The Middle East: Out of Step with History

Abstract

F JL or most of 1989 the Middle East languished outside the mainstream of global change. Stubbornly wedded to timeworn arguments about primordial conflicts, the region increasingly seemed a backwater of intellectual ossification and political stagnation. Toward the end of the year there were some tentative signs that Middle Eastern actors might yet transcend their pasts, but those changes were slow, hesitant and easily reversible. The Middle East remained a challenge to the rest of the world, but it was also in danger of becoming a mere bore. Nothing better symbolizes the Middle East's declining sa lience in world affairs than the contrast between the regional landscape awaiting President George Bush in January 1989 and that which eight years earlier had confronted his predecessor. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, attention was riveted on two crises: a massive Soviet counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, which many Western analysts interpreted as the first stage of an aggressive Soviet strategy aimed at the Persian Gulf, and the Iran-Iraq War, which had just broken out and which threatened to destabilize the major source of the world's oil exports, and perhaps presage the spread of revolutionary Islam throughout the Middle East. By the time George Bush embarked on his presidency, the Soviet Union had suffered an embarrassing defeat and virtu ally withdrawn from Afghanistan. The new Soviet leadership was actively promoting the idea of cooperative superpower efforts to resolve regional conflicts. Those developments not only signified the diminution of any direct Soviet military threat to the Middle East but also foreshadowed a general Soviet retrenchment throughout the Third World. Meanwhile, events had exposed Iran's inability to impose its revolutionary vision on Iraq, much less on the rest of the Islamic world. Six months before Bush's inauguration, Iran had agreed to a cease-fire on terms previously described as