman, including the replacement of the crown prince and foreign minister,
indicates the absolute determination of this dynasty to readjust its policies in order not
to let Iran dominate the region.
Saudi Arabias recent bombing campaign against Iran-backed Houthi tribesmen in
Yemen and Riyadhs renewed intensification of support for anti-Iranian Syrian rebels
(helped also by Turkey and Qatar) is a reaction to what Riyadh sees as an impending
American-Iranian nuclear accord. Indeed, the Saudis are already factoring into their
calculations the strong possibility of such a deal, and thus the bombing in Yemen and
recent pressure on the pro-Iranian Assad regime in Syria represent ahead of the
actual fact the post-nuclear accord Middle East. That accord, if it indeed happens,
though limited to nuclear issues, will be viewed with some justification as the
beginning of a more general American-Iranian rapprochement-of-sorts: in regional
terms, that is, one declining imperial power coming to terms with a rising indigenous
power.
To contain a post-accord Iran, the United States will need not only to bolster Saudi
Arabia, but Egypt and Turkey as well. Egypts security services under de facto military
strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi are already quietly allied with the Israeli security
services in Gaza, Sinai, and elsewhere. America requires a strong Egypt
democratic or not as a regional anti-Iran ally to bolster Saudi Arabia. While Turkey
under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not normally viewed as a pro-American
country, a strong Turkey in and of itself also helps balance against Iranian power. The
jostling among these geographically and historically fortunate powers for regional
dominance will define the new post-imperial order.
A new American president in 2017 may seek to reinstate Western imperial influence
calling it by another name, of course. But he or she will be constrained by the very
collapse of central authority across the Middle East that began with the fall of Saddam
Hussein and continued through the post-Arab Spring years. Strong Arab dictatorships
across the region were convenient to American interests, since they provided a single
address in each country for America to go to in the event of regional crises. But now
there is much less of that. In several countries, there is simply no one in charge to
whom we can bring our concerns. Chaos is not only a security and humanitarian
problem, but a severe impediment to American power projection.
Thus, the near-term and perhaps middle-term future of the Middle East will likely be
grim. The Sunni Islamic State will now fight Irans Shiite militias, just as Saddams
Sunni Iraq fought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeinis Shiite Iran in the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran
War. That war, going on as long as it did, represented in part the deliberate decision of
the Reagan administration not to intervene another example of weak imperial
authority, though a successful one, since it allowed Reagan to concentrate on Europe

and help end the Cold War.

Back then it was states at war; now it is sub-states. Imperialism bestowed order,
however retrograde it may have been. The challenge now is less to establish
democracy than to reestablish order. For without order, there is no freedom for
anyone.
Photo credit: JOSEPH EID/AFP/Getty Images
Posted by Thavam