Большой Ближний Восток: урок реального мироустройства

Abstract

Here we represent our interview with renowned expert and analytics Prof. Yevgeny Satanovsky, Ph.D. (Economics), President of the Institute for Middle East Studies. The main question to discuss was contemporary Middle East realities: geopolitical processes, the alignment of forces, and controversies in Greater Middle East and surrounding it. According to Dr. Satanovsky, in the early 21st century, this region is characterized by the rapid emergence of short-term situational alliances that pursue short-term goals and serve the personal interests of political leaders and elites. Such chaotic arising and collapsing “free for all between all” alliances, sometimes even irrespective of Sunni and Shiite (which used to be completely uncharacteristic for the Arab World) or even more (this previously impossible alliance is Israel’s military, military-technical and defense cooperation with the Arab monarchs of the Gulf or with Maghreb Countries), testify not only to the weakening of the old geopolitical powers, which were in full control of the region as far back as the 20th century. This indicates fundamental change in the entire format of international relations, regardless of the emergence of new or even ‘partially new’ key players (for example, China’s return to the Middle East after several centuries of self-isolation and also after medieval Great Silk Road lost its geopolitical status). In this new world order, now no one plays by any rules, everyone acts as they want in order to get what they want. State institutions are declining, instead of them, states increasingly use unconstitutional means, from private military companies to inviting terrorists as mercenaries to restore order among its kind (such as France invited Chechen rebel fighters to control migrants from Africa). The political establishment is less and less interested in state-building, but it is extremely interested in the money that can be obtained for the project to build a state (such as in the case of Palestine in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict) and as a result of controlling hydrocarbons (such as in the case of the Iraqi Sunnis, who developed ISIS project), or, finally, at the expense of the diplomatic support of the chronic negotiation process (as UN officials and diplomacy of all countries participating settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and now also the Syrian one). Dr. Satanovsky concludes that today, the world is rapidly returning to the world order, i.e. allocation of economic, military and political forces that were characteristic of it in the 17th century, but without any European powers (such as Spain and Portugal were still in the 16th–17th centuries). In this situation, the greatest problem is the unreadiness of both the political establishment and the mass consciousness as a whole (in Russia, in Europe and perhaps even in the US) to the very fact that long gone is the time of the classical political and geopolitical rules.