Arab states in the Middle East can't be sleeping as well at night as they look around and see rival Moslem powers ringing the Middle East vying for the loyalties of Arab Moslems.
Turkey is one non-Arab power.
No doubt that Turkey is the strongest single power in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Even Israel can't match Turkey's ability to sustain a long war. But what of it? Turkey can't isolate any of its potential targets. Greece is in NATO. And Egypt has powerful Arab allies like Saudi Arabia.
Is Turkey going to throw its weight around so much that NATO ejects Turkey? NATO has a Plan B if Turkey goes Full Erdogan. And then Turkey would have to face its historic enemy Russia alone in Syria and the Black Sea.
Is Turkey going to go to war against the Arab world? Maybe Turkey uses its power to expand influence in Africa--where it is the dominant power in Somalia (good luck with that)--and leaves the Middle East alone. Turkey is not unopposed. Maybe if Turkey was less aggressive, opposition couldn't form so easily.
Also, has Turkey's air force recovered from the purges?
Turkey is rising in power but it has historic enemies and former colonial subjects around it, and has alienated NATO and Israel.
Pakistan is another non-Arab Moslem power. It has nukes and troubles.
Yeah, this will work out well for Pakistan:
Pakistan continues to deny that it had anything to do with the August Taliban victory in Afghanistan and the formation of the IEA (Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan). ... Unofficially, Pakistan let it be known since 2002 that if Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, they would do as they were told by their Pakistani patrons. That is not happening and Pakistani military commanders are unsure how to handle this and are openly feuding with each other and the Pakistani government about how to fix the very real mess they have unofficially created.
Good luck with that. Say, here's some blowback:
Thousands of supporters of a banned radical Islamist party Saturday departed the eastern Pakistan city of Lahore, clashing for a second straight day with police who lobbed tear gas into the crowd, a party spokesman and witnesses said.
Four dead so far.
Pakistan with its nukes was once a source of support for Saudi Arabia. It is the only Moslem state with nukes. Yet Pakistan has alienated America and the West with its nukes and persistent support for jihadis. And despite Chinese interest in Pakistan, India looms over Pakistan. While Pakistan may be too troubled to be a threat to Arab states it is also not in the position to be much of a supporter.
And we have Iran, which has been a power to be reckoned with in the region for a long time and which actively courts Shia Arabs to bolster its attacks on the Saudis as the keepers of Mecca and Medina in the name of the Moslem world.
Oddly, a number of Westerners love Iran and are downright eager to get out of the way of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. For example, this fantasy about a nuclear-armed Iran is simply too good to be true:
Critics of the theocracy in Tehran tend to cast that outcome as a nightmare scenario. In fact, going nuclear could lead to the undoing of the Islamic Republic. Getting the bomb would likely backfire on the regime, in part by sparking a much-needed reset of U.S. policy that would allow Washington to finally focus on the Islamist state itself and not just its nuclear apparatus. A nuclear arsenal would not offer the regime the security it so desperately craves; to the contrary, soon after testing a nuclear weapon, the theocracy would find itself more vulnerable than ever.
Articles like that are an excuse to let Iran go nuclear. The magical global consensus to oppose the nuclear-armed mullah regime will never be formed and never be effective when our enemies prop up Iran and weaker powers succumb to Iranian nuclear-backed pressure.
Foreign Affairs rarely informs on international affairs as much as it reflects what the elites believe. I remember being terribly disappointed decades ago when I discovered how banal its articles are. At least I have a bunch of their coffee cups for my lesson.
But I digress.
Add in Iranian efforts in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, and elsewhere to use Arabs as cannon fodder to achieve Iranian objectives and you have yet another "alien" threat.
And add in America's retreat from the Middle East punctuated by the sudden and needless defeat in Afghanistan and you have a situation where Arab states in the heart of the Moslem world are almost under siege with outside help less assured.
Is Saudi Arabia working the problem? What's with the local efforts to heal the intra-Sunni rift in the Middle East? Is this about Shia Iran? Is Erdogan abandoning neo-Ottoman ambitions or just trying to soften the image of that drive by a non-Arab power to reclaim influence in Arab countries?
From the Arab point of view it might take one non-Arab power off the siege lines that has enough problems and opportunities elsewhere to keep Turkey busy.
Pakistan is at least farther away and the least of the problems.
As for Iran? Well, a Turkey eased out of the threat column automatically becomes a source of anti-Iran power to push Iranian power and influence out of Arab states. And perhaps Turkey eases its opposition to Israel, which is a growing source of power to resist Iran and prevent it from going nuclear.
The Israelis are not (mostly) Arab but the Jews are at least fellow Semites. And Israel is not a threat to the loyalties of Arab Moslems. The logic of dealing with the siege should mean more Arab states expand the Abraham Accords to normalize relations with Israel.
Unless the Arab states want to simply live under the domination of Turks, Persians, and Pakistanis, the Arab Middle East needs to conduct a lot of diplomacy to break the siege.
I hope it works because the alternative is the proliferation of nuclear weapons to deter the looming threats. Good luck hoping MAD--as dangerous as it is--can be a source of uneasy stability in that patchwork of hostilities and religious passions.
