Of all the challenges to the OPEC+ effort, Iraq remains the biggest and most daunting.
As the GNA’s Sirte offensive shows, the confrontation is hardly over and meaningful talks will only start when military gains have been exhausted.
Steven Kenney and Ross Harrison join host Alistair Taylor to discuss their recent policy paper, “Conflict in the Middle East and COVID-19 — A View from 2025.” The COVID-19 crisis is disrupting the status quo on nearly everything, including regional conflict. How will that disruption worsen — or possibly improve — the trendlines of regional conflicts as we head toward 2025?
The impact of COVID-19 on Iran-linked forces in Syria has provided Russia with an opportunity to expand its influence through its proxy forces, particularly in eastern Syria, as Iranian and pro-Iranian forces redeploy elsewhere in the country.
World leaders have long stressed the need to maintain Syria’s territorial integrity, but at the moment, such a goal is unrealistic. Syria first needs a transitional phase in which the country will be divided into three zones of foreign influence to allow for reconstruction, the return of refugees and IDPs, and a gradual process of reconciliation.
Since 2017, Iran has seen several waves of protests rooted in political, social, and, most importantly, economic grievances. In light of COVID and the post-pandemic fallout, there is every indication that unrest will continue to grow, and even accelerate. Until now, the regime’s coercive apparatus has had both the capacity and the willingness of its members to successfully suppress anti-regime unrest. But has COVID-19 changed this balance? What impact, if any, has the pandemic had on the regime’s security capacity?
As Lebanese protesters look to advance the systemic reforms they seek and contend with an entrenched ruling elite with little incentive to change, they can draw on their Algerian peers’ successes and shortcomings.
Conflict and instability have been constant features of the Middle East for decades. Over the most recent decade, four civil wars and fraught relationships between the major regional powers have been pushing the region toward a potentially perilous political and economic future. We know that the COVID-19 crisis is disrupting the status quo on nearly everything, including regional conflict. What we do not know is how that disruption today might worsen — or improve — the trendlines of those conflicts as we head toward 2025. In this MEI Strategic Foresight Initiative paper we employ a scenario-based methodology to explore this question.
Our ongoing analysis in MEI’s Strategic Foresight Initiative examines scenarios built around different combinations of drivers of change related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We used the scenarios to analyze what conflict in the region could look like in 2025, as we believe that how these drivers change the dynamics of the Iran-Saudi Arabia rivalry and the civil wars could be a primary determinant of what the region is like in that timeframe and beyond. Our study posited differences in the health response of governments, the economic response from governments, and the social dynamics of populations to the COVID-19 crisis. Rather than consider them as independent forces of change, our foresight analysis focuses on the interaction between these drivers.
The Syrian economy is entering its most fragile phase yet in the country’s nine-year-long conflict. After being devastated by the fighting, constrained by biting Western sanctions, and ravaged by widespread corruption, it is now witnessing the sharpest rise in inflation in its history.
The story of Japan’s relationship with Libya, which Tokyo often maintained even as other countries were shunning former Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qadhafi as a pariah, predates the latest outreach by many decades. This story provides a fascinating window into Japanese diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) more broadly. More specifically, the story of Japan-Libya relations shows how Tokyo often pursued its own interests in the MENA region despite the preferences of the United States, with which Japan has a longstanding security alliance.
While Russia is currently struggling with the consequences of COVID-19 at home, its foreign policy projections suggest it is also bracing itself for the post-pandemic world.
Quickly attributing or blaming a country for a cyber incident without technical analysis, proof, and government officials willing to go on record only inflames an already tense situation.
The collapse of the OPEC+ deal and the diplomatic impasse in Syria reveal the intrinsic fragility of Russia’s gains in the Middle East. Building relations with the region’s autocratic leaders and maintaining a status quo based on a personalistic approach might be effective for some time, but in the long run the Kremlin’s strategy fails to institutionalize relations and thus will be unable to protect them from disruption.
How the current twin crises of the global coronavirus pandemic and economic collapse will affect the GCC governments remains an open question.