How did the Mideast become a Nuclear Flashpoint? | Informed Comment |

Today, the ongoing war theatres in Ukraine/Russia and in Palestine/Lebanon are threatening to escalate into major regional and global confrontations and escalation into a nuclear holocaust. The ill-conceived NATO expansion since the 1990s has contributed to a Russian backlash and its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The United States for the first time has left Israel 'unhinged,' allowing for significant violation of international liberal norms and values, institutions, and humanitarian and human rights laws that it had spent decades building during the Cold War years. The United States' pursuit of unilateralism and reinvigorated Zionism in Israel is detrimental to a vision of global order based on multilateralism, big-power diplomacy, and international law.    

The US-Israeli Symbiosis

US declaration of `war on terrorism' in 2001 has since resulted in several million mostly Muslim fatalities across the Middle East and an estimated 38 million people displaced in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines. The undeclared and controversial wars and military interventions in Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Syria (2014), and Yemen (2015) have violated international laws on multiple fronts but have also helped serve to destroy `enemies' of the state of Israel while complicating the regional power relations among its major players. 

Meanwhile, the rise of Iran as a regional player, despite the US and the UN's severe sanctions, encouraged and developed the rise of an `Islamic Resistant Front,' dedicated to a struggle against US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East and the restoration of Palestinian rights.

The Barack Obama administration's policy of 'pivot to Asia' was to redirect many resources to Asia in countering the rise of China but instead has encouraged closer Russo-Chinese relations.  The outcome has been economic ruin and political uncertainties across multiple regional states in the Middle East, millions of internal and international refugees, a NATO-led war against Russia since 2022 2008, an intimated China lashing out in East Asia to preserve its legitimate rise in power as a regional hegemon, and an embolden Israel led by an age-old Zionist dream of a dominant 'Jewish state' hegemony in the historical Eretz Yisrael regardless of the cost.

The Growing Danger of a Nuclear Middle East | MERIP - Summer 2008 |

'Sapere aude'