World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

Kissinger subtitles Chapter 3 “A World Disorder” because, in his view, the Middle East and North African (MENA) region is complicated historically, religiously, culturally, and socially. He covers regional development in sweeping strokes by focusing on the following subcategories: “The Islamic World Order,” “The Ottoman Empire: The Sick Man of Europe,” “The Westphalian System and the Islamic World,” “Islamism: The Revolutionary Tide—Two Philosophical Interpretations,” “The Arab Spring and the Syrian Cataclysm,” “The Palestinian Issue and International Order,” and “Saudi Arabia,” and “The Decline of the State?”

Initially, the Middle East and North Africa region was organized from successive empires, such as the those of Mesopotamia and Sumer. Later, the Sassanid Persian and Byzantine Empires controlled much of the Middle East. At this time, a new religion based on the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed began to rise: “Few events in world history equal the drama of the early spread of Islam” (98). When this occurred, Arabs led a tribal and pastoral lifestyle. Its attributes made Islam differ from other societies in history because it was “a religion, a multiethnic superstate, and a new world order” (101).

After this, Kissinger compares the early schism in Islam between the Sunnis and the Shia Muslims. The split involved debates about the succession after the Prophet Mohammed. The Sunnis believe that Mohammed appointed his advisor Abu Bakr as his successor. In contrast, the Shiites consider Ali, a relative of the Prophet—and those who came after—to be the only authentic leaders.

The rise of Islam affected the rest of the world in different ways. At first, non-aggression treaties were allowed with non-Muslim states. At the same time, Islam clashed with the Byzantine Empire and with Europe through the Crusades. The Islamic conquest of parts of southern Europe eventually led to the Spanish Reconquista of the formerly Christian lands concluding in the late-15th century. The Byzantine Empire fell to what was to become the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1453. The Ottoman Empire was subsequently positioned in an important geostrategic location in Anatolia which included the Bosporus Strait. The Ottomans also expanded into the Caucasus, Arabian Peninsula, and beyond, refusing “to accept the European states as either legitimate or equal” (108).

The Ottomans’ eventual decline was, in part, the result of the Austrian and Russian move into the Balkans and the Russian move into the Black Sea and Caucasus regions. Kissinger argues that the Ottomans, an outlier, were treated as “the sick man of Europe” affecting the European balance of power (110).

World War I led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres “reconceived the Middle East as a patchwork of states,” for instance, the French and British mandates (111). Turkey became a secular state in 1924 moving away from pan-Islamism. Simultaneously, political Zionism, a Jewish movement to found the state of Israel, was also active at this time. This move was favored by the British through the Balfour Declaration (1917).

These developments led to two contrasting trends: Pan-Arabists sought a state-based system in the region, whereas the so-called political Islam maintained its focus on religious identity with such groups as the Muslim Brotherhood. Since then, the Muslim Brotherhood—today designed as an extremist organization by some countries—sought to fuse political Islam with the modern system of states. Until World War II, Europeans maintained regional order. Afterward, the United States emerged as the dominant foreign power in the region.

For much of the Cold War period, the region followed a Westphalian balance of power with two camps: the Soviet camp with Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, and Syria, and the American camp with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Morocco. However, some countries, like Egypt, switched sides. Different internal arrangements were also attempted. Syria and Egypt, for instance, maintained a confederation between 1958 and 1961. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, that country participated in and won wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. Its politics were expansionist, which created additional challenges in the region.

In 2010, the MENA region was shaken by the so-called Arab Spring. Kissinger believes this event initially involved reformists and youth challenging the autocratic and jihadist leaders, for instance, in Tunisia and Egypt. Because of this ideological direction, the Arab Spring was “greeted exuberantly by Western political leaders” (122). However, the movement toward democracy was distorted, highjacked, or crushed, argues Kissinger. For example, a Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohammed Morsi, came to power in Egypt, while the fundamentalist supporters launched “a campaign of intimidation and harassment of women, minorities, and dissidents” (124). The United States intervened by attempting to “condemn, oppose, or work to remove governments it judged autocratic” (124).

Unrest also began in Syria in 2011, which the Western leadership described as a struggle to pursue democracy against the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. The different domestic and regional conflict groups, including extremist, jihadist militants, “saw the war as not about democracy but about prevailing” (126). The extremist groups included the so-called Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL), and key regional players comprised Turkey as well as the Kurdish groups seeking autonomy. Kissinger believes that the so-called international community could have handled “one of the major humanitarian disasters of the young twenty-first century” differently (128).

Furthermore, the regional order in the MENA is even more complex because of the Israeli-Palestinian issues:

Few topics have inspired more passion than how to reconcile Israel’s quest for security and identity, the Palestinians’ aspirations toward self-governance, and the neighboring Arab governments’ search for a policy compatible with their perception of their historic and religious imperatives (129).

According to Kissinger, many Arabs believe that Israel is “an illegitimate usurper of Muslim patrimony” (130). He divides Arab perceptions into three categories: coexistence with Israel, destruction of Israel, and using negotiations to “overcome the Jewish state in stages” (131). Kissinger considers Israel a Westphalian state, whereas many other Middle Eastern countries “view international order through an Islamic consciousness” (132).

Finally, the author underscores one key paradox in the MENA region: one of the important allies of Western democracies is an Islamic theocratic state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Contemporary Saudi Arabia is the product of shedding Turkish rule after World War I. Kissinger qualifies the Kingdom’s foreign policy as cautious. At the same time, “as the birthplace of Islam and protector of Islam’s holiest places, Saudi Arabia cannot afford deviation from Islamic orthodoxy” (131).