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.

Indeed, the Italian Minister of Interior encapsulated the unfortunate, if not desperate, situation in which Greece unwillingly finds itself.  Angelino Alfano, in very eloquent terms, resembled the EU to a building where the residents quarrel non-stop and everybody blames the poor janitor, the powerless gate keeper to the EU, that is to say, Greece. How true!

On the other hand, Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister shouts out: ‘why should I subject my country to the burden of unruly refugees when I did not have a hand in all this’?

But is it so? Are the European leaders absolutely clear of any responsibility of the horrors taking place in the Middle East North Africa region today? It is high time, the Europeans, reflected on the root causes of the current MENA region crisis. The root causes are no other than the unilateral policies of NATO aimed at regime change in an entire raft of countries of the region in order to serve US interests. We are now experiencing the long term consequences of non-stop US interventions in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, and now in Syria to which the EU-NATO either unwisely subscribed or was unwillingly dragged into. Thirteen years into the US-led ‘Coalition of the willing’ intervention in Iraq, the country is still shattered by bomb blasts that kill hundreds week in, week out. Five years since the NATO bombing campaign that unseated and assassinated Muammar Qaddafi: Libya is in deep tribal civil war, ungovernable and a hot bed of jihadists.

What is new with US allies in the region? The Saudis, who have an abominable human rights record, yet have been for decades the US military-industrial complex best client building up a formidable war machine, have been for a couple of months now stitching up, a new Arab NATO-style alliance, purportedly to ‘fight terrorist organizations’. For once, Riyadh has been aiding and abetting extremist Sunni organizations for five years in Syria in effort to topple largely secular Assad and radicalize the Sunni population of the country. In this alliance, the House of Saud, relies on the support of Turkey, the arch state terrorist, of the region, who has been murdering its own Kurdish population on and off for over thirty years, with a revived vengeance as of late. Ankara is seeking to neutralize the YPG, the Syrian Kurds civil protection units that have achieved success in pushing away Islamic State terrorists with the help of Russian airstrikes on ISIS targets.

In conclusion, what the MENA region needs to pacify is not another NATO-style unilateralist organization but consolidation of the Syrian political process after the agreed ceasefire. For obvious reasons ISIS, being an extremist terrorist organization is excluded. The ISIS threat should be eradicated. Russia, invited by the Syrian government, seems to be the only power that achieves, through its air campaign, real results in that respect. Ironically, the EU blindly follows the US, in imposing sanctions on Russia, failing to see where the threat lies and who its real ally is in securing a prosperous European future.

Recently, the American leadership has expressed readiness to invite Russia in a coalition against the Islamic State (IS) terrorist organization, noting that Russia is not ready to join her. “They focus on other thing – the support of the Assad regime, and this does not allow them to create their own coalition, at least close in size to the one that US created”, the White House exclaimed.

It is obvious that the cause of disputes between Moscow and Washington in the settlement of the war in Syria lies not only in fundamentally different approaches to solving the Syrian crisis, but also mainly in the real goals of Russia and the United States in the Middle East. The main difference of the two respective coalitions is the goal of their creation. The US formed a coalition under the banner of the fight against the IS. However, their activity was limited only to this slogan. The Russian leadership announced the same purpose, adding that it intends to stop the spread of terrorism. Another difference lies in the actual measures taken to achieve positive results. In this respect the Americans are totally confused.

Washington and its allies, which are gathered under American banner, clearly demonstrate their unwillingness to destroy the IS. The main reason of their inaction is that it is their own creature. They created, instructed and trained opposition fighters in the Middle East. As a result, these very same structures became the allies of the Islamic State or directly passed under the control of this terrorist group. However, they still remain “clients” of Washington, although they went out of its control.

Syrian opposition forces are also close allies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. These countries have already invested lots of money in the training of Syrian and Iraqi terrorist groups, the supply of weapons to them and the conduct of combat operations.

In addition, these structures are related ideologically. The lack of democracy in Saudi Arabia looks like a deep rooted problem, whose solution, may optimistically, be reached in the next century. Currently, there are is no hope that Riyadh will proceed on the democratic path. All attempts to force the Saudis to do so constantly end in failure and rebuke. The Saudis persistently shout out: “Do not meddle in our affairs”. They do not make concessions and do not heed the admonitions of human rights defenders. All of them in fact, are ideological allies: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Islamic State share the same ideology based on the Salafi interpretation of Islam.

Russia sees the IS as an enemy, a threat to Muslims and all of Islam, because the Islamic State uses religion as a front cover to promote their political and economic goals. The terrorists train their followers, intoxicating them with ideas of their understanding of the concept of Jihad, which is explicitly contrary to the tenets of the Holy book of Moslems – the Koran. The main goal of Moscow is to prevent the propagation of this distorted ideological infection among Russian compatriots of the Muslim creed, whose number in the country is estimated to be around twenty million.

On the contrary, the US created terrorist groups. Washington sought to bring the Middle East into a state of managed chaos so as to control the entire region. It is easier to negotiate with small terrorist groups and their marginal unimportant leaders than with a strong country, defending its national interests.

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.