From the point of view of Americans, the lands within the collapsing Ottoman Empire were an intermediate zone between Europe \u2014 the Eurasian subcontinent to the East of the United States \u2014 and the Indian subcontinent.<\/a> [1]<\/a> That\u2019s why Alfred Thayer Mahan decided they should be called the \u201cMiddle East,\u201d not the \u201cNear East.\u201d\u00a0In time, even the people who lived there began to use this American-minted term. The largest newspaper in the Arab world is \u0627\u0644\u0634\u0631\u0642 \u0627\u0644\u0623\u0648\u0633\u0637 \u2013 which means \u201cthe Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n The name persists, but the people living in the region no longer acquiesce in foreign definitions of their homelands\u2019 place in world affairs. Ottoman cosmopolitanism disappeared when the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate expired. After flirting with a variety of transnational ideological identities \u2014 including pan-Arabism, Ba`athism, Judaism, Sunni, and Shi`ite Islamism \u2014 the region\u2019s peoples have redefined themselves as \u201cnation states.\u201d T\u00fcrkiye<\/a> [2]<\/a>\u00a0and the fragments of the Ottoman Sultanate\u2019s Levantine territories carved into semi-independent, neo-colonially administered countries by British and French bureaucrats have acquired well-defined international personalities.<\/p>\n Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria have come to embrace strong national identities that have survived multiple external and internal challenges to their existence.<\/p>\n Iran has broken with its neocolonialist patrons, installed a defiantly independent Shi`ite government, and asserted its own sphere of influence in West Asia. In this century alone, Iraq has experienced a period of governance as a \u201cthugdom,\u201d an anarchy imposed by a botched American effort at hit-and-run democratization, and the slaughter by foreign and domestic forces of at least half a million of its population.<\/p>\n Israel has degenerated from the vaguely humanistic vision of early Jewish nationalism to today\u2019s Zionist negation of universal Jewish values.\u00a0The indigenous people of Palestine have been the continuous object of relentless genocidal dispossession and brutal oppression by the Zionist settler state. Lebanon, once the playground of French confessional politics and Arab hedonism, has become ungovernable.\u00a0Syria has been isolated, vivisected, and devastated by coalitions of domestic forces supported by external actors, including the Gulf Arabs, Israel, T\u00fcrkiye, and the United States.<\/p>\n Syria continues to be the locus of a variety of proxy wars, including between Israel and Iran, Russia and the United States, and T\u00fcrkiye and Kurdish separatists.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, once proudly pan-Islamist rather than pan-Arabist or nationalist, has embraced nationalism. It celebrates its official founding as a state in 1932 and employs the international \u2014 not the Hijra \u2014 calendar to do so. Egypt retains its distinctive character and cultural identity under a comprehensive military dictatorship. Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) practice independent foreign policies and exercise influence not just regionally but globally. Kuwait \u2014 which is surrounded by Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia \u2014 is appropriately cautious. Bahrain defers to Saudi Arabia and serves it as a useful proxy in contacts with Israel and the United States military.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What has not changed is West Asia\u2019s geopolitical centrality. It is where Africa, Asia, and Europe and the routes that connect them meet.\u00a0The region\u2019s cultures cast a deep shadow across northern Africa, Central, South and Southeast Asia, and the Mediterranean.\u00a0 It is the epicenter of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three \u201cAbrahamic religions\u201d that together shape the faiths and moral standards of over three-fifths of humankind. This gives the region global reach.\u00a0But as the countries of West Asia seek their own destinies, they have graduated from subordination to great power rivalries and ended their vulnerability to external efforts to impose alien ideologies like Marxism or representative government.\u00a0Political Islam, their original answer to these foreign systems of government, is in retreat.\u00a0The peoples of the region are reinventing themselves in accordance with their own traditions of monarchy, military dictatorship, consultative politics, parliamentary democracy, or theocracy.<\/p>\n As the rule of law everywhere yields to populism (including in our own country), Aristotle\u2019s observation that democracy tends to degenerate into demagoguery, autocracy, and the tyranny of the majority seems to be being born out. Various forms of elected autocracy are flourishing in Russia and Turkey and taking root in India and Israel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n The era of foreign dominance of the crossroads of the world that began with Napoleon\u2019s 1798 invasion and occupation of Egypt is clearly over. This should not surprise us. It has been two-thirds of a century since Egypt forced the British and French to cede control of the Suez Canal. Britain abandoned imperial ambitions east of Suez 56 years ago. Forty-four years have passed since Iranians expelled their Shah, who had been installed in an infamous Anglo-American regime-change operation a quarter century earlier. The Cold War, which long dominated regional politics, ended 34 years ago.\u00a0 \u201c9\/11,\u201d which fundamentally estranged the region from the United States, occurred more than two decades \u2014 a full generation \u2014 ago. The Arab uprisings of 2011 are a distant, garbled memory for all but their participants. The world has undergone fundamental change, and so has Afro-Asia \u2014 West Asia and Northeast Africa.<\/p>\n Among the changes is the reduced appeal of alien intellectual traditions and systems of government.\u00a0Marxism is pretty much dead as an ideology except at the Central Party School in Beijing and a few institutions of higher learning in the Anglosphere.\u00a0As the rule of law everywhere yields to populism (including in our own country), Aristotle\u2019s observation that democracy tends to degenerate into demagoguery, autocracy, and the tyranny of the majority seems to be being born out. Various forms of elected autocracy are flourishing in Russia and Turkey and taking root in India and Israel.\u00a0In this context, Washington\u2019s efforts to portray world events as driven by a grand contest between democracy and authoritarianism have little appeal abroad, where they strike many as both irrelevant and seriously detached from reality.<\/p>\n But this is only part of the reason that, by contrast with the Cold War, the countries of West Asia (with the notable exception of Iran) have opted for nonalignment between the United States and America\u2019s designated Chinese and Russian adversaries.\u00a0To have called West Asian client states and dependencies like Israel and the Gulf Arabs \u201callies\u201d of any great power was to seriously misunderstand and misdescribe their status. They were and, to some extent, remain \u201cprotected states,\u201d consumers of security supplied by foreign backers rather than providers or guarantors of security to these backers. States in the region have been more likely to embroil their patrons in wars than to save them from enmeshment in them.\u00a0Now, rather than attaching themselves to a single protector, these states have filled their dance cards with multiple great power partners.\u00a0They offer fealty to none.<\/p>\n Iran, too, was originally nonaligned between East and West.\u00a0But decades of U.S. policies of ostracism and \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d left it nowhere else to go but into the arms of America\u2019s adversaries.\u00a0Iran has now turned to them to help it evict American influence from the region. In support of Moscow\u2019s proxy war with the United States in Ukraine, Tehran has become a supplier of drones, artillery shells, tank ammunition, and other weapons systems to Russia.\u00a0And it is working with India and Russia to develop an International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) that will bypass the NATO-controlled sea route through the Bosphorus as well as the Suez Canal.\u00a0The INSTC will link Russia with the Iranian port of Chabahar, connecting Moscow to Bombay and other ports on the Indian west coast.<\/p>\n Unlike the United States, China has worked hard to maintain untroubled relations with all the nations of the region. This has been of particular benefit to Iran, recently helping it to restore normal relations with previously hostile Arab neighbors. Among other benefits, this rapprochement breaks the American-imposed embargo by opening Iran to trade and investment from the capital-rich societies across the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, new roads, railways, and energy pipelines financed by China\u2019s Belt and Road Initiative promise to restore Iran to its premodern role as a regional hub for both east-west and north-south economic exchanges.<\/p>\n As Iran did four decades ago, the Arab states of the region are now also in the process of freeing themselves from past patron-client relationships.\u00a0Their interactions with Britain, France, the Soviet Union, or the United States were inherently unequal.\u00a0In return for protection, these countries offered obsequious deference to their patrons\u2019 interests and policies but undertook no reciprocal obligations.\u00a0They made no commitments to aid in the defense of their patrons\u2019 regional interests, which included security of energy supplies, assured overflight and transit, market access, counterterrorism, and the exemption of Israel from global pressure to conform to the norms of international law.<\/p>\n Israel now faces some of the same dilemmas in its relationships with the United States and other external powers that its Arab neighbors have long confronted. It chafes under its continuing overdependence on support from the United States and sees aligning with America against China and Russia as contrary to its own interests.\u00a0 Israel can no longer claim shared values with American idealists, though it retains the enthusiastic support of diehard Zionists as well as U.S. racists and religious bigots.\u00a0Like others in its region, Israel is under pressure from the United States to change both its foreign and domestic policies, though fear of political reprisals or the loss of electoral support from the American Israel lobby continues to suppress public criticism of it by U.S. politicians.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the final decade of the 20th<\/sup>\u00a0century \u2014 a period that the late Charles Krauthammer evocatively named \u201cthe unipolar moment\u201d in global affairs \u2014 the United States eclipsed all other external powers as the protector and patron of both the Arab states of the region and Israel.\u00a0In 1973, in response to Egypt\u2019s surprise attack on Israeli forces occupying the Sinai, the United States provided massive military support that enabled a successful Israeli counteroffensive. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, Washington came to the aid of the Gulf Arabs against Iraqi aggression but then began to levy ideological and other demands that they found inappropriate and unacceptable.\u00a0After \u201c9\/11,\u201d Americans embraced Islamophobia.\u00a0As the second decade of the 21st<\/sup> century began, the United States not only failed to support erstwhile prot\u00e9g\u00e9s like Hosni Mubarak against overthrow but \u2014 in the name of \u201cdemocracy\u201d \u2014 appeared to applaud their removal from power.\u00a0These events deprived previous U.S. pledges of protection of client states and their leaders in West Asia of almost all credibility. The rest of it disappeared when Washington failed to respond to various moves by Iran against Gulf Arab interests and freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n Now, as the Gulf Arabs separate themselves from past deference to and exclusive dependence on the United States, they do not seek and will not accept subordination to China, India, Russia, or others outside their region. The protection of these other external actors is, in any event, not on offer.<\/p>\n What is happening is not, as Washington mindlessly asserts, an effort by China, Russia, or any other great power to replace American hegemony in the so-called \u201cMiddle East\u201d with its own. Nor are the states of the region either open to or in search of alternative dependent relationships. They are in active pursuit of strategic autonomy through diversification away from political and economic overdependence on the United States.<\/p>\n Such autonomy will not come easily. In practice, there are limits to the extent to which the states of West Asia can hope to wean themselves from military reliance on America. No other great power has either the disposition or the capability to accept the burdens of defending them against each other or external enemies as the United States once did. West Asian states are happy to exploit \u201cgreat power rivalry,\u201d but they are not driven by it. If they cannot extract defense commitments from great external powers, they must take responsibility for their own defense. They are beginning to do so.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Israel faces an especially challenging transition.\u00a0Zionism\u2019s Ashkenazi founders agreed with their European Christian persecutors that Jews were an ethnic group rather than a religious community. As such, Zionism asserted, Jews were as entitled to self-determination as other ethnic minorities in Europe\u2019s collapsing empires.\u00a0Zionists sought Jewish independence in the mythic Jewish homeland, Palestine, which \u2014 with the racist condescension toward non-European native peoples that was typical of the time \u2014 they described as \u201ca land without a people,\u201d dismissing the resident Palestinian population as unworthy of acknowledgment, let alone recognition. This sowed the seeds of today\u2019s Zionist state, which practices segregation against Arab Israelis in Israel proper, denies basic rights to West Bank Palestinians, seeks to drive them into exile by evicting them from their homes, destroying their farms, and conducting pogroms against them, and deliberately immiserates and occasionally massacres the nearly 2.2 million Palestinians it has imprisoned in Gaza.<\/p>\n This behavior, not surprisingly, incites both wider Arab hatred of Israel and global abhorrence of Zionism. It jeopardizes the US-sponsored \u201cAbraham Accords<\/a>\u201d by making them seem a cynical project of autocratic Arab ruling families imposed over the opposition of most of their subjects, who continue to see Israel as an inherently illegitimate, foreign-supported, anti-Arab settler state. Since Iran turned against it, Israel has been unable to develop any friends in its own region, despite strenuous American efforts to help it do so. Its denials of ready access to Muslims seeking to worship at the al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem (Islam\u2019s third holy city), not to mention Jewish extremists\u2019 escalating assaults on the site, offend the global Muslim community.\u00a0Only in India, where Hindutva is on the rise, have Israeli extremists found a religious nationalism to match their own antipathies to Christianity and Islam.<\/p>\n The extremist parties that now control the Israeli government provide daily evidence of their racist hatred for Palestinians, disdain for American and European Jews, denigration of liberal Israelis, contempt for\u00a0goyim<\/em>, and full-blooded support for and incitement of settler thuggery and violence.\u00a0They have just overridden the independence of their country\u2019s judiciary. They propose to give its government the power to lock up Jewish Israeli citizens in pre-trial detention in much the same way that it has long imprisoned stateless Palestinians.<\/p>\n These extremists are creating a deep rift between Jewish Israelis, destabilizing Israel\u2019s economy, catalyzing a loss of confidence in Israel\u2019s future, and causing foreign investors to flee.\u00a0<\/strong>The streets remain filled with protesters and much of the Israeli air force is on strike.\u00a0Abraham Lincoln\u2019s prescient observation (in 1858) that \u201ca house divided cannot stand\u201d seems very relevant to Israel\u2019s future.\u00a0Israeli threats to attack Iran now sound less like plans than like bravado \u2014 efforts to use a foreign threat to paper over domestic divisions and conceal Israeli weakness, while warning others in the region that Israel remains its premier military power.<\/p>\n Zionist excesses are not just dividing Israelis \u2014 many of whom are emigrating \u2014 but seriously disillusioning and estranging previously sympathetic and supportive Jews in Europe and the Americas.\u00a0 Their backing and that of fundamentalist Christians has been as essential to sustaining Israel as that of European Catholics was to the survival of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem in the 11th<\/sup>\u00a0and 13th<\/sup>\u00a0centuries.\u00a0Israel will find it more difficult than its Arab neighbors to diversify the sources of its international support.\u00a0No great power other than the United States seems prepared to overlook, let alone subsidize Israel\u2019s brutal oppression of its captive Arab populations.\u00a0And as the international role and stature of its Arab neighbors grow, the willingness of external great powers to offend them can only decline.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Israel\u2019s efforts to avoid taking sides in the Ukraine war despite its dependence on the United States and its large Russian-speaking population have not endeared it to either Washington or Moscow.\u00a0Some of the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs opposed to Russian President Vladimir Putin now reside in or claim citizenship in Israel.\u00a0The United States has adamantly opposed Israeli outreach to China.\u00a0If Israel loses the affections and politico-military protection of Americans, whose support for the Zionist cause now reflects both partisan and generational divisions, it will not find it easy to reposition itself geopolitically.\u00a0Despite the Netanyahu government\u2019s current efforts to cultivate China, India, and Russia, Israel has no feasible alternatives to dependence on the United States.<\/p>\n The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has faced a comparable challenge and responded with its own geopolitical repositioning.\u00a0 Saudi-American estrangement steadily deepened over the twenty-two years since the 9\/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. These attacks led to the successful vilification of Saudi Arabia, other Arab nations, and Islam in American politics. The inability of Americans to distinguish between the Saudi establishment and its al Qaeda enemies was a shock to ordinary, previously pro-American Saudis as well as to the ruling Al Sa`ud. Washington\u2019s subsequent failure to oppose the mobs that toppled Egypt\u2019s Hosni Mubarak \u2014 its longstanding prot\u00e9g\u00e9 \u2014 from power in 2011 then cost it the confidence of the Al Sa`ud and other Arab rulers previously reliant on backing by the United States. Their concerns deepened when the U.S. failed to respond to Iranian-backed attacks on Saudi and Emirati petroleum facilities as well as shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and military bases in Abu Dhabi. The Saudis and other Gulf Arabs saw this as creating an urgent imperative to develop alternatives to reliance on America. They redoubled their efforts to do so.<\/p>\n The gruesome murder of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 cemented the American shift from quiet support for Saudi Arabia to vocal antipathy toward it, overriding President Trump\u2019s narcissistic minuet with it and leading to presidential candidate Joe Biden\u2019s pledge to make both the Kingdom and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman Al-Saud international pariahs.\u00a0President Biden\u2019s subsequent discovery, once in office, that U.S. interests require a cordial and cooperative relationship with the Kingdom led him to a belated effort to court both it and Crown Prince Mohammad.\u00a0This has not succeeded.\u00a0Vocally expressed opprobrium, even if formally retracted, does not encourage fealty.\u00a0U.S. policies based on denunciatory diplomacy, unconditional support for Israel, and total animosity to Iran have clearly exceeded their sell-by date in the Arab Gulf states.<\/p>\n Far from being seen as a pariah, Saudi Arabia is now widely courted as a key player in global and regional geopolitics and finance, with the capacity to offer or withhold crucial cooperation or acquiescence on multiple issues of global concern.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Instead of renewing its previous deference to the United States, Saudi Arabia has built a strong consultative relationship with Russia, which, for all intents and purposes, it has now integrated into OPEC.\u00a0It has courted China, its largest and most promising export market and biggest source of imports.\u00a0The Kingdom is normalizing its relations with Iran, dealing a hard blow to the US-Israeli plan to rope the Gulf Arab states and Israel into an anti-Iranian coalition.\u00a0It has made it clear that, while it is prepared to deal transactionally with Israel, normalization of ties with the Zionist state would cost both the United States and Israel far more than either could ever bring themselves to offer.\u00a0Like Israel and the rest of West Asia (other than Iran), Saudi Arabia has declined to align itself with either the West or Russia in the Ukraine war.\u00a0And \u2014 over American objections \u2014 the Kingdom is now normalizing diplomatic relations with Syria.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Crown Prince Mohammad \u2014 who turned to China, India, and Russia when he was\u00a0persona non grata<\/em>\u00a0in the West \u2014 has since exchanged visits with President Macron of France and President Erdo\u011fan of T\u00fcrkiye.\u00a0He has received President Biden and the former British prime minister and their key subordinates in his homeland.\u00a0He has just been invited to visit London.\u00a0He has doubled down on efforts to craft relations and choose friendships with other countries that, in his judgment, best serve Saudi interests.\u00a0As a result, along with the UAE and Qatar, which have adopted similar Realpolitik-based foreign policies that bypass or challenge American primacy, the Kingdom has emerged as a middle-ranking power with significant global reach.\u00a0At the same time, Riyadh has sought to enhance its regional influence through rapprochement with the Syrian government it spent the previous twelve years trying to overthrow.\u00a0And it has reopened its long-severed dialogue with Hamas.\u00a0Far from being seen as a pariah, Saudi Arabia is now widely courted as a key player in global and regional geopolitics and finance, with the capacity to offer or withhold crucial cooperation or acquiescence on multiple issues of global concern. Consider, for example, the August 5-6 \u00a0peace conference in Jeddah<\/a>, which the Saudis reportedly convened in response to a U.S. request for their help in expanding support for Ukraine in the Global South.<\/p>\n Saudi custody of two of Islam\u2019s three holy cities reinforces human ties to the roughly two billion members of the global Muslim community, for whom it is a religious duty to perform the Hajj or `Umrah pilgrimages.\u00a0Under Crown Prince Mohammad, the Kingdom has tempered its idiosyncratically narrow-minded version of Islam and moved closer to its religion\u2019s tolerant traditions.\u00a0This, and the Kingdom\u2019s leadership of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation and the Islamic Military Counter-Terrorism Coalition has reduced previous frictions with other, more permissive Muslim societies.\u00a0The reduction of religious constraints on individual and group behavior in the Kingdom has begun to enable the flowering of its women\u2019s talents.\u00a0This has also facilitated foreign willingness to invest in Saudi Arabia\u2019s expanding non-oil economy and the mega-projects it has launched as part of \u201cVision 2030.\u201d<\/p>\n Saudi Arabia is far from alone in seeking to expand and diversify its international politico-economic relationships.\u00a0Most commentaries focus on the efforts of the UAE and Qatar to consolidate ties with China and Russia. Like Israel, Dubai is now a major refuge for Russians seeking to avoid the complications to life in their country created by Western sanctions.\u00a0The United States cited the UAE\u2019s cordial military relationship with China as an excuse for aborting the transfer of F-35s the UAE had been promised to incentivize its normalization with Israel.\u00a0But the success of Dubai as an international entrep\u00f4t, business, and financial center is stimulating increasing Saudi competition with the UAE in finance, trade, investment, surveillance technology, and armaments production.\u00a0Saudi Arabia expects that its main investment vehicle, the Public Investment Fund, will have more than $2 trillion by 2030, making it the world\u2019s largest.\u00a0It has applied for membership in the so-called \u2018BRICS\u2019 and its New Development Bank.<\/p>\n The Saudis in particular, after decades of near total dependence on international arms imports, now seek to attract investment in their domestic military industries.\u00a0This is a potential deathblow to the traditional American approach of insisting that the Kingdom and other protected states like the UAE not buy U.S. competitors\u2019 weapons, while Washington simultaneously refuses to sell them U.S. alternatives.\u00a0American policies that equate security with militarism, ignore political, economic, trade, and cultural factors, and rely on sanctions and ostracism rather than diplomatic dialogue have proven seriously counterproductive.\u00a0This explains the paradox that, while U.S. air, naval, and ground forces continue to be present or to exercise in all six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council as well as in Iraq and Syria, the United States is perceived to be in retreat from the region.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As great power dominance of West Asia recedes, the countries of the region are pursuing their own interests there through Realpolitik. This is enabling them to make progress on issues that had long been viewed as intractable. Five months ago, years of efforts by Iraq and Oman to facilitate the restoration of Saudi-Iranian relations culminated in the successful Chinese mediation of rapprochement between the two countries. Since then, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have normalized their previously hostile relations with Syria. Egypt and Turkey have moved to end the rift between them. The so-called \u201cAbraham accords\u2019 by which Bahrain and the UAE established diplomatic relations with Israel are yet another example of self-interested pragmatism producing progress. These accords reflected Arab states\u2019 interest in harnessing the political power of the Israel Lobby in the United States to their advantage as well as in expanded access to U.S. weaponry. The Israel Lobby has since played its desired role, but the United States has failed to deliver the F-35s and other weapons systems it had pledged to provide.<\/p>\n The major exception to forward movement in the region is now the Israel-Palestine issue.\u00a0Rising violence between Israel and its captive Arab populations has halted the development of Israel\u2019s overt ties to Arab states and is estranging Israel from the West.\u00a0 Regional acceptance of Israel, desirable as it is, depends on Israel\u2019s acceptance of the rights of its Arab subjects.\u00a0But there is no current evidence of either American or Israeli willingness to grapple with this issue.\u00a0There has been no \u2018peace process\u2019 for decades now and it has become apparent that what Israel means by \u201cpeace\u201d is Palestinian surrender to Jewish supremacy and dispossession.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sadly, on none of these issues is the United States now able to exercise effective leadership.\u00a0Washington has no ties to Teheran or Damascus. It has strained relations with Riyadh, tense relations with Ankara, stagnant relations with Cairo, and mutually exasperated and deteriorating relations with Jerusalem.\u00a0The region\u2019s move away from the United States is reflected in the efforts of countries there to join the so-called BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organization and to use currencies other than the dollar for trade settlement.\u00a0While they do not wish to sacrifice their relationships with the U.S., regional powers including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt have signaled that they intend to take full advantage of these new openings as they prepare for a post-American, multipolar world.<\/p>\n De-dollarization is part of this evolution. It remains a work in progress but has been accelerated by apprehensions generated by the U.S. and European confiscation of Iran\u2019s, Venezuela\u2019s, and Russia\u2019s dollar and gold reserves. These seizures made a mockery of the fiduciary responsibilities of central banks. They underscored the reality that the United States and its Western allies now make and break the rules of the post-World War II international order as they see fit. They raise serious doubts about the extent to which dollar deposits will remain reliable stores of value.<\/p>\n Still, despite the increased risk attached to holding dollars, for now the petrodollar agreement of 1973 remains in force. This agreement enabled the dollar \u2014 having just become a fiat currency no longer backed by gold \u2014 to continue as the universal medium of transactions in commodity markets, like energy and raw materials. Under it, the Saudis \u2014 and by extension, other members of OPEC \u2014 agreed to maintain their currency reserves in dollars and to reinvest any dollars they received for their oil in the United States. The resulting ability of the United States to print money rather than export goods and services that balance its imports is both unique and the basis of American global primacy. But the indefinite perpetuation of the \u201cexorbitant privilege\u201d conferred on America by such monetary hegemony can no longer be taken for granted.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There is a lot at stake for the United States with the newly cantankerous states of West Asia. The region remains a central feature of global geopolitics, but it is no longer a U.S. sphere of influence.\u00a0Washington must adjust to the new reality that its erstwhile client states now see it as in their interest to maintain political, economic, and military relationships with multiple external partners.\u00a0They will no longer afford America a monopoly of arms purchases and military presence. Nor will they defer to interests of the United States they cannot be persuaded to see as their own.\u00a0Such persuasion would require a level of respectful American diplomatic engagement with them not seen in decades.\u00a0The countries of the region need reassurance that Washington is a reliable supporter of their interests rather than the unilateralist champion only of its own.\u00a0To this end, the United States must earn their cooperation by offering tangible economic and political benefits.\u00a0America will not succeed by focusing on preventing them from accepting such benefits from China or other great power competitors while offering no attractive alternatives.<\/p>\n The United States long recognized that both domestic and global prosperity require access to the hydrocarbon resources of the Persian Gulf region and acted unilaterally to protect such access.\u00a0Despite the U.S. reemergence as a net energy exporter and international competitor with West Asian oil and gas, the Persian Gulf retains its importance to the world economy.\u00a0But the willingness and ability of Americans to shoulder the entire burden of protecting other nations\u2019 access to Gulf hydrocarbons are not what they once were.\u00a0Recent experience has made it next to impossible to convince anyone there that, in fact, the United States remains committed and ready to do what it once did in this regard.\u00a0No country in West Asia is now prepared to rely exclusively on the U.S. to protect either its energy trade or its national identity.<\/p>\n There is growing interest in the region and beyond it in alternatives to fading American guarantees of global access to the energy the world needs to prosper.\u00a0Such alternatives must be grounded in strengthened individual and collective defense capabilities by the region\u2019s energy producers as well as by agreement between them not to obstruct each other\u2019s exports. The major countries to which they export would also need to be involved.\u00a0Much as the United States might prefer to restrict diplomatic and naval cooperation to \u201callies,\u201d this would not be enough.\u00a0China is now the largest importer of oil and gas from the Persian Gulf, followed by India.\u00a0Both must be part of any multinational security arrangement and field an effective force structure to support it.<\/p>\n The prerequisite for effective burden-sharing is an agreement between the great external powers to set aside their military rivalry in the Persian Gulf in favor of protecting a common interest in sustaining global prosperity as well as their own wellbeing. The operative question is whether the United States, with our current \u201cyou\u2019re with us or against us\u201d mentality and obsession with \u201cgreat power rivalry,\u201d could muster the flexibility to help put in place a framework that would serve more than our own selfish interests.\u00a0It is hard to be optimistic about this.<\/p>\n American subsidies for Israel and insistence on its unique exemption from the norms of international law, more than anything else, cause the world to dismiss U.S. claims to support justice, human rights, and democracy with skepticism bordering on derision.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It is even harder to be optimistic about the future of Israel, which continues a march to perdition that answers those who call it out and try to halt it with baseless smears of antisemitism. Israel was born in hope.\u00a0It risks ending in tragedy, a victim of hubris and deaf inattention to the lamentations and warnings of its well-wishers. Israel\u2019s demise, if it comes, will not be imposed by the Palestinian resistance to its injustices or by the hostility of its Arab neighbors. It will be by its own hands, with more than a little help from its American friends.<\/p>\n Sadly, the United States has been as much the enabler of Israel\u2019s descent into self-destructive and obnoxious practices as is any person who gives money to an alcoholic to buy liquor. Unquestioning support for Israel remains essential to extracting campaign contributions from American armchair Zionists, but it creates nothing but moral hazard for Israel and makes it an albatross around the neck of U.S. foreign relations. American subsidies for Israel and insistence on its unique exemption from the norms of international law, more than anything else, cause the world to dismiss U.S. claims to support justice, human rights, and democracy with skepticism bordering on derision. Unless and until U.S. enablement ends, Israel will persist in behavior that dishonors Judaism, makes enemies for both itself and the United States, and jeopardizes not just its moral standing but its viability as a nation state.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For better or ill, West Asia has acquired a dynamism that demands the reconsideration and adjustment of longstanding American policies.\u00a0The relationships between its countries and between them and the outside world are in flux.\u00a0A rigid adherence to historical partnerships does not serve American interests. The United States must refrain from offering any country there an apparent blank check, rebuild ties where they have become strained, place American interests first, and be prepared to offer tough love to friends who violate those interests.\u00a0This will require a competence at statecraft and skill at diplomacy that are not currently in evidence in U.S. foreign policy.<\/p>\n What worked in the unipolar moment or the Cold War that preceded it will not work either in the emerging multipolar world and or in the new multi-aligned West Asian regional order.\u00a0To serve American interests in the new circumstances, U.S. policies require fundamental rethinking and redesign.\u00a0Sadly, so far, there is little evidence that Americans are ready to rise to that challenge.\u00a0But policies that fail to anticipate and accommodate change risk strategic surprise and humiliation by it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Europe\u2019s \u201cFar East\u201d is across the Pacific from the United States: our Far West.\u00a0 We now call it East Asia, the Western Pacific, or \u201cthe Indo-Pacific.\u201d<\/span> This text is edited from a talk given via video in remarks to the Middle East Forum of Falmouth by Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.), Visiting Scholar, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, on August 6, 2023.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ambassador Chas Freeman on the dynamism of West Asia and the west’s failing geopolitical grip on “the greater Middle East.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":383,"featured_media":27755,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,51],"tags":[435,555,908,2930,1128,1326,1518,2852,1734],"article-category":[],"article-type":[],"coauthors":[2662],"class_list":["post-27750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","category-tmr-weekly","tag-colonialism","tag-egypt","tag-israel","tag-mena","tag-middle-east","tag-palestinians","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-swana","tag-turkey"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Western-Asia-political-map](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/Western-Asia-political-map-courtesy-nations-online.jpg\")
\n<\/strong><\/em>The Birth of the Nation-State in West Asia<\/h4>\nGeopolitical Centrality<\/h4>\n
Colonial Dominance<\/h4>\n
![\"Panoramic](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/Panoramic-view-of-Ankara-Turkey-Sergii-Figurnyi.jpg\")
\n<\/strong><\/em>Breakout to Multiple, Simultaneous Alignments<\/h4>\nThe Ebb of U.S. Influence and the Regional Pursuit of Strategic Autonomy<\/h4>\n
The Special Difficulties of Israel<\/h4>\n
![\"Overlooking](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/Overlooking-the-city-of-Al-Ula-Saudi-Arabia-photo-brizardh.jpg\")
\n<\/strong><\/em>A Newly Assertive Kingdom of Saudi Arabia<\/h4>\nOutreach by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman Al-Saud<\/h4>\n
![\"Restored](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/Restored-ziggurat-in-ancient-Ur-sumerian-temple-Iraq-photo-Sergey-Mayorov.jpg\")
\n<\/strong><\/em>Toward a Gulf Arab Arms Industry<\/h4>\nThe Fruits of West Asian Realpolitik<\/h4>\n
The Impact on the United States\u2019 Regional and Global Roles<\/h4>\n
What Must Be Done?<\/h4>\n
The Dynamism of West Asia<\/h4>\n
\n
\n[2]<\/a>\u00a0At the Turkish government\u2019s request, this is now the approved international rendering of the country\u2019s name.<\/span><\/p>\n