US Hegemony In The Middle East Is Over | West Asia Will Define Its Own Future | US Amb. Chas Freeman

Essay available here: https://chasfreeman.net/the-middle-east-is-once-again-west-asia

Many thanks to the Middle East Forum of Falmouth (MEFF) for the fantastic talk! Check out their talks at http://www.meff.world

Beginning of Ambassador Freeman's Essay:

Title: The Middle East is Once Again West Asia
Date: August 6, 2023

Names make a difference. Those who confer them reveal their perspectives on the places and peoples they are naming.

Over the course of the 16th to the 19th centuries, Europeans conquered and colonized the world, imposing their self-centered perspectives on its geography. For them, the Ottoman Empire was “the Near East,” a region encompassing West Asia, Southeast Europe, and Northeast Africa. Then, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the United States became the preeminent component of the self-styled “West,” a trans-Atlantic perspective supplanted the European one. From the point of view of Americans, the lands within the collapsing Ottoman Empire were an intermediate zone between Europe – the Eurasian subcontinent to the East of the United States – and the Indian subcontinent.[1] That’s why Alfred Thayer Mahan decided they should be called the “Middle East,” not the “Near East.” In time, even the people who lived there began to use this American-minted term. The largest newspaper in the Arab world is الشرق الأوسط – which means “the Middle East.”

The Birth of the Nation-State in West Asia

The name persists, but the people living in the region no longer acquiesce in foreign definitions of their homelands’ place in world affairs. Ottoman cosmopolitanism disappeared when the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate expired. After flirting with a variety of transnational ideological identities – including pan-Arabism, Ba`athism, Judaism, Sunni, and Shi`ite Islamism – the region’s peoples have redefined themselves as “nation states.” Türkiye[2] and the fragments of the Ottoman Sultanate’s Levantine territories carved into semi-independent, neo-colonially administered countries by British and French bureaucrats have acquired well-defined international personalities. Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria have come to embrace strong national identities that have survived multiple external and internal challenges to their existence.

Iran has broken with its neocolonialist patrons, installed a defiantly independent Shi`ite government, and asserted its own sphere of influence in West Asia. In this century alone, Iraq has experienced a period of governance as a “thugdom,” an anarchy imposed by a botched American effort at hit-and-run democratization, and the slaughter by foreign and domestic forces of at least half a million of its population. Israel has degenerated from the vaguely humanistic vision of early Jewish nationalism to today’s Zionist negation of universal Jewish values. The indigenous people of Palestine have been the continuous object of relentless genocidal dispossession and brutal oppression by the Zionist settler state. Lebanon, once the playground of French confessional politics and Arab hedonism, has become ungovernable. Syria has been isolated, vivisected, and devastated by coalitions of domestic forces supported by external actors, including the Gulf Arabs, Israel, Türkiye, and the United States. Syria continues to be the locus of a variety of proxy wars, including between Israel and Iran, Russia and the United States, and Türkiye and Kurdish separatists.

Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, once proudly pan-Islamist rather than pan-Arabist or nationalist, has embraced nationalism. It celebrates its official founding as a state in 1932 and employs the international – not the Hijra – calendar to do so. Egypt retains its distinctive character and cultural identity under a comprehensive military dictatorship. Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) practice independent foreign policies and exercise influence not just regionally but globally. Kuwait – which is surrounded by Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia – is appropriately cautious. Bahrain defers to Saudi Arabia and serves it as a useful proxy in contacts with Israel and the United States military.

Geopolitical Centrality

What has not changed is West Asia’s geopolitical centrality. It is where Africa, Asia, and Europe and the routes that connect them meet. The region’s cultures cast a deep shadow across northern Africa, Central, South and Southeast Asia, and the Mediterranean. It is the epicenter of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three “Abrahamic religions” that together shape the faiths and moral standards of over three-fifths of humankind. This gives the region global reach......

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