Shahmahmood Miakhel

Watch for a second front in the Ukraine war. Vladimir Putin is pressuring Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko to bring his troops into the fight.

Expert regional analysis by MEI scholars and contributors.

The U.S. and Russian presidents staged high visibility visits to the Middle East in the past week and a half. The visits were designed to assert each great power’s influence in the region at a time of escalating great power conflict. But both presidents cut a diminished figure on the regional stage at a time when leaders in Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are feeling increasingly empowered.

The main objective of President Joe Biden’s trip to the Middle East last week was to signal to both partners and adversaries that the United States was serious about restoring its strategic position in the region, which has taken considerable hits in recent years.

Russia’s war launched on February 24, 2022, may have partly been motivated by Ukraine’s large reserves of critical metals and their global strategic importance in the production of advanced “green” energy technologies. The cutoff of access to Ukrainian sources, combined with the nature of the partnership between Moscow and Beijing — with China being the largest supplier of the necessary critical minerals — could endanger the very notion of the West’s energy transition.

Recent months have seen unprecedented levels of dust storms in the Middle East. Hundreds of people were hospitalized because of breathing difficulties; public buildings, offices, and schools were closed; and flights were grounded. Sand and dust storms are not a new experience for the people of the region, but continuous exposure to thick blankets of dust — as seen in April and June 2022 — is quite alarming and has affected local communities and residents across the region from Syria to Iran.

Sudan has a longstanding strategic partnership with Turkey, forged on the basis of shared ideology and fostered by growing economic and political ties, that has proven resilient to regime change. Khartoum has not abandoned its relationship with Ankara despite the ouster of former President Omar al-Bashir in 2019 or the opposition of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt, Turkey’s former regional rivals and more recent cautious partners.

Turkey’s economic problems continue to go from bad to worse. Its foreign trade deficit has reached a monthly average of $8 billion this year. Amid the sharp rise in global energy prices this spring following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country’s average gross energy imports shot up from $3-4 billion per month to $7-8 billion. A reduction in energy imports and the recovery of tourism this summer have not offset this, and the current account deficit continues to widen.

Power-sharing arrangements remain a paradoxical phenomenon. As a powerful tool to stop the guns of conflict, they tend to kill the ingredients for peace by preventing politics from changing. Three countries with such arrangements have recently held elections in which outcomes have — ostensibly — led to such political change. Change, however, has yet to materialize and so far the elections have brought more of a perennial companion of power-sharing arrangements: political gridlock.

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The last few years have seen a lot of consolidation in Gulf financial sectors. Not only do these mergers create economic benefits, the merged entities also become potent tools for economic development. The mega-funds and other major financial institutions are part of a trend where Gulf political elites sidestep ossified bureaucracies and instead centralize power in private entities over which they have even more control.