The return of authoritarianism is priming the Middle East for more conflict

Boys sit on the rubble of a two-floor building after it was allegedly destroyed by Saudi-led airstrikes on the northern outskirts of Sanaa, Yemen, 23 August 2017. Picture by Hani Al-Ansi/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.Today, conflict in the Middle East is
reduced to Saudi-Iranian rivalry. The story
is that emergent Iranian hegemonic designs in the Levant pose a
threat to regional peace that needs to be countered. The narrative is
cast as religious ‘Shi’a v. Sunni strife’ for additional
existential effect. However, this simplistic frame obscures a more
significant development: the return of authoritarianism to the Middle
East.

Autocratic rule is consolidating in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt
and Iran alike. It is overlaying the causes of the Arab Spring – a
lack of bread, freedom, social justice and human dignity – with new
waves of repression. This realization is insufficiently reflected in
western foreign policy that is dominated by concerns over radicals
and refugees. Yet, the mix of domestic repression and foreign neglect
stores up conflict for the future. It also runs the risk of simply
repeating history.

The regime of president El-Sisi has been
consolidating itself ever since the coup d’état of 2013. In
particular, it uses the escalating insurgency
in the Sinai to increase its control over Egyptian civil society and
religion. As the country is basically broke, it has pawned its
foreign policy in part to Saudi Arabia to foot the bill. North,
Turkey has discarded its rule of law where political dissent is
concerned and re-started a civil war against 20% of its population.
Absolute majority rule takes precedence over individual- and minority
rights. East, the Iranian state retains a paradoxical balance between
revolutionary believers and geopolitical pragmatists with elements of
democracy in a cast of clerical autocracy. Rescinding
the Joint Comprehensive Plan for Action (‘the nuclear deal’) is
likely to strengthen its hardline factions. South, Saudi Arabia is
transforming heterogeneous royal rule with limited foreign ambitions
into a centralized autocracy with a muscular
foreign policy. The one (former) regional power that offers a glimmer
of hope is Iraq’s fledgling democracy. The country was on the road
to autocracy under Prime Minister Al-Maliki, but the Islamic State’s
successes in 2014 made his tenure unsustainable, throwing electoral
competition wide-open.

The smoldering ruins of Syria demonstrate what can ensue.

The short of the matter is that these four
key regional powers are – to varying degrees – autocracies, which
means they can pursue their foreign policy objectives without much
regard for their own people, let alone others. The smoldering ruins
of Syria demonstrate what can ensue. They are in large part the
result
of regional powers fragmenting the civil war by supporting different
proxies. So far, the conflicts between powerful rulers – Mohammed Bin
Salman, Recip Erdogan, Ali Khameini and Abdel Fattah El Sisi – have
largely taken place in the weaker states of the Levant, i.e.
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and, at the periphery, Yemen. The forced
resignation
of Prime Minister Saad Hariri of Lebanon was only the latest twist in
this saga of proxies, politics and patronage. Yet, these battlefields
interact with sites of conflict located inside the regional powers
–Kurdistan in Turkey, the Sinai in Egypt and the Eastern Province
of Saudi Arabia – in ideological, human and/or material terms. The
unresolved Palestinian case also remains a potent conflict catalyst.
In short, more ‘Syria’s’ cannot be excluded.

Four-way autocratic competition has
temporarily given way to an Iranian-Saudi face-off because Egypt and
Turkey are preoccupied at home as internal violence followed their
authoritarian consolidation. While Iran and Saudi Arabia are
embroiled in a classic realist geopolitical competition –
instrumentalising identity and religion for political gain –
research suggests
that Iran is less dominant than typically assumed, while Saudi Arabia
is not the modernising society it pretends
to be. As a result, the emerging unofficial partnership between
Israel, Saudi Arabia and the US as ‘balancing act’ against Iran,
the Syrian regime, Hezbollah and some Iraqi paramilitary groups not
only risks fighting the ‘wrong’ conflict, it also exposes the
Middle East to a greater conflagration.

Iran, for example, does hold appreciable
sway in Iraq. Yet, there are also powerful nationalists and religious
forces arrayed against its influence, such as Moqtada al-Sadr and
Grand-Ayatollah Al-Sistani. The Iraqi Kataib Hezbollah militia and
the Lebanese Hezbollah have little in common in terms of political
influence other than their name. After all Iranian efforts to ‘run’
Iraq by way of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, the results
appear modest.
In Syria, Iran and Russia preside over a broken country with a huge
legitimacy and reconstruction problem. In Lebanon, Iran has more
clout via Hezbollah. Yet, this is mostly a problem of Israel’s own
making by not using the Oslo Accords to resolve the Palestinian
conflict, and less a manifestation of Iranian hegemonic designs.

Stability in the Middle East is served by addressing the causes of its present instability – authoritarianism – not by promoting more of the same

Saudi Arabia is in a worse state. Its more
assertive foreign policy of late has resulted in a series of
expensive disappointments.
Qatar is not bending to the Saudi will, Yemen has become a quagmire
and Syria exemplifies ineffective meddling by proxy. Yet, the real
problem of crown prince Mohammad bin Salman is that the foundations
of his family’s rule are trembling. The Islamic State has exposed
the real nature of Wahhabi religious worldviews, lower oil prices
undermine the fiscal sustainability of the Saudi state and people are
disgusted
with corrupt rule.

Instead of focusing
on the false binary of Iranian-Saudi rivalry, the drivers of the Arab
Spring should be dusted off for policy purposes. Diplomatically, that
means standing up more forcefully against the Middle East’s
autocracies in fora like the United Nations, stopping to treat them
as valuable business partners and creating better prospects for the
region’s refugees. It also means toning down the Saudi-Iranian
conflict frame in the knowledge that neither country has a governance
model to offer that has much attraction beyond its borders or,
actually, within them. Stability in the Middle East is served by
addressing the causes of its present instability – authoritarianism
– not by promoting more of the same.