The New Middle East : Six Volatile Regions Raising the Global Stakes
Shifting Alliances and Conflicts are Creating Fresh Geopolitical Challenges. It’s Time to Rename an Interlinked Theatre Stretching from the Sahel to India
Simon Sebag-Montefiore
This month three Islamic powers, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, signed a treaty that promised to change the region for ever. Its ambitions were planetary: nothing less than a Middle Eastern Nato with its own Article Five, guaranteeing mutual defence — and in case anyone missed its totemic significance, they signed it in Mecca, named it the Mecca Pact and then prayed together in Masjid al-Haram, the Great Mosque.
Whether one calls the present Middle Eastern conflict — the spasms of violence unleashed by Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023 — the Third Gulf war or the October 7 wars, this is not just about whether Iran has nuclear weapons or who controls the Strait of Hormuz.
Rather, this signals a dramatic and momentous new era with fresh contenders, new rules and wider boundaries in a broader tournament of power that accelerates a convergence of strategic theatres and makes the very term “Middle East” obsolete.
On paper, the Mecca Pact has potential: it musters the only Islamic nuclear power, Pakistan, which has a population of 260 million and a battle-hardened army of 600,000; Saudi Arabia, leader of the Sunni Arab world, largest state in the Middle East with vast oil reserves and the prestige of the guardianship of the Islamic holy cities; and Turkey, pivotal Eurasian power, Ottoman successor state, deployer of Nato’s second-largest army and a superb tech-military capability (including drones).
Their leaders are sophisticated players: Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi crown prince already in power for 11 years but still only 40, is a dynamic autocratic reformer capable of ruthless measures and dramatic advances in his quest for Saudi security; Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 72, Turkey’s Islamist autocrat, in power for 25 years, combines ambitions to promote a Muslim Brotherhood mission with a neo-imperial project across the provinces of the former Ottoman sultanate that ruled virtually the entire Arab world.
Third is the man who is in effect Pakistan’s ruler, Field Marshal Asim Munir, 58, who has managed (at least for now) to bypass his country’s chronic instability and give it a surprising if fragile and probably temporary role as a regional contender.
All Middle East statesmen have historically needed to handle the chief imperial powers of their day, whether it was the top potentate of the region, the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid before the First World War, the British or French premiers Lloyd George and Clemenceau after it or Khrushchev and Kennedy, Brezhnev and Nixon in the Cold War.
But these three are adept at playing the most capricious of world emperors, Donald Trump. Erdogan appeals to the president’s taste for swaggering autocrats; MBS, the grandson of King Abdulaziz, conqueror of Saudi Arabia, is the quintessence of dynastic power that appeals to Trump’s neo-tsarism.
The emergence of Pakistan as regional player is the culmination of Pakistani dreams of Islamic leadership since its independence in 1947. It is surprising because the country is a hybrid of intermittent democracy, feudal dynasticism, fervent Islamism and praetorian rule, often close to bankruptcy and mayhem.
Yet Munir and his fey frontman, premier Shehbaz Sharif, dynast of a perennial power family, have leveraged the Trumpian triptych of state, family and business to thrive in the presidential court — Trump calls Munir “my favourite field marshal” — and become mediator with Iran.
The pact is aimed at the two Middle Eastern powers who are regarded as dangerous threats — most immediately, a rampaging but wounded Iran, which is bombarding the US allies Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. The Iranians regard their Arab neighbours with imperious disdain — Ayatollah Khomeini called the Saudis “the camelgrazers of Riyadh and barbarians of Najd” — while the present leaders have long plotted to destroy the “family states” of the Gulf, “even before we get to destroy Israel”. The feeling is mutual: as soon as the Iranians were vulnerable after the fall of the Shah, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, funded by the Saudis.
This is all recent history: the Revolutionary Guard generals who now command Iran under their hidden (possibly dead) supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei earned their spurs as twentysomething officers in that Eighties war.
Iran’s tyranny is battered, its economy shattered, the blood barely dry from its slaughter of 40,000 protesters in January, and it has lost vassals — Hamas decimated, Hezbollah weakened, Syria fallen — but has been preparing for this war for decades, which its Shia theology, apocalyptic Mahdism, murderous tyranny, mosaic strategy, geographical assets and anti-western resistance radicalism qualify it to fight.
The pact is also aimed at Israel, which, since October 7, will no longer tolerate local threats on its borders. Spectacular in tactics and technology but exhausted in strategy and war-weary, it is overstretched and struggling to bank its early gains because of the poisonous antics of extremist firestarters in its shambolic government.
But despite diplomatic froideur in Europe, Israel has new alliances. That with the UAE through the Abraham Accords has deepened; as has the link with Greece. Israel and India are bonding over their horror at Pakistan’s new prominence. Then there is America.
The Mecca Pact is a tonic for the chronic vertigo and painful whiplash that MBS and the Gulf powers are experiencing from Trump. It is not the swagger and lucre of his neo-tsarism that they object to but the wild unpredictability and social-media rhodomontades, as well as the failure of the US to protect its allies and, alarmingly, its own bases. The US has always been feckless: “It’s dangerous to be America’s enemy but to be America’s friend is fatal,” said Henry Kissinger.
But after this Third Gulf war, no one will trust America again — hence the Saudis are making other security arrangements, what traders call a “hedge”, that do not exclude American alliance or even one day (if ever the Israelis open a pathway towards some definition of Palestinian statehood) the Abraham Accords.
Yet all of this is based on vulnerability. Saudi Arabia, the world’s eighth-largest arms buyer, found its American jets and brilliant pilots did not defeat the Houthis, safe in the caves of their northern stronghold Sadah, during a brutal war that started in 2015 and is still going on. The kingdom faces attacks from south and north, Houthi and Iranian. But is the pact really a new Nato? Would Pakistan and Turkey fight the Houthis, yet alone Iran? Doubtful.
Turkey is a clever player of the international system, having squeezed billions out of the EU to control its refugees, occupied zones of Syria and Iraq, not to mention Cyprus, without any penalties. But its Nato membership is a restraint as well as a boon, while its success depends in part on the prestige of the ailing but wily Erdogan, who has mismanaged its economy and resorts to brazen repression to restrain rising opposition.
If Turkey clashed with Israel or Iran, would the other two join? Pakistan brandishes the trophy of the only “Islamic bomb”, as its father-premier Ali Bhutto called it, and it hates Israel — it sent jets to fight the Israelis in the Yom Kippur War.
But if Pakistan became embroiled in the Middle East, its Indian flank would be temptingly vulnerable — and co-ordinated between Delhi and Jerusalem; its Afghan gadfly might not be able to resist its other flank; and would the Saudis and Turks really be on for fighting India? Impossible. Pakistan may really be in this for the prestige and Saudi billions. Last, the pact lacks the greatest Arab state, Egypt, restrained by its treaty with Israel.
Amid freefalling flux and dangerous jeopardy, Middle Eastern powers are rehearsing different conjunctions in their desperate instinct to find security and stability. This is partly reaction to, and reflection of, the new multiplayer world game. Just beneath the three mega-powers (US, China and a diminished Russia) loom energetic new continental powers, unrestrained by Cold War ideology and alliances, and able to follow their own interests in a scramble for power and safety that less resembles the 19th century, more the world before the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th.
Rise of the new middle powers
These powers come in all sizes: the empire states, Iran and Turkey, sophisticated societies who combine versions of Islamism with aspirations to recapture the glories of historic empires; the dynamic, chaotic war democracy Israel; the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia; and what I call the boutique powers, the UAE and Qatar, who created a new template as luxury monarchies that in their cosmopolitan success have been a standing rebuke to the grim Mahdist praetorians of bleak Iran.
The civil war in Sudan, by far the greatest humanitarian tragedy in the Middle East since 2023, with 400,000 slaughtered and 12 million displaced, has become an arena for uninhibited power competition between Middle Eastern powers: Turks, Emiratis, Saudis, Iranians and Egyptians.
The Middle East is strategically essential to any world power for all sorts of reasons — geographical and geological as well as its multiethnic, multi-sectarian composition and the way its states were formed after the world wars. But behind the fray of the Third Gulf war, something else is happening. The Middle East itself is ceasing to be a distinct theatre.
Starting around the time that Britain took over direct rule of India, the expression “Middle East” was favoured by the imperial powers Britain and France since it lay between the British Raj and home metropoles. It was closely related to the “Near East”, which was linked to the Eastern Question about the future of the Ottoman Empire, from its capital Constantinople to the Middle Eastern domains it ruled for 400 years.
After the Ottoman and western empires had departed, the Soviets and Americans conducted their rivalries in convenient spheres — southeast Asia, Latin America, as well as the Middle East. Even then the local potentates — the Shah of Iran, Nasser of Egypt, Nuri al-Said of royal Iraq and Saddam of Baathist Iraq, Assad of Syria and democratic premiers of Israel, from Ben-Gurion to Rabin and Netanyahu — were experts at both playing off the superpowers and doing what they wanted anyway. At times American hegemony was an opportunity for the region — the Oslo Accords, for example, between Israel and Palestinians came close to settling that insoluble conundrum.
But 9/11 diverted America’s power into destroying Saddam’s Iraq instead of Iran. Tehran exploited US vulnerability and the removal of Iraq to forge an informal empire of what its paramilitary maestro General Soleimani called the Six Armies, including Hamas and Hezbollah, that would defend Iran with Arab blood on Arab land.
But Hamas’s October 7 slaughter demonstrated the perils of proxies: ultimately the proxy lights a fuse that leads straight back to the patron. The fate of Iranian power is yet to be decided but its eclipse — along with America’s mixed performance, Israel’s inconclusive semi-successes and the Russia-Ukraine war — have combined to break down the last boundaries of the traditional Middle East.
The best way to understand this is to glance at the foreign advisers or troops who are, in large or small numbers, now present in wider Arabia: there is nothing new about the American presence in Gulf bases but now there are Ukrainian advisers setting up anti-missile systems, 10,000 Pakistani troops and jets in Saudi Arabia, Iranian advisers in Yemen and Israelis with anti-missile systems in UAE.
These are striking developments: however small the Israeli contingent, there have not been Jewish warriors in Arabia since the Jewish kingdom of Himyar (Yemen) between AD390-500 and certainly not since the triumph of the Prophet Muhammad. As for Ukraine, a state that has only fully existed for 35 years is now a world military power sophisticated enough to station advisers in the region.
What we are seeing is the convergence of theatres: regions that we have long regarded as separate and distinct are increasingly interlinked and fusing. The first is the Russia-Ukraine theatre. Second is southern Europe — the Byzantine theatre — between Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Israel.
Third are the new powers of the former Romanov tsardom, central Asia and Caucasus: Azerbaijan, the oil-rich Caspian republic ruled by the Aliev dynasty, is close to both Turkey and Israel; Uzbekistan is close to Turkey; Kazakhstan has just signed the Abraham Accords with Israel.
Fourth is south Asia, where, as we have seen, India and Pakistan are seeking Middle Eastern allies. Fifth is a conflict that is already hot and murderous: the battle of east Africa, including the genocidal conflict in Sudan in which many Middle Eastern powers have stakes. Ethiopia is allied with Israel and Somaliland, where it hopes to get a port.
It is planning to damn the Nile on which Egypt depends for its lifegiving Nilotic lushness: Egypt threatens war. Ethiopia also aspires to a port in Eritrea, which in turn is allied with Egypt and Saudi. This could become the War of the Horn.
The sixth theatre is already in flames: the Sahel — that band of coup-stricken failed states backed variously by Russia, France and the US, including Mali, Chad and Niger, who are fighting Islamic State/al-Qaeda militias that could sweep into northern Nigeria or west Africa or through the failed state of Libya in the north to menace the Levant or join the Sudanese war.
Potential merging of six theatres
These six theatres could ultimately merge into a much larger conflagration. A flashover — that moment when a housefire expands from a room to an inferno — could lead to a Third World War; but more likely it will lead to interlinked alliances and intermittent connected conflicts, particularly in Africa.
The US is suffering a crisis of both arms and credibility in Iran, but an armed blockade was always a better strategy than hot war and there are signs that a determined blockade may be starting to damage Iran, for all its defiance. Notwithstanding its follies and inconsistencies, America will remain the megapower, with the tradition, the relationships and the power to maintain a presence here.
Just listing these convergences and the potential flashovers demonstrates how desperately the world needs a judicious, measured US that will still have the authority to guard its interests and those of the open world — and prevent the worst scenarios.
Whatever its role, we need a different name for the Middle East and a different way of looking at the emerging single theatre from the Sahel to India. That is how the leaders of the region are thinking; EU and US politicians and business leaders need to catch up.
West Asia was once fashionable, but it leaves out Africa and Europe. Swana (Southwest Asia, north Africa), favoured by decolonialist activists, excludes southern Europe (Greece, the Caucasus) and east Africa and the Horn, where much of the action is taking place.
The Greater Middle East (Game) maintains the neo-imperialism of the Middle East. West Asia, south Europe, Africa (Wasef) does the job but the most sonorous is Semastia (South Europe, Middle East, Africa north and east, and west Asia).
Whatever name does or doesn’t catch on, this is perhaps the only harmless part of this potentially lethal tournament of power that marks the end of what we used to call the Middle East.
The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East by Simon Sebag Montefiore will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on August 25
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