The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey

Syria’s announcement of its first COVID-19 case highlights the public health threat posed by war zones that produce millions of refugees and displaced persons living in sub-human and sub-standard health and hygienic conditions. The enforcement of international law governing wars and respect for human and minority rights is now critical.

Saudi Arabia’s oil spat with Russia throws a spanner into the works of the Kingdom’s long-standing effort to hedge its bets, a strategy that has taken on added significance as the Gulf comes to grips with the likelihood that the region’s security architecture will fundamentally change.

There is little indication that Middle Eastern rulers are learning the lessons of the Coronavirus’ devastating effect.

Nor is there any suggestion that they are willing to see the pandemic as an opportunity to negotiate new social contracts at a time that the virus has temporarily taken the sails out of mass anti-government protests in various countries and discontent continues to simmer in others.

The fight in this week’s Democratic primaries may have been about who confronts Donald J. Trump in November’s US presidential election, Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden. But irrespective of who wins the primaries and the election, one thing is certain: the next American leader will preside over fundamental changes in the US military commitment to the Gulf and what a new regional security architecture will look like.

As the coronavirus spreads, so does its likely political fallout.

For authoritarians and autocrats, the fallout is likely to be a mixed bag.

The Eastern Mediterranean has become a flash-point for the meshing of geopolitics, the struggle for regional hegemony, battles for control of resources, religious soft power rivalry, and blatant interference in the politics of others.

As tens of thousands of refugees shiver in the cold on Turkey’s borders with Europe and a new phase of the brutal Syrian war erupts, Russia, Turkey, the European Union and the international community are being presented with the bill for a flawed, short-term approach to the nine-year old conflict that largely lacked empathy for millions of victims and was likely to magnify rather than resolve problems.

Civilisationalism’s train may well have left the station. That may also be true for a fundamental re-definition of US foreign policy.

To what degree, civilisationalism continues its march and how US foreign policy will be re-defined is likely to be determined by who wins this year’s US presidential election.

Television news summarizes daily what a new world order shaped by civilisationalists entails.

Nicholas Blincoe’s More Noble Than War: A Soccer History of Israel-Palestine (Bold Type Books, 2019) is a beautifully narrated and written history of a century of conflict between pre-state Jews and Palestinians and Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians after the establishment of the state. It is a story that goes far beyond the history of the conflict, the mirror images of developments in Jewish and Palestinian society, and the internecine ideological infighting and power struggles within the two communities. It paints in graphic detail the incestuous and inseparable relationship between sports and politics and the importance of soccer, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, in identity and nation formation as well as nation building. It also demonstrates in graphic detail how first Jews and then Palestinians exploited soccer to first achieve international recognition of their struggles and then as nations by dispatching teams to tour other countries and being granted membership in world soccer body FIFA. In doing so, Israelis and Palestinians set an example that decades later became a key pillar of the Algerian liberation struggle in the 1950s and 1960s with the National Liberation Front (FLN)’s creation of its own national soccer team that put its fight for independence on the world map. The skeletal facts of Blincoe’s tale have long been known. The significance of Blincoe’s contribution is that he puts flesh on the skeleton by weaving the facts into a meticulously researched and reported, easily accessible narrative in which he brings key players and ideological trends to life. It’s a tale that is all fact but reads like a thriller.

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James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.