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George Friedman and Robert D. Kaplan on the Rise of Sectarianism in the Middle East

Hello, I'm Robert Kaplan. I'm the Chief Geopolitical Analyst for strapped for. With me as George Friedman, who is the Chairman of strapped for. And we're here to discuss today the various exclusivist beliefs and ideologies that plague the greater Middle East today. The exclusivism in the sense that the feeling of love and compassion extends not to the state, but to a tribe, a clan, a sectarian or ethnic group. In the Middle East, what you see George, is, you see states imploding. You see states unraveling a suffocating authoritarian system have dissolved. No new institutional structures have emerged sufficient to maintain order. And in the chaotic breathing room have come various clan, tribal and sectarian beliefs that are fighting for control. And the reason these have come up is not because people have become more sectarian or tribal or clan ish. It's that with the breakdown of institutional order, people need protection, and they find protection their group. In, in Asia we have a totally opposite scenario. We have strong states from Japan all the way south to the Philippines and elsewhere, China. And these states have become more nationalistic in recent years to such an extent that they're projecting power in the Maritimes. Fear, and their alleged borders are overlapping and clashing. So, you see real, a real kind of traditional nationalist power struggle in Asia. Whereas in the Middle East you see sectarian and tribe and clan and struggles due to the breakdown of states. Well, it's going to be interesting to watch Asia over the next generation to see how strong this nation states are going to be. China in particular is an area that swings between strong states, weak states. And we'll see, but it is there you call the Middle East, which we'll call North Africa. And the area to the east of that. That's the most interesting because the nation state that was created, there was a European concept. Europe out of the enlightenment, developed the notion of the nation state as opposed to the great dynastic empires. And they really didn't create nation states in places like Africa, north Africa. However, when they left, that's what they left behind. Some had long historical identities, such as Egypt or Tunisia, for example, Tunisia, others had much shorter identities. Others like Libya was more confederation of tribes. Monsieur, graphical expression and a vague one at that. But there is one thing and all of these that we see, which is whether it's a nation or anything else, community. Human beings don't live outside of communities. You might have a theory and liberalism of the pure individual, but that's really not how human beings. Live they cat. And so, what you have here in all of these places, our communities, but the states don't match them. So, you have tribes, but they have only partial authority. And what we're seeing is the tension between the nation that was created by the Europeans, the state that was bequeath them, and the genuine communities that exist there. And much of what I think happens in the Middle East in particular. And they well yet happened in Asia. As a reorganization going on, the Ottoman Empire is gone. The British agon, the French are gone. They left behind something and that something doesn't work very well. I would put it in the Middle East, we have two different kinds of entities. We have age-old clusters of civilization, like Greater Carthage, which is Tunisia, and the Nile Valley civilization, which is Egypt. To a much lesser extent we have Yemen, which is another angel cluster of civilization, but different kingdoms within it. So, it's never really cohered as a state very well. And then you have these vague geographical expressions like Libya, Syria, Iraq. And it's those places that required suffocating authoritarian rule to hold them together. And that now that that rule has come on done, they've, they basically crumbled and been pulverized into their constituent parts. Morocco is, Morocco is like tuna sits. It's another Tunisia, it's another historically bound state, so to speak. Algeria. We will see the current leader Abdullah's, these boutique LCA is apparently near death. And we'll see if you know how, how well Algeria does. But what I see is between the Eastern edge of the Mediterranean and the Central Asian plateau. The only two real states that cohere our Israel and Iran with Jordan very much in the balance. Syria is an interesting case. Syria is the descendant of a province of the Ottoman Empire that contained what is today Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and the state of Syria. And the Sykes-Picot treaty drew line which arbitrarily made a southern part British, northern part, French, and a group of a tribe out of Saudi Arabia arrived on the East Bank, the Jordan River. They're having lost the power struggle silently with the L. So, for having a jaw thrust by the British, depend on how you want to look at it. And they had no name for this place. They called a trans Jordan, the other side of Jordan. You don't have nation states. And when we consider the origin of Jordan, I mean, it's very hard to think of that as a nation state. It may temporarily have a powerful state, but it wound up there by accident. But even more, what's happening in Syria is what's really fascinating. Syria and Lebanon were one country. There was no Lebanon until the French took over Mount Lebanon, which was a part of Syria. That's not Raiders. That's how they gave it the name. And what you're seeing here is that Lebanon state collapsed back in the seventies. Yes. And what really took over where these communities, these tribes, these and even within the Christian community, you had the front, G is the Gmail. You had constant fragmentation. They all survived, they fought and so on. We now have that lemmatization ups area of Syria where Assad is no longer governing Syria, but he's a very powerful warlords that no one is going to reduce. And the opposition is fragmented among various factions and tribes. And it's trying to define itself. That model really is what I'm talking about in North Africa. The Sykes-Picot treaty, which revised the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Empire's province of Syria. These have become irrelevant. The area is redefining itself entirely Union. The only European style state it's actually viable. Israel is in the middle of this sort of wondering precisely what's going to go. In a sense, we have never really come up with a solution to the demise of the Ottoman Empire, I think. And because f, because when the Ottoman Empire existed, the Sultan controlled everything except places that by force he was forced to give autonomy to like the KDFs in it, in Egypt or, or some of the bays on the Algerian or Tunisian coast. So, because the Sultan owned everything, there was no disputes over territory or very little for what? The Sultan's domain was taken over by the European colonial powers at the end of World War One. They drew lines in the sand. And the, the, the Saddam Hussein's, the Hafez al-Assad, who replaced the European leaders, basically ruled in a post-colonial fashion. The same borders, very authoritarian rule and with their demise for one reason or another. Of course, it was American invasion that toppled Saddam. These are the borders that were, that were drawn by the Europeans have basically been dissolving and we're back to an Ottoman Empire but without a Sultan and control. Well, we are back to is the constituent elements. So, what I think I really want to emphasize is, yes, we can talk about the dissolution of Lydia, or we can talk about the re-emergence of the real components of Libya were not very comfortable with that sort of thing. We're comfortable with the idea of thinking of Libya as a nation state. And if we don't reconstitute it, or Syria or Iraq as a state, then we have failed. That, that is the way it's seen in, in, in, in conventional policy circle. Well, in conventional policy circles who see the world as an engineering problem and American or European power as a problem engineering, we, this isn't working, so we're going to come in with the plumbers. It is simply a misunderstanding of what community means in these places. And it's an attempt to impose a definition of community which coheres her ID of the nation state. And it doesn't work because when we took apart the state that repressed the impulses of Iraq. What emerged was not an alternative arc, but the constituent parts yet engage in ongoing civil war there. And that will reveal just how artificial the British creation was. Because the British put together a Kurdish north with the, with the sunny center and a tribal eyes Shiite South. With the Kurdish north being very mountainous and closer and many ways to Anatolia, together with a Mesopotamian Flatland composed of Sunni's in the center and Shiites in the South. And it was mainly done to protect the British route to India was part of a Brit Britain's India strategy. And because of its very artificiality, it required extreme forms of repression to hold together. After the British left because the monarchy fell apart and night or was toppled and 950. Let's remember that the British also faced uprisings in Iraq. And they bought in a Hashemite related to the Jordanian King, king to try to rule. But I think the cynicism of the British in how they constructed the area was based simply on the fact that they had to get to India. That they had various routes overland and through the Suez Canal. And today we are going to instruct political entities that were not designed to work, designed to facilitate whether ended, that’s how the Gulf shape themes came into being and they've work because of the accident of where hydrocarbons happened to have been found. The fortune of having oil, which raises the question, much has been said about him. I'm not sure that's true. But if the United States becomes self-sufficient, if alternative sources of hydrocarbons emerge in China, and the price plunges. What happened? City shakes, hymns. There's a shake and there's people. And have they been a people together long enough to form the community? Are there other communities? Bahrain is a very uncomfortable example of what it means. But certainly, I think a place like Oman, it's in a separate category because that is a real state in a way that some of the others like rain or not. But we will see because even a self-sufficient energy America will still just like you diversify your financial portfolio, will diversify its energy portfolio, and will continue to import some number of hydrocarbons from the golf or whether the price of oil stays where it is now is another question, but what we're really looking at is way the entire Islamic world leaving Indonesia side for the moment. But from Pakistan, yeah, all the way to Morocco in the process, after the imperialism to the Turks, after the imperialism of the British and French, after the American intrusions of trying to define who they are. And I think they're going to define themselves as they always were much smaller entities than we're comfortable with dealing with. There are many tribes, there are many ethnic groups, there are many sects. And they feel affinity for each other. And that affinity is going to define it's far more than patriotism and close what I would say is that this greater Middle East is going to be in turmoil for many years to come and a fit. And if it connotes any other era in the past, it may be late antiquity, St. Augustine's world, which is a world where the Roman Empire was not fully collapsed, was weakening. But yet new entities had yet to come to the fore and B form this such. So, you had a kind of very messy, messy world of sex and heresies and fights for territory. Well, thank you very much for joining us.

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