The Middle East underpax Americana:how new, how orderly?

Abstract

It is now commonplace to suggest that the collapse of the Soviet Union as a superpower has profoundly changed the international system. Analysts of the realist persuasion are already speculating about what the structural change from bipolarity to something else-be it monopolarity or mutipolarity-will mean. How will it affect the security perceptions, policies and behaviour of the major actors? Is President Bush's US dominated 'New World Order' likely to be more stable, more integrated, more prosperous, and less tense and dangerous than the old Cold War order? Initial US euphoria has been dissipated by the enormity of adjustment problems in the former Soviet bloc as well as by growing concern about the long-term capabilities of the USA itself. The answers are far from clear. Students of Middle East politics are also asking with growing apprehension how the New World Order will affect this troubled region. The 'cradle of civilisation' has been a 'cradle of conflict' for the past half-century. In 1990-91 the Middle East was the site of the first significant manifestation of Washington's bid for unchallenged world hegemony when President Bush assembled a formidable international coalition, joined by the USSR as a junior partner, to punish Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait. What will be the long-term effects of this unprecedented US intervention in the international politics of the region? What will the US-led New World Order in the Middle East be like? Is it really new? And how orderly will it be? How one answers these questions depends on what one takes to be 'objective realities' in the region and also on the analytic perspective employed. The first part of this essay reviews the Middle East regional situation after the Gulf War. The second part develops a typology of four scenarios of regional prospects, each argued in terms of two broad and widely utilised analytical approaches: the sociological approach, which sees actors' foreign policy behaviour mainly as the result of domestic factors, and the neorealist approach which explains international behaviour in terms of the security calculations of presumably rational, informed state actors. In the third part I make an argument as to which of the four scenarios might be the more plausible, in light of the configuration of domestic and international factors, and discuss some implications for the US position in the region.