Who will douse the flames of Middle East conflicts?

Will common sense break out in 2020, or will more of the Middle East follow the path of Syria? (Illustration by Mohamad Elaasar)

David Hearst

Well, we survived 2019 - just - but what beckons for the new year and the new decade cannot but make us hunker down even deeper in our bunkers. There is no doubt about it, even to the liberal globalists of the Financial Times, that the western world, long advanced as the example the rest of the world should follow, is in a profound political crisis.

The region is so unstable, it would not take much to trigger a third Gulf war

Voters in England and Wales have just handed the most unstable prime minister in postwar history the biggest mandate since Margaret Thatcher. I say England and Wales because undoubtedly now, if given the chance, a majority of Scots would choose to leave the union first set up in 1707.

The virus of rightwing white nationalism has spread throughout Europe and the US. Watch out for the rise of the neo-fascist League in Italy in 2020, and the strong possibility it could form a government.

This and US President Donald Trump’s re-election will continue to have profound impacts on the Middle East. The unpredictability of western actions in the region, as well as the profound absence of a coherent policy, will affect regional actors such as Turkey, Iran and Israel.

The Gulf is on a hair-trigger, but my betting is still against war on Iran in 2020. Military action in the Gulf is unpredictable, and Trump fancies his chances of turning impeachment into an electoral asset and getting re-elected. That said, the region is so unstable, it would not take much to trigger a third Gulf war.

The Americans are worried, so they recently put substantial efforts into publicly embracing Qatar (Ivanka Trump showed up at this year's Doha Forum) in order to pressure Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman into talks aimed at ending the two-year blockade against Qatar. The talks themselves, however, are in their infancy, and both Bahrain and the UAE are against any change to the status quo.

The civil war in Libya could easily descend into house-to-house fighting in Tripoli, unless both Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin come to an Astana-like deal. The military balance has recently swung in General Khalifa Haftar’s favour with the arrival of hundreds of Russian mercenaries.

Overall, we enter a new decade with record temperatures, strong winds and bush fires raging throughout the region. There are limited means to fight those fires. Will common sense break out, before vast tracts of the Middle East look like Syria? No time soon.