The Middle East is a tinderbox. The convergence of military, economic, social and geopolitical crises makes this moment, one of the most dangerous periods in the modern history of the region, an inflection point. Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 has emerged as a major global crisis, causing a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, rocking the political status quo and threatening to trigger a wider regional conflict. At the precise moment when the United States as well as Israeli and Arab strongmen were set to celebrate an expansion of the Abraham Accords, which were premised on ignoring the plight of the Palestinians, Palestine has been thrust to the center of regional and global politics. The long-standing quest by Palestinians and the many other peoples of the region for dignity, respect, and self-determination is once again at the heart of regional politics, reminding all that unresolved questions from the past still animate and haunt the politics of the contemporary Middle East.
Compounding his dangerous geopolitical picture is a much older story: an informal partnership between foreign powers and local autocrats has crushed the agency of the people in the region and denied them self-determination. Nonetheless, the people of the region continue to struggle for political freedom, justice and dignity, knowing they face great odds and even death.
Tempting though oversimplifications may be, there is no “one cause fits all” that explains the current turmoil and instability in the Middle East. With so many states and forces jockeying for power and advantage in the region today, it would be arbitrary and simplistic to look for a single explanatory variable. For example, do economic vulnerabilities like abject poverty and high unemployment among youth explain instability in the region? How about the role of autocrats and repression in fueling extremism and terrorism? Or does the “oil curse” and black gold in the Middle East leave the region prey to intense and repeated intervention by the Great Powers? What about geostrategic rivalries and structural vulnerabilities like the prolonged Israel-Palestine conflict? Can the instability in the region be traced back to European imperialism, the global Cold War, or America’s attempt to resurrect empire in the region? How about the huge social dislocations borne by Arab countries through the neoliberal reforms urged by Washington-based institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank? Do all these causes or a combination of them help explain socioeconomic underdevelopment and deepening political authoritarianism in the Middle East?
These questions do not lend themselves to easy, straightforward answers. The Middle East is in a transitional moment that reflects the enduring impact of the colonial legacy and the bloody path of nation-building as seen elsewhere in the Global South. Far from being frozen in time and space, the Middle East surprises us with its constant change and sudden shifts. The region’s fluidity, variability, and volatility are difficult to quantify or compartmentalize. There is no substitute for firsthand knowledge of everyday people in the Middle East, their hopes, fears, and aspirations as well as their struggle for justice, freedom, and a dignified life. In this sense, the people of the Middle East are like everyone one else. We historians have forgotten the subject of our study, as Leo Tolstoy reminds us, which is the collective will and agency of the people, as well as the causes behind the manifestations of political power.
To insist on the complexity and specificity of the historical trajectory of the Middle East does not mean neglecting the existence of dominant “threads” of interrelated issues. These “threads” help us organize and synthesize our knowledge of the region and make sense of it. This essay will zero in on the key drivers that help us make sense of the roots of instability and war in this region. My argument is built around the interaction of three key forces within the context of prolonged conflict. The first force is the constant and intense intervention by foreign powers in the region’s internal affairs, initially by formal empires and later by informal ones.[1] The second is the local trajectories of governance developed in different forms of traditional and modern authoritarianism. The third is the agency of everyday people in the Middle East. Making sense of the interactions of these forces requires that we consistently keep in mind how the first two forces, of foreign intervention and domestic authoritarianism, benefit from and actively propagate prolonged, violent conflict. This historical layer of prolonged conflict, or structural causes, runs throughout this essay and provides the backdrop against which all three key forces operate.
There is a puzzle at the heart of this essay: How and why did the Middle East reach this low point after a century of state- and nation-building and under what conditions might collective action and political change take place in the region? This investigation will be structured by considering the three key forces foregrounded in this book—foreign intervention, political authoritarianism, and the agency of the people—and the theater of prolonged conflict, all of which feed upon each other and are organically interconnected.
Foreign Intervention and Dependency
Since the early nineteenth century, Western powers have repeatedly intervened in the Middle East. Driven by imperial ambitions and the desire for military and economic expansion, they have presented the Arab-Islamic world as an exotic, irrational, and inferior cultural Other in need of a “civilizing mission.” The pretext for intervention is usually national security, cited to cover more complex motives. These include, depending on the time, control of the region’s strategic location, its natural resources, access to its markets, backing allies like Israel and the Gulf states, social engineering experiments like America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, and preventing rival global powers from gaining a foothold.
This pattern of repeated and intense foreign intervention in the region’s internal affairs continues today. The end of imperial politics has been predicted many times, but in spite of the tumultuous events that have rocked the region over the past century, it has not yet happened. As a set of practices and an ideology, imperial domination and control has proven remarkably durable, nimble, and dynamic. The colonial experience derails and disrupts a country’s normal social, economic, and political progression, leaving deep and lasting scars.[2] The Middle East has not recovered from the social, economic, and political devastation caused by European imperialism. Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and its attack on Lebanon, backed by the West in the name of fighting terrorism, extends this legacy in the 21st century.
Besides this toxic legacy, colonialism did not really end with the formal independence of Middle Eastern countries following World War II. Western intervention has persisted, prolonging colonialism under different names and disguises. From the 1950s until the late 1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union also fought proxy wars in the newly decolonized Global South, including in the Middle East. Casualties among American and Soviet citizens were relatively low—but in the proxy societies they were staggering.
In my recent book, What Really Went Wrong, I argue that the impact and effects of the global Cold War on the newly independent Middle Eastern states and societies was transformational. The region was reimagined as a Cold War chessboard, leaving a legacy marked by weak political institutions, fragile sovereignty, lopsided economic growth, and political systems prone to authoritarianism. Washington’s decision to roll back Soviet communism and its desire to build a new informal empire frustrated early efforts by the first generation of postcolonial leaders in newly independent nations. The Cold War also polarized the Middle East into two rival camps—pro-Western and nonaligned—forcing decolonized leaders to shift focus and priority away from development and institution-building to geostrategic competition and rivalry.[3]
The worst legacy of the Cold War was to deprive people of the Middle East of their right to self-determination. From colonial times to today, Western (and Russian) covert and overt military interventions repeatedly undermined internal societal forces seeking to bring about alternative forms of progressive governance but strengthened compliant dictators. The lingering impact and effects of colonial and neocolonial processes is discernible not only in the ways actors within the Middle East think about their past but also in the persistence of colonial narratives and in the old European (and later American) attitudes toward the region. Colonialism did not just retire into the sunset. It reproduced itself through indirect means of control, making sure to preserve the vital economic and geopolitical interests of the imperial powers, particularly oil, military bases, and arms deals.
Although the United States can no longer unilaterally impose its will and dominate the Middle East, it has been trying to compensate for its relative decline and retrenchment from the region by setting up an empire by proxy. U.S. decision makers seek to assemble a new regional grouping, which will include Israel and pro-Western Arab states, whose raison d’être is containment of Iran and ultimately regime change in Tehran. The first Trump administration and its Biden successor have used the Abraham Accords, normalization of Arab-Israeli relations, as a vehicle to setup its empire by proxy in the region. The US aims to lead from behind and provide its local partners with weapons, intelligence, leadership, and logistical resources, whereby they defend themselves and do the heavy lifting.
It is precisely the region’s many riches and strategic assets that attract so much unwanted interference. In the past 100 years, trillions of petro-dollars have been recycled and invested in the West, deepening the material ties—or, more precisely, the dependencies—that bind the region to the global capital and financial markets.
That is why the role of the Great Powers is so central to understanding how we reached this point of organic crisis in the Middle East. Of all explanations, the international level of analysis helps us make sense of why the region is marked by dependency, political authoritarianism, weak democratic forces, geostrategic rivalries, and rampant militarism and extremism. The story of the Middle East in the last 100 years cannot be fully told without accounting for the preponderant role of external actors (be it the colonial European powers or neocolonialist America), which made pacts with local autocrats and strongmen. Both the borders of some Middle Eastern states and their institutions were set up by white men in smoke-filled tea rooms in Western capitals, as was the establishment of Israel in the heart of the Arab world. Those outside forces never eased their grip on what they set up with the deliberate goal of maintaining control, disregarding the interests and aspirations of everyday people in the region.
While European colonialism exercised direct territorial control, after World War II the right to self-determination and sovereignty could not be so openly violated. Nevertheless, the United States used informal means to tame assertive Middle Eastern leaders like Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh and Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and to financially and militarily reward local collaborators and friends like Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, Israel, and the Saudi royal family. The means were different, but the effects were the same. What emerged from this was a policy of backing authoritarian strongmen and settler colonialism in the name of stability, which has become a cardinal rule of how Western governments deal with the Middle East today.
Unlike other regions, Middle Eastern states and peoples, with few exceptions, have not been left alone to determine their own affairs. Unceasing foreign meddling by Western powers has exacerbated the region’s problems and undermined territorial sovereignty and independence. Local leaders who resist Western hegemony do so at their peril. Mossadegh lost power and his freedom in August 1953 after he nationalized oil and sought to use natural resources to modernize the country. In the second half of the 1950s, Nasser narrowly escaped a similar fate to Mossadegh’s because he pursued a nonaligned foreign policy and mobilized economic assets to lift millions of Egyptians out of severe poverty. Half a century later, the Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein met a fatal end after he dared to challenge America’s hegemony in the Gulf.
Despite their stark political differences, what Mossadegh and Hussein shared in common was a defiance of Western (American) imperial ambitions and a desire to act independently. The United States, together with Britain, deposed both Mossadegh, a democrat, and Saddam Hussein, an autocrat, under the pretext of combatting Soviet communism (replaced later on with Islamist extremism) and defending stability. The result is that Iran’s and Iraq’s political and developmental trajectory was altered, empowering radical and revolutionary ideologies like Shia and Sunni puritanical Islamism.
One hundred years after the end of European imperialism, Arab states are as dependent on and subservient to foreign patrons as ever. Unlike the first generation of postindependence Middle Eastern leaders like Mossadegh, Nasser, and Saudi king Faisal, who defended the dignity of their people and nations, today’s Arab rulers fear their people and depend on external support for political survival. Most lack popular legitimacy and authority, relying instead on patronage, cronyism, and coercion. More than a hundred years after its formation, the modern Middle East is still the most penetrated region in the world.[4]
With the exception of Turkey and Iran, Arab states have not attained either economic sovereignty or even basic food security. The neoliberal economic reforms known as the Washington consensus imposed by the IMF and the World Bank on many Middle Eastern countries in the mid-1980s and 1990s led to huge inequities and disparities.[5] And while these policies were applied across the Global South, the damage took a particularly heavy toll on the middle class and the poor in the Middle East. The ruling elite plundered both private and public sectors, defeating even the misguided intentions of reforms imposed by the international financial institutions and exacerbating the already-yawning wealth gap. The United Nations estimates that the Arab region’s top thirty-one billionaires, all men, own almost as much wealth as the bottom half of the adult population.[6] Such massive inequality was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the food crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and Israel’s ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon since 2023.
One of the great tragedies of the Middle East is the contrast between its near-total dependence on others and its inherent, indigenous riches—and here I do not only mean oil, crops, or other commodities but also the intelligence and ingenuity of its peoples. The region used to export food but can no longer feed its people, relying for its bread on wheat from Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and beyond. In fact, for all of its rich, fertile land, waterways, and millennia of farming and irrigation, the Middle East is now one of the most food-insecure regions in the world.[7] This could be explained by official neglect and mismanagement of the agriculture sector as well as water scarcity.
Domestic Authoritarians and the Agency of Everyday People
Yet, foreign intervention and colonialism are not the whole story about the dynamics that affect the everyday life of people in the Middle East. The role of local autocrats is key to making sense of why the region reached this seeming low point after a century of state- and nationbuilding. The story of the Middle East over the past 100 years is one of creeping and deepening political authoritarianism and gross economic mismanagement. While the Great Powers constantly intervene in the region’s internal affairs either directly or indirectly, autocratic leaders who depend on external patrons for survival have crushed the agency of everyday people in the region.
My new book, The Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East—which traces more than a century of consequential events in the region, from the end of the Ottoman Empire and the European carve-up of the Middle East to the Iranian Revolution and the Arab Spring uprisings—shows how this partnership between domestic authoritarians and their great powers patronshas systemically denied the people of the Middle East denied self-determination, political representation, and effective government.
Although the aspirations of the protestors have been crushed, activists and civil society groups acknowledge that the struggle to transform their societies will be long and fraught with setbacks. Even for a region that has dominated world headlines for decades, today’s Middle East is remarkable for its surprises. For example, after 13 years of a devastating war in Syria that cost hundreds of thousands of casualties and almost destroyed the country, many in the West and the region had written the Syrian revolution off and declared Assad the winner. Yet in 2024, it took the Syrian people only two weeks to seize their country back from that dictator and reclaim their freedom and dignity. The swift fall of Assad stunned the world and showed the resilience of Arab agency and that the people’s struggle for self-determination and freedom will continue. As the Syrian people have shown, we have not heard their last roar, however.
The region’s rulers face a stark choice. Will they continue to rule by domination, divide-and-conquer tactics, and dependence on their foreign masters, or will they address the legitimate grievances of their people and their calls for justice, dignity, and freedom?
The first choice, almost too scary to contemplate, means more of the same failed policies, failed development, and even failed states, not to speak of the senseless loss of life and potential of the affected population. The second option promises to arrest economic and cultural decline and end the political violence and civil wars that have ravaged the region. Middle Eastern rulers resist instituting change at their own peril, as Bashar al-Assad finally discovered. It is not a question of whether protestors will achieve their aims but rather when. The future of the Middle East will ultimately be determined by the massive and growing Arab/Muslim youth population, not by the dictators who rule over them. Autocrats get a disproportionate amount of media coverage, thus distorting the reality of the region and the many problems that plague it. As Leo Tolstoy famously declared, history’s great protagonists, its drivers, are the ordinary people who too often get overlooked. Nowhere is this truer today than in the Middle East.
Fawaz A. Gerges is professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of What Really Went Wrong: The West and the Failure of Democracy in the Middle East and Making the Arab World (Princeton).
Notes
[1] In his book Imperialism and the Developing World, Atul Kohli compares British formal empire during the nineteenth century with America’s informal empire in the twentieth. While formal empires imply direct control of territory, informal empires are based on “an alliance in which elites in the imperial country allow elites on the global periphery to share in economic growth in exchange for establishing stable but ultimately subservient governments there.” Kohli cites the US relationship with the shah of Iran during the global Cold War as a “classic … example” of an informal empire. See Atul Kohli, Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the U.S. Shaped the Global Periphery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 4, 6.
[2] Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
[3] Yezid Sayigh and Avi Shlaim, eds., The Cold War and the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
[4] L. Carl Brown, International Politics of the Middle East: Old Rules, Dangerous Game (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 16.
[5] Nadine Sika, “The Political Economy of Arab Uprisings,” European Institute of the Mediterranean, March 2012, https://www.iemed.org/publication/the-political-economy-of-arab-uprisings/.
[6] United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), “ESCWA: 31 Arab Billionaires Own as Much Wealth as Half of the Region’s Population,” June 3, 2020, https://www.unescwa.org/news/31-arab-billionaires-own-much-wealth-half-region’s-population.
[7] Zahra Babar and Suzi Mirgani, eds., Food Security in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
