China has become more bellicose toward Taiwan.
India has embraced a virulent nationalism.
Israel has formed the most extreme government in its history.
And on Saturday morning, Hamas brazenly attacked Israel, launching thousands of missiles and publicly kidnapping and killing civilians.
The simplest explanation is that the world is in the midst of a transition to a new order that experts describe with the word multipolar. The United States is no longer the dominant power it once was, and no replacement has emerged. As a result, political leaders in many places feel emboldened to assert their own interests, believing the benefits of aggressive action may outweigh the costs. These leaders believe that they have more sway over their own region than the U.S. does. (...)
Why has American power receded? Some of the change is unavoidable. Dominant countries don’t remain dominant forever. But the U.S. has also made strategic mistakes that are accelerating the arrival of a multipolar world.
Among those mistakes: Presidents of both parties naïvely believed that a richer China would inevitably be a friendlier China — and failed to recognize that the U.S. was building up its own rival through lenient trade policies, as the political scientist John Mearsheimer has argued. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. spent much of the early 21st century fighting costly wars. The Iraq war was especially damaging because it was an unprovoked war that George W. Bush chose to start. And the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, overseen by President Biden, made the U.S. look weaker still.
Perhaps the biggest damage to American prestige has come from Donald Trump, who has rejected the very idea that the U.S. should lead the world. Trump withdrew from international agreements and disdained successful alliances like NATO. He has signaled that, if he reclaims the presidency in 2025, he may abandon Ukraine.
In the case of Israel, Trump encouraged Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to show little concern for Palestinian interests and instead seek a maximal Israeli victory. Netanyahu, of course, did not start this new war. Hamas did, potentially with support from Iran, the group’s longtime backer, and Hamas committed shocking human rights violations this past weekend, captured on video.
But Netanyahu’s extremism has contributed to the turmoil between Israel and Palestinian groups like Hamas. An editorial in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, yesterday argued, “The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession.” Netanyahu, Haaretz added, adopted “a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.”
Even with the rise of multipolarity, the U.S. remains the world’s most powerful country, with a unique ability to forge alliances and peace. In the Middle East, the Trump administration persuaded Israel and four other countries — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco — to sign unprecedented diplomatic agreements, known as the Abraham Accords. In recent months, the Biden administration has made progress toward an even more ambitious deal, between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Hamas attacked Israel in part to undermine an Israeli-Saudi deal, many experts believe. Such a deal could isolate Iran, Hamas’s patron, and could lead to an infusion of Saudi money for the Palestinian Authority, a more moderate group than Hamas (as Thomas Friedman explains in this column). But if the recent Hamas attacks lead Israel to reduce the Gaza Strip to rubble in response, Saudi Arabia will have a hard time agreeing to any treaty.
by David Leonhart, NY Times: The Global Context of the Hamas-Israel War (read more):
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When the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco announced that they were establishing relations with Israel in 2020, Emirati officials said the deals were symbols of peace and tolerance, while then President Donald J. Trump declared “the dawn of a new Middle East.”Those words rang hollow to many in the region, though. Even in the countries that signed the deals, branded the Abraham Accords, support for the Palestinians — and enmity toward Israel over its decades-long occupation of their land — remained strong, particularly as Israel’s government expanded settlements in the Palestinian West Bank after the agreements.
On Saturday, when Palestinian gunmen from the blockaded territory of Gaza surged into Israel, carrying out the boldest attack in the country in decades, it set off an outpouring of support for the Palestinians across the region. In some quarters, there were celebrations — even as hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians were killed and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel threatened a “long and difficult war” ahead. (...)
The ripples spreading from Gaza underscored what many officials, scholars and citizens in the region have been saying for years: The Palestinian cause is still a deeply felt rallying cry that shapes the contours of the Middle East, and Israel’s position in the region will remain unstable as long as its conflict with the Palestinians continues. (...)
Diplomatic “normalization” agreements between Israel and Arab governments — even with the powerhouse of Saudi Arabia, where American officials have been pushing recently for normalization — will do little to change that, many regional analysts say.
“The current war is a stark reminder that lasting peace and prosperity in the region is only possible after resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Bader Al-Saif, a professor at Kuwait University. “No amount of heavy lifting or acrobatics in dealing with Israel on other files can sidestep or erase this simple fact.”
Many Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, have long insisted that the price of recognizing Israel must be the creation of a Palestinian state. But over the past decade, that calculus has shifted, as authoritarian leaders weigh negative public opinion toward a relationship with Israel against the economic and security benefits it could offer — and what they might be able to get from the United States in return. (...)
It also made comments by King Abdullah II of Jordan at a conference in New York last month appear prescient: “This belief by some in the region that you can parachute over Palestine — deal with the Arabs and work your way back — that does not work,” he said.
Indeed, some Arab officials and scholars complain that their warnings about normalization deals that do not sincerely address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have fallen on deaf ears.
Watching the events in Gaza feels like hearing Arabs say “we told you so” to the American president, Khalid al-Dakhil, a prominent Saudi academic, wrote on the social media platform X. “Ignoring what’s right in finding a just solution to the Palestinian cause creates a trap for the region and threatens peace,” he said.
American officials say that normalization is a key step toward a more integrated Middle East, with positive implications for regional security and American defense interests.
by Vivian Nereim, NY Times: Across the Mideast, a Surge of Support for Palestinians as War Erupts in Gaza (read more):
Image: Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
[ed. See also: You're not going to like what comes after Pax Americana (Noahpinion-Noah Smith).]
[ed. See also: You're not going to like what comes after Pax Americana (Noahpinion-Noah Smith).]
