For several decades the international system has seen a concern about the so-called North-South divide. This divide encompassed a gap between the advanced industrial world and the so-called third-world that encompassed Latin America, Africa, and much of Asia. In more specific terms it was an economic gap, best indicated by a much lower standard of living outside of Europe and North America.

Even before the end of the Cold War, the Mediterranean saw increasing numbers of illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees from war zones coming from the Middle East, North Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and of course Sub-Saharan Africa. Hundreds of thousands of refugees began crossing the Mediterranean fleeing from war zones, civil wars, and of course last but not least economic conditions that were not acceptable anymore given the opportunities that people in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America saw in the advanced industrial democratic world. This gap was compounded by the fact that the demographic growth in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia was not economically sustainable. Rising expectations saw then millions of people trying to move into Europe. In 2019 alone, 2.7 million immigrants from non-EU countries entered the EU.

As refugee and immigration crises in the European Union have shown neither national governments nor the European Union institutions have been able to develop a systematic or coherent approach in dealing with constant conflicts in the Middle East or Africa. The end of the cold war had welcomed the idea of peace in our time, but as Samuel P. Huntington prophetically outlined in his essay and eventual book The Clash if Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, the international system was going to see a constant conflict between the secular democratic Euro-American world and as it turned out, the Islamic and Chinese world. The wars in the Persian Gulf, the Near East and the rise of Islamic terrorism in Africa, Europe and Asia followed the traumatic attack by a handful of radical Islamic terrorists on New York. By 2021 the consequences could be seen through the American retreat from Afghanistan. That country had been the breeding ground for the attacks on New York. The United States, Britain and other Western countries came to be humiliated by the Taliban’s victory. 

The Taliban victory in Afghanistan saw hundreds of thousands more refugees trying to enter Europe principally through Turkey and Belarus. Radical Islam wrote a new chapter in the history of the Islamic world. 

The constant international crisis that precipitated a flow of immigrants and refugees to Europe demonstrated increasingly the inability of the European Union and the United Kingdom to resolve an issue that challenged in the final analysis European culture, European economic wellbeing and societal sustainability. The rise of political parties that articulated the apprehension, fears and anxiety of widespread strata of the European population accepting non-European and Islamic newcomers, legal and illegal in France, Spain, Italy, Belgium and Germany for example, were symptomatic of future political instability. The inability of European countries to agree on common policies of protecting European borders and even developing a defensive mechanism outside the framework of NATO speaks of structural deficiencies in European strategic decision making.

Immigration was in the final analyses fueled by demographic growth in   Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Governments in Europe were unable to respond to the increasing expectations of the populations of those regimes. The population of Egypt had reached by 2020 102.3 million, Pakistan 220.9 million, Bangladesh 164 million, Ethiopia 115 million, and Nigeria 206.1 million; these are examples of what Europe was going to face. Increasing mass communications and transportation allowed millions of people to enter Europe. 

European governments seem unable to coordinate a policy that could cope with the increasing movement of people from the developing world towards Western Europe and North America. The issue of illegal immigration was of concern to many societies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa to the extent that economic concern lead many people to move from one nation to another. For example, the case of Bangladesh stands out, hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis were moving into India generating social, economic and social conflicts. And in the case of Africa, millions of people were moving across the continent with spill over into North Africa and Libya. In turn, hundreds of thousands of Africans were trying to cross the Mediterranean into Italy, Spain and Greece to reach the promised land: the European Union.

The sustainability of such movements did not and does not seem to concern international organizations and NGOs that were and are interested in bringing refugees to Europe. Inevitably, the issue of settling refugees, providing employment and preventing cultural clashes was the subject of much debate but with no solution in sight.

Critical debates on sustainability and climate change did not necessarily address themselves to the catastrophic problem of population growth and food supplies. In fact, the reluctance of some countries such as India, Indonesia and China to comprehend the anxieties of industrial states and European and North American activists was to be expected. Beijing, Delhi and Jakarta were by far more concerned with their populations and their standard of living. Rising expectations could not be postponed because they could be a cause of political instability. The demand for fossil fuels was not decreasing as energy was crucial to the creation of a higher standard of living for hundreds of people in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Immigration is bound to be the biggest challenge for the European Union and Britain. Illegal immigrants from the Middle East were coming to France to cross the channel as others were trying to come through the Italian peninsula to enter Switzerland and Germany. The soft underbellies of the European Union, Italy, Spain and Greece continue to be so. Countries such as Belarus and Turkey use the movement of immigrants into the European Union as a tool for gaining concessions from Brussels and individual European countries. The president of Turkey Erdogan had been successful earlier (in 2015) in gaining financial support from the European Union and Germany to stop the flow of Islamic immigrants into the continent. Hundreds and thousands of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan could become a great tool for gaining concessions from the European Union and single European states whose power is becoming ever more marginal. 

The trend in international conferences shaped by Western powers and NGOs on climate change, sustainability, energy and food security, and human rights should be understood in the context of an overwhelming demographic shift that does not seem to enter into the political calculus of Western decision makers and their constituents. 

European and American museums are confronted by requests of the return of artifacts bought or seized by colonial powers: Greece Presses for the Return of the Parthenon Marbles to where they belong: Athens Acropolis.

Researchers still looking for the Amber Room, Tsarist treasure allegedly stolen by the Nazi occupation forces and presumably destroyed or still hidden somewhere in Germany.

In 2008 a scandal hit the world of archaeology in Spain as it was reported that supposedly ancient artifacts were faked. In time the scandal became connected to the attempts to strengthen a real or imaginary Basque nationalist past. This episode in Spanish archaeology history is a modern example of how archaeology has played a role in shaping modern national identities and the creation of national myths.[1] In the Spanish case, Basque nationalism rooted in a very ancient language was one of the sources of conflict in 20th century Spain. It contributed to fueling the Spanish civil war in the 1930s and terrorism in Spain after the transition from Franco’s dictatorship to a modern democracy. Only in 2017 ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna – Basque Country and Freedom)[2] finally stopped fighting the Spanish state. Paradoxically, the end of this violent Basque separatism was followed in Spain by a Catalan separatism and the attempt of some Catalan parties to declare independence by arguing for a separate identity that set apart the Catalonian region linguistically and culturally from mainstream Spanish history.

The archaeological background to modern nationalism and conflicts is not new. In fact, in the earlier part of the 19^th century the Greeks, with great European support and sympathy, fought against the Ottoman Empire for a political and cultural independence that was stimulated by a connection to Classical Greece and of course the Byzantine Empire. By 1870, the German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann had begun discovering Homer’s Troy. His findings and the discovery of artifacts connected to ancient Greece stimulated enthusiastic interest in the near-Eastern archaeological and historical heritage.[3][4] Streams of archaeological discoveries reshaped a new Hellenic identity that shaped Greek politics and the conflicts with the Ottoman Empire, conflicts that saw the catastrophic Greek-Turkish war of 1922 and decades later the conflict in Cyprus between the Greek majority and the Turkish minority.

In Cyprus, the destruction of Greek archaeological sites was one of the subjects of the Greek-Cypriot political stance against the occupation of northern Cyprus by thousands of Turkish soldiers following the 1974 invasion of the island, when Turkey claimed it was protecting the rights of the Turkish-speaking minority.[5] The invasion followed years of conflict in Cyprus, ruled for decades by the British from 1878 until 1960[6]. The ethnic conflict was resolved through a compromise where the Greek-Cypriot desire to be reunited with Greece was set aside by giving independence to the island along with a constitutional compromise between the two ethno-linguistic groups.

Modern archaeology and the new scientific disciplines associated with it have now come to create greater knowledge and insight into the past of many regions across the globe.  They have also fueled value systems and political ideologies that have now come to spread increasingly across regions and nations, serving to bolster the perennial search for power and meaning in an international system tied by new economic realities and social mobility that challenges older historical and religious traditions. Some intellectuals and critics have used the encounter of the West with the non-traditional world, especially Islamic in the Middle East, as an example of cultural colonialism above and beyond political and economic imperialism. A classic case of the debate on the subject was the systematic work of Edward Said who wrote extensively criticizing western scholarship as being unable to truly understand the East – especially the Middle East – in his work Orientalism. His approach was very influential in the academic world, and continues being so, though his understanding of the Western-European insights into the Middle East especially are methodologically unsound and ideologically biased.[7]

Thus, archaeology comes to have even greater relevance in the reformulation of many aspects of international relations and ideological and civilizational clashes.  It then becomes even more incumbent on academics at large, especially historians, archaeologists, and ethno-linguists to dispel whenever possible the constant mythologizing and distortion of historical and archaeological scholarship.[8] The Americas were not exempt from these trends.

Across the Atlantic the mystification of new archaeological and linguistic discoveries became a systematic component of local nationalism, particularly when studying pre-Columbian civilizations in Central and South American states and Native American tribes in the United States and Canada. In Mexico, the Aztec heritage boosted Indianismo, which came to be one of the pillars of the new regime in Mexico after the epic of revolution that shaped a new Mexico after 1912.  From the 1920s onwards, the official historiography of Mexico emphasized Aztec civilization which had been systematically studied since the 19^th century by Western archaeologists and denounced the Spanish conquest as an assault on some past noble human experiment.  The reformulation of a new Mexican identity saw even a revival of attempts to remove the bones of Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who had been entombed in Mexico City. By 2020, the Mexican government, run by a progressive leftist president was seeking official apologies from Spain for the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire, and for the violence involved in the establishment of Spanish cultural hegemony in Mexico.[9]

The reinterpretation of the past by now had come to see in both North and South America the denunciation of Columbus and the arrival of the Europeans. In some respects, it was a reassertion of the Rousseauian paradigm of the Noble Savage being overwhelmed by civilization. In fact, the reaffirmation of aboriginal rights in North, South, and Central America from the Arctic Circle to Patagonia, in claims to land and resources came to be often articulated through archaeological discoveries and the assertion of the parity of native languages with Spanish as in Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, or Guatemala.

Even in Europe, the creation of a pan-European identity seemed to have enhanced the reaffirmation of ethno-linguistic ideologies rooted in mythical pasts given some superficial credibility by archaeology and linguistics. Examples range from the Dardanian movement in the Balkans following the independence of Kosovo as Albanians and Kosovars reiterated their European roots by linking to classical Greek history and mythology, including the destruction of Serbian Orthodox religious sites to the revival of Celtic religions and outright paganism professing a return to animism and Norse religions in Scandinavia. In the United States within the last generation there has been a revitalization of Neo-Pagan religion and witchcraft, ranging from the Church of Satan as an established institution to Wicca as a legitimate religious experience.[10] New political movements, ranging from neo-Scandinavian nationalism to neo-Nazism have connected their political ideology to Old Norse religious mythologies.[11]

These new phenomena tended to have a more strictly sociological significance and had yet to develop a political relevance. The age of instant electronic communication lent itself to the mystification of archaeology, ethnography, and linguistics from Europe and North America to the rest of the globe.  Fueled by misperceived scientific and academic research, science fiction, UFO sightings, political propaganda, mysticism, religion, eschatology, and catastrophism gave rise to a vast body of literature, movies, and internet-propagated debate and speculations grounded in the outright mystification of science and racialism intensifying and legitimizing national conflicts and political violence.

Their interpretation of the past through archaeological discoveries and political influence in terms of modern ideological postures characterizes every area of the world, ranging from Latin America to Australia and Africa. [12] European and American museums came to be confronted by requests of the return of artifacts bought or seized by colonial powers. The British museum, for example, was going to return the Benin bronzes to Nigeria.[13] The bronzes had been seized by British troops in 1897 during the British conquest of Benin. Benin today is in modern Nigeria, and part of the federal state.

The Greek Cause for the Parthenon Marbles Return to Athens

In modern Europe one of the more chronic problems in archaeological politics is the pressing demand of the Greek state for the repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles, also known as the Elgin Marbles, from the British Museum to Athens. The Marbles were part of the façade of the Acropolis of Athens and were allegedly purchased by Lord Elgin, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1807. The issue came up again following Brexit, as the Greek government pressed once again for the return of the Elgin Marbles.[14] The subject became part of the diplomatic bargaining between the United Kingdom and Brussels over the future of the political relationship between the European Union and London. The controversy has been going on for decades. In the same vein, stolen art from Italy is a subject of Italian international requests for return of what it considers to be Italian cultural patrimony.[15]

Last but not least, the Nazi German state’s looting of European art all over the occupied areas during World War II still stands out as an example of the role of war in the displacement of national art and culture. Researchers are still looking for the Amber Room, a Tsarist treasure allegedly stolen by the Nazi occupation forces and presumably destroyed or still hidden somewhere in Germany.[16]

Thus, one may conclude here by saying that symbolically archaeology goes beyond the mere study of the past through what remains of the past materially, but it also shapes how individuals and nations may see themselves in the modern age. As archaeological explorations expand, inevitably the reinterpretation of the past also takes place. This is especially relevant in the Middle East, which by many standards, is the birthplace of civilization. Arguably, the most important dimension of this past is a religious experience that has characterized the Middle East ever since the birth and evolution of Judaism, the rise of Christianity and the shaping of monotheistic belief systems.

Modern Re-Elaboration of Jewish Identity Through Rise of Zionism

Perhaps the most outstanding example is the modern re-elaboration of a Jewish identity through the rise of modern Zionism in 19^th century Europe and the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1947. In the 2^nd century AD, the Romans wiped out what had been a Jewish ethno-religious state in Judea along with the destruction of what had originally been the Temple of Solomon in 70 AD. Judea became a Roman province and hundreds of thousands of Jews were enslaved and deported throughout the Roman Empire, though the territory still held a considerable population of Jews.

Some decades later, in 132 AD the Jews rebelled again. This revolt saw Emperor Hadrian raze Jerusalem and rename it Aelia Capitolina. To add insult to injury, Judea came to be renamed Palestina with a reference to one of the peoples in the area, the Philistines mentioned in the Bible. From then to modern times, Palestine was a common name for a territory that eventually became the state of Israel and came to be seen by Jews scattered across the world as a land to return to with the coming of the Messiah. Herein lies an added Christian dimension to the religious and cultural relevance of the Jewish historical linkage to a lost state, to be restored with, by a coming Messiah for Jews and the second coming of Christ for all Christian denominations.

The rise of Islam in the 7^th century and the conquest of Jerusalem by the Muslims in southern Arabia added a third monotheistic appeal to the city of Jerusalem which came to have historical and cultural consequences for centuries for the people of the region, Europe, and in time for international relations from the 19^th century onwards. By the 18^th century, there was already a historical and archaeological interest in the Middle East and the biblical connection was the most relevant aspect of it. In the development of modern states in the Middle East, whether Turkey, Iran, Egypt, or as a matter of fact anywhere else in the world, reconstructing the past through archaeology and other disciplines such as linguistics was not a new phenomenon, and continues to be ever more relevant. Paradoxically, in an ever more globalized world, national identity becomes ever more relevant for domestic political purposes. The reconstruction of the past through archaeology to enhance modern national identity becomes ever more interesting in terms of ideological, economic, and international premises. Thus, tourism, education, propaganda, articulated through mass and social media come to stand out and add to an even greater dimension to the models developed in the theories of international relations and conflict.

[1] Ashley Cowie, “Archaeologist Busted for Faking Artifacts Showing Jesus Crucifixion,” in Ancient Origins, 8 February 2020. https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/iru-veleia-artifacts-0013266

[2] Claude Canellas, Sonya Dowsett, and Isla Binnie, “Basque militants ETA surrender arms in end to decades of conflict” Reuters, April 2017. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spain-eta-idUSKBN1790YK

[3] Caroline Moorehead, Priam’s Gold: Schliemann and the Lost Treasure of Troy (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016).

[4] Robert Payne, The Gold of Troy: The Story of Heinrich Schliemann and the Buried Cities of Ancient Greece (Dorset: Dorset Press, 1990).

[5] Lefkios Zaphiriou, Costas Nicolaides, Miltos Miltiadou, Marianna Mammidou, Van Coufoudakis, “The Loss of a Civilization; Destruction of cultural heritage in occupied Cyprus” Government of Cyprus, 2012.

[6] For a Turkish perspective, see Ozmatyatli, I. O. & Ozkul, A. E. “20th Century British Colonialism in Cyprus

through Education.” (Egitim Arastirmalari-Eurasian Journal of Educational Research, 50, 1-20. 2013).

[7] Morris Mottale, “Book Review: Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India.” (Canadian Political Science Association, 2010).

[8] See Also: The MESA Debate, 22 November 1986. Cf: Robert D. Kaplan, “Remembering Elie Kedourie: How One Analyst Spoke Truth to Power in the Middle East.” (The National Interest, 25 April 2020)

[9] “Mexico demands apology from Spain and the Vatican over conquest.” (BBC, 26 March 2019). See Also, Renzo Pipoli “Spain denies Mexico apology over 1521 Spanish conquest.” (UPI, 26 March 2019)

[10] See for example Jessica Bennet “When Did Everybody Become a Witch?” (New York Times, 24 October 2019). See also; David Brooks “Commentary: Witchcraft enjoying a surge in popularity” (New York Times, 13 June 2019).

[11] Samuel Sigal “What To Do When Racists Try To Hijack Your Religion” (The Atlantic, November 2, 2017).

[12] Paul Daley “There’s a new push for the return of looted Aboriginal artefacts – in the name of ‘truth telling’.” (The Guardian, 1 December 2019). See Also; Geoff Gray “A Cautious Silence: The politics of Australian anthropology”. (Aboriginal Studies Press: August 1, 2007)

[13] Kieron Monks “British Museum to return Benin bronzes to Nigeria.” (CNN, 14 December 2018). See also: “The British Conquest of Benin and the Oba’s Return”, Art Institute of Chicago (2013).

[14] Ian Wishart “EU Brings Greek Demand for Elgin Marbles Into Brexit Talks.” (MSN, 19 February 2020).

[15] See for Example “Italian Court Orders Getty Museum To Return Statue To Italy”. (NPR, 5 December 2018).

[16] “Amber Room: Priceless Russian treasure stolen by Nazis ‘discovered by German researchers’” (The Independent, 19 October 2017).

The normalization of relations between Morocco and Israel came in with the United States agreeing to legitimize Morocco’s annexation of Spanish Sahara, a territory which had been vacated by Spain in 1976, something that Rabat had been seeking for a long time regardless of the opposition of the Organization of African Unity and ostensibly against international law and precedent. Trump was able to convince Arab parties to recognize Israel by promising arms and foreign aid, more importantly, opposition to Iran and its nuclear policies gave Washington even more psychological leverage amongst conservative Arab states.

There were a series of factors which allowed President Trump to seize the moment and achieve these diplomatic breakthroughs which contributed to the changing balance of power in the Middle East. These developments had not been expected and did not receive the deserved attention in terms of power shifts in the region and in the international system. Such an evolution will be seen in the context of an increasing shift away from the use of fossil fuels, specifically oil and coal, and an increasing trend towards renewable energy, ranging from solar power to hydrogen power, and as many expected, advanced nuclear power, with a possible move towards nuclear fusion. An indicator of these trends was the realization on the part of some Middle Eastern powers that their possession of oil reserves was not guarantee for future economic wellbeing and security. Thus, confrontation and war with the Jewish state and support for the Palestinian cause had become an ever greater liability for the future of political and economic wellbeing of many states, ranging from Africa to the Persian Gulf.

The trend away from fossil fuel was and is being further highlighted by the concerns over climate change and the policies that states will follow to mitigate the effect of climate change and global warming. Indeed, one crucial concern in the financial world, for example, was the role of the insurance and reinsurance companies in planning new insurance policies and possibly high premiums for catastrophes, fires and severe weather storms such as hurricanes. These trends inevitably influencing the corporations whose profits derive from investments in economic enterprises connected to the energy sector, ranging from oil refining to coal powered power plants, the plastic industry, the automotive industry, air transportation, shipping, and tourism. Areas of interest for alternative and renewable energy sources range from solar power, hydrogen power, nuclear power through both fusion and fission, and eolic power.

The consequences of such a shift for the financial institutions and investment banks, and most importantly for pension funds, are difficult to fathom. In analogous terms, the consequences for international power relations become ever more problematic for forecasting international security trends and future balances of regional and global power. The breakthrough of the Trump Administration in brokering peace agreements in the Middle East is an indicator of how decision makers in Washington crafted US security policies in the Middle East and the Mediterranean to further American interests. Traditionally, as John Kerry and the Obama Administration had kept harping on, there was a constant focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict and how failure to resolve the Palestinian – Israel conflict would block peace from being reached in the region. Indeed, the success and appeal of Iran in the area owed much to its fanatic opposition to the Jewish state and its support for the Palestinian cause. As it was, it turned out that given the trends in the Arab world, the Palestinians could not now veto peaceful relations between Arab states and Jerusalem. The Saudi state did not object to these developments and its role as the guardian of Islamic holy sites, its control over huge petroleum resources, and foreign exchange allowed Saudi rulers to indirectly promote Israeli-Gulf cooperation.

The trend away from the use of fossil fuels is taking place, paradoxically, when Turkey is challenging many of its neighbors for control over oil and gas production in the Mediterranean while truculently threatening Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, France, and the European Union. In fact, Erdogan, at the United Nations was denouncing Trump and the United States, along with Israel in virtually anti-Semitic terms in his promotion of Palestinian rights and independence. Ankara was meanwhile moving arms, mercenaries and advisors into Libya while claiming rights over large swaths of the Mediterranean Sea. The Turkish moves in the Mideast and North Africa were matched by an increasing Russian military and political presence in the region, highlighted by Moscow’s military presence in Syria, and an ever larger navy in the Mediterranean. Trends in the Middle East and Persian Gulf also witnessed an ever increasing interest in Chinese investments, especially in the case of Iran, where the Ayatollahs were enticing Beijing in return for oil, gas, and financial backing of the Iranian economy with the hope of blocking American influence in the Gulf. Peace trends were being paradoxically strengthened by the ever increasing fear on the part of Arab States of Iranian Shiite imperial ambitions that saw a very successful manipulation and control of paramilitary organizations controlled by Iranian officers and the revolutionary guard in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, Yemen, and very likely in some African States as Islamic radicalism spread throughout East and West Africa.

As the Gulf saw conservative Sunni Arab States reassess their relations and past confrontations with the state of Israel, the diplomatic breakthroughs were an indicator of shifts in the balance of power in the area as Turkey and Iran were articulating nationalist neo-Islamist ideologies generated by Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. In the 20th Century, the region’s preeminence from West Asia to North Africa was connected to international demand for oil and gas. From the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf, to Libya and Algeria, oil and gas became one of the central themes in international conflict and cooperation with oil producing states manipulating the price of oil. Geology gave these states in the Middle East and North Africa an incredible leverage in extracting concessions both economically and politically from Europe and the United States. However, by 2020, concern about climate change and the increasing CO2 emissions, convinced all nations of the necessity for decreasing the use of fossil fuels and to seek alternatives in renewable energy or nuclear power.

The economic shifts in the evolution of energy alternatives were inevitably shaping the economic evolution of the international system. Leaders of Gulf States, as well as other oil producing nations such as Norway, realized that the demand for advanced technology and scientific research was now as important as the financial resources that had been accumulated in the last two generations. The trend toward peace treaties was structurally driven. Thus, ideology was now taking a more secondary seat in the political calculations of the leadership in the Arab and Islamic world. All the same, it had been inevitable that for some countries ideological considerations did not lose their primary role in their foreign policies, as in the case of Turkey and Iran. By September of 2020, Ankara had goaded Azerbaijan to go to war with Armenia as a conflict between the two Caucasian countries would have enhanced the neo-Ottoman ambitions of Erdogan’s Turkey. Some of Erdogan’s statements were already causing apprehensions in Tehran as he implied by the end of 2020 in Baku that Iranian Azerbaijan, with a Turkish-speaking population, was part of the greater Turkey that Erdogan was envisioning.

Iranian Shi’ite ideology was not to be underestimated in Tehran’s policies as the Ayatollahs’ aggressive moves within the Arab and Islamic world were rationalized in terms of defending Islam and Shiism. Trends in the Gulf toward more peaceful relations with Israel and more cooperation with the United States were ever more motivated by anxiety and fear about Iranian political ambitions. Turkey’s own imperial moves in North Africa, the Caucasus, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria and Turkish vocal and truculent support for Palestine as it denounced “Zionism” were again indicators of historical ideological motivations that were provoking anxieties in many Arab countries, particularly Egypt, the most important Arab country. Erdogan’s cooptation of the Muslim Brothers, an organization dedicated to Pan-Islamism, and by now based in Turkey after fleeing Egypt, was not to be underestimated. The Muslim Brothers were very influential in Tunisia, Morocco, Qatar and they were supported even by the Iranian Mullahs, regardless of their historical aversion towards Sunnis.

The trends toward new configurations of power relations in the region and in the Mediterranean had been made strategically possible by the fact that in the United States and Canada, more oil and gas was being produced than ever before, and the United States was not dependent on oil imports as the case had been in the 1970s and 1980s. If anything, the US could be an alternative to Europe and Japan for oil and gas. President Trump tried to pressure but failed to convince Germany to abandon the construction of gas pipelines from Russia, offering American gas via maritime routes.

The ever increasing surplus of oil and gas in the world was decreasing the economic power of many states, not only in the Middle East but also in states such as Mexico, Venezuela, Angola and Nigeria, a trend that was enhanced by the discovery of new fossil fuel deposits in the world. In the Mediterranean, the discovery of gas and oil deposits in the territorial waters of Israel, Cyprus, and Egypt saw increasing cooperation in building sea pipelines to carry gas through Europe. Cooperation was brought forward amongst gas producing states within an International Organization, including, Cyprus, Israel, Palestine, Greece, Italy and Jordan.

What stands out in terms of the historical developments shaping the international system is European Union’s inability and certainly Germany to have a role in promoting peaceful developments in the area. Even the much vaunted role of China in the international system does not see a comparable Chinese involvement in promoting peaceful trends in the area. As it is, the international system relies –as always- on Washington and Moscow with the contributions of Paris and London in promoting a more stable Middle East. That is to say historically the role of the Great Powers that had shaped the Middle East in modern time is not declining. Trump had indeed reasserted American power in the wake of Obama’s failure to resolve some of the more outstanding conflicts of the Middle East. The evolving shift away from the use of fossil fuels has been matched by a reassertion to Great Power politics echoing the developments of European 19th Century history, as Imperial Russia, Great Britain and France competed for hegemony over the territories of a declining Ottoman Empire. The paradox now is that Erdogan’s Turkey has become a revisionist power trying to reassert a historical role more consonant with Ottoman history and reflecting a virulent Turko-Islamic nationalism.

National and international rhetoric about climate change, human rights and the more progressive world has not necessarily impacted on international power politics whilst the arms race in the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific were and continue to be harbingers of new political scenarios. Realism and idealism continue to shape international diplomatic activity, national rhetoric and political ideologies regardless of the fact that the Covid-19 virus did have an impact on slowing down diplomatic interaction and that climate change rhetoric appealed to more active political parties in Western countries.

The successful diplomatic activity of the Trump administration which has begun in 2017 with Trump’s visit to the area and Washington’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, triggered the chain of developments that brought more Arab States to recognize Israel. In turn, the expansion of alternatives to fossil fuels, the fear of climate change and new developments in mass communications and artificial intelligence portend to be the harbingers of structural changes in the international political economy.

By 2020, the confrontation between Turkey and Greece in the Aegean and in the Mediterranean at large, saw the Greek Minister of Defense speak about possibility of military conflict with Turkey.(i) This statement by the Greek Minister of Defense came a few hours after the Turkish President held a press conference in Ankara with Fayez Al Sarraj, Prime Minister of the UN-recognized National Accord Government based in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.(ii) Erdoğan said that Turkey and Libya would proceed with oil exploration and drilling in Greece’s contested maritime space in the eastern Mediterranean(iii), adjacent to Crete and now claimed by Libya aided and abetted by Ankara as it kept challenging Athens. Turkey had begun its military and political involvement in the civil war in Libya while confronting the Saudi, Emirati and Egyptian involvement in North Africa against a Turkish presence and the ideological influence of the Muslim brothers and manipulated by Erdoğan’s Islamist ideology. Just a few weeks earlier, there had been confrontations between Greek and Turkish forces on the border in Thrace.(iv) Thousands and thousands of real and imaginary refugees and other irregular migrants from the Middle East at large, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, moved to Turkey and planned on entering Europe. Having encouraged them to move to the Greek border, Ankara is seeking to entice those manipulated unfortunate souls to step into the European Union. In its confrontation in Cyprus, Turkey paved over the entry point in northern Cyprus in favor of entering the republic to the south.

Some years earlier, the war in Syria had seen thousands of refugees going to primarily Germany and Sweden. This development gave Erdoğan a chance to blackmail Europe to receive aid and status recognition and drawing concessions regarding Ankara’s relations with the European Union. For decades, Turkey had tried to be admitted into the European club. The EU, in trying to avoid conflict with Turkey, had already admitted Greece in 1980 and promised future admission to Turkey as to avoid conflicts in the area. Both Athens and Ankara have been long standing members of NATO but that membership has not lessened the confrontation between the two countries. Neither has it mitigated Turkey’s contemporary attempt to revise power relations with its Greek neighbor.

The Arab-Israeli conundrum receives the bulk of interest in Europe and North America, and of course the Islamic world, as the Jewish state’s legitimacy has always been challenged at some level or another. The European, and especially Italian relations to North Africa and the Middle East and inevitably to Mediterranean security have been historically linked in the mind of the European public and political parties to the wars between Israel and its neighbors. What are overlooked in the European political world are the other conflicts in the Middle East. For example, the partition of Cyprus, the confrontation between Turkish and Greek worlds which overlaps with contentious maritime borders, potentially rich with oil and gas in the Aegean Sea and off the shores of Cyprus. Sectarian conflicts in the Middle East are also relevant, as Shii, Sunnis and other radical Islamists in the Sunni world challenge the social fabric and political systems of individual states such as Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria.

Italy with specific strategic interests is, arguably, the European country with the most important role in the Mediterranean. The fall of Gadhafi in 2011 after an internal revolt aided and abetted by France and other powers against the desires of the Italian government brought a power vacuum that allowed hundreds of thousands of African, Middle Eastern and Asian illegal immigrants moving successfully to the European continent through Italy. The Syrian civil war added even more impetus to these catastrophic migrations that have brought the European Union to a point of delegitimization in the eyes of many European citizens. In the recent past, the government of Silvio Berlusconi, had been successful in supporting the Gadhafi regime so as to stop illegal immigration in exchange for Italian development aid and of course purchase of Libyan oil.

Historically Italy’s main state-owned oil company, Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, ENI, successfully entered the international oil and gas markets from the 1960s onward. Its total revenues never matched those of companies such as Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, Total or British Petroleum (BP); all the same, the company itself came to play a big role in Italian daily and political life. It does so to this day. It serves Italian strategic needs very well. The Italian gas and oil markets have always been characterized by long term national policies, because of the vulnerable economic position of Italy as it lacks natural resources. Following the Chernobyl disaster, Italy did away with nuclear energy in the 1980s. In this regard, the rhetoric about renewable energy in the country has not been matched by policies. By 2019, ENI was drilling offshore Cyprus for gas and oil, challenged by Turkey.(v) In early 2020, both Italian ENI and French energy giant Total announced the suspension of their drilling programme in Cyprus waters allegedly because of the corona virus crisis. However, not a few are those who believe that the real reason is the Turkish bullying.

The energy power game was also seeing at this time the entry of another player, Israel, with the plan to build a gas pipeline from the Israeli controlled seabed in the Eastern Mediterranean to Europe via Cyprus and Greece. The East Med pipeline has already received European support with the European Commission designating it as a project of common interest.

As in many European nations, Italy relies heavily on revenues derived from the taxation of energy consumption and highway tolls. The Italian transportation industry has been faced with a lot of challenges and its contribution to environmental degradation and pollution is not to be underestimated. In the last decade, the government has pushed forward policies to motivate the population to purchase more environmentally sound cars. However, it looks like it will take some generations before the adoption of non-polluting cars. All the same, Middle Eastern conflicts have influenced the price of oil in markets all over the world, and have been exploited politically by states in conflict such as Iran vs Saudi Arabia. As many oil producing nations encounter political problems, such as those in Venezuela, industrially advanced states – Italy is one of them – have to be very careful about managing and resolving international conflict. International conflict and instability in the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea present a challenge to any Italian government and even to the military organization to which Rome belongs, in this case, NATO. The politics of oil and gas, became less problematic as by 2020, the price of these commodities had collapsed in the international market while the United States had become the largest producer of oil. But in no way did this relatively positive development lessened the need for alternatives to fossil fuels for environmental considerations.

Whilst Turkey and Greece are members of NATO, the policies of the current Turkish government continue to be very confrontational toward Athens and Nicosia. Current relations between Washington and Ankara are becoming ever more problematic because of overlapping conflicts in the Mideast such as the Syrian civil war, the confrontation between Israel and its Arab neighbors and the rise of the Islamic State. A development that took important political significance was the acquisition of Russian anti-aircraft missiles S400 by Ankara over and above the objections of Washington.

Turkey’s acquisition of sophisticated Russian military hardware was, by 2020, an indicator of a successful Russian re-entry into the politics of the area, after the demise of the Soviet Union, as Moscow’s involvement into the Syrian and Libyan civil wars foreshadowed another chapter in the great power conflicts in the Mediterranean. While the United States, under the presidency of Donald Trump, had stated that the US administration was committed to withdraw from conflicts in the area, the reality on the ground showed that the US was still heavily involved in the security of the region. Among other reasons, was the decades old confrontation between Iran and the United States as the radical Mullahs of Tehran had successfully entered the Near-East, especially Iraq and Syria, directly challenging US interests in the area, threatening Israel with genocide and challenging very subtly both Russia and Turkey for hegemony in the region. (vi) In fact, by 2020, American military commanders involved in anti-Islamic terrorism campaign in Africa (vii) were mentioning the possibility and inclination toward an American involvement in Tunisia as its border with Libya was becoming even more challenging for international security.(viii)

The great power game was already witnessing the entry of China in the region through Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative that saw, on paper, a revival of the Silk Road and the systematic expansion of Beijing’s commercial interests in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.(ix) The entry of China added an ever greater dimension to the theory of the balance of power in the study of international relations. If anything, it confirmed and strengthened the ideas of neo-realism in international affairs and challenged idealism and globalization as harbingers of peace and conflict resolution in the world. What stood out was the inability of Italy to act as a great power in the Mediterranean and even more the European Union as its policies for peace and cooperation seemed to be totally irrelevant to the power conflicts in the region.

(i) Paul Antonopoulos, “Greek Defense Minister: Turkey’s behavior is aggressive but our powerful Armed Forces are deterrent,” Greek City Times, June 5th, 2020, https://greekcitytimes.com/2020/06/05/greek-defence-minister- turkeys-behaviour-is-aggressive-but-our-powerful-armed-forces-is-a-deterrent/.
(ii) Ibid.
(iii) Ibid.
(iv) Steven Brown, “Tensions soar as Turkish troops invade Greece occupying piece of land on contested border” Express, May 22, 2020, https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1285915/turkey-Greece-invade-contested-border- world-war-3-latest-ww3-news.
(v) “Our work in Cyprus,” ENI, https://www.eni.com/en-IT/global-presence/eurasia/cyprus.html.
(vi) Sina Azodi and Giorgio Cafiero, “Idlib is a stress test for Iranian-Turkish relations,” Atlantic Council, March 17, 2020, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/iransource/idlib-is-a-stress-test-for-iranian-turkish-relations/.
(vii) U.S. Army Africa Public Affairs, “USARAF commander engages Tunisian Land Forces army chief,” United States Army Africa, May 13, 2020, https://www.usaraf.army.mil/media-room/pressrelease/29481/usaraf- commander-engages-tunisian-land-forces-army-chief.
(viii) Jared Szuba, “US commander suggests sending military trainers to Tunisia after Russia sends aircraft to Libya,” Al-Monitor, June 1, 2020, https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/06/us-commander-send-military- trainers-tunisia-russia-libya.html.
(ix) Andrew Chatzky and James McBride, “China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 28, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-massive-belt-and-road-initiative.

In the first part of the 21st century, what became increasingly important was the role of China and its systematic policy of creating an economic network through maritime and land routes between the Far East, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. Thus by 2020, Beijing’s increasing presence in the Mediterranean was characterized among other developments by commercial control of the Piraeus harbor in Greece, Haifa in Israel, and an interest in Trieste, in Northeastern Italy on the Adriatic. The presence of new Chinese immigrant communities in Italy boosted China’s evermore interest in what China called the “Belt and Road Initiative”(1).

In the Mediterranean, China had an ever growing presence in Algeria. Indicative of this presence was the construction of Djamaa El Djazair or the Great Mosque of Algiers by the China State Construction Engineering Corporation. It was the largest mosque in Africa and the third largest in the world, bigger even than the Great Mosque of Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque of Medina.(2) By 2019, Italy was the first major European country to join the “Belt and Road Initiative” (3), a move that was met with criticism from both Washington and the European Union.

The power and influence of China was such that, considering European moral and ethical concerns about conflicts in Africa and immigration from the Islamic and African world and continuous statements on diversity, tolerance, and religious freedoms, there was very scant interest in the persecution of Islamic national minorities in China, especially the Uighur Turkic national minority in Sinkiang western China.(4)

By 2020, the Trump Administration’s commercial, political, military and territorial objections to China’s international behavior (5) was another confirmation of what in the 1990s been called the Clash of Civilizations, or rather a great power conflict that certainly in the Mediterranean was not a new chapter in its long history. There was a new actor in the Mediterranean and all littoral states had to adjust accordingly.

In May of that year, the Secretary of State of the United States Mike Pompeo made a visit to Jerusalem that made ever clearer that Israel was the closest ally of Washington in the Middle East, as Trump pushed his Middle Eastern Peace plan to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. At the same time, Washington made it clear that the presence of China in the area economically, strategically and politically was not welcome. In the previous decade, Israel had allowed China to enter the Israeli technical and economic world. Chinese firms for example, were involved in building a metro system and were set to participate in the construction of a desalinization plant. American objections to the Chinese presence of a G5 advance phone network system in Israel were taken into account by Jerusalem. The US convinced Israel to avoid Chinese involvement with the construction of the phone system as it potentially allowed China to spy on Israel and its political, and military intelligence alliance of the United States.(6)

The COVID-19, Coronavirus, or Chinese virus of 2020, highlighted an ever increasing Sino-American confrontation worldwide with challenging implications for the strategic configuration of power in the Mediterranean interesting enough, for classical theories in International Relations ranging from the balance of power to hegemonic competition to clashes of civilizations.

(1) See Morgan Stanley post on March 14th, 2018, https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/china-belt-and-road.
(2) See Youtube video post March 12th, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3kXGmqAqMs.
(3) See CNBC post by Holly Ellyatt on March 27th, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/italys-joins-chinas-belt- and-road-initiative.html.
(4) See Haaretz post by Davis Stavrou on October 17th, 2019, https://www.haaretz.com/world- news/.premium.MAGAZINE-a-million-people-are-jailed-at-china-s-gulags-i-escaped-here-s-what-goes-on-inside- 1.7994216.
(5) See Fox News post by Liam Quinn on October 30th, 2019, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mike-pompeo- communist-china-beijing-challenges-head-on.
(6) See Jerusalem post on May 23rd, 2020, https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/israels- relations-with-china-are-creating-a-storm-629076. Also see Times of Israel post on May 26th, 2020, https://www.timesofisrael.com/amid-us-pressure-israel-taps-local-firm-over-chinese-bid-for-desalination-plant/.

Saudi Arabia’s quest for security in the last three decades have seen a primary confrontation with the rising power of Iran and its regional allies in Lebanon and Syria and the attempt to contain Iranian hegemonic ambitions in the Persian Gulf. The second and equally important Saudi concern has been a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, while a more immediate concern in the last three years was the Syrian civil war as one of the conclusive chapters of the so-called Arab Spring that had seen the rise of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and the defenestration of President Mubarak’s regime. He had been a steady reassurance for Saudi security, however when the Arab Spring began, the Saudi perception of Washington’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the humiliation of President Mubarak in Egypt rankled Saudi leadership.

The Election of a new president in Iran, Hassan Rouhani, and American and European diplomatic opening toward Tehran regarding the Ayatollahs quest for nuclear weapons had alarmed the Saudis to the extent that their top leadership had even approached the Israelis to encourage a preemptive attack on Iranian nuclear installations. The opening with Iran was taking place as the Syrian civil war saw an emboldened Iran protecting Assad’s regime against an opposition that had been aided and abetted by the Sunni world principally Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. By March of 2014 however, it seemed as if Iranian military advisors and Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon had been able to stop the Sunni and Islamist radical attempt to seize Damascus. The Saudi support for the Sunni opposition to Assad’s rule derived from the close alliance of Damascus with Tehran which had basically become an example of Iran creating client states and rulers in the Levant as its power expanded even in Iraq as Tehran came to increasingly influence Iraqi politics due to its Shiite connection to the new government in Baghdad.

The civil wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, and Iranian contribution to instability in Bahrain created critical and strategic concerns in Riyadh to the extent that American reassurance was sorely needed and in fact Obama promised not to agree to a nuclear deal with Tehran if the deal did not put a stop to Iranian nuclear ambitions. It has often been forgotten that regardless of Iranian claims for a peaceful pursuit of nuclear power, the Ayatollahs were busy building long range ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads and certainly were not to be equipped for just conventional warheads. In the months following the opening between Washington and Tehran, Iran began a charm offensive in the Gulf in trying to reassure members of the Gulf Cooperation Council of its peaceful intentions, this is while vitriolic denunciations of the Zionist entity and calls for the destruction of the state of Israel were routine pronouncements by the Ayatollahs in seeking support from Radical Shiite fundamentalists within Iran itself.

Saudi’s foreign policies should be understood in terms of not only immediate regional threats, but of domestic developments that range from demands for increasing political participation by the Saudi population, increasing social freedoms for women, and economic policies to favor the replacement of foreign workers by Saudi nationals, a policy that had yet to bear any fruits. Riyad was also confronted by the presence of a Shiite minority in the eastern regions where Saudi oil extraction was concentrated and where Saudi fundamentalist Wahabi doctrine perceived Shiites as pagan and heretics.

There was a second front that challenged the Saudi leadership but has not received and does not receive much academic focus, and that is political violence and instability in Yemen where Shiite groups in the north and al-Qaeda radical sympathizers in the South challenge the government in Sa’ana. In fact, Yemen had seen also an Arab spring chapter where the long lasting president, Ali Abdullah Saleh had been forced to resign in November of 2011. Yemen’s exploding population and unemployment were certainly not conducive to political stability in southern Arabia as the Ayatollahs in Tehran were fishing for challenges to Saudi power by supporting Iranian leaning minorities in Yemen, principally the Houthis an offshoot of Shiism. Thus, Saudi Arabia saw itself surrounded by Persian sympathizers whose religious beliefs were considered anathema by the Wahabi establishment that considered itself and Saudi Arabia the purest example of what Islam is supposed to be.

Meanwhile, the American Secretary of State, John Kerry, as he was trying to deal with Moscow and the European Union, was trying to negotiate again the restart of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for a two state solution, one that could have diffused one of the historic problems of the Middle East and had been a catalyst for rationalizing the failures of the political systems of the area.

Saudi ruler’s legitimacy derives principally by their claim on protecting Mecca and Medina as the sacred sites of Islam. In this quest, any challenge to Wahabi legitimacy by Shiite powers is a mortal danger to the monarchical establishment in Riyadh. Thus, Iran is the main security dilemma in the international relations of Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, the profound antipathy and objection to the reality of an Israeli state and Zionism have been part and parcel of the Saudi political, popular, and populist worldview in buttressing a political, national, and religious identity held together by enormous oil revenues, American security guarantees, and religious inspired social and political repression in domestic politics.

President Obama reassured Saudi rulers after his short visit that America’s commitment to security in the area was not going to decrease. In fact, by the end of 2013, the United States had agreed to provide Saudi Arabia and the Emirates with over 10 billion dollars worth of new weapons to counter Iranian security threats that were being compounded by Saudi quarrels with Qatar that was being denounced for its support of radical Islamists and Turkey that were perceived by Riyadh as being a threat to Saudi ambitions.

The Saudi rulers were thus confronted by the hegemonic aspirations of Erdogan’s regime, Persian-Shiite imperialist ambitions, and radical Sunni Islamist groups that were and are challenging every regime in the Arab world. Washington had thus come to reassure Riyadh that the United States was there. The Syrian crisis was seen more and more as a victory for Iran, thus confronting Saudi Arabia and some of her allies with ever-greater anxiety of Iran’s attempt to gain hegemony in the Gulf and the Fertile Crescent. One of the main pillars of the Saudi foreign and defense policy is the Gulf Cooperation Council, however by the time of Obama’s visit, Qatar and Kuwait were not in tune with the perspectives of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, and of course Saudi Arabia. Obama’s visit was part of the configuration of American diplomacy as Washington attempted to move from the Middle East to the Far East in confronting trade and security in the most dynamic area of the international system with a rising China challenging Japan and other Asian countries.