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Middle Eastern regimes act at a subsistence level: Their sole concern is survival, and all of their energies are focused on staying in power. They turn their security forces, both military and police, into tools for preventing domestic dissent. They resist liberalizing their economies, since reducing the public sector -- which dominates most economies in the region -- translates into a loss of government influence. The net result is stagnation and a violent resistance to change.
Having allocated most of their resources for internal purposes, Middle Eastern governments have few levers for shaping external events. Traditionally, they have relied instead on the region's strategic location as their key instrument for managing interference.
Now, however, the global dynamic has changed and the United States has become the only superpower. The impact of this reality on the Middle East is catastrophic: Regimes have lost their tool for managing external involvement. At the same time, their domestic legitimacy has been eroded by economic stagnation and a growing sense of disinheritance among the masses.
Divisive Diversity
Stretching in a desert-clad arc from the Atlantic shores of Morocco to the mountainscapes of eastern Iran, from Turkey's Bosporus straits to Yemen's Gulf of Aden, the Middle East is an ethnic, linguistic, religious, economic and geographic hodgepodge of nations residing near the bottom of the global political hierarchy.
Arab Muslims make up the single largest ethno-religious-linguistic group in the region, but there is a cornucopia of other ethnic and religious identities -- including Jews, Christian, Druze, Berber, Kurd and Circassian, to name a few. The diversity works against the region rather than for it: The lack of unity permeates every aspect of life and shapes relations between the groups, between the government and its various constituencies and between states. The groups compete for control over natural resources, including oil, land and water. They also vie for a voice in the government and by extension, a role in the international community.
Even within the Arab-Muslim group, unity has been elusive, despite many calls for pan-Arab and pan-Islamic movements. Instead, Arabs tend to fall back into patterns of nationalism and tribalism. Though they often strike similar rhetorical notes -- particularly in relation to the Israel-Palestinian issue -- unified, actionable positions are rare, occurring only at the national and tribal levels. And even on the Israeli-Palestinian score, bilateral actions are the norm. For instance, Egypt suffered a harsh diplomatic backlash in the Muslim world, losing investment from the oil-rich Gulf and enduring political snubs from the region as a whole, for its 1979 peace treaty with Israel -- a move that was dictated by its domestic political situation and its relationship with the outside world, rather than its relations with other Arab nations.
These fractures, in turn, create an opportunity for outside powers to exploit. The diversity of peoples in the region reflects a long and sordid history of external influence, intervention and exploitation by outside powers. For instance, France has long maintained its relationship with the Maronites in Lebanon as a means of countering British influence in the region and shaping the Levant in its favor. The difference now is that the entire spectrum of Middle Eastern society is aware of the disparities between the region and the rest of the world -- and that the governments of most of these states are incapable of reversing this trend and re-empowering the region.
International Arena: Political Impotence
Because of its location, the Middle East long has played a central role in international politics.
Situated between the Far East and Europe, it is the world's most-trafficked crossroads. The discovery of oil, the nectar of the industrialized world, added to the region's significance and gave it a steady income -- whether directly, as in the Gulf States, or indirectly through expatriate workers' remittances, as in the Levant and North Africa.
Geography and oil wealth, however, have not sufficiently empowered governments in the region to manage the dramatic change brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The end of the Cold War drastically shifted Middle Eastern governments' relationship with external powers. Many states lost their sponsor in Moscow, and this translated into a loss of not only financial aid and arms but also -- and more importantly -- to the loss of their one method of balancing external pressures and interference.
During the Cold War, Syria could rely on its relationship with the Soviet Union to balance pressure from the United States. Without that recourse, Damascus now cannot defend against a diplomatic offensive aimed at forcing Syria to hand over Baath party officials who crossed the border during the U.S. war in Iraq. Similarly, Egypt once could switch its alliance from Moscow to Washington, knowing that its strategic location would ensure the flow of aid to Cairo, no matter who the paymaster. Now that option is gone. The United States is the only game in town, and Middle Eastern states must play by its rules or not play at all.
Iran and Libya, to a lesser extent, have tried to play outside the U.S. sphere of influence. Between the 1991 Gulf War and Sept. 10, 2001, Washington was willing to let Iran maneuver slightly in order to reenter the international arena, taking care to renew harsh economic sanctions while tacitly encouraging a reformist movement that advocated détente with the United States.
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