By Dr. David Wurmser
Flaring tensions between Jordan and Israel, and in particular the escalating, hostile rhetoric coming from Amman, over the “status quo” on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem have stunned long-term observers of the situation. Even strong advocates who traditionally defend and even advocate increasing Jordan’s regional role were jarred. Israelis have been particularly shocked by the acerbic determination of Jordan’s exacerbation of this tension. As a result, some now question that relationship.

Moreover, that volley of harsh statements was made by the most senior Jordan officials over recent weeks against the backdrop of the most fatal terror wave Israel has faced in many years, with 20 Israeli fatalities in just over a month, and as hundreds of thousands of Muslims gathered on the Temple Mount to chant, “Khaybar, Khaybar Oh, Jew!; the army of Muhammad is returning,’ which is a blunt reference to the extermination of the Jews at Khaybar by Muhammad in 628 AD. The juxtaposition terror attacks and chants for another genocide of Jews against the verbal assault from Amman amplified the recoil Israelis felt from the substance of the statements and lead many who in the past supported Jordan to doubt Amman’s continued goodwill toward Israel and the resilience of the attending peace treaty.

Israel, the United States and those who view Arab-Israeli peace as positive should indeed be concerned about the survival of the peace treaty. Indeed, Jordan’s behavior in public plunged a dagger into the heart of the reigning Israeli defense concept since 1967; Jordan and Israel shared an interest in preventing the Palestinian issue from exploding out of control and threatening the Kingdom, and thus Amman could be counted upon by Israel to always help calm and manage the fallout of any increase in local and regional tension. Suddenly, Jordan was instead pouring kerosene onto Israeli-Palestinian tensions.

However, the statements themselves are not the problem, nor did this latest episodic flare-up in Palestinian violence cause the emerging “Jordanian problem.” It merely exposed something much deeper and more troubling about the state of affairs in Jordan.

Indeed, both the statements and Jordan’s vulnerability to Palestinian escalations are symptoms of a failing Jordanian policy. Or more accurately, Jordan’s instability and the more provocative and hostile Jordanian policy in fact both reflect and result from an underlying shift in King Abdallah’s strategic outlook. That shift not only is out of kilter with the spirit of various articles in the Israel-Jordanian peace treaty, but contradicts it.

The shift is not recent, but likely occurred between five and ten years ago. And the longer and deeper it takes root, not only will the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty come under further duress, but the purpose of the shift to shore up King Abdullah’s reign politically will fail. The stability of the Kingdom, in fact, will deteriorate further.

Jordan’s tantrum

Since April, Jordan has not only escalated its rhetoric against Israel, but has crossed several red lines in this round of conflict.

Echoing Palestinian incitement

Most particularly, it descended to unprecedented levels when its prime minister, Bisher al-Kasawneh, praised those who attacked the Jews and called those Arabs who work with Israeli authorities as legitimate targets for violence. He praised the rioters as those:

“who proudly stand like minarets, hurling their stones in a volley of clay at the Zionist sympathizers defiling al-Aqsa Mosque under the protection of the Israeli occupation government.”

The term “Zionist sympathizers” cut Israeli hard because it so closely echoed a highly inflammatory statement by the Israeli Arab List leader Ayman Oudeh made a week earlier right after a Christian Israeli-Arab policeman, Amir Khouri, was killed in the line of duty as several Israelis were being killed in a terror attack in Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv in March. The verbal assault by Oudeh on Arabs who have integrated into Israeli official institutions like the military and police was a clear attempt to denigrate their memory, especially since he then proceeded to call on Arab police in Israel to resign and resist. Jordanian PM’s Kasawneh’s words – which both praised resistance to Israel and denigrated those police who cooperate with Israel — on the heels Oudeh’s statement were inescapably to many seen as an intentional echo. The statement thus horrified Israelis and emboldened their adversaries.

Moreover, Jordan de facto accepted Israel’s ultimate control over the Temple Mount in the 1994 peace treaty. In return, Israel would prioritize consideration of Jordan’s special and historical role over Muslim holy sites. But Jordan, via Prime Minister Kasawneh’s statement annulled Israel’s legitimacy and erased any Jewish connection to the Temple mount by calling Israelis illegal colonial settlers, a second time a week after the first statement:

“Israel has no sovereignty over the holy sites in Jerusalem! It is a Muslim place of worship, and only the Jordanian Waqf has full authority over the management of the compound…This is occupied Palestinian land.”

These were particularly bitter pills for Israel to swallow coming in the wake of a sudden, unexpected wave of Palestinian terror that claimed 20 Israeli lives.

Contradicting the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty

And it was essentially annulling two critical parts of the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. Article 2, paragraph 3 states that: “They will develop good neighbourly relations of co-operation between them to ensure lasting security, will refrain from the threat or use of force against each other and will settle all disputes between them by peaceful means.” The point is so important that the treaty returns, expands and dwells at length on this point again in Article 4, which states:

• ”Both Parties, acknowledging that mutual understanding and co-operation in security-related matters will form a significant part of their relations and will further enhance the security of the region, take upon themselves to base their security relations on mutual trust, advancement of joint interests and co- operation, and to aim towards a regional framework of partnership in peace…The Parties undertake, in accordance with the provisions of this Article, the following:  
• to refrain from the threat or use of force or weapons, conventional, non-conventional or of any other kind, against each other, or of other actions or activities that adversely affect the security of the other Party; 

• to refrain from organising, instigating, inciting, assisting or participating in acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, subversion or violence against the other Party; 
• to take necessary and effective measures to ensure that acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, subversion or violence against the other Party do not originate from, and are not committed within, through or over their territory (hereinafter the term “territory” includes the airspace and territorial waters). 
• ‘Consistent with the era of peace and with the efforts to build regional security and to avoid and prevent aggression and violence, the Parties further agree to refrain from the following:  
• joining or in any way assisting, promoting or co-operating with any coalition, organisation or alliance with a military or security character with a third party, the objectives or activities of which include launching aggression or other acts of military hostility against the other Party, in contravention of the provisions of the present Treaty.“

In other words, Kasawneh’s statements – echoing Palestinian threats and allowing Jordanian territory to be a haven for factional heads calling for violence against Israel, praising those who attack Israelis by senior officials, and labeling Israeli Arabs who serve in Israel’s defense structures as traitors are all direct violations of the peace treaty.

The second inconsistency with the peace treaty emerged from Article 9, Paragraph 2 of the Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace, which says that:

“In this regard (i.e., regarding freedom of access to places of religious and historical significance), in accordance with the Washington Declaration, Israel respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem…When negotiations on the permanent status will take place, Israel will give high priority to the Jordanian historic role in these shrines.”

While this article benefits Jordan greatly, it also enshrines Jordan’s acknowledgement of Israel’s ultimate control over the area. Kasawneh, in contrast, asserts Israel as a squatter and essentially promotes Jordan as the sovereign authority over the Temple Mount and Israel as an illegal occupier. In both his first and second statements, PM Kasawneh sought to criminalize the essence of Article 9 and through that, the very Israeli control through which Jordan derives its “special role” on the Mount in the peace treaty.

Moreover, this Jordanian behavior followed a particularly intense two-month period in which Israel’s leadership had invested great time and capital in coordinating with Jordan, including by offering major concessions and goodwill gestures to Amman and the Palestinians, in order to ensure that the Ramadan-Passover-Easter holiday trifecta would pass smoothly. Indeed, Israel paid some price in confidence among Gulf Arabs and Egypt by trying to bring Jordan and the Palestinian Authority into Abraham Accords structure at the United States’ behest during the recent Negev Summit in March. As such, Jordan’s turn toward a darker side not only raised doubts about that investment, but humiliated the Israeli government at a highly sensitive political moment, especially those political leaders most involved, namely Benny Gantz, Omer Bar-Lev and Yair Lapid.

Jordan suggests resurrecting the 1852 Ottoman status quo

Another troubling aspect of recent months has been that Jordan’s government drafted a position paper elevating and expanding its “legal” role in Jerusalem and demanding the revival of the “historic status quo.” It then released, or perhaps “leaked” portions to the public, not as an official Jordanian position, but as one of the Jerusalem Waqf.

The document is highly problematic and aggressive in its claims and demands. First, what is one to make of this new concept, “the historic status quo?” Anyone who has visited the Temple Mount since 1967 understands that there has never been a static status quo. It has evolved considerably over the five and half decades since then. And that evolution has invariably been in the Muslims’ favor:

• There are ever increasing restrictions on visiting the site by non-Muslims, including the banning not only of any religious articles, but even non-Palestinian Authority sanctioned tour books.
• The Waqf has increased the expanse and intensity of its Palestinian-Arab nationalist and Islamist political behavior, especially after 1994 when it fell under the control of Ikrima Said Sabri.
• The Waqf also in several periods undertook activities that damaged the archeological, sacred remains of the temple.
• The Waqf expanded – especially in recent years – the definition of “Muslim holy places” from originally the al-Aqsa mosque alone to now not only the entire Temple Mount compound but even the Western Wall (called by Muslims the al-Buraq wall after Muhammad’s horse which supposedly was tied up there).

The Jordanian document, instead of acknowledging the increasing, restrictive control by Muslims of the entire Temple Mount area, instead furthers a timeline of grievance of erosion of Muslim rights and control since 1852 which it noted as a prelude to demanding a restoration of the “historic status quo.” Placed in this context, the term “historic status quo” which Jordan seeks is clearly not a reference to anything which was in place or evolved since 1967 – since going backwards in the last 55 years increases non-Muslim rights — but a reference to the original rights enshrined by Ottoman edicts until the beginning of the erosion of exclusive Muslim control that started in 1852 upon which the document focuses.

Indeed, Jordan via this document demands full sovereignty essentially over the Temple Mount, even in cases of emergency or attack on Israel or Israelis. Indeed, even in conditions that worshippers are attacked at the Western Wall from atop the Mount, Israeli police could no longer be allowed on the Temple Mount for any condition or reason. Jordan also demands “giving the Waqf the authority to severely restrict non-Muslim visits to the Temple Mount; requiring non-Muslims to apply to visit in writing in advance; and setting restrictive tour routes of no more than 500 feet (150 meters) in each direction for non-Muslim visitors.”6

Official Jordanian statements in recent weeks since also outline the justification for such demands by the Jordanian government: Israel “illegally” occupies Jerusalem and that thus it has no right to determine realities and regulations governing the sites in it. In short, for all intents and purposes, the Jordanian government simultaneously insists that the Israeli presence in eastern Jerusalem is illegal, while at the same time insisting that under the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreements, Israel lent Jordan de facto, if not de jure, sovereignty over the holy sites. And the reference to 1852 raises the strong likelihood that “holy sites” means all “holy sites,” not only Muslim since that is the “historic status quo” as it stood in 1852 at the chosen beginning of Jordan’s timeline of grievance.

As if that was not provocative enough, Amman then shopped the document around the region and with officials in the United States. Such an action is inescapably hostile and can be seen only as a calculated humiliation of Israel, an attempt to raise tensions between Jerusalem and a relatively unsympathetic current administration in Washington, and finally also as an attempt to damage Jerusalem’s relations with some of its newer peace partners, such as the UAE.

Jordan moves to “Vaticanize” the holy sites

But if Jordan is trying to wrest sovereignty away from Israel, it will need a governing body with full authorities and heft to function effectively as the sovereign government of the Temple Mount complex. Which is where the issue of the size and role of the Waqf authority and structure comes in.

A decade ago, the Jerusalem Waqf was a rather small, administrative body primarily concerned with the preservation of Islamic structures, institutions and interests over Muslim holy sites. Over the last half decade, however, it has ballooned and changed into primarily a political institution advancing Palestinian national interests and monitoring and harassing the presence of non-Muslims who test their rights to freedom of worship (also enshrined in the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty) or presence on the Temple Mount and posing a direct challenge to Israel’s sovereignty over the area. In other words, for the first time since World War II under Hajamin al-Husseini, who sided with and strategically helped the Nazis, the office of the Mufti in Jerusalem has become a political instrument of confrontation. True, there has been some movement in that direction several decades ago under Ikrima Sabri as the Mufti in the 1990s, but his removal and replacement with a more pro-Jordanian Mufti halted that drift in the first decade and a half of the 2000s.

But since 2016, something began to change. The Size of the Waqf and its employees expanded dramatically, to the point where there were as many as 850 employees by the beginning of this year – a size vastly greater than any administrative structure over the area required.

Indeed, as if that was not odd enough, the Jordanian monarch asked for an additional four dozen to be hired by the Waqf over the last several weeks. Israel has thus far refused that request.7

And not only has the Waqf employee base been expanded, so too has its administrative council over the last several years under Jordanian pressure.8 Both tracks are designed to increase Jordan’s control over the religious sites, but these moves also largely expand the power of key, and notably corrupt, PLO officials (such as Yousef Dajani, who is an Abu Mazen crony and the former head of the East Jerusalem Electric Company).9 To note, the peace treaty bars Jordan from siding with any third party to undermine Israel in any of the territory west beyond the Jordan river.

To be clear, what Jordan is trying to do with the vast expansion is to create a sovereign structure ruling not only over the Temple Mount, but other holy places as well given the context of the references to 1852 and “the historic status quo,” at which time the Ottoman Khaliph had ultimate sovereignty and authority over all religious sites, not only Muslim. In short, Jordan is trying to turn the holy sites of Jerusalem into a status akin to the Vatican in Rome and over Catholic assets, except in this case, such a dispensation would also govern the key Christian and many Jewish holy sites too (the Western wall has been redefined by the Waqf, for example, as the al-Buraq wall, marking the wall to which Muhammad’s horse, al-Buraq had been tied during his night journey to the furthest [al-Aqsa] mosque, which thus makes it a Muslim holy site).

Underlying it is the same concern Jordan has about the Palestinian population more broadly. Jordan fears the complete loss of control by Abu Mazen over his population and ceding of the leadership to Turkey, Hamas and Iranian-oriented factions. Having spectacularly failed to employ elections last spring (2021) to validate the decade-and-half rule of Abu Mazen – another effort led by Jordan and Abu Mazen which led to war and weakening of Abu Mazen – Jordan embarked on another shibboleth designed to shore up Abu Mazen and Jordan’s leadership among Palestinians, this time to try to preempt Hamas, Turkey, Iran and Iran on this issue. However, this effort led to the opposite result.

By expanding the Waqf, expanding Jordan’s control over the Waqf along with the PLO’s leadership, King Abdallah hoped to preempt its complete takeover by Hamas and other geopolitically threatening factions. The problem is that not only is this failing to shore up either the PLO’s leadership role or Jordan’s currency among Palestinians, this all is being done at the expense of Israel, and at the expense of delegitimizing and undercutting Israel’s sovereignty and control over the site. The result is not that Jordan replaces Israel to fill the expanding vacuum left by Israel, but that Hamas dashes in successfully to fill it. In other words, Jordan’s strategy is enabling rather than preempting a greater role and control of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and others.

As such, most disturbing is that the Waqf – which answer ostensibly to the Jordanian King – was directly involved in encouraging and inciting the violence centered on the al-Aqsa mosque. Jordan is creating a Frankenstein’s monster that weakens both it and Israel.

Indeed, it is easily predictable that such a vast expansion of the Waqf and erosion of Israeli continued legitimacy on the Mount (a policy onto which the Biden administration has now signed) becomes exponentially more disturbing as the Waqf – instead of being essentially an administrative body – assumes the role of instigator and organizer of the riots that occurred over the last three months on and around the Temple Mount (including the very serious attempt to cause a riot and embarrass Israel during Easter services at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre).

Jordan shifts geopolitically away from the West

This shift in Jordan toward the Arab nationalist camp also carries with it a geopolitical shift more reflective of the historical alignment of Arab nationalism against the West, including for example in supporting Russia against Ukraine. Jordanian papers – especially “state-sponsored” daily, al-Rai – are increasingly tolerant of and even echo some of the worst Holocaust denial theories de jour, and peddle extreme versions of anti-Semitic attacks and re-writes of history that convolute Nazism and Judaism, narratives which are by their very essence incitement. Muhammad Kharroub wrote on May 8, for example:

“[It was] the heroic Soviet soldiers and generals who invaded the Third Reich, flew the Red Flag over its headquarters and declared the defeat of Nazism while the Zionist movement and a group of Jewish leaders made a pact with its leader, Hitler.”10

And employing the concept of global Jewish conspiracies that dominate superpowers: “[Disagreements between Israel and Russia] have attracted the attention of political and media circles and research centers in Russia, and some of them have opened the ‘dossiers’ of the Jews and Zionists and [to discuss] the role their institutions played in dismantling the Soviet union and in usurping the Soviet-Russian civil sector and privatizing it for paltry sums in favor of U.S.-supported Jewish mafias.”11

Another writer in the same state-sponsored paper wrote: “Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov exhibited courage when he refuted the ostensible contradiction between Judaism and Nazism by making a statement that will in no doubt go down in history that ‘Adolf Hitler had Jewish blood in his veins.”12 And “This lie was followed by another one, amplifying the Jewish Holocaust and falsifying a lot of information about it as Zionist propaganda maintained that the Nazis killed almost six million Jews during World War II out of the 11 million Jews worldwide at the time. This figure is hard to believe.”13

Such articles in organs affiliated with the Jordanian state are calculated to instigate violence. And observers of Jordan have noted with alarm for several years the rising intensity and increasing frequency of these sorts of grotesque anti-Semitic incitement and conspiracy theorizing over the last half decade, to the point where Jordan is rapidly becoming an epicenter of the new anti-Semitic literary and journalistic scene.

This deterioration is perhaps most intense lately, but it is not a recent addition. Since 2017 at least, Jordan has turned to a much more confrontational path with Israel.

And one must also recall the role played by Jordan last year in the sequence of events that led to the summer 2021 war and the underlying dynamics that led to last May’s escalation into war. Indeed, the war began months earlier when Jordan, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the newly minted Biden administration launched a plan to resurrect the Palestinian Authority by holding an election that they believed would lend the PA an easy electoral victory which then could be leveraged to validate its authority, strengthen it, and through that to resurrect the moribund Palestinian “peace process.”

The plan went horribly awry, however, when it became clear that Abu Mazen’s PLO would face not victory, but a certain catastrophic electoral annihilation and with it political collapse. Thus, the PA chose to cancel the elections rather than follow through. Cancelling elections because of imminent loss only deepened the PLO’s loss of legitimacy, which thus encountered an enormous backlash and threat of civil war – which in turn would certainly have been won by Hamas. As a result, the PA attempted to deflect blame for cancelling the elections onto Israel and began whipping up a war hysteria. That war hysteria (for which Hamas had long prepared) led eventually to war (for which Hamas had also long prepared). Hamas held all the cards.

Jordan failed, however, to learn from this failure. Instead of revisiting its policy of based on championing the most damaging aspects of the PA’s failed narrative and strategy to itself regain control of Palestinian Authority leadership, Jordan tied itself ever deeper to this rudderless PLO which has been reduced strategically to employing a one-trick deck show (Defend Jerusalem from the Jews!) as its ship sinks.

Where to from here?

This point of this article is neither to question Jordan’s intent on remaining within the peace treaty with Israel, nor to review of the genuinely disturbing rising anti-Semitic nature of Jordanian discourse, although both legitimately have led some in Israel to begin to weigh the costs of continuing to answer to Jordan’s steady diet of demands or indulge its provocations.

Indeed, one has to acknowledge that Jordan’s King has for decades actually had amicable relations with Jews and has never been considered in any way particularly hostile to the Jewish people. This shift and recent anti-Israeli behavior is, to be true to the historical record, quite out of character. So much so that this new wave is likely not the result of any heartfelt or genuine anger, but a more calculated move driven by the increasing desperation.

Moreover, almost all years Netanyahu was prime minister, other than his last four, were calm years in Israeli-Jordanian relations, in contrast to disturbed relations not only in the last five years, but even now when Jordan faces a rather sympathetic government in Jerusalem.

Rather, Jordan is reacting to the failure of the Oslo process to produce a new Palestinian leadership capable of actually leading the Palestinian Arabs rather than pillaging them, and encouraging them into peace rather than employing incitement to divert internal anger. The complete failure of the Oslo process to transform the revolutionary, externally-imposed leadership into a genuine governing structure left a power vacuum among Palestinians, which was additionally exacerbated by the dilution of Jordanian influence over the Palestinians caused by decisions both by those made early by Moshe Dayan after Israel assumed control of the area in 1967 and by King Abdallah’s father’s (King Hussein’s) decision in 1988 to sever his ties and claims to the areas of Judea and Samaria.

In essence, this led to a situation today where Jordan knows a vacuum has emerged among the Palestinians that is being filled by dangerous regional forces, but at the same time Jordan has left very little effective ability to control Palestinian politics.

That, however, is a manageable circumstance, and Israel will eventually prevail over Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and any other foreign power like Turkey or Iran that seeks to lord over the Palestinians and ride their plight to pursue fantasies of Israel’s destruction. What is far harder to manage is Jordan’s strategic misstep in handling this circumstance – the answer to which will be addressed in following parts of this essay.

As yet, it is barely perceptible, but with each day it is becoming more apparent that only a week into a globe-shaping crisis, we are seeing the first signs of a new phase.

It is clear that the United States is not whole-heartedly engaged and is lagging far behind its European allies in showing resolve. For example, while the EU has sanctioned 490 entities as of March 3, and Switzerland 371, the United States has only sanctioned 118. Moreover, leaks from the administration show signs of faltering rather than steeling will. Articles are appearing in elite Western papers, such as the New York Times, which only a week ago led the charge into confrontation, already laying out intellectual paths to backing off and yielding to Putin. In conversations in the last 24 hours with people in the bordering lands north of Russia, from what I gather the populations of the Baltic states are beginning to assess that they are next in Putin’s plans, but that they will not be saved by NATO despite all the talk and commitments. As a result, in the last 24 hours, there has been a drop in the hitherto lava-hot housing market in all those lands, and we are even seeing the first signs of an exodus from them. Population movements are among the best indicators of what people really think since they are voting with their feet at the cost of great disruption. In this case, they are voting on their appreciation as to whether the US – as the only genuine leader that can pilot the Western world — will go the distance on this and draw the hard border on Putin to stop the slide at and within Ukraine and no further, or whether the United States will back off after the initial hoopla, which will then set everyone up for Putin’s next thrust of which those closest to Russia will pay first and hardest.

Israel, the UAE and the Saudis are on the other end of this rising Eurasian power and face off against one of its most important allies, Iran. While the West demands fealty on Ukraine, all are deeply fearful that if they go blazing in, they will be picking a fight with a colossus and be left alone holding the bag. Arab nations and Israel just do not have faith yet that the US is genuinely changed, is now serious and has effectively begun mobilizing for the long haul. The emerging Iran deal, in fact, tells them the opposite.

There also appears as yet to be no appreciation in the West as to how great and disruptive sanctions will have to become to genuinely sever Russia and isolate its economy – which is one of the first steps as the globe enters another Cold War. There is no way to do this but to also sever the West from China, since Beijing will cut out banks that commit to the sanctions, and others that won’t. For example, Chinese banks can just hide and transfer monies internally between the two, therein positioning China as a money-laundering superpower on a scale never before seen. At this point, our elites are hesitant on truly isolating Russia, and thus are hardly in a position to really draw the line on China too.

In fact, we are not even willing to disrupt our dependence on Russian oil and gas. The White House, via its spokesperson, Jen Psaki, has made that clear a dozen times over the week since the invasion of Ukraine. As a whole Germany is more serious, as are several other European nations. For this they are to be commended. And yet, in the end, even Germany is willing to suspend NordStream2, which was not going to truly come on line until next winter. In other words, it took a stand for which payment is expected to come due only after Ukraine falls or wins. In contrast, Germany allows NordStream to continue to flow. Again, Germany and some of its European allies are still to be given credit for what it has done, but we should be sober. The sanctions all Western nations have imposed on Russia via SWIFT structures are riddled with holes because of this continued trade.

If we are really not willing to wean ourselves off Russian gas and oil, then it is unlikely that we will be willing to do so on everything else. Once Ukraine settles into a festering mess (it will never be truly subjugated by Russia, even if the Ukrainian army dissolves as a coherent conventional fighting force, which is itself not even certain), we will begin to feel the full effects of severed economic ties to Russia — the consequences of which (devastated supply chains, for example) we really have not thought through, and certainly not felt, yet.

In general, at this moment, when suddenly things really matter and everything becomes deadly serious, there seems to be a verdict on the reckoning of the US foreign policy establishment and of its uninspiring record of missteps, delusions, inconsistencies and lapses since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, despite the unveiling by Putin of a chilling manifesto last summer, US diplomats, indeed our Under Secretary of State for Policy, Victoria Nuland, this last October traveled to Moscow and left the impression that we were distancing ourselves from Ukraine, and even reprimanding it for its resolute interpretation of the 2014 Minsk Agreement. For a leader like Putin, who outlined last summer a dangerous imperial vision, that was like throwing steak to a tiger. He understood this as weakness and an invitation to invasion. A seasoned official like Nuland should have understood, given the troubling evolution of Putin’s thinking as unveiled over the last half decade, that whatever diplomatic nicety or polite deference she expressed, and any light she showed between the United States and Ukraine, would be met by man who brags about physically subjugating tigers and bears as weakness, not refinement.

Thus, as Ukraine fights for its freedom, its identity and its survival, nations around the world and their peoples will settle into a hedging pattern until they are convinced the US has it in it to go the distance here linearly and decisively, rather than in a partial, waivering and hesitant process, the consequences of which are that many closest to the fire will pay a horrific price until the US finally comes around clearly and determinedly.

Sadly, the problem is not just the shortcomings of the Biden team. If it was, then we could just fix it by changing leaders. The problem is far deeper. It is, in fact, a civilizational reckoning. People are beginning to take note of the speeches and writings of Putin and his clique of intellectuals – teaching us once again that we are ill served us when we ignore the earnest nature of what others with ambition say. And yet, while people are beginning to realize the expanse of the challenge he poses, there is little discussion of the magnitude. The geographic parameters of Putin’s ambitions are coming into focus, but still ignored is his civilization critique of the West and his grandiose solution, which in the end is a far more dangerous assault than any real estate. He believes the rise of Western freedom has corrupted Christianity, and that his Eurasian fantasy is the salvation of European civilization. Along the way, he has no need for the small and weak, all of whom should be retuned to the strong and bog as minions.

In as far as Putin judges the flaws of Western civilization (as distinct from his grandiose answer), it is important the West appreciates that there may be part of this critique which demands serious introspection on our part. Indeed, there is a common thread uniting Hitler, Japan, the Soviet Union, Khomeini, and bin-Ladin with Putin: they all believed that the West was a soul-less, corrupted civilization that confronted with strong will can be swept aside as easily as breezes scatter dust on a floor. While Hitler and Japan were buried decisively and immediately when a relentless America obliterated both their armies and their ideas, continental European powers and elites had until that point failed and were in fact swept aside.

It bears consideration as to why that was so. European elites, led by failing aristocracies, had become a pessimistic lot that had traded the souls of their national identity for an increasingly performative but ultimately hollow rising set of international ideas and institutions. In the end, those elites never really internalized that they were part of their nations or accepted the passing of the baton of defining “legitimate” culture to their whole populations. They thus increasingly distanced themselves from their own people, whom they believed had rejected their inherently superior status. The elites, led by a dying aristocratic class, felt jilted. Hitler gauged that Europe’s elites simply could no longer tap into and leverage their nation’s cultures for power, and thus with utter disdain he played upon the elites’ resulting impotence, internally and externally. His appreciation of the continent was correct, and despite Germany’s initial weakness and his personally tenuous grip on power, it fell to him within half of a decade. He then leveraged this as a parade of Western retreats not only to destroy, but to humiliate along the way, his internal doubters.

And yet, America was different, and its elites at that time were still products of the culture and its informing ideas that all Americans shared. Thus, when either Hitler or the Japanese imperial leadership slammed against America, it slammed against an insurmountable tide of power. It took a still confident America a bit longer to lead the world to devastate the Soviet Union, but win it did in the end. Still, there were some warning signs along the way as elites in the 1970s increasingly began to resemble the elites of their trans-Atlantic allies who lacked civilizational confidence and instead of confidently tapping the sinews of power of their own cultures, increasingly invested in international structures, institutions and norms to codify inertia – or which they hoped would at least — and hide their fading self-confidence.

Reading Putin and his intellectuals for years, it is this question which most animates him. The imperial expansion of geography is the aim, but his imagination that he can realize his ambitions emerge from his appreciation of the rot and corruption of the West, which he fingers as emanating from freedom itself rather than from the Western elites’ abandonment (rather than embrace) of their cultural identity and soul. For Putin, the West is a desert of nobody people, but the new Russia is a land of faith and a soul. His substance will vanquish our emptiness. In this civilizational challenge, Putin follows in the footsteps of the Hitlers, Ishiwara Kanjis, Mussolinis, Stalins, Nassers, Che Guevaras, Maos, Xis, Khomeiinis and bin-Ladins.

So where is America today as we enter the next great challenge? Do people outside America measure us as a rising confident civilization with a strong sense of who we are? Or do our urban and foreign policy elites — which after all is what is most visible to the outside, not the patriot with a pickup truck sitting in a diner in Fargo with a gun rack on the back window — either act with deep pessimism as if either we assume our own decline or behave as if we are a nobody people (no soul, no faith, no history, no identity)?

Putin, and for that matter Xi, ISIS, al Qaida, Iran too, measured us up as deficient. The real question, the answer to which will determine how far and fast the world will mobilize around the new order — which is not yet clearly either a cold war or a world war, but which is rapidly approaching somewhere on that level of seriousness — is whether people eventually see Putin’s, Xi’s, bin-Ladin’s and Khomeini’s assessment as the better bet or not.

Ukraine is an opportunity, not only a bellwether, in this regard. Putin views core elements of the West’s foundations with disdain. Our response to the Ukraine crisis ultimately must be a reassertion of our confidence as a civilization and the values (that unique combination of Greek, Roman, Judeo-Christian, Renaissance and early Enlightenment foundations) upon which it is grounded, not a specific policy or action.

The first signs are the American people are beginning to appreciate the true civilizational nature of this challenge. But our political elites face a reckoning. For many decades so far, they have failed us. Will our foreign policy be based on the platform of our culture and values, or on a ratatouille of academic theories, reactive scrambling and shifting values based on diplomatic expediency?

By Dr. David Wurmser
July 29, 2021

In a summer of brewing crises, from Havana through Caracas to Tehran (and other Iranian cities), Lebanon’s descent into crisis tends to be overlooked. And yet, it is part of a larger picture in which our greatest adversaries are on the ropes (Communists in Cuba and Venezuela, the Khomeinist regime in Iran, and Hizballah in Lebanon). While this is clearly a fortuitous moment, the emergence of which can properly be attributed to the policies of the previous administration, the Obama administration’s catastrophic failure to turn previous crises into opportunities should provide a cautionary tale. These crises can be weathered by our adversaries or hijacked by others as dangerous (or even more so) if the United States abandons the underlying policies that led these inimical regimes into their cul de sac. There is no predetermined arc of history, for better or worse: decisions matter. And this administration is dangerously close to fumbling.

The dream palace of Arab nationalism
Lebanon and to some extent Syria have always been both a bellwether and symbol of regional politics. The land of the cedars is an incubator of Arab politics, and thus its history is the first draft of the regional history of ideas. And nobody embodies the swirling development of ideas better than my old doctoral advisor, Fouad Ajami, who himself is a child of Ansar from the heart of the Jabal Amel Shiite community in Lebanon’s embattled south. The progression of his books are like a roadmap to understanding the ebb and flow of both the content and geography of ideas in the region.

In The Arab Predicament (1981), Ajami reflected upon the crises of Arab nationalism. It promised to deliver the great renaissance of the Arab world. Instead, it suffered its most decisive and humiliating defeat in 1967 at Israel’s hands. While in the West, the 1970s may have been the heyday of admiration for the international symbol of Arab nationalism – the Ray-Ban bespectacled Yasir Arafat – those in the region understood something was dying. For those who cared to see, Arafat’s expulsion from south Lebanon in 1978 and Beirut in 1982 marked the end of his Arab nationalism.

Courting Arab nationalists remained the foundation of policy in Western capitals (and still does via the Oslo peace process obsession) – with the exception of the great scholar of the region, Bernard Lewis, who was the first westerner to discern the resurfacing of Islam as politics. But the rubble of Arab nationalism was not given to reconstruction and instead yielded new forces. Fouad Ajami captured the final tortured moment and despairing departure of the soul of the idea in The Dream Palace of the Arabs (1999), and the immense swath of destruction of Arab society left regionally in its place.

The resurfacing of Islam
The new lingua franca of Arab politics was a return to authenticity of the old through the language of Islam. While a few lingering leaders still held a corner of the stage for their final performance, the stage itself was now dominated by actors vying to control the legacy of the mystic past for control over the clouded future.

Arafat knew better than we the region’s trajectory. Arafat himself was already reconnecting to his underlying Islamic essence. When the Islamist threat challenged and then seized power with the rise of Khomeini in Iran, exposed its brutality in the seizure of the great Mosque in Mecca for a month, and revealed its penetration of the structures of power in the murder by the Gamaat al-Islamiyya in Cairo of President Sadat, Arafat was already a step ahead. He beat a path to Tehran – the first foreign “leader” to do so. And his top aid in Force 17, Emad Mughniya, became the developing architect of Hizballah. And Arafat asked of his Libyan allies that the leader of the Lebanese Shiite Awakening, Musa al-Sadr, be eliminated – probably at the behest of the Iranian Revolution, since such a charismatic and potent Shiite leader with greater credentials and a stronger claim to standard-bearing than the upstart Iranian regime posed a grave threat to Khomeini’s leadership. Lebanon again played the unwelcome role of regional incubator.

The first act was actually quite early, and took place in Lebanon. Indeed, the first act was the story of Musa al-Sadr. The tumultuous transition from the heady seduction of Arab nationalism — which though in most of the fertile crescent was a veiled form of Sunni dominance that nevertheless still drew the imagination of young Shiites — to a “Shiite Awakening” was captured with heart-tugging empathy and brilliance in The Vanished Imam (1986). Here were two ironies wrapped up in one: First, the return to Islam, with which the region and outsiders alike have had to contend for the last three decades, arose not from the heart of the Sunni world, but from the suppressed, backward and impoverished Shiite hamlets of southern and eastern Lebanon. Second, this Shiite Awakening came far from Lebanon, and not from the heart of Shiite Islam — Iran and southern Iraq. It manifested itself years before the Iranian revolution, which has ever since tried to claim fathership over an older and more tried “son.” Lebanon’s Shiite leadership thus controlled the claim to authenticity and true fatherhood over the Shiite Awakening – a claim which was so deeply and jealously sought by the Iranian revolution. True, the Shiites extended the tentacles of Iran’s central nervous system to the Levant, but as it extended Iranian power, it also profoundly threatened it. Iraq’s Shiites could have represented this duality as well, but they lived invisibly under the withering hand of Saddam. For that moment at least, the ownership and future of the Shiite Awakening was to be battled out in the south of Lebanon, not in Iraq’s ancient mosques in Kufa, Khadimain, Najaf and Karbala.

The Iraq war
For Ajami, that moment ended in 2003 when the inevitable angel of death, dressed as the American armed forces, claimed the lingering ghost of Arab nationalism in Baghdad. Ajami, being a Lebanese Shiite, understood that as much as this might influence the region, the battle over the Shiite Awakening had shifted from Jabal Amel to the cradle of Shiism itself in Iraq. Iran had spent two decades subjugating with tenuous success the competing center of the Shiite Awakening in Jebel Amal only to find itself now facing a far greater, closer and more serious competitor in an untethered Iraq. The prospect burst onto the Arab stage that at least a Shiite corner of it might find a better future out of Arab nationalism’s rubble.

Ajami captured in The Foreigner’s Gift, that brief ambivalent moment unleashed by the Iraq war in which the hope of freedom was at the same time haunted by fear. Iran despaired of facing this new Shiite challenge coming from the cradle of Shiism, so it was inevitable that it would launch its must-win war to control the Shiites of this newly liberated realm. Ajami in this book passionately echoed a century earlier when the works of Polish expatriate writer, Joseph Conrad, captured this tension between brutality, despair and hope in an unhinged political environment. Ajami also understood that Western eyes failed to see this battle over the soul of Iraqi Shiism – echoing the same battle over ownership of authenticity which Lebanon’s Shiites had posed.

Iraq’s Shiites were both a threat and a weapon for the West. They could be either the tentacle of Iran’s schemes or a dagger plunged into Iran’s heart. But the West’s elites, schooled almost exclusively in the Sunni narrative, could not fathom the existence of this internal Shiite battle nor the magnitude of its stakes. So with historic clumsiness, the West’s elites – especially the British Foreign Office and the American Foreign Service — sought their peace with Iraqi Shiites by preemptively surrendering them to Iran, ensuring the defeat at once of both themselves and of Iraq’s Shiites who so intrinsically threatened Iran’s revolution. Along with the surrender came the belief that Iraq could only be properly stabilized by accomplishing a larger accommodation of Iran regionally—giving birth to the two decade attempt now to invent Iranian-regime moderates and to pursue a nuclear understanding with it. A very different story could have been told, one which might have led to a very different Iran, but wasn’t.

Still, Ajami understood that the vast wasteland left by Arab nationalism was still waiting to be filled, and that the fragile order the foreigners broke was not easily restored. And the struggle between the forces of chaos and restoration shifted yet again to Beirut and Damascus. Instead of seizing control of the forces of chaos and change to ensure they deliver a shift in a favorable direction, Western elites sided with the forces of restoration, while at the same time insisting that the agents of restoration be changed. That was akin to validating the goal of restoring the old communist order in eastern Europe, but at the same time demanding that the leadership be changed to one more palatable. But the result of this muddled perplexity was that the West again imposed irrelevance on itself. The battleground now shifted between the old order’s elites – Assad and Russia – their uncomfortable ally – Iran – and the new parade of Khaliphs, from bin Ladin through Zarqawi and al-Baghdadi to Erdogan.

The collapse of Syria was described by Ajami as the clash of two immutable forces – the people shaking off their dictator and the regime determined to survive — in his book The Syrian Rebellion (2012), but he also quickly understood how regional geopolitical forces had reasserted themselves in the Levant and turned this clash in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon once again into their battlefield in his book, Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent (2014). The history of the fertile crescent has been written ever since by the interplay of these actors.

The question of Saudi Arabia
Ajami understood that if chaos was to be yielded to the new Khaliphs in Ankara and Deir Zuheir and their nostalgic imperial schemes, then there was to be a preference toward restoration, but it had to lay on a path to greater calmness than reversion to the old order and its masters in Moscow, Damascus and Tehran. He looked to those who withstood the charms of Nasser, the dynamism of Tehran or the new beacon of Ankara. He looked to an unlikely place. He looked south into the Arabian peninsula, which hitherto had been a desert in the geography of terrain and ideas other than the dangerous ideas of Salafism with which the Kingdom had now broken. Perhaps Ajami understood it was destined that a restoration based on some sort of change might yet come from this new periphery rather than the core.

Ajami wrote Crosswinds: The Way of Saudi Arabia in 2010, though it was published after his death in 2020. This itself was a comment on the state of Arab political thought: it was becoming so impoverished as a whole – and the intellectual heartland of Arab thought in Beirut and Damascus so stagnant — that the history of Islam and Arabdom was being written either in the non-Arab capitals of Ankara and Tehran or was being surrendered to mediocre secondary franchises in the Arab world. Islam itself, he notes, was moving in that direction, where the generation of fatwas and other religious decisions moved to “Shaykh Google” and populist, unrefined religious leaders, while traditional Islamic elites were increasingly relegated to being the Islamic equivalent of “Dear Abby” and commenting on issues of sexuality and sorcery.

Saudi Arabia seemed an unlikely place for intellectual movement at the time. It was a land of harshness which Ajami argues induced a conservative retrenchment into a system that leaves room for those that stray and seek their own path, but ultimately absorbs them. The irony, he noted, was that the very harshness of the land and environment produced a society of rules, but also found patient accommodation of those that strayed from the rules. The loner always returns when he finds that the harshness of the environment leaves no room for the loner.

And yet, it was in the chaos of the Arab world and the rise of Shaykh Google that the outside world laid siege to the Saudi realm. As Ajami put it, “once upon a time, Saudis were consumers of the literature of Beirut and Damascus. Now they render their own world.” Commenting on Ajami’s opus, a friend of Ajami’s, Charlie Hill, noted that it emerged from the shock that Saudi Arabia had defined itself as a sovereign state and as the embodiment of Islam, and then discovered in the 1980s that these are two incompatible and the Saud were riding “two galloping steeds at the same time.”

Ajami never carried through this intriguing line of thinking before he died because the drama of the clash between the forces of collapse, of change and of brutality took his mind elsewhere shortly afterwards, back to Lebanon and Syria, and he put the book aside unpublished. But from its pages, it was clear that he seemed confident to the end that the Arabian Arabs would somehow reassert their ability to absord the wandering loners and survive. They would find their path, and maybe even this was the path for the region to survive. Perhaps it is a stretch, but one could in some ways even say that he envisioned the Abraham Accords a decade before they happened.

Exhaustion, reflection and retrenchment
In his last book before cancer claimed him, In this Arab Time: the Pursuit of Deliverance (both in 2014) Ajami retreated into a retrospective and wistful survey of the outstanding – but often solitary – liberal voices of the Arab century, as well as the creative but also the destructive voices of ideologies and their battles in the shadow of events shaking the Arab universe. The retrospective nature of the anthology reflected perhaps his sense of his own approaching death, but it also captured the mood in the region of an end of a journey of potential and promise that in its various forms all were drawing now to an end.

It was a sort of eulogy of the world from which he came but within which he could not think and live. There were no great ideas or hopes looking ahead, only reflection on the colorful parade of promising ideas that failed.

By 2014, the struggle between chaos and restoration were dominated almost entirely by the voices of brutality. The new order of the 20th century had sidelined the old order of centuries, but left only chaos in its demise. And the softer nature of Arab politics of the earlier part of the century, when overthrown leaders were sent into exile and debate tolerated within margins, had yielded by the 60s and 70s to the brutal new generation where public inhumanity became common and horrifically tortured murder of dissent became normal. Besieged and in retreat, as well as abandoned by the West under the Obama years, the calmer voices of order in the region had out of despair realized they had no choice but to find their own path to survival, but at the same time they knew that they lacked the power on their own to do so. When Ajami died, in parallel the region had reached a chaotic and very dangerous abyss. And it was no longer the stage of great ideas, but the soapbox of very small ideas, demagogues and elixir peddlers. And with it any shred of charm, dignity and toleration was gone.

Left at the margins of this maelstrom was what Ajami had discerned in the Saudi kingdom: a world of smaller ideas and street fare was emerging. And a system that learned not only to survive but to forgive and absorb those who have deviated. And as an earlier generation of Saudi royals learned to preserve their system internally and protect it externally by making their peace with the West to survive the turbulence of a region flailing to find its moorings, seduced by dream palaces, and besieged by great power rivalries, so too was this generation of royals willing to make their pragmatic peace with the rising local power, namely Israel, which for lack of choice began to fill the regional void that was opened by an America fatigued by the withering hopelessness of the region to which it sought to bring great hope.

Lebanon returns to center stage
But then Lebanon, which had always regarded its role as the crucible of Arab thought as a guilded curse, could nonetheless not let go. What was happening in Lebanon in the last years is again the first writing of the next chapter of Arab history.

With the demise of grand ideas seeking to paint a vast new regional canvas, communities which earlier had thought that their participation in the dreaming, sketching and painting of the contours of such grand new epochs would allow them a new, integrated and common identity. But now they instead found themselves again on the outside. Again, as always, they were alone, different, and threatened. Minorities, who had spent over a century trying to transcend who they were to join a greater whole now realized that their only path to survival lay in the other direction. They could do nothing else but remember who they always were and retreat into that shell. The world of sects, tribes, clans and ethnicities had never really left; the region’s elites – especially among the minorities who let their hopes overpower their judgment — only imagined they had. But those loyalties survived. They adapted themselves to the new vocabularies and also appropriately wore the dress of the latest fashionably dominant ideology in the cavalcade of ideologies. But in the end, those ancient loyalties and affinities were the only true safety and identity, so underneath it all, they remained the bottom line.

It was through the nexus of the rivalries of greater powers and the rampaging of franchised ideologues that these minority communities – especially those who lived along the seam lines of the fertile crescent — knew they were particularly precarious. And nowhere was this dynamic more early and clearly palpable than in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria in the last few years. And while these minority communities retreated into themselves to provide the illusion of safety, they also knew they had to seek a hand of support from a distance. Adrift in chaos, all cling to the familiar and scan the horizon to seek the ship of their salvation.

Israel was close, but uninterested in playing the role of savior. It had been scorched a generation earlier trying to navigate Lebanon’s communal politics, and the trauma of that adventure lingered. True, Israeli leaders nearly universally understand the imperative of preventing the subordination entirely of Lebanon and Syria to the region’s ambitious Ayatollahs, self-anointed Khaliphs and raw dictators. And yet, at the same time, there is almost as universally no Israeli leader who entertains the idea of trying to save either Lebanon or Syria, and perhaps the region more broadly, from itself.

Salvation, however, could not wait. A Hizballah stash of ammonium nitrate exploded and tore the center of Beirut to shreds in August 2020. The veneer of calm which masked a deeply unsettled reality yielded. Any semblance of national community crystallized into anger at the domineering outsider — namely, Iran and its local agent Hizballah. And in the anger, something new seemed to emerge among Lebanese: the hope no longer to be a regional incubator, but instead to be just left alone. Lebanese took to the streets to demand their quiet and the solitude to live their lives. Perhaps this is symbolic of the region; a popular desire emerging among many to just stick their heads down, live their lives and finally just be left alone – exhausted from a century of grand ideas that ushered in upheaval and grand destruction. We hear of such voices in other lands, and even among the people whose very existence was the product of the grand idea of Arab nationalism itself, the Palestinians. Even as far away culturally and geographically as Iran we hear Iranians demonstrating also to be just left alone: “not Gaza nor Lebanon nor Syria; Iran for Iranians” they chant on the streets of Tehran, Ahwaz, Isfahan and Tabriz and elsewhere in anger toward the Ayatollahs and their grandiose projects.

And yet, also symbolic of the region as a whole, the Lebanese were not to be indulged in their simple dream. Into their chaos immediately intruded all the ambitious actors, who redoubled their efforts to tear apart the region more broadly, especially Turkey (which saw an opportunity) and Iran (which sought to preserve its position). Lebanon was such a prize for decades, as well as the treasure chest to raid and the conduit to channel wealth, corruption, trafficking and laundering for the dark forces of the region. Money flowed from all corners of the earth through Lebanon’s dominated institutions to conduct all sorts of nefarious activities from Iraq to Palestine and further line the wealth of the region’s corrupt elites from Tehran to Ankara. It is an asset of utmost critical value for all the region’s malevolent actors and thus cannot be ceded under any circumstances since doing so could threaten their very survival, let alone their further enrichment and empowerment. These oppressors, thus, will subject Lebanon to any cost, no matter how horrifying, to stay in power. And unfortunately, entangling Israel to the south may be part, even their most important part, of their perverse toolbox to do so by changing the subject into an active regional war.

So now we have the two trends converging. On the one hand, the pillaging of Lebanon by outsiders, led by Iran and to some extent Turkey, has reached such a level that it has left the Lebanese people with nothing to lose. And in contrast, the populations are so broken that they wish nothing more than to withdraw from the region spiritually and just be left alone to mind their own business not in condominium, but in isolation.

But it is at this moment that Lebanon does offer hope. When a population has its back against the wall and nothing left to lose, the domineering outsiders face a collapse of their position to a potentially volcanic challenge from the street. That challenge is swelling as I write. So Lebanon now returns to where it has always returned: the laboratory concocting the region’s trends and ideas and the vessel through which the region’s actors pursue their ambitions.

Despite the hopes of Western elites, Lebanon’s institutions, from its government to its armed forces, stand helpless and powerless, as they always have, to the sway of those internal and regional dynamics. Indeed, it was always a western fantasy to believe that any institution, agreement and border, rather than leaders and ancient communal bonds, moved reality. To invest in those institutions as realities is to follow the leprechaun to the end of the rainbow.

So we are left with two immutable forces destined to clash: on the one hand, a restive and imminently erupting population fatigued of grand ideas and has nothing to lose, and on the other hand powerful regional actors with raw ambition who have proven they will act to win at all costs. And lurking in the wings are street ideologues with their small ideas selling their wares as well.

The squandering of opportunity
Which takes us back to the beginning. Our policies over the last several years have so weakened and besieged the nefarious actors in the region that the balance was tipped, and there was lent a modicum of hope to the despairing populations from Tehran to Beirut that there might be a chance to prevail, and the age of exhausted introversion might be brewing. That is what is playing out these weeks in the streets of Iran and Lebanon (and in Caracas and Havana too).

We have been here before in other places and other lands – for example, in central and eastern Europe in the late 1980s – and we have learned one thing in all those places: which side of the fork in the road is travelled between victory of peoples over their oppressors on the one hand and the gut-wrenching crushing of dreams on the other, is set greatly by the tone in the capital of freedom, the United States and its most powerful allies.

In other words, if Washington and its powerful ally to Lebanon’s south, unwilling as it may be, build on the policies of the past administration and understand the nature and stakes of the coming clash and embark on a robust policy of support of the Lebanese people, and if we support our ally Israel if attacked by Hizballah in their effort to change the subject, and if Hizballah is left tattered, or even better eradicated, then Tehran may reach the end of its road, not only in Lebanon, but in Tehran itself. The battle over the great prize of Lebanon has the power to set regional trends and crown regional winners, but also to bury regional losers.

And yet, Washington’s attentions are elsewhere. It is torn between not noticing, governed by obliviousness to currents on the ground, still obsessing over the dream palaces of old which long ago died in the Arab world (and their frameworks like peace processes), investing in institutions whose existences are empty (such as the Lebanese Armed Forces or the UN Interim Force In Lebanon), and unattuned – or misinformed — to the broad regional geopolitics which are playing out on the Lebanese stage. So, instead of placing our powerful hand to tip the scales toward the people of Lebanon, the United States is emerging as an eclipsing and powerful but utterly irrelevant non-player by its own doing, which is sad.

What happens in any one of these current upheavals in the seats of evil – Havana, Caracas, Tehran or Beirut – will set the tone for all the rest. But supporting the demonstrators does not seem to be the guiding principle of the current U.S. administration. Sanctions are lifted on Caracas and Tehran, weak platitudes are extended the freedom fighters in Havana, and dead silence is greeting the Lebanese and Iranians who clearly have had it. The summer of 2021 may yet be remembered more like the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and Prague Spring of 1968: the age of crushed hopes – but this time because the West could have at almost no cost helped those aspirations prevail, but instead chose to do nothing.

But if the collapse of Iran and the frustration of Turkey is deferred (not cancelled), it will come, but the issue is whether it comes now, or years in the future.

Conclusion
Lebanon has become once again the microcosm, or more accurately the herald of the region to come. The tragedy of Lebanon is that the Lebanon as we have known it for a century is about to implode and die. There is no rehabilitation or resurrection. Yes, there is a noble attempt to seize the state intact by the people of Lebanon who are unified by the desire to exorcise the demons hijacking them — as we all had briefly hoped after the horrific destruction of the exploded Hizballah depot last August. And yet, all that is left of that state – especially its internal structures of authority and power, including finance, education, culture and favor — is mastered by the region’s two greatest imperialists, Iran and Turkey. So total is their domination that their removal would leave not institutions worthy of inheritance, but only a vast, razed expanse of societal and governmental debris. And yet, avoiding that collapse only leaves these reprehensible actors in power and Lebanon still shackled to their continued predatory ambitions. It is an unenviable choice, but the former – the collapse of the Lebanese state — is the only path to true freedom. If there is to be change, Lebanon faces sadly the need for it to be revolutionary, not velvet, as we have learned in the last three decades in the former Soviet lands.

And yet, as will go Lebanon, so too will go the region. And thus, it is critical for the world on the outside, and the collection of forces under assault by Iran and Turkey (including and especially the United States which remains oblivious to its being their target), band together to stand with the Lebanese as they inescapably must pass through Mordor’s scorched Plateau of Gorgoroth on their way to build anew, not rebuild.

If successful, what will emerge there, as in its neighbor Syria, eventually is unlikely to be a truly Western sense of freedom, let alone democracy. But it will be an exhausted, perhaps impatient, and not necessarily unified introversion among a collection of besieged and defensive minority communities, tribes, clans and sects which is, after all, a good incubator for the generation of new ideas that the regio