The Middle East: Out of Step with History
Article Summary and Author Biography
The parties to the Arab-Israeli dispute remain "stubbornly wedded to timeworn arguments about primordial conflicts", and look to the USA for progress in a peace process, despite an evident inclination on the part of the Bush administration to see a reduction in the importance of the region.
Mark A. Heller is Senior Research Associate at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University.
For most of 1989 the Middle East languished outside the mainstream of global change. Stubbornly wedded to timeworn arguments about primordial conflicts, the region increasingly seemed a backwater of intellectual ossification and political stagnation. Toward the end of the year there were some tentative signs that Middle Eastern actors might yet transcend their pasts, but those changes were slow, hesitant and easily reversible. The Middle East remained a challenge to the rest of the world, but it was also in danger of becoming a mere bore.
Nothing better symbolizes the Middle East's declining salience in world affairs than the contrast between the regional landscape awaiting President George Bush in January 1989 and that which eight years earlier had confronted his predecessor.
When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, attention was riveted on two crises: a massive Soviet counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, which many Western analysts interpreted as the first stage of an aggressive Soviet strategy aimed at the Persian Gulf, and the Iran-Iraq War, which had just broken out and which threatened to destabilize the major source of the world's oil exports, and perhaps presage the spread of revolutionary Islam throughout the Middle East.
By the time George Bush embarked on his presidency, the Soviet Union had suffered an embarrassing defeat and virtually withdrawn from Afghanistan. The new Soviet leadership was actively promoting the idea of cooperative superpower efforts to resolve regional conflicts. Those developments not only signified the diminution of any direct Soviet military threat to the Middle East but also foreshadowed a general Soviet retrenchment throughout the Third World.
Meanwhile, events had exposed Iran's inability to impose its revolutionary vision on Iraq, much less on the rest of the Islamic world. Six months before Bush's inauguration, Iran had agreed to a cease-fire on terms previously described as totally unacceptable, and it had begun to experiment with postrevolutionary reconstruction and normalization of foreign relations. Those actions were tantamount to defeat in the war and the successful containment of the Iranian threat to the conservative Arab oil-producing states on the western side of the Persian Gulf...
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