The rise of Sunni Islamist regimes in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, possibly Yemen, and perhaps additional countries will not make the international relations of the Middle East much more conflictual. The main reason is that these rebellions were motivated by anger at the corruption, malfeasance, and repression of the old regimes, not by religion. The new regimes are Islamist not because there has been a big change in popular attitudes about religion but because the old regimes prevented any ‘normal’ political mobilization, so that mosques became the only places where mobilization was possible at all. The Catholic Church played the same role in Eastern Europe. In the last years before the 1989 revolutions the churches were full, but afterward it soon turned out that Poles, Hungarians, and other Eastern Europeans had not become more religious than before and the influence of the Church faded away.

The new regimes will also not be more hostile to the U.S. or Western Europe, because foreign powers did not try to defeat these rebellions and no one has forgotten that in Libya they helped. Egypt will take a harder line toward Israel, not because of the makeup of the new regime but because the Egyptian public never supported the old regime’s policy of normal relations with the Jewish state. The new regimes will also treat their minorities worse, especially the Copts in Egypt. During and after any revolution it is easy to demonize minorities as not truly part of the nation or, worse, as having collaborated with the old regime. The fact that the old regime may not have treated the minorities very well either usually does not matter.

Syria is different. How radical a revolutionary regime becomes usually depends, more than anything else, on how much violence it took for them to gain power. Given how bloody the Syrian civil war is already, if the rebels win it will be likely that the new regime will be more radical than any seen in the Middle East in a long time, Iran included. Also unlike the other Arab Spring rebellions, this is a communal rebellion. What is important is not that the divide between the mainly Sunni rebels and the Alawite controlled regime is sectarian, but that the divide exists; the communities now see each other as collective enemies. The sides do not identify with each other and do not want reform society to make it better for all of them; after this much killing, they want to dominate or destroy each other.

If the rebels win the new regime will not likely be Salafist dominated or sympathetic to international jihadism—neither of these has ever had much support in Syria. What it will have is an exceptionally clear division of the world into friends and enemies. It will abuse the Alawite minority, the Christians (whom the rebels see, with some justice in this case, as allied to Assad), and possibly other minorities including the Kurds. A second reason why a new Syrian regime might treat its Kurdish minority badly is that it will likely owe its victory in part to Turkish aid. This does not mean that Kurds can gain anything by supporting the Assad regime, which has not treated them well. Even more important, the Sunni majority is almost bound to come to power sooner or later. Any person or community seen as having helped the old regime will be persecuted.

A rebel regime in Syria will also be hostile to both Iraq and Iran while they, seeing what the Syrians do to the Alawite minority, will have worsened relations with anyone seen as having helped the rebels—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar especially. This will not raise much danger of international war; Iran has no intention of attacking its neighbors and Iraq is too busy internally. Nor is there much danger of a permanent Tehran-Baghdad axis. Iraqi Shia have too much cultural and national self-confidence to subordinate themselves to Iranian policy any further than internal or external threats make necessary at a particular moment. But the fact that the threat may be mild will not necessarily stop Sunni states from over-reacting; Saudi and Turkish nuclear weapons programs are not unlikely.

Anything that pushes Iraq and Iran together should reduce maneuvering space for Kurds in both countries, although worsened relations between Turkey and both of them could create open space. It is not obvious which effect will be stronger.

I have not mentioned the superpowers till now because they are the least important actors in all this. Russia remains weak and, if Syria falls, will have no clients left in the Middle East. China and the U.S. increasingly see each other as rivals, and the U.S. is beginning to think about ‘containing’ China as it did the Soviet Union. But China does not have as ambitious global goals as the Soviet Union did, nor is there an ideological conflict to intensify the rivalry. Except in East Asia, the U.S. and China are not likely to engage in the kind of aggressive competition for clients and allies that the U.S. and the Soviet Union did worldwide. In the Middle East China’s most important interest—the free flow of oil—is the same as the U.S. interest. So while we may see the superpowers criticizing each other or blocking each other in the U.N. Security Council, their rivalry is not likely to affect the Middle East in more important ways than that.

The U.S. thus retains considerable freedom of action but, beyond containing Iran, does not know what to do with it. Although the U.S. cannot stand the Assad regime it is reluctant to do much for the rebels, partly because it is foreseeable that their behavior will also be ugly but even more because the U.S. does not want to take sides in a regional Sunni/Shia rivalry and thus push Iraq toward Iran. If the regional fallout of the Syrian civil war gets bad enough the U.S. could be forced into a regional ‘pro-Sunni’ stance, but it will not do that willingly.




Chaim Kaufmann is Associate Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.