More than a decade after long-departed Western leaders called for his removal from office as a precondition for any resolution to the Syrian crisis, Bashar al-Assad is on the verge of reintegrating into the region. He has survived in power despite the efforts of many regional leaders who’ve financed, armed and attempted to coordinate the efforts of opposition groups seeking his overthrow.

Some Gulf states have reopened their Damascus embassies in recent years, and in the past few weeks the Egyptian foreign minister paid his first visit to Syria in over a decade and the Syrian foreign minister visited Saudi Arabia for the first time since 2011.

A possible return of Syria to the Arab league is also being discussed.

At first glance, regional relegitimisation of Assad seems to be another blow to Washington’s prestige. Coming hard on the heels of a Beijing-brokered detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran, regional political arrangements appear to be developing despite, rather than because of, American diplomatic efforts. There’s no doubt that the Middle East views Washington in a different light than it did a decade ago. Military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the on-again, off-again nuclear deal with Iran and its consequences for regional security, along with a belief that Washington is focused on Russia in Europe and China in the Indo-Pacific, mean that US administrations have little ability to focus on the Syria file. Washington opposes normalisation with Assad, but it has little interest in expending political capital to dissuade regional states from doing so.

Even though Syria has long been the most wicked of wicked problems—and always in Moscow’s rather than Washington’s sphere of influence—the failure to ensure the fall of Assad meant that Iran, through its military support for the Syrian regime, took on an importance much greater than it had before the Syrian uprising. Some argue that a regional rapprochement will allow Arab states to supplant Tehran’s influence, though there’s little evidence for that.

The US does retain some leverage over Syria, with its continued troop presence in the country ostensibly to fight Islamic State but really to have a say in Syria’s political outcome, as well as the sanctions regime imposed under the Caesar Act. While Washington may be powerless to stop Assad’s diplomatic reintegration, it can exact a significant cost, if it chooses, on anyone seeking to rebuild and reintegrate Syria economically.

Millions of Syrian citizens are still refugees in neighbouring countries, Turkish and American troops and their armed supporters occupy parts of the territory, Israeli regularly conducts airstrikes on Syrian and Iranian targets inside the country and a range of longstanding international sanctions remains in place. Exactly what practical benefits regional normalisation will bring in the short term is debatable. We do know that whatever benefits there are will go first and foremost to the regime and its closest supporters.

At a time when US diplomatic influence in the region is waning, however, the Syrian regime knows that time is on its side, and in the long term, regional recognition and engagement are the first steps in fracturing international unity. It worked on the military front and Assad has cause to believe that it will work on the diplomatic and economic fronts, too.

As the protests in Iran enter pass the three-month mark, their number and intensity are beginning to decrease due to brutal government suppression. The policy of the ruling theocracy has been clear from the outset: they aim to crush the protests, which they will most likely succeed in doing, to ensure public dissention doesn’t gain sufficient traction nationally to threaten the regime’s existence.

An accurate picture of developments in Iran is clouded by the misinformation and disinformation being disseminated by various groups. What is known is that the protests were triggered by the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, an ethnic Kurd, detained by the religious morality police for wearing her headscarf, or hijab, ‘inappropriately’.

Amini’s death triggered nationwide protests, initiated and led by young women, many university students and graduates, using the slogan ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’. However, the protests quickly spread beyond these issues, attracting wider public and mixed-gender support for pursuing broad social and other issues including economic hardship, high-level corruption and the theocratic nature of the regime itself.

How many protesters have taken to the streets, and the gender mix, are not known. As of early December, the non-profit organisation Iran Human Rights estimated that more than a thousand separate demonstrations had occurred nationwide, involving some 155 cities and nearly half the nation’s universities.

At least 458 protesters have been killed, including 29 women and 63 minors. More than 50 members of the security forces have also been killed. Besides Tehran, most killings occurred in the Baloch, Azeri and Kurd ethnically dominant provinces in the southwest, north and northeast. More than 18,000 protesters have been detained and 11 have been officially sentenced to death by Iranian court. Two have been executed so far. An Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps general acknowledged on 28 November that more than 300 protesters had been killed, the only number of deaths admitted to date by the government.

Earlier national protests—for example in 2009 about electoral fraud and in 2019 over fuel prices—had a political and economic focus, and were primarily initiated and driven by men. That women have led the current protests, based principally on social issues, is a first, posing new challenges to the theocracy.

Women have long faced cultural discrimination in Iran. Despite women comprising a majority of the country’s university graduates, Iran ranked 144th out of 146 for gender inequality by ‘economic participation and opportunity’ in Human Rights Watch’s 2022 report. Only 15% of Iranians in the job market were women and unemployment was estimated at 36% versus 21% for men. Women’s prospects for promotion to higher management positions in government, in the multitude of government-owned enterprises and major charitable trusts, and in the private sector were significantly lower than men’s. And while all women over the age of 18 have the right to vote and contest elections for the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Iran’s parliament), of its 290 elected members, just 16 are women. Only one woman is serving in the current 35-member cabinet, Ensieh Khazali, the vice president for women and family affairs.

Religious strictures, more generally than just dress code, are also a major issue for many women. Iran’s constitution, introduced in 1979 by the revolutionary clerics, states that ‘both men and women equally enjoy the protection of the law and enjoy all human, political, economic, social and cultural rights’. It also provides freedom of the press, expression and public gatherings. However, these rights are subject to the qualification that their exercise must be ‘in conformity with’, ‘not violate’ and not be ‘detrimental to the fundamental principles of’ the ‘criteria of Islam’. Iran has adopted the unique Velayat e Faqih system of Islam, under which all civil rules, regulations and state functions are subject and subordinate to Islamic law. But as with laws anywhere, they are subject to interpretation, and the final authority rests with the supreme leader, the ‘national guardian’, who has the constitutional powers of ‘supervision’ over all state and religious matters. The current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is a conservative.

One of the strong demands of the protesters is more social freedoms, including a more liberal dress code for women. While some freedoms were allowed during the presidency of Hassan Rouhani (2013–2021), a moderate, an increasingly strict version of the Islamic code has been enforced since the election of his successor, Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative. Enforcing and resisting the ‘correct’ wearing of hijabs has become a symbolic contest.

This contest has also taken on another dimension: while the majority of protesters are seeking liberal change within the existing theocratic system, a minority have been pushing for structural change, a secular system with the separation of religion and state. Both have been seen by the ruling regime as seriously challenging the system, but the latter are more threatening because they challenge the very structure underpinning the ruling regime.

The Iranian government has predictably blamed ‘foreign enemies’ for the unrest. Protesters have indeed received foreign support, especially across the internet and social media. The most likely overseas sources of support are the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and members of the anti-regime diaspora, particularly in the US and Europe. Other reports indicate attempts to exploit the protests to cause ethnic unrest, notably among the Kurds in western Iran and the Baloch in the southeast. While ‘foreign interference’ has contributed in part to the protests and unrest generally, the primary cause is unquestionably domestic policies.

But is the regime listening at all? Media reports claimed earlier this month that the morality police had been ‘shut down’. In the absence of official confirmation, it’s more likely that the government has adopted its predecessor’s interim non-enforcement policy to take some of the heat out of the protests.

Some prominent Iranians have called on the government to listen to the protestor’s demands and back off their crackdown. These include Mohammad Khatami, the reformist president from 1997 to 2005; Badri Hosseini Khameini, sister of the supreme leader, who has described her brother’s ‘despotic caliphate’ as having brought nothing but suffering; and the Iranian soccer team, who demonstrated their support for the protesters by refusing to sing the national anthem in their first match at the World Cup in Qatar.

The theocracy’s brutal response to the protesters has also generated strong condemnation by the leaders of Western and other nations, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong. The UN Economic and Social Council has just adopted a US-drafted resolution to ‘remove with immediate effect the Islamic Republic of Iran from the Commission on the Status of Women … for the remainder of its 2022–2026 term’.

There is considerable scope for Iran’s ruling conservative government to compromise in ways that could lessen discrimination and advance women’s rights, but without threatening the theocratic structure of the regime. Non-enforcement of the hijab rule is a start.

When US President Joe Biden visits the Middle East next month, his hosts—in particular, Saudi Arabia—will probably try to persuade him to re-engage with the region. Far from enabling the United States to focus on strengthening its position in the great-power competition with China and Russia, they might argue, strategic disengagement from the Middle East gives China an opening to bolster its own regional influence. But the reality isn’t that simple.

As a major fossil-fuel producer, the Middle East is clearly important to the US. In fact, it is sky-high energy prices that have forced Biden to try to patch up his relationship with Saudi Arabia. Until recently, Biden was shunning Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler, over his alleged role in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey in 2018.

Biden’s about-face highlights the extent of Saudi Arabia’s leverage. And the Saudis are likely to use that leverage to urge the US to sustain its military engagement in the Middle East. Warnings (which Israel is likely to echo) that China will quickly move to fill any security vacuum left by the US will seem to bolster their case further.

But China is unlikely to establish a military footprint in the Middle East, not least because its key partners in the region—Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—are adversaries of one another. While Iran and Saudi Arabia, for example, are willing to do business with the same actors, neither would maintain good relations with a country that was cultivating a substantial security relationship with its main rival.

China’s hesitation to advance its security interests in the Middle East suggests that it is well aware of this. Even in the case of Iran, which could serve as a proxy in China’s strategic rivalry with the US, China has avoided steps that could jeopardise its relations with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. For example, unlike Russia, it has refrained from providing advanced weapons to Iran.

Even if China had more room to manoeuvre strategically in the Middle East, it might not significantly expand its strategic footprint there, because it doesn’t view the region as critical to its security. While the Middle East accounts for nearly half of China’s oil imports, the most important theatre in the unfolding US–China cold war is East and Southeast Asia. China doesn’t want to expend limited resources in the Middle East any more than the US does.

Against this background, China is likely to continue relying on diplomatic and economic tools to expand its influence in the Middle East. The only way to counter these efforts, it seems clear, is for the US to raise its diplomatic and economic game.

That means, first and foremost, abandoning the effort to frame America’s strategic competition with China and Russia as an ideological contest between democracy and autocracy. After all, the vast majority of Middle Eastern countries are autocracies. The last thing the US needs is to alienate them with an overtly ideological foreign policy that enables China to portray itself as a more reliable, supportive and like-minded partner.

Economic engagement remains China’s most effective tool for expanding its geopolitical influence. In 2020, merchandise trade between China and the Middle East totalled US$272 billion. Though comparable figures aren’t available for America’s trade with the Middle East as a whole, the trajectory of the two powers’ trade with Saudi Arabia is revealing. While America’s trade turnover with Saudi Arabia rose only moderately between 2000 and 2021—from US$20.5 billion to US$24.8 billion—China’s soared, from US$3 billion to US$67 billion.

On technology, the US may be giving China yet another opening. The West has long used sanctions as a tool for punishing ‘rogue’ countries, with Iran as a case in point. But the comprehensive technological and financial sanctions imposed on Russia over the war in Ukraine have compounded fears in Middle Eastern countries that they, too, might be targeted.

As China builds up its technological and innovative capacity, it can present itself as a more reliable source of technology and a safer investment destination. It is telling that no Middle Eastern country has banned the Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s 5G networks, despite strong American lobbying.

While the case for a new Middle East strategy focused on diplomatic and economic engagement is strong, any attempt by Biden to implement one will meet significant resistance. Befriending dictators will lead to charges of hypocrisy—the last thing Biden needs months before midterm elections in which his Democratic Party is unlikely to perform well—and protectionist sentiment remains strong in the US. But if Biden frames the shift as part of a larger strategy for winning the new cold war with China, he might have a chance.

The Yemen conflict is now a decade old. It keeps taking on a wider dimension, with no relief in sight for the suffering Yemeni people. All peace-brokering efforts have failed to produce any tangible results, and this is likely to remain the case for as long as no regional consensus exists between Saudi Arabia and Iran, as well as between Iran and the United States.

The recent attacks by Iran-backed Houthis on Abu Dhabi that killed three people and the Saudi-led Arab coalition’s retaliatory strikes on Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, that killed scores, underline not only the intractable nature of the Yemen war but also its potential to become a regional fireball.

The conflict commenced as an internal power struggle among the multi-ethnic, tribal and sectarian Yemeni population following the ousting of dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’ or pro-democracy uprisings in the Arab world. Saleh had ruled North Yemen from 1978 until 1990 and then a united Yemen from 1990 until 2012.

However, Saleh’s toppling opened the way for the two Persian Gulf powers to intensify their sectarian and geopolitical rivalry for regional influence. The predominantly Shia Islamic Republic of Iran threw its weight behind the friendly sectarian Houthis. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, backed by its allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council, most importantly the United Arab Emirates (as well as the US, which has sought to eliminate al-Qaeda cells in Yemen), supported Saleh’s Sunni replacement, President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. The Houthis’ success in driving Hadi out of Sanaa in 2014 posed a formidable security challenge to the new Saudi king, Salman bin Abdulaziz, who succeeded his politically nuanced half-brother, Abdullah, in January 2015.

The king’s powerful young son, Mohammad bin Salman, who rapidly emerged as the kingdom’s de facto ruler, decided to tackle Iran’s expanding influence in Saudi Arabia’s backyard (Yemen) and indeed in the region. Within less than three months of his father’s assumption of the throne, he commenced, with the UAE’s full participation, a Saudi-led Arab coalition military operation against the Houthis.

The war has devastated the Yemeni people. It has generated an unspeakable humanitarian crisis. Close to 400,000 people have so far been killed because of direct combat operations, involving relentless Saudi-led coalition air raids, and related indirect causes, such as hunger and preventable diseases. A United Nations Development Programme report released in November estimated that by the end of 2021, a good percentage of the civilians killed would have been children under the age of five. The UNDP’s administrator, Achim Steiner, said ‘we believe that the number of people who have actually died as a consequence [of the] conflict exceeds the numbers who have died in the battlefield’. More than half of Yemen’s some 30 million people have become destitute.

Upon assuming office in 2021, US President Joe Biden made a number of policy announcements in relation to the Middle East. Among them, he declared a halt to US support for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen, which his predecessor, Donald Trump, had backed to the hilt, as well as the stopping of the sale of American offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. He called for an end to the Yemen war, removed the Houthis from the US list of terrorist organisations, and undertook to revive the July 2015 multilateral Iran nuclear agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA. He also committed his administration to the promotion of human rights and democratic values as a priority in the region.

However, one year on, Biden has not followed through with any of these measures, except seeking the JCPOA’s resurrection. Faced with mounting domestic problems and the strategic consideration to confront America’s adversarial powers, Russia and China, and with Middle Eastern regional complexities, he has found it expedient to pursue America’s traditional policy approach to maintain close ties with oil-rich Saudi Arabia and its Arab partners, and its strategic partnership with Israel. US arms sales have continued, as have the Saudi-led coalition’s operations in Yemen. Biden’s initial emphasis on human rights and democracy promotion has also subsided in favour of sustaining the status quo.

The only area where he has made a push is that of the JCPOA, but without any substantial progress so far. The indirect US–Iran negotiations in Vienna have become bogged down over whether Washington should first lift all the JCPOA-related sanctions on Iran or the latter should first fully comply with the agreement. A failure to reach a compromise in the next few weeks could spell the end of diplomacy, potentially opening the arena for use of force by the US or Israel, both of which have repeatedly said that they will never allow Iran to become a military nuclear power.

The Houthis’ claim of the recent attacks on Abu Dhabi has resulted in intensified Saudi-led retaliatory bombardments, including the targeting of a Houthi prison at the cost of dozens of lives. The UAE has now asked the Biden administration to reinstate classification of the Houthis as a terrorist organisation. As the situation stands, the prospects for an end to the Yemeni carnage and devastation look very bleak. Yet, for humanity’s sake, there is a need for consistency in the American approach and serious international effort to urgently move all the parties in the conflict towards a viable political settlement of the Yemeni crisis.

The Middle East is one of the driest regions in the world. The scarcity of water has often been touted as a source of national and interstate disputes in the area. Some scholars have predicted for some time the possibility of deadly national altercations and regional clashes over the distribution of water resources in parts of the region. Although no full-blown war has erupted so far, two current episodes illustrate this point: public protests in the Iranian province of Khuzestan and the growing discord between Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan over water dispensation from the Nile River. With climate change causing more droughts, the potential for conflict over water cannot be underestimated.

In recent days, the oil-rich southwestern province of Khuzestan, largely populated by Iran’s Arab minority, has experienced public protests over a shortage of water as the province and all of Iran have been hit by one of the worst droughts in modern times. The protests have rapidly spread into other parts of Iran, which has come on top of the damage wrought by Covid-19 and US sanctions. Public anger is mounting against the Iranian government, which has been unable to provide remedial responses. The security forces’ heavy-handed treatment of the protesters has resulted in several deaths, with many injured and scores arrested.

However, the protests are a reflection of the deeper and wider public disenchantment with Iran’s Islamic regime. The regime’s popular base of support has shrunk over the years. A number of interrelated factors have contributed to this, including not only Covid and sanctions but also poor theocratic governance, widespread administrative malfunctions and corruption, severe economic hardship and lack of a good health system and facilities. The regime is now faced with a multi-faceted crisis. The protests, at which ‘death to the Supreme Leader’, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been loudly chanted, can no longer be contained or reversed by business as usual—that is, repressive security measures. Khamenei has now called on the security forces to be more understanding of the protestors and the outgoing moderate and reformist President Hassan Rouhani has joined him in that message.

Yet, the Islamic regime requires a lot more than moderation and understanding on the part of the security forces if it’s to deal positively with the growing public discontent. It is in need of urgent and serious domestic and foreign policy reforms that give it the capacity and capability to serve the common good for the benefit of the increasingly restless society and to end America’s sanctions and isolation. This is a challenge that Rouhani wanted to tackle, but which the conservative factions of the ruling cleric impeded. The task will soon fall on president-elect Ebrahim Raisi, when he assumes office in early August. Since Raisi shares Khamenei’s conservative Islamic platform, he can use his position to be innovative, though the general expectation of that happening is very low.

While Iran is unlikely to go to war over water with any of its neighbours, the same cannot be firmly said about some of those downstream on the Nile River—the second longest, if not the longest, river in the world, yet with a relatively small reservoir capacity. Ethiopia has been getting closer to a serious dispute with Egypt and Sudan ever since Addis Ababa decided in 2011 to build what it calls the hydroelectric Grand Renaissance Dam for securing more water for developmental purposes. Egypt, which regards the Nile River as its ‘lifeline’, and Sudan, which has concerns about the security of its own supply, have seriously objected to Addis Ababa’s unilateral start of the second phase of the dam project.

The filling of the reservoir of the second phase over a period of two years will affect the amount of water to which Egypt claims to be entitled. Under a bilateral Egypt–Sudan agreement in 1959, the two sides agreed to increase Egypt’s share to 55.5 billion cubic metres and Sudan’s to 18.5 billion. But the agreement isn’t recognised by Ethiopia. It has refused to budge on its determination to go ahead with the second phase, irrespective of serious objections by Cairo and Khartoum.

US mediation in 2020 and ongoing similar action by the African Union have failed to produce any result. In early July 2021, the issue was put to the United Nations Security Council to consider one submission by Ethiopia and another by Egypt and Sudan for a resolution. But a conclusion couldn’t be reached. One of the council’s permanent members claimed that the body didn’t have sufficient expertise to deal with the issue. The council as a whole urged the three parties to avoid unilateral action and reach a negotiated settlement. In a recent article, former Egyptian foreign minister and ambassador to the US Nabil Fahmy warned that ‘sooner or later confrontation seems inevitable, unless we see a sudden and unexpected change in Ethiopia’s position’.

Fahmy has echoed a view that a number of scholars have held about the future possibility of war in the Middle East over water rather than oil. Miriam Lowi’s 1995 book, Water and power, is very telling. The Khuzestan and Ethiopian dam episodes alert us to the urgency of yet another issue that adds to volatility in the Middle East while the tragedy of climate change remains unaddressed.