Boys sit on the rubble of a two-floor building after it was allegedly destroyed by Saudi-led airstrikes on the northern outskirts of Sanaa, Yemen, 23 August 2017. Picture by Hani Al-Ansi/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.Today, conflict in the Middle East is reduced to Saudi-Iranian rivalry. The story is that emergent Iranian hegemonic designs in the Levant pose a threat to regional peace that needs to be countered. The narrative is cast as religious ‘Shi’a v. Sunni strife’ for additional existential effect. However, this simplistic frame obscures a more significant development: the return of authoritarianism to the Middle East.
Autocratic rule is consolidating in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Iran alike. It is overlaying the causes of the Arab Spring - a lack of bread, freedom, social justice and human dignity – with new waves of repression. This realization is insufficiently reflected in western foreign policy that is dominated by concerns over radicals and refugees. Yet, the mix of domestic repression and foreign neglect stores up conflict for the future. It also runs the risk of simply repeating history.
The regime of president El-Sisi has been consolidating itself ever since the coup d’état of 2013. In particular, it uses the escalating insurgency in the Sinai to increase its control over Egyptian civil society and religion. As the country is basically broke, it has pawned its foreign policy in part to Saudi Arabia to foot the bill. North, Turkey has discarded its rule of law where political dissent is concerned and re-started a civil war against 20% of its population. Absolute majority rule takes precedence over individual- and minority rights. East, the Iranian state retains a paradoxical balance between revolutionary believers and geopolitical pragmatists with elements of democracy in a cast of clerical autocracy. Rescinding the Joint Comprehensive Plan for Action (‘the nuclear deal’) is likely to strengthen its hardline factions. South, Saudi Arabia is transforming heterogeneous royal rule with limited foreign ambitions into a centralized autocracy with a muscular foreign policy. The one (former) regional power that offers a glimmer of hope is Iraq’s fledgling democracy. The country was on the road to autocracy under Prime Minister Al-Maliki, but the Islamic State’s successes in 2014 made his tenure unsustainable, throwing electoral competition wide-open.
