Thanassis Cambanis
For a generation, the Middle East has been a byword for state failure. A series of cataclysms buffeted Arab states in this period, weakening institutions, security, and regional governance. The turmoil began with the US invasion of Iraq on false pretenses, which plunged that country into chaos. Then came the Arab Spring, ISIS and its conquest of a swath of Mesopotamia and the Levant, the dissolution of Syria and Libya, serial dysfunction in Lebanon, and the Saudi war in Yemen, among other troubles.
Yet despite ongoing conflict and instability, the Arab state system has made a hard-earned comeback in recent years. Iraq has crafted the foundations of a functional state. In fits and starts, the monarchies in the Persian Gulf region have fashioned modern bureaucracies and a measure of mutual security cooperation. Autocrats spurned popular demands for democracy and good governance. But the same Arab regimes succeeded at rebuilding state capacity — a necessary if insufficient ingredient of regional stability.
Now, however, that glimmer of possibility has come under threat from Israel’s spiraling, maximalist regional war. With a mostly blank check from Washington, the Jewish state has challenged the viability of states across the region, threatening to undermine the Middle East’s only recently rebounding, fragile state order. The Trump administration gets the importance of stable states, but its response is limited to off-the-record or background seething. “Bibi acted like a madman,” a White House official told Axios this week. “He bombs everything all the time. This could undermine what Trump is trying to do.”
Those remarks concerned Israel’s intervention in Syria, ostensibly carried out to protect the country’s Druze minority. The US government has its own concerns about whether Syria’s new leader can control his security forces or protect minorities. But Washington does not support Israel’s approach of bombing government targets, occupying Syrian territory, and arming proxies, supposedly under the guise of a humanitarian mission.
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