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A Multipolar World and The Middle East

来源:moderndiplomacy.eu;发表于:2023-01-26;人气指数:305

Thursday, January 26, 2023

 


A Multipolar World and The Middle East


By Amer Ababakr

For most of the past months, the Biden administration has struggled to find ways to ease oil prices, amid the trauma of the Russian war in Ukraine. And when OPEC+, a group of oil exporting countries, decided to cut oil production by two million barrels per day in early October, Washington’s reaction was harsh. White House Secretary Karen Jean-Pierre confirmed, “OPEC Plus is clearly biased towards Russia.”

The administration’s bilateral view aligns with its broader perspective on partners. Since the Biden administration came to power, the administration has frequently taken a binary view of the world order — “a competition between democracies and authoritarian regimes,” according to the administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy. And they tend to portray the decisions of their partners as a test of loyalty to the United States.

This is a vision that many of America’s partners do not share. It is not clear to most of them that categorically siding with Russia or China, or the United States, is the fruit of choice. Moscow and Beijing are not allies, but partners [business customers]. Meanwhile, America is going through a phase in which its international priorities fluctuate, which makes its partners less certain that Washington will continue to care tomorrow about what preoccupies it today, or that their support for the United States on a particular issue guarantees them reciprocal treatment by the United States on other issues. Accordingly, an increasing number of US partners seek to avoid taking sides entirely and to maintain relations with all the great powers simultaneously. This means that the United States needs to pursue a more explicit strategy. Faced with partners that are unlikely to satisfy all of Washington’s wishes, it must adopt a smarter, tougher approach to the international system, maximizing its influence in a multipolar world.

All of the above, not all or nothing

Most states view great-power competition as the greatest challenge to their interests, not the threat of one superpower to another. China is Saudi Arabia’s first economic partner, and it consumes about 20 percent of their exports. Meanwhile, the Saudis see the United States as their number one security partner. Having to put one relationship before the other – or to reduce one significantly – is costly. So it, like many other states, seeks instead to preserve both relations.

In the Middle East alone, some states are current or future dialogue partners with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It is a political, economic and security group centered on China, and is sometimes described, with a great deal of exaggeration, as the alternative to NATO. It is said that two Arab states have expressed interest in joining the “BRICS” organization, which is a group of emerging market countries, of which India and China are members despite the growing competition between them (“BRICS” combines the initials of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Turkey, the only state in the Middle East formally allied with the United States, has also shown interest in becoming a member of both organizations.

Some researchers, such as Paul Post of the University of Chicago, suggest that expanding BRICS and SCO membership is a precursor to the emergence of an “alternative international order”. However, states that seek to deepen their participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS do not distance themselves from the Group of Seven, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or the United Nations. Instead of building a competitive order, a growing number of states are rejecting the binary world order – or are seeking to escape its constraints and consequences – by keeping one foot in the US-led camp and the other in the multilateral institutions led by Russia and China. Many of these states were non-aligned during the Cold War and today are taking all sides together instead.

By adopting such an approach, some states seek to minimize the costs of great power competition and to enhance the benefits of competition. As great-power competition escalates, small and medium-sized states are increasingly vulnerable to competing demands—such as requiring China to support its policies toward Hong Kong and Taiwan, or requiring the United States to avoid investment in China’s 5G technology and infrastructure. It is likely that both sides consider a certain state as a reasonable partner, targeting a state with persuasion, not sanctions, and pacifying the interested superpower in return for relatively low costs and not provoking the other power.

Many states see benefits from this strategy. Siding with everyone instead of not being aligned means – in theory if not actually – influencing the decision-making process of the great powers, to enjoying the benefits of this bias. These advantages increase in the event that one of the great powers fears the loss of a partner in favor of another power. Siding with all is a hedge against the impossibility of predicting the behavior of great powers. This precaution is most evident in the Middle East, where the future of US and Chinese engagement is uncertain, and where even the US’s closest partners find their relations with Washington increasingly unstable due to US domestic politics.

There is no doubt that such hedging entails costs. Turkey’s purchase in 2017 of the Russian S-400 air defense system, in violation of Turkey’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, led to its expulsion from the F-35 fighter programme. Hungary’s refusal to participate in European sanctions against Russia may reinforce Brussels’ determination to withhold EU funds from Budapest over rule of law concerns. And Israel itself, which is one of the closest allies of the United States, is a witness to the solution of the problem of its relations with Russia and China, as the main subject of the dispute with Washington, in place of the dispute over Iran or the Palestinian issue.

The United States might be tempted to issue an ultimatum to its hedging partners — the ultimatum alerts partners that competition with Russia or China requires them to choose sides. If the partners continue to deal with these competitors, Washington may be forced to reduce its preferential relations with these states. But such an approach is not practical. On the one hand, many forms of cooperation between US partners and Russia or China – much of the trade is commodities – do not pose a significant threat to US interests, nor merit strong opposition. Moreover, in the case of China, reaping the fruit of the ultimatum may be impossible. This is because the economy of US partners is intertwined with that of Beijing – a major difference between the current stage of great-power competition and the previous one. Moreover, such a request is likely to lead to requests from US partners for stricter economic and security guarantees, which Washington may be reluctant to provide or may be unable to provide.

Amer Ababakr holds Ph.D. degree, Cyprus International University. His major is in Politics in the Middle East. His fields of interests include international relations, international security, foreign policy, and ethnic conflict.

Modern Diplomacy

The views in the article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of InfoBRICS.

Source: moderndiplomacy.eu

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