Ralph Schoellhammer
There is a famous—if apocryphal—quote attributed to Lenin: “There are decades where nothing happens and then there are weeks where decades happen.” We find ourselves in such a period today, particularly when examining the trajectory of the Middle East. The challenge in these transformative moments is distinguishing signal from noise, a task that becomes exponentially more difficult when every development carries the weight of potential historical significance.
Consider the period between 1918 and 1938. Those twenty years witnessed countless movements across Europe that pointed in wildly different directions from what ultimately transpired. There were rapprochements between Germany and France, negotiations between Britain and Germany and throughout the 1920s, especially, no clear indication of which course European and world history would ultimately take. In hindsight the course of history appears to have been predetermined, but this was not so. The Locarno Agreement of 1925 that was intended to guarantee Germany’s Western borders was at the time as significant as the Abraham Accords are today. Unfortunately, the former did not stand the test of time – and it is too soon to tell whether the latter will. To put it differently, we face a similar predicament in the Middle East today as Europe faced in the interwar years.
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