Biden and Mother Nature Have Reshaped the Middle East

Thomas L. Friedman is a good person. Deceptive on rare occasions but overwhemingly truth-telling as he sees it. Israel Lover, BIG Israel Lover, I'm not, maybe you are. Annoying like Harbaugh is annoying. More annoying than Harbaugh. Optimistic, that is the one word I would use if I was to use just one, and I have used thousands, to describe Friedman.

So, I just have one question: Should I point out how President Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan is already reshaping Middle East politics — mostly for the better? Or should I wait a few months and not take seriously yet what one Gulf diplomat drolly said to me of the recent festival of Arab-Arab and Arab-Iranian reconciliations: “Love is in the air.”

What the heck, let’s go for it now.

Because something is in the air that is powerfully resetting the pieces on the Middle East chess board — pieces that had been frozen in place for years. The biggest force shifting them was Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan and tell the region: “You’re home alone. If you’re looking for us, we’ll be in the Straits of Taiwan. Write often. Send oil. Bye.”

Not annoying. I really liked that.

But a second factor is intensifying the pressure of America’s leaving: Mother Nature, manifesting herself in heat waves, droughts, demographic stresses, long-term falling oil prices and rising Covid-19 cases.

Indeed, I’d argue that we are firmly in a transition from a Middle East shaped by great powers to a Middle East shaped by Mother Nature. ...

I can tell that Friedman's annoyance quotient is going to rise exponentially from here. I'll go only until he hits critical mass.

And this shift will force every leader to focus more on building ecological resilience to gain legitimacy instead of gaining it through resistance to enemies near and far. We are just at the start of this paradigm shift from resistance to resilience, as this region starts to become too hot, too populated and too water-starved to sustain any quality of life.

More on that in a minute — [I am very confident that when we hit More on that we will have arrived at critical mass.] first, let’s go back to Biden. He was dead right: America’s presence in Afghanistan and tacit security guarantees around the region were both stabilizing and enabling a lot of bad behavior — boycotts, occupations, reckless adventures and brutal interventions.

Our staunch support for traditional allies, whether they were behaving badly or well, encouraged people to reach beyond their grasp, without fear of consequences. ...

...

And now, well, as the song says: The best part of breaking up is making up!

... Both the U.A.E. and the Saudis understand that with their U.S. big brother withdrawing, they cannot afford hostilities with a bigger Iran...Bahrain and the U.A.E. have built an open relationship with Israel, and Saudi Arabia has built a covert one. Meanwhile, Egypt and Israel are working together to defuse tensions with Hamas in Gaza.

...

...I’d argue that just as we once supplanted the Soviets as the dominant shaper in the region, Mother Nature is now supplanting America as the dominant force.

In Mother Nature’s Middle East, leaders will be judged not by how much they resist one another or great powers, but by how much resilience they build for their people and nations at a time when the world will be phasing out fossil fuels, at a time when all the Arab-Muslim states have booming populations under the age of 30 and at a time of intensifying climate change.

Okay, that wasn't too bad at all.