What’s Love Got to Do With It? Building a Different Middle East

New Thinking for a New World - a Tallberg Foundation Podcast

Gilles Kepel discusses the recent developments in the Middle East that could reshape the global order.

Over the last several months, there have been a series of extraordinary developments in the Middle East that could have almost as big an impact on the shape of the new global order as Russia’s war on Ukraine. Consider even a partial list:

• China's engineering of rapprochement between supposedly implacable enemies Iran and Saudi Arabia;

• The Arab League celebrating the return of Syria's president Assad, still considered a war criminal in the West;

• Saudi Arabia's application to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization while also moving towards membership in the BRICs;

• Countries from Morocco and Algeria to Saudi Arabia and Turkey moving away from political Islam;

• A growing web of diplomatic, economic, and financial ties among China, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, Iran, and Russia, that have intensified even as the West tries to enforce draconian sanctions against several of those countries.

The only thing that is clear is that a new Middle Eastern political order is under construction, one in which the United States and Europe are likely to have considerably less influence than they enjoyed over the past century.

Gilles Kepel, one of France's leading experts on the Middle East and a regular columnist for Al-Monitor, recently shared his thinking about these profound changes with New Thinking for a New World.

Listen and tell us what you think: Will the Middle East be more peaceful and prosperous without the United States playing a dominant political role?