Vast changes in the Middle East mirror vast changes across the world

A few weeks ago I noted, in the context of the Syrian Army's Idlib Offensive, which had been dragging along for more than a year, that sometimes things bump along for a long time then suddenly BAM. That's what happened in Idlib's Khan Sheikoun, which stunned the Turkish government and other foreign governments, as the Syrian Army achieved a victory in about 48 hours that even by the most hopeful estimates should have taken several months. What happened at Khan Sheikoun parallels other situations that have been bumping along for years in the Middle East, but which only now are becoming surprisingly evident. 

One marked change is the final dissolution of pan-Arabism as governments in the Middle East increasingly put 'national' sovereignty above overarching ideologies. 

I placed 'national' in quotes because it's been argued that Saudi Arabia was never a real nation. Well, it is a real nation now under Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman's leadership, which it turns out is the rationale driving his "Vision 2030," but which Western analysts have assumed was purely an economic initiative. Those analysts are set for a big surprise, as this August 20 article by Stasa Salacanin, 
New nationalism on the rise​ in Saudi Arabia, indicates.

Ironically Salacanin's discussion was published by The New Arab, but it seems from many indications that the new Arab is less concerned with ethnicity and more concerned with the fate of his own country, as the present situations with Qatar, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Emirates and even Yemen amply indicate.

If all that sounds vaguely familiar -- yes, a similar situation has been unfolding in European Union countries and other parts of the world, and even in the United States. Donald Trump's famous motto doesn't so much mean making America "great" again as making America "America" again. In this, he was intuiting a sea change that rejects overarching internationalist ideologies in favor of national sovereignty.

(Naturally, this sea change became evident just as Western academics were pronouncing sovereignty a relic of the past.)

As to where we go from here, I think it's going to be a bumpy ride because the internationalists are fighting back with everything they've got -- whether they're defending the internationalized ideologies of Islamization, political globalization, Communism, or Human Rights or the more regionalized border-erasing ideologies of pan-Arabism and a New Caliphate.

It's a fight that has been misleadingly characterized, at least in the West, as a political "Socialist-Conservative" divide or more generally as Liberalism's stand against resurgent Fascism. (Here in the USA, it's now hard to sing the national anthem in public without being accused of fascism by self-proclaimed defenders of the Liberal Order.)

However, it's a mistake to stuff a sea change into a single movement; it's manifesting in different ways in different parts of the world. It's an easy mistake to make. Human nature likes the consolidation that marks overarching ideologies; a consolidation is easier to understand than myriad nation-states. But the single European phone number that Henry Kissinger hoped for masks the fact that to consolidate myriad nation-states into a single entity requires a centralized level of authority that eventually gains so much power it is oppressive, leading to rebellion.     

In the Middle East, pan-Arabism placed Israel in the role of the Little Guy -- a role Israeli leaders played so well that they got away with invading Lebanon in the name of self-defense. It also made it easy for other Arab governments to gang up on Syria while Western governments in league with those Arabs called Bashar al-Assad bad names to rationalize the onslaught.

The Syrians learned their lesson the hard way as they watched their Arab brethren reduce their country to ruins -- and as the Baathists stood by helplessly and the International Community turned their backs on them. Even Qatar's government, which has more money than God, has had to learn the hard way that strong fences are more important than ethnic alliances with one's neighbors.

********