Follow us on social

Pkk-scaled

Surprise: no one 'bad guy' responsible for violence in the Middle East

New report finds that Iran is not 'on the march,' but among multiple powers, some US-backed, destabilizing the region.

Analysis | Middle East

Americans love a good-guy, bad-guy story — especially in the Middle East.

In the 1980s, Muammar Ghaddafi was “the mad dog of the Middle East.” Two decades later, overthrowing Saddam Hussein was supposed to be a death blow to the “Axis of Evil.” Around the same time, Syria became a “rogue nation” that exports “killers.” Throughout this whole time, Iran has remained the “evil hand” behind all of the instability in the region.

The reality is a little more complicated, as new research by myself and Trita Parsi for the Quincy Institute has found. Our report, "No Clean Hands: The Interventions of Middle East Powers, 2010-2020," looks at the last decade of conflict in the Middle East and does not show Iran on the march, emboldened by U.S. failures to act. Instead, it shows that multiple regional powers have jostled to take advantage of the post-Arab Spring unrest, with U.S. partners and enemies alike getting involved in bloody proxy warfare.

As Peter Beinart says, each of the Middle East’s major players is a “brutal, self-interested, middle power among others.”

The report also casts an unflattering light on the U.S. role in the region. Five of the six regional states implicated in interventions — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, Qatar and Israel — are armed and financed by the United States. (In fact, a full third of U.S. arms exports around the world went to these states between 2010 and 2020.) While U.S. leaders don’t always like these states’ actions, they continue to support them with billions of dollars in weapons and military aid every year.

Three powers — Iran, Turkey, and the UAE — have been particularly interventionist in recent years. And they’ve all settled on a similar model for interventions: bring in drones and an army of mercenaries (often child soldiers) recruited from different conflict zones as a “cheap” way to influence the outcome of civil wars. These states learned many of their techniques from America’s own “forever wars,” whether by observing U.S. drones in action or hiring American sellswords to raise their armies.

But for all of their malign activities, none of these powers alone bears the blame for the past decade of instability. If anything, it seems that unrest is driving intervention rather than the other way around. Conflicts like the Syrian, Libyan, Iraqi, and Yemeni civil wars blew up on their own — or due to U.S. military intervention — before dragging in regional powers. And once one regional power got involved in a conflict, others were soon to follow.

There is a common phenomenon in international relations called the “security dilemma.” In certain environments, states feel like the only way to ensure their own security is by undermining their rivals’ positions. The data suggests that this was exactly what happened in the Middle East over the past decade. 

The research also has implications for the Biden administration’s ongoing nuclear talks with Iran. Some hawks have tried to argue that U.S. economic sanctions have helped curtail Iran’s regional activities, and lifting those sanctions would flood the Islamic Republic with cash to spend on foreign wars. But the data provides no evidence for that argument; Iran’s regional interventions peaked before the 2015 nuclear deal was completed, and remained steady through both the lifting and re-imposition of sanctions.

States like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the UAE did escalate their interventions after the nuclear deal was signed. In part, those powers feared what U.S.-Iranian diplomacy meant for them. If the United States was no longer going to use “our military power to settle scores” for them — in the words of then-President Barack Obama — then perhaps states like Saudi Arabia needed to get more proactive.

Still, much of the escalation had nothing to do with Iran and its rivals. Many of the conflicts that escalated from 2014 onwards were actually proxy wars between Washington’s partners, such as the Qatari-Emirati conflict in Libya and the Turkish-Kurdish conflict in Syria and Iraq. And U.S. officials even egged on some of these conflicts.

Because the United States has played such a large role in arming and supporting interventionist powers, it also has leverage to de-escalate conflicts involving these partners. U.S. politicians may not be able to smooth over all the issues between U.S. partners like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, but they can demand that those countries act more responsibly with the tools America puts in their hands.

Ultimately, the problem is not any single troublemaker, but the entire Middle Eastern security environment. Again, the United States cannot solve all of the region’s problems by itself. But it can encourage states to talk to each other, and stop creating the power vacuums that become venues for brutal competition.

As they say in medicine: “First, do no harm.”

PKK camp in Kandil, April 23, 2013. (ymphotos/shutterstock)
Analysis | Middle East
ukraine war
Diplomacy Watch:
Diplomacy Watch: Ukraine and allies reeling as war heats up

Russia makes substantial gains in Ukraine’s east

QiOSK

October of 2024 was the most militarily successful month for Russia since July of 2022. After months of sustained pressure, and mostly stagnant front lines, Russian troops have broken through and made significant gains in the Donbas region of Ukraine. According to the New York Times, Russian forces have secured more than 160 square miles there, and are capturing strategic towns along the way.

It seems as though the next goal for Russians in the Donbas is to take the strategic rail town, Pokrovsk, which would seriously inhibit Ukraine’s ability to resupply its forces in the region. Encirclement of this strategic city is likely as Ukraine has likely lost Selydove this week, a city which is only about 20 miles south of Pokrovsk.

keep readingShow less
An unfortunate rush to judgment in Georgia elections
Top photo credit: Supporters of Georgia's opposition parties hold a rally to protest and dispute the result of a recent parliamentary election won by the ruling Georgian Dream party, in Tbilisi, Georgia October 28, 2024. REUTERS/Irakli Gedenidze

An unfortunate rush to judgment in Georgia elections

Europe

One did not have to be an Elijah or an Amos to predict the aftermath of the Georgian elections, but all the same, the Quincy Institute and Responsible Statecraft can claim a modest prize for prophecy. The domestic and international background to the elections and the ensuing crisis are analyzed in a QI policy brief published earlier this month; and as I wrote for RS back in July:

“Parliamentary elections are due in Georgia on October 26, and the universal opinion among Georgians with whom I have spoken is that if the government wins, the opposition, backed by pro-Western NGOs, will allege that the results were falsified, and will launch a mass protest movement in an effort to topple the Georgian Dream government. Judging by recent statements, most Western establishments will automatically take the side of the opposition. This narrative is already well underway, with lines like 'Government vs. the People in Georgia' and 'a crisis that has pitted the government against its people.' This suggests that Georgia is a dictatorship in which 'the people' have no say except through street protests.”

keep readingShow less
 Shigeru Ishiba
Top image credit: Japan's Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba speaks to the media at the Liberal Democratic Party's (LDP) headquarters on October 27, 2024 in Tokyo, Japan. Takashi Aoyama/Pool via REUTERS

Election leaves Japan in a mess

Asia-Pacific

Sunday’s general election in Japan left a mess.

The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has ruled Japan for much of the past 70 years, lost its majority in the House of Representatives, which selects the prime minister. The leading opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), picked up a lot of seats, but far from a majority. So conservatives in the LDP and liberals in the CDP will spend the next few days, or maybe weeks, trying to cobble together a governing coalition.

keep readingShow less

Election 2024

Latest

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.