Unanimity on a new American century had gone unchecked for a decade. The warhawk John Bolton lambasted Xi’s authoritarianism, claiming the new crackdown has made it practically hard for the CIA to keep agents in China.
Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) has evolved enormously since its inception. Today, multipolarity has developed, promising long-term progress for everyone who follow its norms. And Syria is one among them, having lately returned to world prominence after defeating a decade-long military offensive by the traditional unipolar actors.
In spite of this, unlawful US sanctions continue to harm the hungry, impede the rehabilitation of essential infrastructure and access to clean water, and restrict the livelihood of millions in Syria.
“We welcome Syria’s involvement in the Belt and Road Initiative and the Global Development Initiative,” stated Xi Jinping to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad on November 5.
In July 2021, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with the Arab League’s head to discuss Syria’s return to the fold. A four-point plan to end Syria’s multi-faceted crisis was signed by China at the end of the tour, which coincided with Assad’s re-election.
Surrounded by western-backed separatist movements, Syria reiterated its support for China’s territorial integrity. In 2018, China gave Syria $28 billion, and in September 2019, Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi proposed China-Iraq oil for rebuilding and greater BRI integration.
Events orchestrated by foreign forces halted this progress. Protests swiftly overthrew Abdul Mahdi’s administration and the oil-for-reconstruction scheme. In recent months, Iraq has rekindled this endeavor, but progress has been modest.
These projects are currently mostly channeled through the 25-year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership deal between China and Iran in March 2021. This might open the way for future rail and energy lines connecting Iran with Iraq and Syria.
At the first formal BRI meeting in April 2019, President Assad stated: “The Silk Route (Belt and Road Initiative) crossing through Syria is a foregone conclusion when this infrastructure is constructed, since it is not a road you can merely put on a map.”
China and Syria are now staying quiet on specifics. Assad’s wish list may be deduced from his previous strategic vision for Syria. Assad’s Five Seas Strategy, which he pushed from 2004 to 2011, has gone after the US began attacking Syria.
The “Five Seas Strategy” includes building rail, roads, and energy systems to connect Syria to the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, Black, Red, and Caspian Seas. The project is a logical link that connects Mackinder’s world island’s states. This initiative was “the most significant thing” Assad has ever done, he claimed in 2009.
Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon were among the countries Assad led delegations to sign agreements with in 2011. President Qaddafi of Libya and a coalition of nations including Sudan, Ethiopia, and Egypt were building the Great Man-Made River at the time.
We can’t comprehend why Qaddafi was killed, why Sudan was partitioned in 2009, or why the US is presently financing a regime change in Ethiopia until we grasp this tremendous, game-changing strategic paradigm. Diplomatic confidentiality between China and West Asia is so essential in the post-regime transition situation.
Over the last decade, BRI-compliant initiatives throughout West Asia and Africa have been sabotaged in various ways. This has been a pattern. Neither Assad nor the Chinese want to go back to that.
The Arab League re-admitted Syria on November 23, revealing the substance of this hidden diplomacy. They have proved that they are prepared to accept their humiliation, acknowledge Assad’s legitimacy, and adjust to the new Middle Eastern powers of China and Russia: the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Unlike decades of US promises that consider Arab participation as disposable short-term interests, the China-Russia cooperation provides genuine, demonstrable advantages for everybody.
The BRI now includes 17 Arab and 46 African countries, while the US has spent the last decade sanctioning and fining those who do not accept its global hegemony. Faced with a possible solution to its current economic problems and currency fluctuations, Turkey has turned to China for help.
Buying ISIS-controlled oil, sending extremist fighters to the region, and receiving arms from Saudi Arabia and Qatar were all known methods of supporting ISIS and Al Qaeda operations in Iraq and Syria. The CIA’s funding has dwindled in recent months, leaving ISIS with little else to work with.
Though US President Joe Biden reiterated US military backing for the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces (SDF), the Kurds’ hand has been overplayed. Many people now realize that the Kurds have been tricked into acting as ISIS’ counter-gang, and that promises of a Kurdish state are as unreal as Assad’s demise. For a long time, it was evident that Syria’s only hope for survival was Russia’s military assistance and China’s BRI, both of which need Turkey to preserve Syria’s sovereignty.
This new reality and the impending collapse of the old unipolar order in West Asia give reason to believe that the region, or at least a significant portion of it, is already locked in and counting on the upcoming development and connectivity boom.
Hamas eyes Malaysia as a possible operations base
Mohamad Zreik is a doctor of international relations. His research interests focuses on Middle Eastern Studies, Chinese foreign policy, China-Arab relations, and international relations of East Asia.
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Malaysia has emerged as a potential external operations base for Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip if Turkey expels or restricts the group’s movements as a part of its rapprochement with Israel.
Turkey has in recent months deported Hamas activists or refused them entry into the country as it sought to improve its troubled relations with Israel, according to Israeli press reports.
Turkish-Israeli relations have been strained since Israeli forces stormed a flotilla in 2010 headed towards Gaza in a bid to break an Israeli-Egyptian blockade. Nine activists were killed, and ten Israeli soldiers wounded in the incident. The flotilla sailed from Turkey and was chartered by a Turkish NGO.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited Ankara in March, becoming the first Israeli president to do so in 15 years. At a summit with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, both leaders pledged to open a new chapter in the relationship.
The press reports suggested that the deported Hamas operatives had been on an Israeli list presented to Turkey of individuals involved in the group’s armed activities in violation of their terms of residence in Turkey. Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’ deputy political bureau head, and former military commander, reportedly was among those expelled.
Sources close to Hamas warned that a withdrawal of support for the group would undermine Turkish efforts to position itself as a champion of Muslim causes, first and foremost Palestine, at a time that it is competing for geopolitical leverage and religious soft power in the Muslim world.
“Tukey knows that a break with Hamas would damage its image. Also, don’t forget that Palestine remains an emotive issue in Turkey itself,” one source said
Israel has long demanded that Turkey, which has granted Turkish citizenship to some Hamas leaders, crackdown on the group as part of any improvement in relations.
Earlier this week, Al Mekalemeen, a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated television station, said it was shutting down its operations in Turkey “due to circumstances that everyone knows about.” Al Mekalemeen did not specify the circumstances.
Turkey had earlier begun to curtail Egyptian opposition media that had either flocked to Istanbul or been newly established in the city as it emerged as a Mecca for primarily Islamist Middle Eastern opposition and dissidents.
Hamas is widely seen as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The anti-Islamist moves are part of broader Turkish efforts to improve relations with its Middle Eastern detractors, not only Israel but also Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt, where general-turned-president Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi toppled in 2013 a democratically elected Brotherhood government with Saudi and Emirati support.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE have designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation. Last year, UAE foreign minister Abdullah bin Zayed called on Western countries to identify Hamas in its totality rather than just its military wing as a terrorist organisation.
Israel and Egypt have blockaded Gaza since 2005, when Israeli troops withdrew from the Strip conquered during the 1967 Middle East war. Hamas seized control of the region in 2007 in armed clashes with its rival Al Fatah after narrowly winning elections in 2006. Palestinian President Mahmood Abbas leads Al Fatah.
In a twist of irony, Hamas retains a degree of support from Qatar with Israel’s tacit agreement.
Ismail Haniyeh, one of Hamas’s most senior leaders, is believed to remain a resident in the Gulf state, where he publicly meets with visiting dignitaries like Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and Palestinians from the West Bank. The Hamas official has also met twice in the last three years with Qatari emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
Nonetheless, Qatar is unlikely to allow the group to reestablish itself after the Gulf state forced it to move to Turkey as part of a 2014 deal that led to a return of the Saudi, Emirati, and Bahraini ambassadors to Doha. The ambassadors had been withdrawn in protest against Qatar’s alleged support of Islamists.
As a result, Malaysia has emerged as a potential base because the group has nowhere to go in the Middle East if Turkey expels it or severely curtails its activities and presence in the country.
If forced to find another base, Hamas’ choices are reminiscent of those Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat faced in 1982 when Israeli troops forced Palestinian fighters to leave Beirut.
At the time, Tunisia, the PLO’s new home, seemed a long way from Palestine but was at least an Arab country. Malaysia would seem not only geographically but also culturally more distant from Palestine than Tunisia.
Even so, Hamas enjoys public support in Malaysia.
“They already have a substantial base here. Not only in the form of the Palestinian Cultural Organisation Malaysia but also others employed in universities and as professionals. So, anything short of a base – however conceived – would be ok,” said a well-placed Malaysian source.
Some analysts said the cultural organization, or PCOM, was widely seen as Hamas’ ‘embassy’ in competition with the Al Fatah-controlled official Palestinian embassy in Kuala Lumpur. The PCOM was founded after Al Fatah refused to vacate the embassy following the 2006 election.
Malaysian foreign minister Sri Saifuddin Abdullah made a point last month of tweeting about a phone call with Mr. Haniyeh, the Qatar-based Hamas leader.
The well-placed Malaysian source said that the country’s security forces may object to granting Hamas greater leeway in Malaysia. Security forces in some other Southeast Asian nations would likely support their Malaysian counterparts.
The security concerns would likely center on fears that an enhanced Hamas presence could turn Malaysia into a Middle Eastern battlefield. Israel is seen as responsible for the killing in 2018 in Kuala Lumpur of a Palestinian university lecturer and activist believed to be a Hamas operative.
Hamas has used its cultural center in Kuala Lumpur to maintain unofficial contacts with various Southeast Asian nations that do not want to be seen to be talking to the group either because of their relations with Israel, their opposition to political Islam, and/or their standing in Europe and the United States. The US has designated Hamas as a terrorist organisation.
Neither Indonesia nor Malaysia, Southeast Asia’s major Muslim-majority countries, have diplomatic ties with Israel. However, Malaysia is more strident in its opposition to the Jewish state, support of the Palestinians, and at times anti-Semitic statements, particularly by its former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad.
To be sure, it is still early days in the rapprochement between Turkey and Israel at a time when broader efforts to reduce regional tensions remain fragile. Moreover, with US-Iranian negotiations to revive the 2015 international agreement that curbed the Islamic republic’s nuclear program seemingly at a breaking point, tensions could easily still spin out of control.
A failure to agree on a return to the agreement, from which the United States unilaterally withdrew in 2018, could throw the Israeli-Turkish rapprochement into a tailspin.
Moreover, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu warned last month that “sustainable relations” between Israel and Turkey would require Israel to “respect the international law on the Palestinian issue.” Mr. Cavusoglu did not spell out what he issues he was referring to but is expected to visit Israel later this month.
Israel’s rapidly deteriorating relations with Russia contain a message for other Middle Eastern powers: attempting to remain on the sidelines of the conflict in Ukraine risks falling in between the cracks.
Like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey, Israel has sought to maintain good relations with the United States and Russia despite Washington and Moscow’s principle of ‘you are either with us or against us.’
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has good reason to apply the same principle even if Israel and Turkey have sought to use their good offices to mediate between the Ukrainian leader and President Vladimir Putin. They used their mediation to justify their failure to join US and European sanctions against Russia.
Mr. Zelensky this week called out his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan after Turkey announced plans to encourage as many Russian holidaymakers as possible to visit. The announcement came as a senior Russian tourism official said that less than half the 4.7 million Russians who travelled to Turkey in 2021 were likely to visit the country this year.
“This is not entirely fair, and that is why I draw Turkey’s attention to such processes. There is a need to choose,” Mr. Zelensky said a day after meeting in Kyiv with Ibrahim Kalin, one of Mr. Erdogan’s closest advisors.
So far, the Biden administration has been restrained in its response to a Saudi and Emirati refusal to increase oil production to reduce prices and help Europe ween itself off its dependence on Russian energy. However, there is little doubt that the administration will remember who its friends were in a time of need and who was not.
It’s a message that may be registering in Abu Dhabi. In late April, France’s TotalEnergies chartered a tanker to load Abu Dhabi crude in early May for Europe, the first such shipment in two years.
Despite hubristic remarks by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in an interview in March with The Atlantic, relations between the kingdom, the UAE, and the United States have steered away from acrimonious public exchanges.
That has not stopped former officials from trading swipes.
Responding to former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s suggestion that the US should use a carrot-and-stick approach to get the Saudis to boost oil output, former Saudi intelligence chief and ex-ambassador to the United States Prince Turki al-Faisal quipped: “We’re not schoolchildren to be treated with a carrot and stick. When we’re dealt with fairly and squarely, we respond likewise”.
Striking a less belligerent tone, Mohammed Khalid Alyahya, a Hudson Institute visiting fellow and former editor-in-chief of Saudi-owned Al Arabiya English, noted that “Saudi Arabia laments what it sees as America’s willful dismantling of an international order that it established and led for the better part of a century.”
Mr. Alyahya quoted a senior Saudi official as saying: “A strong, dependable America is the greatest friend Saudi Arabia can have. It stands to reason, then, that US weakness and confusion is a grave threat not just to America, but to us as well.”
Israel has not been afforded the luxury of more layered exchanges in its increasingly harsh tit-for-tat official verbal swaps with Russia.
In the latest incident, Israel this week condemned Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s assertion that Adolf Hitler had “Jewish blood.”
Mr. Lavrov used that to justify describing as a “Nazi” Mr. Zelensky, who is of Jewish descent. The foreign minister went on to say that “the wise Jewish people said that the most ardent antisemites are usually Jews.”
In response, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, whose grandfather died in the Holocaust, said in a tweet that “Lavrov’s remarks are both an unforgivable and outrageous statement as well as a terrible historical error. . Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust. The lowest level of racism against Jews is to accuse Jews themselves of antisemitism.”
Subsequently, Mr. Lapid added that “we are making every effort to maintain good relations with Russia, but everything has a border, and this time it was crossed. The Russian government should apologize to us and to all the Jewish people.”
Doubling down, the Russian foreign ministry accused Israel a day later of supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine. The ministry said Mr. Lapid’s statements were “anti-historical” and “explaining to a large extent why the current Israeli government supports the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv”.
Mr. Lavrov and the ministry’s remarks were the latest salvo in the Israeli-Russian spat. A day earlier, a Russian television station disclosed the identity of ten Israeli consular officials and security guards who were on the Polish-Ukrainian border to help Israeli nationals escape from the war-torn country and described them as mercenaries.
“Their names + passports are compromised. It can help Israel’s enemies such as Iran intel,” tweeted Israeli national security reporter Yossi Melman.
The disclosure came a day after media reports said that Israel had foiled an attempt to assassinate an Israeli consular employee in Turkey, an American general in Germany, and a journalist in France.
Israel has walked a fine line in crafting its management of the Ukraine crisis.
It rejected Ukrainian requests for arms sales, including its acclaimed Iron Dome anti-rocket system, and access to Israeli surveillance technology, while providing humanitarian assistance to the war-torn country.
Israel has also shared intelligence, voted for a United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning the Russian invasion, and convinced the United Arab Emirates to do likewise. Furthermore, Israel voted for an Assembly resolution suspending Russian membership in the UN Human Rights Council.
Under pressure to get off the fence, Mr. Lapid sparked the deterioration of relations when in early April, he asserted that Russia had committed war crimes.
In a statement at the time, the Russian foreign ministry charged that Mr. Laipd’s remarks were “a poorly camouflaged attempt to take advantage of the situation in Ukraine to distract the international community’s attention from one of the oldest unsettled conflicts – the Palestine-Israeli one.”
Shortly after that, Russia’s ambassador to Israel, Anatoly Viktorov, told an Israeli television station that Israel and Russia were “still” friends but that Moscow expected a “more balanced (Israeli) position.”
To increase pressure on Israel, Admiral Oleg Zhuravlev, the deputy chief of the Russian Center for Reconciliation of the Opposing Parties in Syria, disclosed that a Syrian-operated, Russian-made Buk M2E air defense system had recently intercepted a guided missile fired from an Israeli F-16 fighter jet in Syrian airspace. The disclosure constituted a warning that Russia may no longer tolerate future Israeli strikes against targets in Syria.
“Israel risks falling off its carefully construed balancing act. Others in the Middle East still have some rope left. How much is the $64,000 question,” said a Western diplomat.
The US withdrawal from Afghanistan was a geopolitical watershed. Its shockwaves continue to reverberate and are magnified by the wars in Ukraine and Yemen.
Coupled with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US withdrawal removed a major obstacle to Iranian projection in Central Asia and created an opportunity for Iran to potentially enhance its influence, increase trade, and expand security cooperation in Central Asia.
Moreover, the withdrawal worked in Iran’s favour by putting one more nail in the coffin of an almost 80-year-old alliance between the United States and Iran’s arch-rival, Saudi Arabia.
Already angry at US President Joe Biden’s refusal to deal directly with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman because of the 2018 Saudi killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia saw the bungled withdrawal, along with the US failure to respond robustly to attacks on critical Gulf state infrastructure by Iran and Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, as further evidence of America’s increasing unreliability as a security guarantor.
Last month’s revival of security talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia highlighted the arc that links the Ukrainian and Yemeni wars with the withdrawal.
Saudi Arabia is groping for an exit from an eight-year-long war in Yemen that has cost it significant reputational damage and raised questions about its military capabilities.
The talks with Iran broke off shortly after the US withdrawal. However, they were revived as Russia struggled to achieve some semblance of victory in Ukraine.
The timing highlighted that Iran’s options might be less curtailed by the Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Yemen wars than those of other regional players.
Ukraine has taken Russia out of the equation as a possible guarantor of security or an alternative to the United States as an arms supplier for Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.
That leaves Saudi Arabia worried about its ability to protect itself despite increased military prowess and an armory filled with some of the world’s most sophisticated weaponry, with no good options.
The kingdom may be looking at China but is likely to discover that it is looking at a power that still lacks the capability and the will to replace the United States and would likely extract a higher price for offering to guarantee regional security.
Few would argue that the scenes of tens of thousands at Kabul airport trying to flee Afghanistan as American troops withdrew inspired confidence in US protection.
The ability of the United States and Europe to bolster Ukrainian resistance will likely have mitigated to some degree the impact of the dramatic pictures from Kabul.
At the same time, Gulf states, if attacked, may not have the wherewithal of the Ukrainians if the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait is anything to go by. That drives home the Gulf states’ dependence on a third-party security guarantor in the absence of confidence-inspiring multilateral, regional arrangements.
Kuwaitis largely fled Kuwait at the time while a US-led coalition forced Iraq to withdraw. In the wake of Ukraine, Russia is too preoccupied to take on other major military commitments, and China would not entertain the idea. That leaves the US for the foreseeable as the Gulf states’ only alternative.
Viewed from Tehran, the post-US withdrawal world is a different world in which the United States has been humbled and removed from one of its borders.
It is a world where the Taliban-governed Afghanistan is a more immediate problem for Iran than the Gulf states.
In recent days, Iran has reportedly moved additional military forces, including the army’s 88th armored division, to its border with Afghanistan amid rising tensions with the Taliban.
Iranian officials say border guards have acted with “restraint” in the face of alleged provocative actions by Taliban forces.
The troops were ordered to the border after Pakistani militants, based in eastern Afghanistan, stepped up their attacks inside Pakistan.
Last month, two Pakistani airstrikes in eastern Afghanistan killed at least 40 people, including some civilians. The United Nations said that 20 children were among the dead. The strikes occurred against areas believed to have been from where militants had killed seven soldiers in Pakistan.
Pakistan hasn’t confirmed the airstrikes and declined to comment on the civilian deaths but said earlier that “terrorists were using Afghan soil with impunity to carry out activities inside Pakistan.”
Anti-Iranian protests in Herat and Kabul and the stabbing by an Afghan national of three clerics in Iran also fueled tensions between the two countries.
The incidents cast a shadow over Iranian efforts to capitalise on the fallout in Central Asia of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Taliban’s acting minister for refugees and repatriations, Khalilurahman Haqqani, is expected to visit Tehran in the coming days in an effort to reduce tensions.
“Yemen and Ukraine are not major headaches for Iran. Afghanistan is,” said an Arab diplomat.
A version of this article was first published by the National University of Singapore’ Middle East Institute
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