This article is Part I to 'Understanding the Modern Middle East.' Part II, that discussed current U.S. opportunities can be found here.
Board of Peace? The fall of Iran? A new Gaza? Republic of Somaliland? Syrian Druze and Kurds? A resurgent ISIS? Oppressed Christians? Saudi Arabia vs. the UAE? Qatari influence of American universities? The Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization?
Americans confused by the flurry of new stories flowing out of the Middle East are in good company. Many of our leading foreign policy “experts” and policymakers are in the same boat. Why? For the same reason that their predictions about the region have been so consistently wrong: They’ve been operating within a fundamentally flawed framework for more than a century.
The key to understanding today’s Middle East—and in fact, everything that’s happened in the region since the Allied victory in WWI ended the Ottoman Empire—is the region’s largest group, Sunni Arabs. Their primary goal since at least 1915 has been restoring the imperial structure that defined the region for most of 2700 years. Over the course of the past century, competing theories of empire and competing claims for the imperial throne have riven the Sunni Arabs—adding to the confusion—but this central story of the region’s dominant demographic frames all else.
The secondary story—largely a reaction to the first—feels more fragmented. Like all empires, the Ottoman Empire was both multicultural and supremacist. Home to many nations and faiths, the Sunni Turks were first among unequals, followed by non-Turkish Sunnis—notably the Arabs. All other subjects—Christians, Jews, Shiites, Kurds, Druze, Alawites, Yazidis, and others—enjoyed measures of internal autonomy that helped preserve their national identities while suffering (often brutally) discriminatory treatment.
As the Empire crumbled, the spirit of European romantic nationalism took hold—as did the spirit of European fascism. The former gave rise to national self-determination movements proclaiming the rights of these long-subjugated nations. The latter announced newly-formed states claiming to obliterate all prior distinctions and define new identities around state citizenship—an artificial designation that only a brutal strongman could impose. The Baath Party, whose competing factions tormented Iraq (under Saddam) and Syria (under the Assads), was explicitly fascist.
By mid-century, however, various Arab elites understood that the restoration of the empire, which they all claimed to want as a matter of theory, would undermine the wealth and status they’d established within the region’s new states. The Sunni Arab world’s first serious claimant to imperial restoration—Nasser’s Egypt-based pan-Arabist United Arab Republic—thus warred constantly with Arab royalists. At its bloodiest, the Yemeni Civil War of 1962-70 pitted American-backed Saudi proxies against Soviet-backed Egyptians.
Few framings of the region’s post-Ottoman century seem willing to recognize that every significant development flows from a combination of these main themes: The Sunni Arab-led drive to restore imperial rule, fights among Sunni Arabs to define the nature and leadership of that new empire, the push for minority self-determination, and the fascist utopian/authoritarian drive to impose new identities for the modern world.
Even the one movement that may seem to be an exception—Iran’s Khomeinist revolution—is really only a twist on those themes. The Islamic Republic was never truly about Iran; it was a Shiite awakening. Khomeinism combined resurgent Shiite nationalism with the imperial drive. Like Hitler’s Nazism, its essential claim was that nefarious forces were restraining those who, by all rights, deserved to dominate and rule.
The Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s pitted this nascent Shiite empire against a Sunni majority. When it ended and Saddam moved to unify the Sunnis beneath his imperial rule, the royalists again balked. His ejection from Kuwait in 1991 buried the idea of a secular Arab empire, allowing the older dream of a Sunni Islamic empire to retake center stage.
Meanwhile, the Arab/Israeli conflict came to define the front lines of the battle between imperialism and self-determination. Because Zionism proved to be the region’s only truly successful movement for minority self-determination (at least to date), it remains by far the greatest affront to the imperial drive. For those seeking to resurrect a Levantine empire—secular or Islamic, Sunni or Shiite—any ethnic homeland carved out of imperial territory is illegitimate.
Lebanon during its Christian heyday and Syria under the Alawite Assads at least pretended to remain within the fold. Only “the Zionist entity,” the Jewish State of Israel, proudly opted out of the whole. Sunni Arab leadership—with backing, at different times, from Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Islamic Republic—conscripted a permanent imperial army to fight it. Their hapless conscripts, deprived of agency and individuality, simultaneously embraced as brother Arabs, consigned to the status of permanently stateless refugees, and reviled as worthless cannon fodder, became known as “the Palestinians.”
As the PLO Charter makes clear (and as the charters of UNRWA and Hamas, along with all League of Nations documents moving the region into its post-Ottoman era) confirm, differentiation among Sunni Arabs never existed beyond the tribal or village levels. National identities were non-existent.
The Palestinian identity was cultivated exclusively to ensure that the region could never stabilize with a Jewish state in its midst. The definition of “Palestinian” was fixed to mean all Arabs capable of forwarding a narrow, personal or ancestral, claim to territory within the Jewish homeland. Any Arab who met the definition was trapped. Their lives were meaningless, their children weapons, their suffering a boon to the cause.
For the past century, the epicenter of the struggle between minority self-determination and revanchist imperialism has pitted Zionism and its allies against Palestinian Liberation (or “Free Palestine,” in its snappy contemporary update) and the forces behind it.
Over the past two decades, the forces of empire and the forces of self-determination have both grown stronger. ISIS forged and governed the largest, longest-standing Caliphate since Ataturk abolished the institution in 1924. It did so in ways that paid no heed to international borders, which it viewed as a foreign and infidel imposition into the rightful empire of Islam. Though American forces during the first Trump Administration defeated ISIS as a territorial force, its ideology and much of its organizational structure remain. Meanwhile, 2020’s Abraham Accords broke the taboo on far more than Arab alliance with Israel; it provided the first effective mechanism for individual Arab states to elevate their national interests above the imperial drive, not only as a matter of practice (which had long been done) but as a proud, open, ideological and strategic choice.
Confusion about today’s Middle East stems almost entirely from a miscast narrative about the region’s post-Ottoman development. See the history clearly and the significance of the present day emerges—as does the path that best serves both American interests and American ideals.
