Great article in Unheard. We have gone from the Abraham Accords to a soft regional war in the Mideast. We have also overtly tried expanding WW2 relic NATO into the Ukraine igniting a regional War in Europe with a half a million dead and just one NATO bomb away from becoming a hot war for the U.S. All the while Xi consolidates his power at home and the Far East and plays Kingmaker in both Europe and the Mideast on our dime. To think America is potentially on the tip of a World War with events no longer in its control when three years ago American citizens voted for elderly Joe Biden because it was told Trump would lead us to War and Joe would lead America back to normal. Fingers crossed, 2024 will be interesting if not defining.
This piece argues that what we are witnessing in West Asia is not a crisis caused by ideology or leaders, but the slow reassertion of ancient civilisations after the collapse of modern empire. The United States, a declining maritime hegemon, is withdrawing unevenly and leaving power vacuums it no longer has the legitimacy or capacity to manage. Into that space step three old civilisational actors: the Arabs, long administrators rather than sovereign powers; the Turks, animated by an unresolved Ottoman imperial archetype; and the Iranians, an Indo-European civilisation that adopted Shia Islam as a cultural defence against Sunni domination. The article suggests that regime change, diplomacy, and external mediation consistently fail because they misunderstand culture as malleable and history as finished. Empires may be over, but their memories, archetypes, and rivalries are not, and West Asia’s instability is best understood as the aftershock of imperial collapse rather than the prelude to a new order.
Sorry but what does “losing us Arab publics for a generation” mean exactly? If the never-ending stream of Western punditry about the Middle East could be culled to - say - 1% of its current volume, I don't believe anything much would be lost. But here anyway is my own two penn'orth: Israel is a little bit of the West stuck in a vast region historically and currently entirely alien to the Judeo-Christian roots of Western civilisation. Abandoning it to its own fate would not seem to be a very civilised thing to do (in Western terms anyway).
Great article in Unheard. We have gone from the Abraham Accords to a soft regional war in the Mideast. We have also overtly tried expanding WW2 relic NATO into the Ukraine igniting a regional War in Europe with a half a million dead and just one NATO bomb away from becoming a hot war for the U.S. All the while Xi consolidates his power at home and the Far East and plays Kingmaker in both Europe and the Mideast on our dime. To think America is potentially on the tip of a World War with events no longer in its control when three years ago American citizens voted for elderly Joe Biden because it was told Trump would lead us to War and Joe would lead America back to normal. Fingers crossed, 2024 will be interesting if not defining.
The best and most cynical explanation for the USA support of Israel was given by Robert Kennedy Jr.
https://www.livingintheair.org/2026/02/in-west-asia-old-civilisations-reassert.html
This piece argues that what we are witnessing in West Asia is not a crisis caused by ideology or leaders, but the slow reassertion of ancient civilisations after the collapse of modern empire. The United States, a declining maritime hegemon, is withdrawing unevenly and leaving power vacuums it no longer has the legitimacy or capacity to manage. Into that space step three old civilisational actors: the Arabs, long administrators rather than sovereign powers; the Turks, animated by an unresolved Ottoman imperial archetype; and the Iranians, an Indo-European civilisation that adopted Shia Islam as a cultural defence against Sunni domination. The article suggests that regime change, diplomacy, and external mediation consistently fail because they misunderstand culture as malleable and history as finished. Empires may be over, but their memories, archetypes, and rivalries are not, and West Asia’s instability is best understood as the aftershock of imperial collapse rather than the prelude to a new order.
Sorry but what does “losing us Arab publics for a generation” mean exactly? If the never-ending stream of Western punditry about the Middle East could be culled to - say - 1% of its current volume, I don't believe anything much would be lost. But here anyway is my own two penn'orth: Israel is a little bit of the West stuck in a vast region historically and currently entirely alien to the Judeo-Christian roots of Western civilisation. Abandoning it to its own fate would not seem to be a very civilised thing to do (in Western terms anyway).