Tag Archive for: Middle East

The legacy of the Arab Spring

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When the struggling street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, on 17 December 2010, he could not possibly have imagined how consequential his desperate protest would be. By sparking a wave of civil unrest across the Arab world, he touched off the region’s most profound transformation since decolonisation.

First, Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution erupted, leading to the ouster of the country’s longtime president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Protests quickly engulfed other Arab countries, and more autocrats—namely, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh—were toppled.

In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad managed to hold onto power—at the cost of plunging his country into a brutal civil war that has killed more than half a million people, forced millions to flee the country and left millions more internally displaced. The conflict returned Syria to the Russian fold, and turned its territory into an Iranian-Israeli battlefield.

Most of those who managed to overthrow their autocrats in the so-called Arab Spring didn’t see their democratic hopes blossom. Yemen’s ‘Coffee Revolution’ quickly evolved into a civil war between the central government and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Though Saleh eventually resigned, the Yemeni people got no relief. On the contrary, Saudi Arabia led a brutal intervention against the Houthis, turning Yemen into the site of a savage proxy war with Iran. The result has been the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe.

As for Libya—already an artificial colonial creation—its regime change, brought about by Western humanitarian intervention, was chaotic. Since 2011, the country has been subsequently torn apart by fighting among forces backed by a variety of external actors, including Egypt, Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, as well as renegade generals and local warlords.

The dominos continued to fall for years, with Algeria’s Hirak Rif Movement erupting in February 2019—six days after Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his candidacy for a fifth presidential term. The protests drove Bouteflika to resign and resulted in a large-scale boycott of the presidential election in December of last year. The winner of that election, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, is merely a new civilian face for seemingly eternal military rule.

The Arab Spring exposed the innate fragility of many of the affected states. While some leaders managed to hold onto power, and some repressive military apparatuses remain robust, weak legitimacy, often based on rigged elections, leaves them highly vulnerable, especially in the face of tribalist and Islamist sentiment. (It is no coincidence that the Arab monarchies—Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia—which derive their legitimacy largely from religious sources, fared much better than the pseudo-presidential republics.)

By exposing state weakness, the Arab Spring opened the way for the rise of the Islamic State, a Sunni terrorist group, in parts of Syria, Iraq and the Sinai Peninsula where central governments had no control. Though local and international forces eventually dismantled IS’s ‘caliphate’, the group still has affiliates in Egypt, Syria and Libya. As long as the problem of state weakness goes unaddressed, Sunni warlords will continue to emerge.

People seem to be pinning their electoral hopes on political Islam, which has emerged as the main alternative to secular autocracy over the last decade. Wherever free elections took place, Islamist parties won power. Tunisia’s moderate Ennahda party, for example, was integral to making the country the Arab Spring’s only true success story, with all three elections since 2011 having led to peaceful transfers of power.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi won the presidency in 2012. But, after just over a year in power, the military, led by Field Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, ousted him and installed a regime even more repressive than Mubarak’s.

No story of the Middle East’s recent transformation can be complete without the United States. In his recently published memoir, Barack Obama confessed that if he were a young Egyptian, he would have joined the protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011. Instead, as US president, he sacrificed America’s two closest regional allies, Mubarak and Ben Ali, opening the way for a redrawing of the Middle East’s strategic map.

As Mohammed bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy commander of the UAE Armed Forces, made clear to Obama, allowing Mubarak’s ouster and accepting Morsi’s electoral victory gave the impression that the US was not a reliable long-term partner. Compounding this sense of betrayal among America’s Arab allies, Obama subsequently negotiated the Iran nuclear deal and rebalanced US strategic priorities toward Asia, opening the way for Russia to expand its influence in the Middle East.

Non-Arab regional powers—Iran, Turkey and Israel—have also been quick to capitalise on Arab woes. While America was busy fighting IS, Iran helped rescue the embattled Syrian regime and deployed its own forces along Israel’s borders. Its reach now extends from Syria and Iraq to the shores of the Mediterranean in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Turkey has become the dominant force in northern Syria, where it claims to be preventing an autonomous Kurdish state from emerging on its doorstep, and has consolidated its military presence in Qatar. Even the influx of Syrian refugees to Turkey has become a powerful bargaining chip for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has threatened to send millions to Europe if its leaders criticise his dictatorial practices.

But perhaps the most shocking outcome of recent upheaval in the Arab world relates to Israel. Viewing the country as a necessary power broker in America, and now a reliable ally in the fight against Iran, a number of Arab states—Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco and Sudan—have normalised bilateral relations. Once Saudi Arabia follows suit, the Arab-Israeli conflict will effectively end, even though the Palestinian question remains unresolved. This is a dramatic paradigm change in Middle East politics.

As 2021 begins, the geopolitical terrain in the Arab world will continue to shift. The outcome will depend on a number of factors, not least whether—or when—the goal of democracy mobilises Arab populations once again.

Biden’s options in the Middle East

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Leaving aside President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated wrangling about the legitimacy of the US election, President-elect Joe Biden is set to engage in a policy of rectification on both the domestic and foreign policy fronts. In US external relations, he can be expected to be a multilateralist and liberal realist in promoting America’s global role.

One key focus will be the Middle East and, in contrast to Trump, Biden is most likely to follow his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, in dealing with the troubled region. There are four areas where he could seek to make a difference.

The first is the July 2015 landmark Iran nuclear agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA). A longstanding critic of the deal, Trump withdrew from it in May 2018. He lambasted the Iranian Islamic regime as an aggressive and destabilising actor in the region and beyond, and adopted a policy of maximum pressure. His aim was to force a defiant Tehran to renegotiate the JCPOA and reduce Iran’s missile capability and regional influence, which would also please Iran’s regional archrivals and Trump’s favoured US allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Trump ignored the fact that the JCPOA was a multilateral agreement. The other signatories, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, opposed his measures and maintained their support for the deal as important for international security, causing a major rift in the transatlantic alliance. Trump’s approach has failed: the Iranian regime has resisted and survived Washington’s pressure, though it has taken a heavy toll on Iranian society.

Biden has indicated that he will restore US participation in the JCPOA and reach out to Iran, as Obama had done, to make the agreement work and thus also remove one of the obstacles in America’s relations with its traditional European allies. He will face strong opposition from the Trump-dominated Republican Party at home, and from Israel and the Saudi-led Arab states in the region. But he should be able to override their objections as Obama did.

Some kind of rapprochement with Iran would allow Biden to focus on bigger foreign policy issues, such as dealing with China as an emerging rival superpower and Russia as an increasingly assertive power.

The second area relates to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Trump dispensed unprecedented friendship with Israel at the cost of the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom and independence. Biden is likely to pursue Obama’s approach. He has made it clear that he will adhere to international law and United Nations resolutions by not recognising Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as legitimate, by opposing any annexation of the West Bank and by favouring the two-state solution as the best option for a political settlement of the conflict.

Given Israel’s bipartisan support in the US Congress, Biden is unlikely to be able to reverse some of Trump’s measures, such as shifting the American embassy to Jerusalem. But he would be well placed to seek a revival of peace talks for a negotiated resolution of the conflict.

The third arena is America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. Trump treated the oil-rich kingdom as a highly favoured nation and valued its purchasing of American arms. He developed very close relations with the controversial Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) and strongly backed the Saudi-led Arab coalition’s military operations in Yemen. He brushed aside congressional concerns and the UN findings about MbS’s involvement in the brutal killing of the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in October 2018. He went to extraordinary lengths to protect MbS, and the kingdom became central to his plan to generate an anti-Iran, Arab–Israeli front.

Trump showed no qualms over the human and material devastation that Saudi-led air strikes inflicted upon the Yemeni people. In contrast to Obama, who halted US support for such strikes during his final year in office, Trump provided logistical backing for them.

Biden and his Democratic entourage are set to take a different view of Saudi Arabia. While not sidelining the kingdom, they will find it compelling to rationalise relations with it to whatever extent possible. This would include softening America’s backing of MbS for both political and moral reasons, and curtailing support for Yemen operations.

The fourth area is the dominance of authoritarianism in the Middle East, from the Arab monarchies in the Gulf to Egypt in North Africa—all US allies. Trump’s authoritarian populism underpinned his admiration for autocratic rulers. In contrast, Biden will have an opportunity to emphasise the need for anti-authoritarian reforms across the region. This is not to suggest that he would make democratisation a centrepiece of his foreign policy, as his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, tried, unsuccessfully, to do. He is most likely to lean against illiberalism in his administration’s dealings with autocracies.

The Middle East has confounded expectations of the US as the traditionally dominant power in the region in the past. However, a non-hegemonic Biden approach stands a better chance of contributing to regional stability than Trump’s policy of ‘divide and rule’ at home and abroad that robbed the region of any opportunity for meaningful regional cooperation. Of course, all this will depend on what Trump’s refusal to concede electoral defeat brings about, and how successful Biden will be in addressing the domestic challenges, especially if he is faced with a Republican majority in the Senate.

Arab–Israeli normalisation could have unintended consequences

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The images were touching. In early October, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas visited the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin with his Israeli and Emirati counterparts. How better to celebrate the recent normalisation of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates? In fact, the establishment of diplomatic ties under the Abraham Accords had little to do with honouring the past. If anything, the deal is an attempt to escape from history altogether.

For most of my lifetime, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was the defining issue in the Middle East. From the Western perspective, ensuring Israel’s right to exist was a way of repaying a historic debt to the Jewish people: Israel, as a homeland for global Jewry, was insurance against future anti-Semitism. But in the Arab world, the displacement of the Palestinians in 1948, and the ongoing experience of Israeli occupation since 1967, was a perpetual rallying cry for successive regimes, most of which capitalised on Palestinian suffering to divert attention from their own failures at home.

With these lines drawn in the sand, the conventional wisdom was that both the Israelis and the Palestinians would need to be compensated for historic wrongs in order to guarantee stability and peace in the Middle East. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict was the key to unlocking a process of diplomatic normalisation across the region. Thus, by agreeing to normalise relations with Israel in the absence of a deal for the Palestinians, the UAE has essentially swept all of this history under the rug. Its embrace of the Abraham Accords, where it was quickly joined by Bahrain, marks a regional paradigm shift.

In recent years, Arab elites’ threat perceptions have changed. If their primary enemy in the 1960s and 1970s was Israel, today it is Iran, followed by Turkey. As the United States has pulled back from the region, many Gulf leaders have come to believe that a regional axis with Israel will be crucial to safeguarding their interests. And on the Arab street—where most of the population had not yet been born when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed on a path to a two-state solution—public opinion has followed suit. Moreover, in recent years, the Palestinians have been out-victimised by other waves of oppression and violence, whether in Iraq after the US invasion, in Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, or in the conflicts in Yemen and Syria.

The UAE leadership is surprisingly frank about its decision to make peace with Israel. While it continues to support the idea of a Palestinian state, it no longer trusts the Palestinian leadership to leverage Emirati support effectively. In response, Palestinian critics argue that the UAE has thrown away the most powerful card that could be played on their behalf. But the reality is that the UAE, like most others in the region, has wider interests beyond creating a Palestinian homeland. Strengthening ties with the US, and securing US-made F-35 fighter jets, is a higher priority. As Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz put it this month, ‘The Palestinian cause is a just cause but its advocates are failures, and the Israeli cause is unjust but its advocates have proven to be successful.’

For their part, the Israelis are hoping that the Abraham Accords will open the way for a new wave of normalisation with other Arab powers, so that the road to regional security will no longer run through Jerusalem. By separating the Palestinian question from relations with other countries in the region, Israel has managed to turn it into merely a domestic problem. The position of the ‘international community’ on the issue will now be more diffuse and thus weaker. With each new normalisation accord that Israel secures, it will gain an ever-more explicit endorsement from the Arab world.

The deals with the UAE and Bahrain amount to a triumph for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of the past decade. But Netanyahu would do well to remember that a victory in the Middle East always contains the seeds of its unravelling. If he makes the two-state solution impossible, he will have laid the groundwork for a challenge to Israel’s future as a Jewish-majority democratic state.

After all, if the Palestinians can no longer negotiate for their own state, their best alternative will be to pursue a one-state solution by pressing for civil rights within Israel. The writing is on the wall. According to the United Nations’ 2019 demographic profile of the Palestinian territories, there are five million Palestinians who could potentially join with the 1,916,000 Arabs living in Israel, thus outnumbering the 6,772,000 Israeli Jews.

Considering how ineffective and divided the Palestinian leadership is, an organised challenge seems unlikely anytime soon. Yet long before Palestinians become capable of winning an electoral majority in Israel, a more competent leadership could start to raise serious questions about the health of Israeli democracy itself. Such arguments would reignite debates about whether Israel is an apartheid state, potentially leading to a renewal of international pressure. And that, in turn, could have far-reaching implications for how other powers relate to Israel, not least the European Union, which accounts for about a third of the country’s total trade.

For these reasons, leading Israeli national-security analysts have argued that if a negotiated two-state solution is not possible, Israel should develop an unnegotiated one, by establishing a viable Palestinian state unilaterally. But this approach would seem to require a complete reconfiguration of the occupation in the interest of Israeli settlements, which could fatally undermine the legitimacy of any eventual Palestinian state. That is why other Israeli leaders with a more strategic outlook—including six former Mossad directors—have begun to look for ways to develop real statehood for the Palestinians through a process of de-occupation.

If Netanyahu fails to develop a viable Palestinian state, his escape from history could prove very short-lived. As William Faulkner observed, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’

A post-Erdogan Turkey: much ado about nothing

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It’s no mystery that the radical changes Turkey has undergone since 2002 can be attributed to prime minister-cum-president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP), or Justice and Development Party.

Once a shining star in the region and international arena for its economic and political acumen, Turkey now finds itself a bête noire to former allies and regional powers alike.

Turkey is in the middle of an economic crisis and is politically polarised. Ankara is regionally and internationally isolated given its continued bellicosity towards NATO allies and assertive foreign policy in the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

There has been a slow and steady slide towards an authoritarian consolidation of power by Erdogan and the AKP since 2011. The 2016 coup attempt and subsequent purging of the bureaucracy, university sector, military and police have increased the speed of the country’s transition away from democracy.

These critical state institutions are now filled with loyalists, and Turkey’s once vibrant economy is run through patrimonial networks similar to those in other authoritarian regimes. There’s limited space these days for civil society groups, and while the opposition finds avenues for areas of protest and contention against Erdogan’s government, the scales of Turkey’s political system are now heavily tipped against them.

A common argument among Turkey analysts is that if Erdogan and his executive presidential system, à la Turka, were replaced, Turkey’s ills would also disappear. But unravelling Erdogan’s influence is unlikely to be that simple. Would his departure mean that Turkey would go back to being a stalwart ally, polarisation would decrease and democracy would return? The answer is yes, and no.

According to recent polling, the AKP’s support oscillates around 35%. This suggests that the polarising, nationalist rhetoric that Erdogan employs is part of a bigger cultural shift that has been happening for decades.

With the 1980 coup, the military junta ushered in an ideological and cultural movement that sought to merge nationalist and Islamic elements of Turkish culture and politics. Its current manifestation, Turkish Islamic nationalism, is a reimagining of this original synthesis and is promoted by ultranationalist elements in Turkish society and, more recently, by the AKP and Erdogan.

Through AKP-controlled media, education and political discourse, Turkish Islamic nationalism has had a transformative effect on Turkish civil society. It manifests in a populist, nationalist and nativist understanding of Turkish culture and politics.

There are already individuals who are being groomed as potential leaders of the AKP after Erdogan goes. Possible contenders for leadership in a post-Erdogan Turkey include two key names, Erdogan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak and Minister for the Interior Suleyman Soylu, who represent two different sides of the same coin of this populist and nativist form of politics.

In a post-Erdogan Turkey with an AKP or opposition successor, it’s highly unlikely we’ll see any immediate change in its foreign policy. Turkey has shown itself to be an independent actor in the region, inclined to use force to bring its interests to the table. It is no longer anchored to an East or West orientation and views itself able to move multidimensionally in its neighbourhood and beyond.

The alliances that once were important, such as NATO and the tenuous partnership with the US, will remain. But they will be more varied as Turkey continues to engage in an increasingly multipolar international order.

It’s also unlikely that Turkey post-Erdogan will engage constructively with the EU, given the reluctance from both sides for future membership.

Issues surrounding Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan’s claim to Nagorno-Karabakh and the fight against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party were points of contention long before the AKP came to power and will continue long after. And the Mavi Vatan (Blue Homeland) doctrine in the Mediterranean is one example of a strategy that will outlast Erdogan and will continue to shape Turkish foreign policy for some time.

But all is not lost for the country’s supporters of democracy. The Turkish opposition has upped its game recently and presents an antidote to the many failures of Erdogan’s populist politics. The opposition has grown in popularity and is personified by caring and responsible political leaders such as Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu and Ankara mayor Mansur Yavas.

The return of a popular opposition challenges the final consolidation of authoritarianism by the AKP and its cronies. The regime is looking tired, unable to muster the will to address the economic ills the country faces. Its foreign policy adventurism and aggressive posturing make it look less like a ruling regime on the rise and more like a strategically directionless elite, employing desperate measures to regain domestic popularity.

But despite the AKP’s many missteps, a transition back to democracy won’t be easy. The polarisation of Turkish society and deterioration of both the formal and informal norms of democracy will take time to heal.

On the economic front, Turkey will need to break away from populist economic policies that favour regime loyalists. If it doesn’t, the combination of economic cronyism and an increasingly pugilistic foreign policy is likely to continue to scare away the vital foreign investment from Europe and the US that underwrites Turkey’s economy. This will only accelerate the downward trend of the economy, further destabilising the regime.

Another complicating factor is the Kurdish issue. Until a viable solution is brokered, the conflict will continue to feed the country’s authoritarian dynamics.

A push towards a more democratic and pluralist Turkey is highly likely after Erdogan, but the ability of democratic forces to undo the ideological and structural damage of AKP’s long rule is less certain.

UAE’s and Bahrain’s normalisation of relations with Israel could be an opportunity for Palestinians

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Israel’s normalisation agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, signed on 15 September, signify a potentially tectonic shift in the Middle East and represent perhaps the greatest advance towards peace there in 25 years.

These developments have been broadly welcomed by those who aspire to a better, safer and more prosperous Middle East. Predictably, they have also been condemned by those who measure success in the region not by the welfare of its population, including the Palestinians, but by how bad things are for Israel.

Unlike Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians, the partners in Israel’s three previous agreements, neither the UAE nor Bahrain has ever had an armed conflict with Israel. Both theoretically observed a total boycott of Israel, but it was an open secret that they had been cooperating under the table on matters of mutual interest for some time out of concern about Iran.

Iran has been an increasingly destabilising influence in the Middle East as it adheres to the doctrine of exporting its Shia fundamentalist revolution throughout the region. In pursuit of this aim, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force has established and supported proxy forces, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, various powerful militia forces in Iraq, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The IRGC also took the lead in buttressing the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s bloody civil war. And Tehran has been pursuing nuclear weapons, despite its claims to the contrary.

The Gulf states felt increasingly threatened by this Iranian activity and, with the US withdrawing forces from the region, have been seeking a regional power with the ability and willingness to stand up to Iran. Israel was the obvious candidate.

It has long been clear to them that Israel poses them no threat, unlike Iran, and there’s been ongoing, if covert, cooperation on matters of defence and intelligence.

The UAE and Bahrain also have much to gain from Israel beyond security. As rich and technologically advanced nations, there’s great potential for mutually beneficial trade, and shared high-tech development.

Other Muslim countries, such as Oman, Sudan and Morocco, may also be ready to conclude deals with Israel in the near future. Saudi Arabia may be more reticent given its position in the Arab world, but it has quietly demonstrated that it supports the arrangements.

The paradigm of the Arab states had long been that there could be no normalisation with Israel until there was a deal establishing a Palestinian state. This, however, has been counterproductive, as rejection by the Palestinian Authority has always been the principal obstacle to a two-state peace.

Giving the Palestinian Authority an effective veto over Israeli relations with other Arab countries simply encouraged this rejectionism, which saw Yasser Arafat refuse offers of a state in 2000 at Camp David and 2001 at Taba. Current president Mahmoud Abbas rejected Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s offer in 2008, and has refused, since torpedoing negotiations in 2014, to even engage in peace talks.

The Palestinian Authority has virulently condemned the normalisation deals as a stab in the back for Palestinians. Iran and Turkey have made similar statements.

While US President Donald Trump’s peace plan released early this year may need some fine-tuning before it could be the basis of a two-state peace, the Palestinians could have taken advantage of its promise of a state as a starting point for negotiations. And the Trump administration’s efforts did help facilitate the UAE deal, allowing leader Mohammed bin Zayed to counter any regional backlash by pointing out that he had prevented Israel from extending its sovereignty to some areas of the West Bank, as the Trump plan permitted.

The normalisation between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain could be a significant opportunity to kickstart the Israeli–Palestinian peace progress, for a number of reasons. First, if the Palestinian leaders recognise that time is no longer on their side, they should prove more willing to genuinely negotiate difficult compromises. Despite the recent history of Palestinian rejectionism and terrorism, the majority of Israelis still support a two-state peace if it does not compromise their security.

The UAE and Bahrain have made it clear that they still support the Palestinians and their aspirations for statehood, and history proves that states that have normalised relations with Israel are far more effective intermediaries than those who deny Israel’s right to exist. Egypt and Jordan have been effective advocates for Palestinian interests on numerous occasions, as well as successful brokers of various temporary arrangements.

In addition, Israelis have genuine and well-founded concerns about their security after the establishment of a Palestinian state. Having friendly Arab states willing to act as guarantors should help assuage those fears, again making a Palestinian state more achievable.

Finally, the deals will lead to a stronger regional front against the threat to peace posed by Iran, which is funding and arming numerous groups dedicated to sabotaging any progress toward Israeli–Palestinian peace, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.

Increased interaction between Israelis and citizens of Arab countries will also lead to greater mutual understanding, greater cooperation and less hostility. This can only be a benefit for all those in the region who aspire to a peaceful and prosperous future.

If the Palestinian leadership genuinely wants a Palestinian state, it should act now to take advantage of changing but potentially propitious circumstances. It would be a tragedy for the Palestinian people if the ageing leadership’s inability to rethink entrenched positions—such as rejection of any normalisation with Israel—were to cause them to miss yet another opportunity to advance a two-state peace.

Russia’s quest to make itself indispensable in the Middle East

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Although it has neither the desire nor the financial or military capacity to actually displace the United States in the Middle East, Russia has become adept at planting itself firmly in the middle of crises and conflicts and establishing itself as an indispensable intermediary at relatively little cost. This has been most visible in Syria and Libya, where Russia and other regional powers manage the complicated political and military dynamics while the US focuses on counterterrorism operations.

Less often discussed, however, are Russia’s attempts to become a key player in both the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and Lebanon. Recent developments in both arenas may well give Russia the space to finally make itself a vital fixture.

The successful Russian intervention in Syria in 2015 is ground zero for Moscow’s ever-expanding presence. Coinciding with abortive US attempts to form an alliance with Russia against jihadist groups in Syria in September 2016—a deal that implicitly guaranteed Bashar al-Assad’s continued rule and allowed Russia to turn its attention elsewhere—Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to host a summit in Moscow between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Relations between the Palestinians and Russians picked up dramatically, however, following US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December 2017, which led the Palestinian Authority to cut off all contacts with the US, including security ties with the CIA. Abbas himself led a high-ranking delegation to Russia in early 2018 to discuss a new multilateral format for Israeli–Palestinian negotiations with Russia at its centre.

In 2018, Russia also began meeting directly for the first time with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an Iranian proxy it once reportedly considered a terrorist group. Direct contact with Hamas, which Russia never considered a terrorist group, also increased, culminating in an intra-Palestinian summit involving all factions in Gaza and the West Bank, including the Palestinian Authority, in February 2019. Although Russia failed to get Hamas and Islamic Jihad to sign up to its ‘Moscow declaration’, which was intended to push back against US announcements, close consultation with all the Palestinian factions continued, with Russia pressing them to unite under the political program of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

While that goal is likely impossible, Russia did manage in a phone call in July 2020 to persuade Jibril Rajoub, secretary-general of the Fatah Central Committee, to hold a joint videoconference with Hamas to present a united front. Since late August, Russia has consulted almost daily with senior Palestinian leaders from several major groups, culminating in a 3 September videoconference between the 14 major factions. Both before and especially since the videoconference, Russia has been pushing all the factions to attend another pan-Palestinian summit in Moscow to help nudge unity efforts along.

On the centrality of Russia to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, at least, the factions are already united. Senior Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzuk stated in July 2019 that only Russia could help the Palestinians against the US, while Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki said in June this year, ‘We trust President Vladimir Putin … Palestine is willing to have talks with Israel via video conferencing and under Russian auspices.’

Russia’s growing presence in Lebanon flows out of its intervention in Syria, with which Lebanon has been inextricably entwined for decades. A 2019 investigative report by Novaya Gazeta found that a business jet associated with Yevgeny Prigozhin—the nominal owner of ‘Wagner’ mercenaries who are fully controlled by the Russian military intelligence agency GRU—had been making monthly flights to Beirut since at least December 2016. From there they would fly to various Wagner theatres of operation in Syria and Africa. Coupled with claims that GRU chief Igor Sergun’s sudden death in January 2016 occurred in Lebanon and not in Moscow, there’s circumstantial evidence to suggest Beirut is an operational centre of Russian activity in the Middle East.

Russian attempts to become a major political player in Lebanon mostly failed until late 2018, when Lebanon accepted an important, if symbolic, US$5 million in Russian military aid. Although Moscow has thus far been unable to get a Lebanese signature on a draft military agreement, the two sides have since 2019 grown closer politically and Russia has become more active in Lebanon’s energy sector.

Yet, until the recent explosion in Beirut and subsequent resignation of the government, Russia was simply not a significant actor in Lebanon. The political vacuum that has now developed, and Moscow’s close relations with all sides, may have opened a door for Russian influence in Lebanese politics. For instance, on 17 August, former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri sent an adviser to consult with Putin’s Middle East envoy Mikhael Bogdanov on future political developments in the country. Bogdanov also had phone conversations with Hariri, Druze powerbroker Walid Jumblatt and the Free Patriotic Movement’s Gebran Bassil, and met in Moscow with Lebanon’s ambassador to Russia and with an adviser to Lebanese President Michel Aoun, with final consultations taking place on 27 August.  A new prime minister, Mustapha Adib, was designated on 31 August, though the actual future of the government is still unknown.

It is unclear whether the crushing US sanctions on both Iran and the Assad regime, which necessarily have an impact on Lebanon, along with severe international pressure for reform, will hinder or help Moscow’s influence. What will certainly help it, though, is its increasingly close partnership with France, which has taken the lead role in Lebanon after the Beirut explosion across a spectrum of political and military issues, as well as its alliance with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, the most relevant actors in the country.

As Lebanon sets out to rebuild its capital, Russia, the only country to maintain close relations with every state and non-state actor involved, could become supreme arbiter as it effectively has in Syria and Libya.

The consequences of the Israel–UAE peace deal

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hailed the agreement normalising relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates—which the two countries will sign at a White House ceremony today—as a historic step that equals Israel’s previous peace deals with Egypt and Jordan. The Israeli leader also boasted that the agreement with the UAE vindicated his ‘Netanyahu doctrine’ of peace for peace, rather than land for peace.

But even peace with a country with which Israel doesn’t share a border and has never fought a war required Netanyahu to give up his plans to annex large parts of the West Bank. So, there was a ‘land for peace’ aspect to the deal after all.

More important, Netanyahu’s ‘doctrine’ practically buries the concept underlying the 2002 Arab peace initiative: that an Israeli–Palestinian peace should be the precondition for normalisation of Arab states’ relations with Israel. The Arab League itself has rejected the Palestinians’ request to condemn the Israel–UAE deal, and the pact also signals the defeat of the Israeli left’s vision of Palestine as the key to peace with the Arab world.

Throughout the many decades of Arab–Israeli antagonism, Arab states have betrayed the Palestinians no less than Israel has. In his 1979 peace agreement with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin made far-reaching commitments on the Palestinian question. But both leaders knew that theirs was a separate peace driven by vital strategic needs—as shown by its survival despite Israel’s ever deepening occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands.

Why, then, has Mohammed bin Zayed, the UAE’s ruler, invited the rage of the betrayed Palestinians by normalising relations with the Jewish state? First, he proved to be a man with the courage to call things by their name. Gulf states including the UAE and Saudi Arabia have had discreet security relations with Israel for years. As a major military and technological power in the Middle East, Israel has become a necessary ally for conservative regimes shaken by the 2011 Arab Spring, the threat of Islamist radicalism and Iran’s growing regional clout.

But it is mainly the fear of a withdrawal from the region by the United States that is bringing Arab states closer to Israel. They saw how US President Donald Trump refrained from any direct military response to Iran’s devastating September 2019 attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil installations. Moreover, Trump didn’t even respond to Iran’s downing a few months earlier of a sophisticated US surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz.

The idea that peace with Israel also means peace with America had always been a fundamental motive behind the Arabs’ decision to consider reconciliation with the Jewish state. Sadat signed the 1979 peace agreement because he wanted to shift Egypt’s strategic orientation from the Soviet Union to the US. The US$2 billion in annual military aid that Egypt still receives from the US is a direct product of that peace. And Syria, Israel’s staunchest Arab enemy, became interested in peace only after the Soviet Union collapsed.

The Emiratis don’t need America’s money, but they do need its continuous involvement in Middle Eastern affairs. Israel is the guarantee that America will always be around, and offers the UAE a path into the US Congress, where arms deals and financial packages are approved.

The Trump administration’s apparent decision to sell F-35 stealth fighter jets to the UAE has been an important objective in the Emirati peace strategy towards Israel. These advanced warplanes—which only the US and Israel currently possess—will secure America’s engagement with the UAE, and add muscle to a small country that has global ambitions and many enemies.

Chief among these foes are Qatar and Turkey. Both countries support the Muslim Brotherhood, a UAE nemesis, which explains Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s virulent reaction to the normalisation deal. In Libya, the UAE is fighting together with Egypt and Russia in support of the Tobruk-based Libyan National Army led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, while Turkey and Qatar are backing the internationally recognised government in Tripoli. The UAE has also sought to check Turkey’s punitive incursions against Kurdish forces in northern Syria.

Framing the Israel–UAE agreement as part of the continuous effort to contain Iran, as Netanyahu and the Trump administration are doing, is a convenient way to make the F-35 arms deal palatable to increasingly isolationist US public opinion. The truth is that the UAE has been pursuing a prudent strategy vis-à-vis Iran. It recently abandoned the Saudi-led coalition in the war against Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen, and has even disengaged from Trump’s sanctions regime against Iran.

Be that as it may, Netanyahu is right to say that the Palestinians are losing their most important strategic asset: their veto power over an all-Arab peace with Israel. Bahrain has already announced that it will follow in the UAE’s footsteps, and more Arab countries are likely to do so as well. The region is changing, and the Arabs are accepting that Israel is a legitimate strategic player. Palestine, the supposed epicentre of the region’s worries, has become a disposable cause.

The Palestinians must recognise that they have brought this situation on themselves by their serial rejection of peace offers in the past. How could they assume that the Arab states would forever mortgage their national interests in a changing region to fulfil Palestine’s implausible expectations? Should they not now shift strategy, stop their ‘boycott’ of the US and engage Israel in the search for a realistic peace plan?

The UAE–Israel deal isn’t about peace

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The agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel, although touted as a ‘peace’ deal, is no such thing. For one thing, the UAE and Israel were never at war. The UAE agreed to ‘full normalisation of relations’ with Israel in exchange for its ‘suspending’ annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank awarded to it by the US President Donald Trump’s Middle East plan. The agreement can be seen in part as an attempt to bolster Trump’s chances of re-election in November because he can sell it to the American public as his major foreign policy achievement.

For those familiar with the development of Israel–UAE relations over the past few years, the agreement is more like a coming-out party than a radical departure from the status quo. It may have symbolic importance but doesn’t add much to the substance of relations between the two countries. After all, Israel–UAE collaboration, especially in the security and technology sectors, has been an open secret for the past several years.

The UAE’s action opens the door for the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between Israel and other Gulf Cooperation Council states. Oman and Bahrain, which have openly welcomed the deal, are likely to lead the way. Saudi Arabia may not follow the UAE’s lead immediately for fear that it could erode its credibility as the keeper of the two holiest Muslim shrines, but it is clearly headed in that direction. Given the UAE’s very close relations with Saudi Arabia, as witnessed in their joint military operations in Yemen and in support of Syrian rebels, it’s clear the deal would not have been done without Riyadh’s blessings.

The fundamental shift in Saudi policy on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has been evident since the coming to power of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In April 2019 he endorsed the pro-Israel Trump peace plan, declaring, ‘The Palestinians need to accept [Trump’s] proposal or stop complaining.’ This was a radical departure from the Arab League peace initiative of 2002 authored by Saudi Arabia. That plan had declared that the Arab countries were willing to normalise relations with Israel if it agreed to withdraw to its 1967 borders.

Both Israel and the UAE perceive themselves as principal beneficiaries of the deal. For Israel, this is the first agreement with an Arab state that doesn’t explicitly link it to a resolution of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Both the Israel–Egypt and Israel–Jordan agreements had made this linkage, although in practice little pressure was exercised on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories. The Israel–UAE deal only mentions that, as a quid pro quo for the UAE’s agreement to normalise relations, Israel has merely agreed to ‘suspend’ its annexation of parts of the West Bank awarded to it by the Trump peace plan.

However, immediately after the agreement was announced, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it clear that Israel’s suspension of annexation of the West Bank was a temporary measure. In any case, the US has insisted that the timing of the annexation must be subject to Washington’s concurrence, which it is withholding for the moment. Moreover, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s open opposition to the annexation plan has acted as a further deterrent for Netanyahu, especially since Biden has a good chance of winning the November election.

The temporary suspension of Israel’s annexation plan is a concession not to the UAE but one that has been forced on him temporarily by American policy and the contingencies of the American election. But, as Netanyahu’s pronouncements indicate, in the long run Israel is likely to have its cake and eat it too.

Abu Dhabi sees its open embrace of Israel as an insurance policy against presumed Iranian designs for dominance of the region. The UAE and most other members of the GCC now perceive Israel as their ‘protector’ against Iran because they are unsure if the United States, in its current retrenchment mode, will come to their aid in case of a showdown with Tehran. America’s reluctance to support Saudi Arabia in any material way when missile and drone attacks were launched on its oil facilities by Iranian-supported forces in September 2019 was a clear indication of Washington’s unwillingness to be drawn into conflict with Iran for the sake of its Gulf allies.

An additional reason that has prompted the UAE to court Israel is the deteriorating relations between the UAE and Turkey. Ankara has been Qatar’s primary supporter and supplier of essential goods, which has helped it defy the embargo the GCC imposed on it in 2017 for its close relations with Iran. Turkey also has a military base in Qatar and sent additional troops to the country when it was faced with the threat of an imminent showdown with Saudi Arabia and the UAE in 2017. Turkey and the UAE are also on opposite sides in the civil war raging in Libya. The deterioration in Israel’s relations with Turkey, which has ambitions of emerging as the leading Muslim state in the Middle East and spearheading the fight for the liberation of Jerusalem, provides further convergence of interests between the UAE/GCC and Israel, and the normalisation agreement is a product of that convergence as well.

Many analysts have argued that the Palestinians are the primary losers in this game. However, they have nothing more to lose as the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank amounts to de facto annexation. Most Palestinians have known for some time that none of the Arab states are interested in exerting themselves in changing the situation in the West Bank. This agreement should convince the remaining sceptics that the only option open to the Palestinians is to work towards the goal of establishing a single democratic state in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that guarantees equal rights for all its inhabitants.

How radicals conquered Iran’s government

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Millions of Iranians have been severely affected by the coronavirus pandemic and an economy strained by sanctions, but the political elite in Tehran have other priorities.

The power base of Iran’s theocratic velayat-e faqih regime—a labyrinth of elected and unelected institutions directed from above by religious experts—is in the middle of a seismic shift. Once the process is complete in around the middle of next year, the country’s governance system will essentially be a totalitarian military dictatorship run by a powerful ideological elite, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Over the past couple of years, an alliance forged between the IRGC and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has gradually assumed near total control of all branches of the regime.

The IRGC has always been a powerful political force in Iran. While most modern states have an army that is subordinate to the political class, the IRGC is a revolutionary army running a state. It is a huge enterprise—200,000 personnel, plus hundreds of thousands of volunteers in the Basij, a domestic paramilitary organisation in charge of suppressing internal dissent. The IRGC’s Quds Force trains and advises proxies that are engaged in terrorism and regime destablisation across the Middle East—such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis—as part of its mission to ‘export the revolution’. These activities led the US to list the IRGC as a terrorist entity in 2019.

Financially, the IRGC is a mega-conglomerate that owns a variety of industries amounting to around half of Iran’s economy. This includes the most prestigious military projects, especially the flagship nuclear-weapon and ballistic-missile development programs. Much of the IRGC’s enormous budget is off the books, as money flows to it through funds directly under the control of Khamenei, free from any public scrutiny.

Two main factors are driving the consolidation of the IRGC’s power: the supreme leader’s desire to secure his legacy and the IRGC’s access to the spoils of the Iranian economy. The 81-year-old Khamenei wants to ensure his ideology and his radical allies survive after his time in office. Exploiting the ruling ayatollahs’ fear of growing internal instability, the IRGC promises to brutally safeguard their ongoing rule in exchange for greater control over Iran’s resources.

Khamenei set out the ideological justification for his deal with the IRGC in a February 2019 speech  on the regime’s future trajectory, titled ‘The second Phase of the Revolution’. On the ground, the deal translates to the insertion of IRGC-affiliated ‘securocrats’ into key positions across the government by the supreme leader.

In return, the IRGC ensures that revolutionary Khomeinist policies are implemented and opposition at any level is crushed. Both sides benefit by preserving unfettered access to the immense wealth in Iran’s religious trusts.

The judiciary was the first institution conquered by this coalition, with the appointment in March 2019 of Ebrahim Raisi as chief justice. His affiliation with the IRGC originates from his time as head of one of the IRGC-related financial funds. An ideological zealot, Raisi continues to oversee the execution of dissidents, just as he did in the late 1980s. He is tipped as the leading candidate to replace Khamenei when he becomes incapacitated or passes away.

In the February 2020 election, the coalition consolidated its control over the legislative branch. The Guardianship Council—half of whose 12 members are nominated by Khamenei and the rest by the judiciary—exercised its authority and systematically disqualified from running anyone not aligned with the conservative ideological position set by Khamenei.

Only IRGC affiliates were allowed on the political playing field and, unsurprisingly, they now fill 200 of the 290 seats in the parliament. Spearheaded by the powerful speaker of the parliament, former top IRGC general and mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the IRGC securocrats hold key positions in the major committees and dominate the presidium, which is in charge of setting the parliament’s agenda.

Ensuring that a like-minded ally wins the presidential elections scheduled for next year would be the final step. The Guardianship Council is expected to veto candidates not approved by the Khamenei–IRGC coalition, erasing any remnants of the real or imagined ‘reformist’ or ‘centrist’ spirit affiliated with outgoing President Hassan Rouhani. Khamenei will only allow the next president to come from the ranks of the right-wing, fundamentalist osoulgarayan (principalist) camp.

An Iran controlled by the IRGC will likely pursue an even more aggressive interventionist foreign policy vis-à-vis the Middle East. It would strive to remove hurdles slowing down its nuclear program and veto any nuclear negotiations, unless it gets major concessions from the West. Internally, an IRGC Iran is likely to be even more repressive and kleptocratic.

One should not assume, however, that such an Iran would be an irrational player. Khamenei and the IRGC have shown over the years that they never take their eyes off their goals and cleverly manoeuvre in agitating their rivals, while being careful not to cross red lines that would lead to all-out conflict. It’s unlikely that an IRGC-controlled Iran would follow the North Korean model—by kicking out UN inspectors, for example. Tehran is more likely to keep carefully building the elements of an indigenous nuclear weapons capability while only selectively cooperating with IAEA inspections.

Anyone devising an Iran policy needs to know that there is no longer any serious political competition in Tehran between ‘hardliners’ and ‘reformists’. Given the power shift to hardliners in Tehran and the scuttling of the JCPOA by the US, it may be time for Australia to reconsider its thinking on Iran.

Although several Western nations were critical of Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal, restoring it now is most likely impossible. If Australia were to follow the US’s lead in designating the IRGC as a terrorist organisation, Canberra would be able expand its bilateral sanctions on Iran to include IRGC-related activities, institutions and personnel. Washington’s ‘maximum pressure’ strategy is one of the important ways to contain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and destabilising regional operations and provide the regime with a strong negative incentive to come back to the negotiating table.

Eliminating Israel’s bomb with a nuclear-weapon-free zone?

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Nuclear-weapon-free zones (NWFZs) deepen and extend the scope of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and embed the non-nuclear-weapon status of NPT states parties in additional treaty-based arrangements. This is why several NPT review conferences have repeatedly affirmed support for existing NWFZs and encouraged the development of additional zones.

There are currently five zones: in Latin America, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Africa and Central Asia. At a minimum, all NWFZs prohibit the acquisition, testing, stationing and use of nuclear weapons within the designated territory of the zone. They also include protocols for pledges by nuclear powers not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against members of the zone.

Israel has seemed more interested in implementing a military solution to its security challenges, including the threat of a preventive strike on Iran, than in exploring diplomatic options. But it’s simply not credible that Israel can keep its unacknowledged nuclear arsenal indefinitely, while every other regional state can be stopped from getting the bomb in perpetuity. The alternatives for Israeli security planners are regional denuclearisation or proliferation. The latter would entail the further risks of heightened tension and increased instability. Moreover, a nuclear-weapon capability is of no use to Israel in deterring or managing the threat of terrorism.

Because ‘the logic of using force to secure a nuclear monopoly flies in the face of international norms’, Israel could consider trading its nuclear weapons for a stop to Iran’s development of a nuclear-weapon capability by agreeing to an NWFZ. Conversely, the confidence built among states through an NWFZ process can spill over into other areas of regional interactions. The experience of working together in negotiating a zonal arrangement, and then working together once the zone is operational, generates habits of cooperation and sustains mutual confidence, both of which are necessary conditions for resolving other regional security issues.

Can an NWFZ be used for nuclear disarmament of a non-NPT state?

When the NPT was extended indefinitely in 1995, the package deal included a resolution on the creation of a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction. The resolution required all regional states (including those outside the NPT) to sign, and International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards to be applied to all nuclear facilities in the region. The 2010 NPT review conference—the last one that had an agreed final document—reiterated the importance of the 1995 resolution and requested the UN secretary-general and Russia, the UK and the US—co-sponsors of the 1995 resolution—to convene a conference in 2012 to that end.

Finnish diplomat Jaakko Laajava was appointed as the facilitator and Helsinki was named as the venue for the conference scheduled to begin on 17 December 2012. However, on 23 November Victoria Nuland of the US State Department said there would be no conference ‘because of present conditions in the Middle East and the fact that states in the region have not reached agreement on acceptable conditions for a conference’. The failure contributed to the collapse of the 2015 review conference.

Like the Red Queen in Through the looking-glass, the UN has to run very fast just to stay where it is. The adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons might be thought to have made another NWFZ redundant. Yet, by an 88 to 4 vote (75 abstentions), UN General Assembly decision 73/546 of 22 December 2018 called on the secretary-general to convene a conference at UN headquarters in 2019 to elaborate a legally binding treaty for establishing a WMD-free zone in the Middle East. Importantly, however, in paragraph a(iii), the document stipulated that all decisions of the conference ‘shall be taken by consensus by the States of the region’. The conference was held on 18–22 November 2019. Its political declaration affirmed ‘the intent and solemn commitment’ to pursue a treaty-based commitment, just like in 1995.

Not surprisingly, Israel is wary of the proposal’s origins in a document to which it did not subscribe, adopted by a conference to review and extend a treaty that it has not signed, whose core prohibition it has ignored. In a formal letter to the secretary-general (document A/72/340 (Part 1), 16 August 2017), Israel emphasised ‘the need for a direct and sustained dialogue between all regional States to address the broad range of security threats and challenges’. It’s difficult to see how negotiations can begin until all states explicitly accept the existence of Israel. No NWFZ has previously been established among states that refuse to recognise one another and do not engage in diplomatic relations and whose number includes some that are formally at war.

The bleak security and political environment in the conflict-riven Middle East is particularly inauspicious for the creation of an NWFZ. There is no regional organisation to initiate and guide negotiations, nor is there a regional dialogue process that can form the backdrop to negotiations. An NWFZ in regions of high conflict intensity may have to follow rather than cause the end of conflicts. Syria is convulsed in a civil war. Egypt has yet to sign the IAEA Additional Protocol and the Chemical Weapons Convention, or ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention and the African NWFZ. But it does strongly support a WMD-free zone in the Middle East.

Turkey is a NATO member. The possession and deployment of nuclear weapons are integral to NATO doctrine and command structure and US tactical nuclear weapons are based in Turkey. How can this be reconciled with Turkey’s membership of an NWFZ? Alternatively, how meaningful would a Middle Eastern NWFZ be without Turkey?

Most crucially, Israel is already a nuclear-armed state. This immediately raises an obvious but critical question. Is the expectation that Israel will sign a protocol as a nuclear-armed state, or that it must sign the treaty after first eliminating its nuclear weapons? The latter would be without precedent and transform the Middle East NWFZ treaty from a normal non-proliferation treaty into a unique disarmament treaty. An NWFZ is traditionally established as a confidence-building measure among states that have already forsworn the nuclear option. It is unlikely to be established as a disarmament measure, or even to constrain the future potential of states like Iran that retain the nuclear option in their national security calculus.