Nabeel A. Khoury
Dr. Khoury taught at the National War College (NDU) this year as a Department of State faculty advisor. He retires from State this fall to join the Chicago Council on Global Affairs as senior fellow for Middle East and national security. He wishes to acknowledge the valuable assistance and insights offered by Dr. Lina Khatib, of Stanford University, and Dr. Sami Hajjar, formerly of the Army War College at Carlisle. MargaretAnne Khoury, Elysaar Khoury and Deborah Ferro offered editorial suggestions and proofed the first draft of this paper.
Starting in 2011, a series of uprisings triggered domestic changes in several countries in the Arab world that affected regional and international politics. The aim of this paper is to explore the foreign-policy dimensions of those domestic changes and project the potential impact on regional and international alliances using Malcolm Kerr's Arab-cold-war model.1 Kerr, in 1965, posited a power struggle between two camps, conservative monarchies and socialist republics.2 Islamists, more or less quiescent at the time, began asserting themselves two decades later, creating a power triangle with ideological, political and military dimensions.
The Arab Uprising3 has resulted in the break-up of this triangle of power, or at least in its transition into a different mold. The "conservative-monarchism / radical-socialism / Islamism" triangle is being replaced with a new one composed of the following players: conservative monarchies, transitioning republics and non-state Islamist groups. The key difference between the two triangles is that, post-Arab Spring, Islamist parties are evolving as mainstream political forces within the transitioning republics, as opposed to forces competing with entrenched regimes in those republics. At the non-state level, radical Islamists, first of a Sunni/Salafi variety, emerged with strength on the scene. In the twenty-first century, however, it is the Shia militias that are shaking things up the most, particularly in the Levant and the Gulf region. The new model proposed in this paper necessitates revisiting intraregional dynamics in the Arab world as well as its international alliances, as the three power blocs compete for influence. This paper investigates the impact of this new dynamic on patron-client relationships in the region. Some of them are likely to continue (such as that between the United States and conservative monarchies), while new patron-client relationships are emerging (such as Turkey and the transitioning republics and Iran and non-state Shia organizations and groups). In this new era, regional superpowers will assume new importance, with Turkey, Iran and Israel as competitive power brokers and with Russia and China as spoilers in any attempt at international conflict resolution.
Contradictions are already apparent at both the internal and international levels: the conservative monarchies, aspiring to continue a patron-client relationship with the United States, are ambivalent about the best course of action in individual uprising cases; the emerging group of republics, at various degrees of democratic transition, are largely dominated internally by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and MB-type parties, all seeking and likely receiving help from Turkey, while aspiring to strike a balance in their relationships with regional and international powers — Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States. Finally, the non-state actors (primarily Hezbollah but also other predominantly Shia groups) seek to continue on Iran's path of "resistance politics," while having to strike internal political deals in their own countries to ensure their survival.
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