Chaos is sweeping the Arab world. Tunisia is in political disarray and can barely control its borders. Libya hardly exists: Tripoli is not the capital of a country but the weak point of arbitration for tribes and militias in far-flung desert reaches. Egypt wallows in a political stasis in which the government has trouble functioning, ideological divisions between the military and Islamists split the country and guns and vigilantism abound. The Sinai Peninsula has become a mini-Afghanistan. The government of Yemen may on a good day control half of its territory. Syria is in a full-fledged civil war with over 100,000 dead. Iraq, too, barely exists as a state and low-intensity violence there is a feature of life. Bahrain and Jordan are much weakened states compared to previous decades. Significantly, none of this anywhere will be solved anytime soon.
The conventional wisdom is that such chaos is bad for the United States: that anarchy anywhere presents a challenge and threat to the American people. That is certainly true in a values sense, particularly about what it says about our planet. I wrote about that in a 1994 Atlantic Monthly essay, "The Coming Anarchy," in which, among other things, I foresaw chaos in places like Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, both of which collapsed a few years later. But what if that is not true in terms of the cold logic of power politics? What if Middle Eastern chaos, in terms of America's geopolitical interests, is not quite as bad as we think?
But don't transnational Islamist terrorists like al Qaeda thrive in weakly governed areas? To a degree, yes. And there is a significant "threat stream" emerging now from new and more autonomous al Qaeda cells throughout a Middle East crumbling into anarchy, as Washington experts and officials have correctly noted during the recent spate of embassy shutdowns. There is another side to the story, however. Transnational terrorists certainly exist in weakly governed areas -- witness post-Gadhafi Libya and the attack on the U. S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi last year. But really thriving is another matter. Thriving in an ungoverned area means to have a zone of control, where you don't have to worry about security threats, so that you can build training camps and develop plans for sophisticated attacks on third countries -- like al Qaeda did in Afghanistan in the late 1990s through 2001. Yet, that is hard to do when anarchy is all around. In fact, Afghanistan back in the late 1990s was not wholly in chaos. Rather, substantial areas were governed by the Taliban, which formally hosted al Qaeda. The areas under Taliban control constituted a hostile state more than a chaotic one. Thus, while smaller attacks emanating from al Qaeda are more likely now because of widespread anarchy -- again, witness Benghazi -- an attack on the level of 9/11 probably requires a more stable environment in parts of an otherwise unstable country. Think Yemen.
Transnational jihadists currently establishing themselves throughout the Middle East are primarily a threat to their host governments, such as they still exist. Yet, from the American perspective the greatest security threat to the regional balance of power is not so much a chaotic state as a stable and strongly governed one: Iran. Iran, precisely because it is not in chaos, is now able to develop a nuclear capacity through a sophisticated and dispersed network of facilities that the Americans and Israelis have found difficult to dismantle without going to war. Would only Iran have been in chaos for years now -- then its nuclear program would likely not be so far along!
Because Iran is both radical and strongly governed, Israel's security is fundamentally undermined, even as chaos elsewhere in the Middle East has been in some ways favorable to Israel, an American ally by the way. The Israeli military recently announced that because militaries in Egypt and Syria, as well as in other Arab states, no longer present a conventional threat to its territory, Israel now has the luxury to concentrate more on unconventional threats like guerrilla infiltrations and cyberattacks. Thus, thanks to chaos in the Arab world, Israel no longer faces a strategic threat on its borders: Rather, the threat has deteriorated to a tactical one. Hezbollah and Hamas cannot send tanks into Israel's population zones like Egypt and Syria -- back when they were strongly governed states -- were once theoretically able to do.
