The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey

JMD interview on Radio Islam about US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's talks in Riyadh

Alarm bells went off last September in Washington's corridors of power when John Bolton’s national security council asked the Pentagon for options for military strikes against Iran.

US President Donald J. Trump’s threat to devastate Turkey’s economy if Turkish troops attack Syrian Kurds allied with the United States in the wake of the announced withdrawal of American forces potentially serves his broader goal of letting regional forces fight for common goals like countering Iranian influence in Syria.

Pakistan is traversing minefields as it concludes agreements on investment, balance of payments support and delayed payment oil deliveries with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates worth USD$13 billion that are likely to fawn growing distrust in its relations with neighbouring Iran.

The Australian Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, is currently meeting with Thai officials in Bangkok, advocating for the release of detained Bahraini footballer Hakim al Araibi, who holds official refugee status in Australia.

Al Araibi was one of 150 athletes allegedly detained in Bahrain following the Arab Spring in 2011.

If not incarcerated and allegedly tortured at that time, Al Araibi would most likely be playing in his national team tonight, in its Asian Cup clash with Thailand.

Football's governing body in Australia, the FFA , has called for his release before, and overnight the world governing body FIFA issued a second statement calling for Hakim's immediate return to Australia.

Absent in any of the discussions has been the Asian Football Confederation whose president is Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa, a member of the Bahraini royal family.

Sheikh Salman is a FIFA vice president. He ran as a candidate for the presidency of the world body in 2016.

At that time the player, Hakim, who was living in Australia, called for an investigation into the role the Sheikh had played in the jailing and torture of Bahraini athletes who protested his family's rule during the Arab Spring.

It is this complicated geopolitical web Australia's Foreign Minister is now trying to extricate Hakim from.

Author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer and host of the podcast by the same name, Dr James M Dorsey is also senior fellow at the Rajaratnam school of International Studies, Nanyang University, Singapore.

A heavy soup made of pulled noodles, meat, and vegetables symbolizes Central Asia’s close cultural and/or ethnic ties with China’s repressed Turkic and Hui Muslims. It also explains growing Central Asian unease with China’s re-education campaign in its north-western province of Xinjiang and its signature infrastructure and energy driven-Belt and Road initiative.

Asian players are proving to be conceptually and bureaucratically better positioned in the 21st century’s Great Game that involves tectonic geopolitical shifts with the emergence of what former Portuguese Europe minister Bruno Macaes terms the fusion of Europe and Asia into a “supercontinent.”

When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently declared that Turkey was “the only country that can lead the Muslim world,” he probably wasn’t only thinking of Middle Eastern and other Islamic states such as Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Increasingly, there is evidence that Indian Muslims, the Islamic world’s fourth largest community after Indonesia and the South Asian states, is on Mr. Erdogan’s radar.

Traditionally focussed on ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim Islam, Saudi funding in the era of crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has been streamlined and finetuned to ensure that it serves his geopolitical ambitions, primarily stymying the expansion of Iranian influence in the Middle East and North Africa and enhancing the kingdom’s global impact.

JONATHAN FULTON AND LI-CHEN SIM, EDS.

External Powers and the Gulf Monarchies

ROUTLEDGE 2018

December 28, 2018 James M. Dorsey

Jonathan Fulton and Li-Chen Sim’s edited volume, External Powers and the Gulf Monarchies (Routledge, 2018) is a timely contribution to understanding the increasingly diversified relations between the Gulf’s six oil-rich monarchies and external powers. Traditionally reliant on the United States for their security, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain have become far more assertive in the wake of the 2011 popular Arab revolts and mounting doubts about the reliability of the United States. The newly found assertiveness of the Gulf states, despite the fact that they remain largely dependent for their security on the United States, have forged closer ties with a host of external powers, including China, Russia, India, Turkey, Brazil, Japan and South Korea. Coupled with shifts in the oil market as the United States emerges as the world’s largest producer and exporter, Asian nations topping the Gulf’s oil clients, and OPEC’s need to coordinate with non-OPEC producers like Russia to manipulate prices and production levels, external powers have seen significant business opportunities in the Gulf states’ effort to wean themselves off oil and diversify their economies. In doing so, they have benefitted from the US defence umbrella in the region at no cost to themselves. This volume breaks ground by looking at the Gulf’s expanding relations from the perspective of the various major external powers rather than that of the Gulf states themselves. In doing so, it makes a significant contribution to an understanding not only of the Gulf but also of the nuts and bolts in the global rebalancing of power the potential emergence of a new world order.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.