A titanic geopolitical struggle is underway.
This is not any geopolitical moment By Thomas L. Friedman 25 Jan, 2024 03:10 p.m. THIS There are many ways to explain the two biggest conflicts in the world today, but mine is that Ukraine wants to join the West and Israel wants to join the Arab East, and Russia, with the help of Iran, is trying to stop the first, and Iran and Hamas are trying to stop the second.
Although the two fronts of battle may seem very different, they actually have a lot in common.
They reflect a titanical geopolitical struggle between two opposing networks of nations and non-state actors on which values and interests will dominate our post-cold war world, after the relatively stable era of the American Pax/globalization that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the main rival of the United States in the Cold War.
Yeah, this isn't any geopolitical moment.
On the one hand is the Resistance Network, dedicated to preserving closed and autocratic systems where the past burys the future.
On the other side is the Inclusion Network, which seeks to forge more open, connected and pluralistic systems in which the future burys the past.
Who wins the struggles between these two networks will determine much about the dominant character of this post-cold-war era.
(And in case you are taking the account at home, China, under the presidency of Xi Jinping, is on horseback between the two networks, along with much of what has been given to call the global south. Their hearts, and often their pockets, are with the Resistants, but their heads are with the Inclusives.
Ukraine is trying to separate itself from the suffocating sphere of Russian influence to form part of the European Union.
Vladimir Putin is trying to block him, because he knows that if the Ukraine Slavs - with his vast engineering talent, his land army and his agricultural barn - joins the European network, his autocracy ladrona will be more isolated and delegitimized than ever.
However, Putin will not be easily defeated, especially with the arms aid of his allies on the net, Iran and North Korea, and the passive support of China, Belarus and many members of the global South hungry for their cheap oil.
Israel was trying to forge a normalized relationship with Saudi Arabia, which is the gateway to the many Arab States of the Middle East and Muslim States of South Asia with which Israel is not yet in relations.
But not only did the Israelis want to see El Al planes and Israeli technologists landing in Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia itself, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, aspires to become a gigantic centre of economic relations that links Asia, Africa, Europe, the Arab world - and Israel - into a network centered in Saudi Arabia.
His vision is a kind of European Union of the Near East, with Saudi Arabia making it an anchor as Germany does with the true EU. Iran and Hamas want to stop this for joint and separate reasons.
Together, Hamas and Iran knew that if Israel tightened ties with a newly modernized Saudi Arabia—in addition to Israel's relations with the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Bahrain under the Abraham Agreements—the balance of power between the secularizing, pluralizing and more market-oriented network of the region and the most closed, anti-pluralizing and political-islamist network could be decisively tilted against both of Iran.
Hamas also does not want Israel to normalize its relations with Saudi Arabia without having to make a single concession to the Palestinians as to their own aspirations to have a State.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, believed that it would be the crowning of his career - and would prove that all his critics were wrong - if he could seal the opening of diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, the seat of the most sacred places of Islam, without granting an apex to the Palestinians.
It was an unwise goal -Netanyahu should have offered the Palestinians at least some way for a greater self-government, even if it was only for everything to be easier to sell in Saudi Arabia- and Israel is now paying the price.
Saudi Arabia says it remains open to normalization with Israel, but only if Israel is firmly committed to a possible two-State solution.
So don't let anyone tell you that wars in Ukraine and Gaza don't matter or are disconnected, or that they're not the matter of the United States.
These wars are our business, and are now clearly inescapable, as we are deeply involved in both conflicts.
What is crucial to take into account about the United States - as the leader of the Inclusion Network - is that right now we are waging the war in Ukraine in our terms, but we are waging the war in the Middle East in Iran's terms.
Why?
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In the war between Ukraine and Russia, the army and the Ukrainian people are bearing the full weight of the conflict, and are willing to continue to do so.
The only thing they ask the United States and its allies is advanced weapons and financial aid.
How is it possible that we refuse?
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For tens of billions of dollars, and without a single dead American soldier, Ukraine has inflicted a deep setback on the Putin army that makes it far less dangerous for the West and for Kiev.
It's the best offer NATO has ever made. CNN recently described, according to a source familiar with this, a declassified evaluation of the US intelligence services provided to the Congress where it was alleged that Russia had lost 87 per cent of its active ground troops prior to the invasion and two thirds of the tanks it had before its invasion of Ukraine.
Putin can still inflict much damage on Ukraine with missiles, but his dream of occupying the whole country and using it as a launch platform to threaten the Inclusion Network - in particular the European Union, protected by NATO - is now out of reach.
Thank you, Kiev.
In a breakfast with NATO leaders dedicated to the Ukrainian question in Davos this year, Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, Chrystia Freeland, said that it is us, the West, who should thank the Ukrainians, not force them to beg for more weapons.
He also eloquently formulated what is at stake: “What Putin wants is to transform the world order” that evolved since World War II and the post-cold war, where “the competition between nations revolved around who can be richer and who can help his people more prosper.
Putin hates that world because he loses in it: his system is a loser in a peaceful, global and wealth-enhancing paradigm.
So what you want is that we return to the dog-come-dog situation, to a competition of great powers of the nineteenth century, because you think you can, if not win, be more effective there.
Let’s not think it’s a Ukrainian problem; it’s a problem for all of us.”
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He's absolutely right.
The struggle in the Middle East has different and fascinating roots: the Resistance Network and the Inclusion Network were born there with two months of difference in 1979. The Middle East Resistance Network was born on 1 February 1979, when the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini flew to Tehran from Paris, culminating in an Iranian revolution that overthrew the Shah and gave rise to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which would attempt to export its ideology to the entire Muslim world, while attempting to drive the United States out of the region and Israel out of existence.
The Middle East Inclusion Network was born that same year, when the United States merged into the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, allowing for the first time the Arab-Israeli collaboration.
Also in 1979, Sheikh Rashid ibn Saeed Al Maktoum - governor of the port city of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates - completed the port of Jebel Ali, one of the largest in the world, establishing Dubai and the United Arab Emirates as a global hub connecting the Arab East - through trade, tourism, services, sea transport, investment and world airlines.
In 2015, this Middle East Inclusion Network received an enormous boost with the rise in 2015 of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman - with whom I recently met in Riyadh- and his aspiration to transform Saudi Arabia into a gigantic Dubai with steroids and turn it into the cultural, investment, conference, tourism and manufacturing center of a much more integrated region.
Nadim Koteich, Lebanese-Emirati political analyst and CEO of Sky News Arabia, who helped me see the contrast between these two networks that struggle to shape the Middle East, explained that the Resistance Network “is orchestrated by Iran, Islamists and jihadists” in a process that they refer to as the “one of the battlefields.”
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This network, he said, “is trying to unite militias, rejecters, religious sects and sectarian leaders,” creating an anti-Israeli, anti-American and anti-Western axis that can simultaneously press Israel in Gaza, in the West Bank and the border with Lebanon, as well as the United States in the Red Sea, in Syria and in Iraq and Saudi Arabia from all directions.
In sharp contrast, Koteich said, there is the Inclusion Network, focused on “training” global and regional markets – instead of battlefronts – business conferences, news organizations, elites, high-risk funds, technological incubators and large commercial routes.
This network of inclusion, he added, “has gone beyond traditional borders, creating a network of economic and technological interdependence that has the potential to redefine power structures and create new paradigms of regional stability.”
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So today, while the United States is indirectly degrading Russia's capabilities, through its proxy Ukraine, things are different in the Middle East.
There, it is Iran who is comfortably seated, indirectly at war with Israel and the United States, and sometimes with Saudi Arabia, fighting through the seize of Tehran: Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and the Shiite militias in Iraq.
Iran is reaping all the profits and virtually does not pay any cost for the work of its seals, and the United States, Israel and its tacit Arab allies have not yet manifested the will or manner of pushing Iran back, without entering a hot war, which all want to avoid.
My opinion is that the best way to deter Iran is to strengthen the pressures from within, where the Inclusion Network has more allies: The Iranian youth and their aspirations to be part of the Inclusion Network.
How do we know?
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Because many of the young Iranians, hungry for inclusion, have rebelled openly against the regime since September 2022, when a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, was arrested in Tehran by the Iranian morality police for allegedly carrying the hiyab incorrectly and then died in custody.
A regime in which women die in custody after being detained for not being sufficiently covered is not a safe or popular regime.
In addition, many Iranian cults know that their regime is only using support for the Palestinian cause as a cover for Iranian imperialism throughout the region, where Tehran indirectly controls Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen.
Therefore, surprisingly, we continue to see protesters in Iran who express their support for Israel since the 7 October Hamas attack and against the costly imperial adventures of Tehran.
Yeah, they read well.
“During a match between the football clubs Persepolis and Gol Gohar at the national football stadium in the country, agents of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps tried to get support for the Palestinian cause by waving Palestinian flags in the field,” the London Jewish Chronicle reported on October 9, publishing the unedited images of X before Twitter.
“Instead of sympathy, the Basij – one of the five forces of the I.R.G.C. – was received with fans’ chants on the stands of ‘get that Palestinian flag on your ass!’
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The images of the incident were made viral on social networks.”
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It included tweets like: “The real Iranians will always support Israel!
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The Islamic Republic is an occupying force.”
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In October, Washington’s non-partisan Stimson Center published a commentary by an Iranian analyst on the Iranian opposition to the Hamas attack, which included an amazing Instagram video published by a prominent Iranian analyst who saw “Iranian university students refusing to pass over the flags of the United States and Israel that are often placed at the entrance of universities in Iran as a sign of support for the Palestinians.” Meanwhile, The Economist reported on “Iranian coffee baristas” who “learned David’s stars in their aprons.”
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This attitude is not at all universal; many other Iranians are surely on the side of Hamas, especially with the civilian victims in Gaza.
However, Iran International, an Iranian opposition channel based in London, "'Ni Gaza, not Lebanon, will die for Iran', has been a recurring motto in many protests in Iran."
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The members of the Resistance Network are very good at breaking down and breaking things, but, unlike the Inclusion Network, they have not demonstrated any capacity to build a government or a society to which someone would emigrate, and much less emulate.
(The queue to obtain a visa to enter Yemen governed by the Houthi is not long.) We don't insist enough on it.
For all these reasons, this is a time of great danger, as well as of great opportunities, especially for Israel.
The competition between the Resistance Network and the Inclusion Network means that the region has never been more hostile or more hospitable to accept a Jewish state.
It is a pity that a traumatized Israel under the failed leadership of Netanyahu cannot see this right now.
If Israel could one day accept a long-term process with a Palestinian Authority transformed to build two States for two peoples, it could decisively tilt the balance between the Resistance Network and the Inclusion Network.
The Resistance Network would have nothing to justify the wasteful wars it waged and the weapons it accumulated, supposedly to defeat Israel and the United States, but in reality to keep its own people subject and itself in power.
Meanwhile, the Inclusion Network would find it much easier to expand, cohes and win.
As I said, today is at stake much more than it seems.
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