Delivered. When, on January 20, new US President Joe Biden takes his place in the White House, the crises in the Middle East – starting with the standoff over Iran’s nuclear power – will unsurprisingly be at the top of the pile of his files. treat. “Failing to be the center of the world – except perhaps during Antiquity – the Middle East has never ceased to be at the heart of its agenda”, notes Bertrand Badie, specialist in international relations and professor emeritus at Sciences Po Paris, in the opening remarks of the collective work edited with Dominique Vidal.
Excellent perspective mixing history and the shock of memories, the book analyzes in particular the moments of change – like the Iranian revolution of 1979 – and also highlights the new issues with the contributions of many of the best specialists in this highly flammable region such as Henry Laurens, Hamit Bozarslan, Jean-Paul Chagnollaud, Agnès Levallois, Bernard Hourcade, Ahmet Insel, Myriam Benraad and many others .
The Middle East remains a rather vague notion, including geographically, between a Middle East which it tends to integrate within it and a Far East which has become the main pole of growth and tensions in the world. The region no longer represents the strategic stake it was, especially in the second half of the 20th century.e century, for its hydrocarbon resources. The United States is now tending to free itself from it, but the area nonetheless remains a hotbed of major crisis at the gates of Europe.
The smokescreen of anti-Westernism
New regional “revanchist” powers are asserting themselves, starting with Iran, the Saudi Arabia of Mohammed Ben Salman and the Turkey of a Recep Tayyip Erdogan prisoner of his hubris. On the other hand, States long pillars of the regional order have collapsed, ravaged by civil wars, such as Syria and Iraq. Others, like Egypt, have lost leadership over the Arab world. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, central since the post-war period, has become increasingly peripheral.
The rise of political Islamism and jihadism, the eruption of civil societies, the failure of the “Arab Spring” have further complicated the situation against a background of rejection of a hated West. “This anti-occidentalism constitutes a smoke screen clumsily obscuring the responsibility of the holders of power, of the elites and, more generally, of Arab-Muslim societies in their own tragedy”, notes the historian and sociologist Hamit Bozarslan, recalling that, throughout history, “The most traumatic wars in the Muslim world were not external but very internal”. It had started with the “Fitna”, “discord”, just after the death of Muhammad. This remains true today. As evidenced by the open-air cemetery that Syria has become.
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