Towards a new regional ...
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This, then, was a critical juncture for the “old” Middle East—more “critical” than other junctures precisely for the coincidence of different levels of change: without the disruptive decision to intervene in Iraq, coming on the heels of the Afghan intervention, the regional balance of power would not have experienced such rapid adjustment, nor would it have opened the field in Iraq and the wider Middle East to such intense regional and external competition. True, some of that competition among external and regional powers could have emerged anyway, but the timing, nature and outcome would have differed.
A sanctioned Iraq, subject to UN inspections, might have become subject to Arab Spring unrest, like its Arab neighbours, but with quite different results. Without the Iraq War, it is unlikely that the sectarian divides exacerbated by the war or the Saudi–Iran rivalry, or the securitization of sectarian politics across the region, would have occurred—at least not to the same degree. As one scholar observes, “sectarianism as the main narrative of regional conflict emerged following the 2003 invasion of Iraq”, later becoming “entrenched via the political vacuum and ensuing geopolitical competition dynamics” that followed the 2011 Arab uprisings. While those uprisings themselves cannot be directly linked to the Iraq War, their outcomes—and the sectarian violence, and the subsequent neo-authoritarian turn that accompanied them—can.
Such counterfactuals serve to highlight the central argument of this article. At all three levels, fundamental and irreversible changes have occurred in the region’s security landscape, triggered by the war itself and then reflected in geopolitical changes and in the new power distribution and the changing face of regional institutions. As highlighted, there is considerable turbulence in the new emerging regional order or architecture, but the changes are such that any return to prior orders would be hard to achieve.
This is reflected in new international alignments—effectively a “three-power” Middle East—a new regional balance of power incorporating alliances between states and non-state actors, and the fragmentation and remaking of regional institutions within a reconstructed and expanded regional framework. Processes of change within the emerging order are still under way. However, beyond the Arab uprisings, more recent events, such as the Ukraine war, or the region’s responses to the COVID–19 pandemic, have helped to underscore some of the emerging patterns which have produced at least partial dealignment from the West and contributed to new alignments with Russia, China and other emerging powers.
For many Middle Eastern states today, there are clear affinities between the harder approach to sovereignty of China and Russia, alongside other states of the global South, and scepticism about the content and intent of the ‘liberal international order’ which extends to the democratization policies of the United States and European powers. The Iraq War ended an era of western hubris about the theory and practice of democracy promotion, which, combined with the reversals of the Arab uprisings, has seen a return to a more authoritarian status quo in MENA and in the wider world. These developments are already being reflected in the region’s changing security architecture and its political arrangements and alliances, which the Iraq War and its consequences helped indelibly to shape.