Rereading “Revolutionary Fevers and Regional Contagion” after Thirty-Five (Long) Years

Fred H. Lawson

Universitas Brawijaya, Malang, Indonesia and Northeastern University, Oakland, California

f.lawson@northeastern.edu

ORCID: 0000-0001-9060-688X

Abstract

Two essays composed by F. Gregory Gause at the outset of his scholarly career offer innovative explanations for the impact of revolutionary movements on the international politics of the Middle East and North Africa. These contributions point to the importance of state consolidation in limiting the spread of popular upheaval and lay out a range of dimensions of state consolidation that deserve further exploration. Moreover, the argument that Gause proposes can provide insight into the dynamics of regional relations in the aftermath of the mass uprisings that washed across the Middle East and North Africa starting in the winter of 2010–11.

Keywords

revolution – state formation – Middle East – sovereignty – Iran – security

During the 1970s and early 1980s, the handful of scholars who analyzed regional international relations focused their attention on the attributes that states located in some part of the world had in common. This body of research defined regions in terms of features that brought prospective member-states together, such as shared culture and language, similar historical experience (especially with respect to colonialism), extensive commercial linkages or sustained diplomatic interactions. With respect to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Leonard Binder emphasized the importance of a common history within provinces of the Ottoman Empire. ¹ James Piscatori and R. K. Ramazani highlighted a package of cultural, sociological and political commonalities. ² And among quantitatively trained observers, William Thompson traced reciprocal official visits. ³ Vestiges of this approach can be found in recent studies that point to “a shared history, language and identity” in order to determine “to what degree the Arab states form their own system.” ⁴

As the 1980s went by, it dawned on a few astute observers that regions sometimes consisted of states that engaged in intense and persistent conflict with one another. This reality was hard to miss in the contemporaneous MENA. The social revolution that ousted the Shah of Iran in 1978–79 and eventuated in the establishment of the Islamic Republic posed a serious threat to established leaderships from Morocco to Oman. The ensuing war between Iraq and Iran was characterized by a scale and severity of fighting that made the battles that took place periodically between the State of Israel and its Arab neighbors look like small potatoes. Even the border wars that flared at the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula seemed pretty nasty and hard to resolve.

So when a freshly minted Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard University set out to contribute to our understanding of the international relations of the MENA, F. Gregory Gause grasped the importance of grounding explanations for the vagaries of regional inter-state politics squarely in the dynamics of rivalry and threat. In one of his very first publications, ⁵ Gause explores a salient aspect of conflict in the MENA during the mid to late 1980s: Even though the Iranian/Islamic revolution generated a high level of danger to existing leaderships and structures of governance throughout the Arab world, it did not spark large-scale upheavals in any of the other countries in the region.

It should be remembered in passing that the first part of this analytical puzzle was not obvious to many specialists in MENA politics. The impact of the Iranian/Islamic revolution on the Arab countries was very often downplayed or dismissed, on the grounds that the popular grievances and types of mass mobilization that had become so conspicuous in Iran were innately ShiÊ¿i phenomena, which would have little if any impact on predominantly Sunni societies. ⁶ I happened to be living in Egypt during the 1978-79 academic year and witnessed firsthand the enthusiasm that news coming from Iran engendered among the disadvantaged populace of Cairo at a moment when Islamist organizations of all sorts were being ruthlessly suppressed by the authorities. Gause addresses the problem in a more rigorous fashion, pointing out that even if the Iranian/Islamic revolution were inherently ShiÊ¿i, one might still wonder why countries with majority ShiÊ¿i populations—most notably Iraq and Bahrain—proved resistant to its allure. ⁷

Instead, Gause asserts that the containment of the Iranian/Islamic revolution can best be explained in terms of the domestic political structure of the countries in which parallel uprisings might well have occurred. In particular, he argues that the appeals for popular mobilization that the revolutionaries who seized power in Tehran broadcast throughout the MENA fell flat, due to the consolidation of state institutions in surrounding countries. The growth of states entailed much larger administrative staffs and government budgets, more comprehensive surveillance of the populace, closer connections between state agencies and local economic enterprises and more extensive and inclusive systems of public education. These institutions were often funded by the immense revenues that leaders derived from the region’s plentiful deposits of hydrocarbons. But even where financial resources were in short supply, the expansion of state institutions militated against the spread of revolutionary movements. Furthermore, in the case of the smaller Arab Gulf countries situated closest to Iran, the creation of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) in May 1981 augmented the capacity of comparatively weak states to withstand externally-based challenges. ⁸

How, exactly, the consolidation of state institutions prevents outside revolutionary movements from taking root inside a country’s borders is left hazy. Countries blessed with hydrocarbon wealth can, and did, sharply increase government spending on “social services” in a bid to keep their respective citizenries quiescent, if not content. ⁹ At the same time, the existence of more and larger administrative agencies gives the general public “channels for the expression of complaints to the government,” as well as “new avenues of access for individuals and groups to the political process.” ¹⁰ The upshot of these developments is that “citizen identification with the state grows, a process which increases the likelihood that people will make more political demands on the regime, including demands for political participation, but which also lessens the appeal of ideological forces opposed to the bases of the state and the regime.” ¹¹

Furthermore, the expansion of the administrative apparatus accords leaders the ability “to vest the economic interests of important social groups in the state.” ¹² This phrase is repeated several times, ¹³ without specifying what exactly it entails. In Iraq, local manufacturers became “almost exclusively reliant upon government contracts and regulatory decisions;” in Saudi Arabia, state agencies “shielded the private sector from many of the consequences of the economic downturn of the 1980s;” and in Kuwait, government officials “bailed out speculators who lost millions in the crash of Kuwait’s unofficial stock market, known as suq al-manakh.” ¹⁴ More tellingly, the expansion of the central administration draws many more citizens into government employment, and “it is easier to monitor and control the political activities of people who earn their livelihood directly from the government.” ¹⁵

Lurking in the background, one discerns the internal security forces, the instruments of brute coercion associated with deepening state institutions. In the wake of the Iranian/Islamic revolution, “the initial enthusiasm sparked within the Iraqi ShiÊ¿i community ...was met with wide-ranging arrests, deportation and the execution of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr.” Similar measures were implemented by the GCC governments, whose “internal security organs ...proved relatively efficient in combatting domestic threats.” ¹⁶ The repressive capabilities of the GCC leaderships were substantially augmented by the GCC itself, which in Gause’s words “fostered cooperation on internal security matters” among the six member-states.

So three very different aspects of the consolidation of state institutions can be hypothesized to account for the containment of externally-based revolutionary movements. More extensive state apparatuses provide enough opportunities for citizens to take a meaningful part in local governance that they decide to concentrate on working inside the existing political order, rather than rejecting it entirely. Second, larger and more corporatist states offer a broad range of economic inducements to local citizens to remain loyal to the existing leadership. And third, firmly-established states deploy larger and better-equipped internal security forces, which do a more effective job of suppressing any citizens who show signs of sympathy for the revolution. What James Rosenau calls the “relative potency” of these three explanatory variables remains open to investigation.

Rather than exploring the relative potency of the explanatory factors, Gause backs up the argument he puts forward by extrapolating it to an earlier era in which MENA countries confronted a potent, externally-based revolutionary movement. From the mid-1950s to the June 1967 war, the Arab Nationalism advocated by Nasirist Egypt “was [just] as threatening to local elites as Khomeinist Islam.” ¹⁷ Established leaderships in Beirut, Amman, Baghdad, Riyad and the capitals of the smaller Arab Gulf states all found themselves severely challenged by escalating popular discontent at home and unrelenting criticism from Voice of the Arabs (Sawt al-Ê¿Arab) radio in Cairo. More important, none of these countries boasted substantial states when the Arab Nationalist movement took shape; in the one country that had the best-articulated set of institutions (Iraq), the pervasive influence of British advisers sapped most of its autonomy. ¹⁸

As the revolutionary movement gained momentum, countries throughout the MENA experienced high levels of “regime instability.” Rapid turnovers of government ministers, recurrent outbreaks of large-scale popular protest and even prospective military coups d’etat swept across the region. Domestic turbulence in Saudi Arabia resulted in the ouster of King SaÊ¿ud bin Ê¿Abd al-Ê¿Aziz Al SaÊ¿ud, while Jordan’s King Husain bin Talal Al Hashimi was only saved by the timely intervention of British paratroopers. ¹⁹ At the same time, United States Marines landed in Lebanon to protect its putative liberal-democratic political system from pro-Nasirist radicals. How these diverse cases support Gause’s argument is a bit hard to ken. SaÊ¿ud was replaced by his half-brother Faisal and the Saudi monarchy not only survived but flourished. One group of colonels succeeded another in Baghdad. It is probably fair to say that Gause’s case is strengthened by the fact that Yemen, whose state institutions were the least well-established of all, displayed the greatest impact of the Arab Nationalist movement. ²⁰

Gause elaborates this line of argument in an analysis that appeared almost simultaneously with “Revolutionary Fevers.” The essay “Sovereignty, Statecraft and Stability in the Middle East” surveys an assortment of ideological currents that attacked established leaderships throughout the MENA from the 1930s to the 1980s. ²¹ Among these were not only the Arab Nationalist movement of Nasirist Egypt, but also the Greater Syria project championed by Jordan, the Fertile Crescent Unity scheme proposed by monarchical Iraq, the notion of Arab national amalgamation advanced by the Arab Renaissance (BaÊ¿th) Party and the doomed effort undertaken by BaÊ¿thi Iraq to incorporate Kuwait in the summer of 1990.

Such integrative, revolutionary (in the English School sense) currents lost almost all of their steam during the early 1970s, as “the regional agenda moderated in terms both of the Arab-Israel question and the movement for Arab unity.” ²² The marked decline of externally-based threats to established leaderships accompanied a sharp rise in overall respect for what Stephen Krasner calls Westphalian (or Vattelian) sovereignty – in other words, leaders stopped considering it proper to actively interfere in the domestic politics of other countries. The question of why this occurred is handled obliquely. One part of the answer seems simply to be that “no major regional power asserted its regional leadership based on Pan-Arabism or Pan-Islam” during the mid-1970s. ²³ Another part is that “outside powers have consistently supported, at times with military force, the regional status quo.” ²⁴ A third part involves the “increased economic linkages between the Arab states.” ²⁵

Nevertheless, a more compelling explanation for the containment of all sorts of revolutionary movements lies once again in “the growing extent to which Middle Eastern states can exercise control over their societies.” ²⁶ Well-consolidated state institutions give leaderships “more carrots, with which to vest social interests in the state [there’s that phrase again] rather than its competitors, and more sticks, with which to confront enemies domestic and foreign.” ²⁷ Moreover, “growing state capacity...alters the framework of political debate;” the heightened “relevance of the state concentrates political activity, be it supportive or oppositional, into the arena of the existing state entities rather than allowing it to search for some hypothetical alternative form of political organization.” ²⁸ During the 1970s, countries as disparate as Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel and Iran saw dramatic increases in the strength of their respective states. ²⁹ In all of them, “the avenues of political change...now seem limited to internal processes of reform or revolution. Coup, conspiracy and transnational ideological pressure can no longer alter regimes.” ³⁰

This explanatory argument was far ahead of its time. It presages current notions of regional security complexes, in which it is precisely the interplay of rivalries and threats that forms the basis for determining the extent of discrete regional orders. ³¹ It melds together the realms of foreign and domestic politics, and claims that crucial security relationships involve interactions across these two levels of analysis. And it hints that regional organizations like the GCC do not grow out of the weakness of prospective member-states, but instead coalesce only after states come to possess institutions of domestic governance that are well-enough articulated that leaderships can collaborate without jeopardizing or encroaching on one other’s internal prerogatives. Gause’s analysis even points to the importance of the socialization of citizens by means of state-supervised education systems, as an incubator of patriotism and (to use a much later term) a mechanism for securitization.

What might these ancient contributions to scholarship on the international relations of the MENA tell us about current trends in regional politics? First, they help us understand a notable aspect of the popular uprisings that swept across the region starting in the winter of 2010-11. None of the anti-government protest movements presented itself as a component of a region-wide phenomenon. Each one kept its attention and energy riveted inside the borders of its own country. As a corollary, none of the concurrent movements took meaningful steps to co-ordinate with movements that were underway in adjacent countries. Moreover, none of the revolutionary movements made an effort to reconfigure the region’s pre-uprising juridical boundaries. Why, exactly, the recent uprisings exhibited a distinctly national character (in the everyday sense, not the Baʿthi sense) remains to be explored, but the answer is no doubt bound up with the consolidation of the separate states that Gause emphasized thirty-five years ago.

Second, and relatedly, these essays offer a corrective to a widely-held view of contemporary events: that the outbreak and spread of the uprisings either reflected or ended up producing a collection of severely degraded states, which can no longer carry out basic administrative tasks. ³² The accuracy of this assertion is open to question on at least two fronts. On one hand, existing state institutions proved resilient enough to withstand intense domestic challenges in several MENA countries, including Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman. Similar outcomes obtained in the case of earlier protest movements in Iran and Turkey. On the other hand, in most of the countries that did experience a change of leadership as the result of a popular uprising, state-related structures and practices of governance quickly rebounded. The role of state institutions in post-uprising Tunisia and Egypt seems little different from what it had been in 2009-10. ³³ Libya, Yemen and Sudan have undoubtedly experienced a collapse of core state institutions, but it looks likely that Syria will emerge from a devastating civil war with a good deal of its pre-war central administration in place.

Third, they lead us to reconsider the often-posed, if not exactly apposite, question of why the MENA displays such a high incidence of violent inter-state conflict. ³⁴ Influential answers to this question no longer propose religious or cultural causes, but almost always point instead to some deficiency or other in the state-related structures and practices of governance that pervade this part of the world, which opens it up to an exceptionally large amount of warfare.

Conclusion

From the very outset, Greg Gause has situated his analyses of international relations in the MENA firmly in the concepts and controversies that propel the broader academic study of world politics. Several of his later writings are much more frequently read, cited and built upon than are the two articles surveyed here. Yet a thoughtful rereading of these early contributions offers not only insight into the dynamics that shaped regional affairs during the turbulent 1990s, but also inspiration for innovative investigations into what many observers believe to be a new era of regional governance.

Beyond Academic Sectarianism and Toward an Upgraded Instrumentalism

Morten Valbjørn

Aarhus University

ORCID: 0000-0002-8739-5425

Abstract

Gregory Gause is a bridge-building Lampedusan conservative, who may have maintained his core positions, but has also been willing to revisit, refine and specify his arguments. Instead of “academic sectarianism,” Gause has consistently been an advocate for a balanced approach that avoids polarized extremes in favor of a middle-ground position, where bridges are built between political science and Middle East studies, between comparative politics and international relations theory, between abstract, decontextualized universalizing theories and a purely descriptive particularism, between ideational and materialist approaches, and between top-down and bottom-up perspectives. This is also the case in his engagement with the past decades’ debate on the role of sectarianism in Middle East politics. Initially aligned with an instrumentalist view—seeing sectarianism as elite-driven power politics—Gause has since refined his approach by integrating institutionalist insights. By emphasizing the interplay between state strength and trans-state identities, Gause has provided an innovative framework, which has not only contributed to the debate on Shiʿa/Sunni relations by specifying why, how, when, where sectarianism matters in Middle East politics, but also expanded the scope of the discussion. By narrowing the focus — to intra-Sunni relations — he has also broadened the sectarianism debate to adress more fundamental questions about identity politics within the Middle East and beyond.

Keywords

sectarianism – identity politics – Shia-Sunni – instrumentalism – Middle East international relations

In the first decades of the 21^st century, a “sectarian wave” ³⁵ swept over the Middle East, and some observers even argued that a “Shia/Sunni sectarian conflict across the Middle East is well on its way to supplant the Palestinian occupation as the central mobilizing factor for Arab political life.” ³⁶ While this prediction was highly contested, it is fair to say that not only the Middle East “out there,” but also scholarship on the region during these years experienced a process of “sectarianization.” ³⁷

One of the highly influential voices in this debate has been Gregory Gause, whose Brookings Institution analysis paper, “Beyond Sectarianism: The New Middle East Cold War,” ³⁸ became one of the standard references in the post-Arab uprisings debate on sectarianism. This is hardly surprising, if one considers the last four decades of scholarly debates on Middle East politics. Here, one will repeatedly find important and influential interventions from Gause. This goes for debates on democracy/autocracy, ³⁹ revolutions, ⁴⁰ statecraft, ⁴¹ monarchism, ⁴² Islamism ⁴³ as well as on alliances and balancing, ⁴⁴ the international system, ⁴⁵ hegemony and great powers, ⁴⁶ and the role of ideology and trans-state identities compared to material factors in regional politics. ⁴⁷

These debates might usually be associated with different subfields in Political Science, but Gause should not be perceived as either a comparativist or an International Relations (IR) scholar. Instead, he has continuously stressed the importance of paying attention to the complex interplay between domestic and international factors, rendering the conventional comparative politics/IR distinction less useful. A similar practice of academic bridge-building is visible in how, in his analyses, he often combines general theories and assumptions from political science with Middle East-specific insights, resulting in convincing and nuanced approaches to the Middle Eastern reality. ⁴⁸

Such a balanced approach, which avoids extremes but seeks a middle ground between abstract, decontextualized, universalizing theory and purely descriptive particularism, might be related to the kind of conservatism with a small “c”, which Lisa Anderson — drawing on Burke — associates with Gause. ⁴⁹ Conservatism might sometimes be linked to a reluctance to change, but it can be useful to recall Lampedusa’s dictum about how, according to conservatives, it is sometimes necessary to change in order to keep things the same. This has also been the case for Gause. While maintaining his core position, over the years Gause has revisited, refined, and specified his arguments and, through this, he has continued to contribute to answering new questions in discussions about Middle East politics.

A case in point is Gause’s interventions in the sectarianism debate. Over the last decades, this debate has evolved and become increasingly sophisticated and nuanced ⁵⁰ — and so has Gause’s position on whether, why, how, when, and where sectarianism matters in Middle East politics. In the following, I will trace how Gause, before and after the 2011 Arab uprisings, in original and substantive ways, has contributed to the debate on the place of sectarianism in Middle East politics.

Power politics or sectarianism

In the wake of the Arab uprisings, sectarianism became “a catchphrase in politics, media and academia,” ⁵¹ and Western as well as Arab commentators, policymakers, analysts, and academics became almost fixated on sectarianism, as Fred Wehrey once remarked. ⁵² The question of sectarianism, however, was not completely new. ⁵³ It had been debated in the wake of the Iranian revolution ⁵⁴ and reemerged after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, where the change in the regional balance of power in favor of Iran led some Sunni Arab regimes to warn against the rise of a “ShiÊ¿ite Crescent.” ⁵⁵ The question about whether the notion of a “ShiÊ¿ite Cresent” should be considered as a myth or reality was in the first decade of the 21^st a highly contested issue ⁵⁶ — and Gause did, unsurprisingly, have a say on this. At that time, he framed the issue as being a question of “balance of power politics” versus “a new sectarianism” and argued in favor of the former analytical lens. ⁵⁷ In his view, neither the US administration nor the so-called “moderate Sunni Arab states” were particularly concerned with sectarianism and he suggested that both saw the “Iranian threat” more in balance of power terms than in sectarian. He also challenged claims about an awakening ShiÊ¿a sectarian identity across the region, which Iran could tap into in its play for greater regional influence. Thus, Arab states “are not so weak as many think,” he argued and predicted that “if there is a rising Shia socio-political movement in the Arab world…it has peaked.” To the extent sectarianism had any relevance at all, it was in Gause’s view mainly a “scare tactic” to sell a policy to a domestic audience that, in reality, was based on classic balance of power considerations.

Power politics and sectarianism

Before 2011, the debate on the role of sectarianism in regional politics had, to a large extent, been framed as a question about whether or not sectarianism truly mattered, where Gause, along with Lynch and others, considered it a “red herring” that distracted from more significant issues. ⁵⁸ In the wake of the Arab uprisings, the interest in sectarianism among observers and scholars not only surged, the nature of the sectarianism debate also changed, with new kinds of questions coming to the fore. It was now widely agreed that the region was experiencing some kind of “sectarianization,” also among former sceptics such as Gause. In a short blog post at Brookings on “Sectarianism and the politics of the New Middle East,” Gause now argued that “there is no denying that sectarianism is a real factor in the politics.” ⁵⁹ However, he did at the same time emphasize that “it is important to recognize the political context in which sectarianism becomes prominent” and that “neither sectarian conflict nor sectarian political alliances are immutable.” In other words, it was important neither to reduce Middle East politics to some essentialist notion of sectarianism nor to completely ignore a sectarian dimension in the politics of the Arab uprisings.

In this way, Gause entered the post-Arab uprisings debate on sectarianism, where the “whether” question was replaced by — occasionally heated — discussions on what sectarianism actually meant, where, how, and why it mattered, and what its implications would be for Middle East politics. This discussion has often been portrayed as being polarized between primordialist and instrumentalist camps. ⁶⁰ The former has been associated with an “ancient hatred” argument about how the contemporary sectarian tensions between ShiÊ¿a and Sunni Muslims were nothing but the most recent expression of a deep-felt and millennium-old conflict within the Muslim community, driven by doctrinal disagreements about the true faith. Conversely, instrumentalism represents a rationalist top-down perspective with contemporary elite actors playing the “sectarian card” as part of a competition for material interests in terms of economic wealth, political power, and geopolitical influence. Sect-specific issues and identities were accordingly not admitted much real importance and would primarily be perceived as a cover for the real — and usually material — drivers.

Sometimes, Gause has been criticized for being an instrumentalist. ⁶¹ While his pre-2011 position might have been close to this position, a close examination of his contributions to the post-Arab uprisings debate on sectarianism reveals that it would be more accurate to consider him as representing one of the “beyond” strategies that have defined the actual positions in the post-Arab uprisings debate.

Saving the instrumentalist baby

Contrary to the conventional framing of the scholarship on sectarianism as split between what has usually been portrayed as two highly influential but flawed approaches to sectarianism, an examination of the last decade’s scholarly debate on sectarianism reveals that “pure” primordialists and instrumentalists are quite rare in academia. Thus, most scholars turn out to consider themselves as representing the much-coveted “third way” that has moved beyond the Scylla of primordialism and the instrumentalist Charybdis.

At the same time, it also becomes clear that scholars are subscribing to different kinds of “beyond-strategies.” ⁶² Some have adopted a New Saviour strategy, which rejects primordialist and instrumentalist approaches completely and instead seeks to replace these with some “brand new saviour.” This can be some broader theoretical currents in social science, such as various versions of constructivism, historical sociology, institutionalism or it can be specific social scientists e.g., Agamben, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Foucault, or Said. Others have favoured a Baby-and-the-bathwater strategy. It acknowledges that “pure” versions of both primordialism and instrumentalism might be deeply flawed, but argues that they also carry important insights and should, therefore, be revised rather than rejected outright. In an attempt to “save the baby from being thrown out with the bathwater,” this has given rise to various suggestions for how some of their pitfalls can be mitigated by combining primordialism and institutionalism or integrating insights from theoretical currents such as constructivism or institutionalism. Still, others have engaged in Lego Theorizing, adopting an eclectic strategy where a variety of quite different approaches and theories are used like LEGO bricks to build complex accounts of sectarianism.

Rather than seeing Gause as representative of a “pure” instrumentalist position, as some of his critics have done, a careful reading of his contributions to the sectarianism debate over the last decade reveals that it would be more fitting to place him as an excellent example of the “baby-and-the-bathwater” strategy. In a way, it is not that surprising that Gause sometimes has been associated with the instrumentalist position. He usually takes his point of departure in an elite level focusing on the interests of elite actors and their threat perceptions and aspirations for security, wealth, power, and (geo)political influence. As for the question of whether these actors are motivated by issues concerning religious doctrine, the true faith, or sect-specific identities, Gause has usually also been closer to the instrumentalist position regarding how the “sectarian card” is used by elite actors as an instrument to serve and secure other kinds of (material) interests.

So, Gause’s approach has certainly been far from the primordialist one, but that does not mean that he has fully bought into a simple and “pure” form of instrumentalism. The latter position might provide necessary, but not sufficient clues when it comes to understanding why, how, when, and where sectarianism mattered in the decade after the Arab uprisings. Besides the basic puzzle of how it can be effective for elite actors to play the “sectarian card,” if sect-specific identities are assumed to be superficial and insignificant for people, it is also puzzling from a “pure” instrumentalist top-down perspective why elite actors are sometimes successful in playing this card, whereas sectarian rhetoric at other times does not resonate among the broader public. For instance, why were “Sunni Arab regimes” much more successful in demonizing Hizballah as a “ShiÊ¿a actor” after 2011 compared to the time of the 2006 Summer War, where Nasrallah — despite of anti-ShiÊ¿a rhetoric — figured as one of the most popular figures in the Sunni Arab public. ⁶³ Gause has by no means been blind to some of these shortcomings of a “pure” instrumentalist perspective. In a POMEPS paper on “Saudi Arabia and Sectarianism in Middle East international relations,” for instance, he concludes that “the top-down version of events does not hold up to even a cursory examination.” ⁶⁴

In his writings on sectarianism during the last decade, Gause has therefore tried to provide a kind of “upgraded” version of instrumentalism that considers some of the critique that — rightly — has been directed at “pure” instrumentalists. To save the “instrumentalist baby” from being thrown out with the bathwater, he has, in particular, supplemented his instrumentalist approach with insights from institutionalists’ interest in the state institutions and how their nature and strength can vary. In this context, strength is not about an international power ranking in a neo-realist military capability sense. It is rather about infrastructural power, state-society relations, and the popular legitimacy of the regime as these factors play an important role for a country’s permeability to regional and transnational influences and sub-national groups ability to challenge a regime. So, despite its smallness and limited military capabilities, a “small state” like Kuwait might in this sense be considered “stronger” than its much larger Iraqi neighbour. ⁶⁵

An instrumentalist perspective might be useful to gain insights into the motives and drivers of elite actors in regional rivalries. However, in order to understand how, when, and where these would be played out, and why they will become “sectarianized,” it is, according to Gause, necessary to supplement a top-down analysis with a bottom-up perspective attentive not only to the relative prominence of supra/trans-state identities in the “Arab sound chamber,” but even more to variances in the strength and weakness of states. Thus, the presence of sect-specific trans-state identities might be important and necessary, but not sufficient to understand why regional rivalries in the wake of the Arab uprisings took the form of a “Middle Eastern cold war,” where “sectarianism was a factor,” or why Syria, Yemen, and Iraq ended up being some of the “hot spots” for a sectarianized regional rivalry rather than, for instance, Kuwait, which also has a demographic mix of Shiʿa and Sunni Muslims.

Here, Gause directs attention to the role of state weakness and permeability. ⁶⁶ This is linked to an outside-in/inside-out logic that can explain why the salience of trans-state identities, such as sect-specific identities, often corresponds with levels of state(de)formation, and how the presence of weak states and strong trans-state identities provide ample opportunities for “inter-mestic” rivalries involving external powers and local (non)state actors. Thus, regional powers can use weak conflict-ridden states with permeable borders as arenas for regional rivalries by proxy, where they leverage trans-state identities to interfere and support opposing local groups (outside-in logic). Meanwhile, in countries where a weak state is unable or unwilling to provide basic goods such as security to its citizens, local actors may instead tend to organize around communal groups and turn to trans-state identities as a way of addressing the “ethnic security dilemma” and attracting support and protection from the outside (inside-out logic). Given these dynamics of “inter-mestic” rivalries and regional sectarianization, sectarian politics, from this perspective, will be expected to be most pronounced in areas with weakened or collapsed state institutions and some form of sectarian division, such as Syria, Iraq, or Yemen, but not Kuwait.

While providing a sophisticated and convincing framework to understand the “Middle East cold wars” and the reasons why, how, where, and when “sectarianism became a factor,” it is at the same time also relevant to note how Gause emphasizes that his approach is not the only way to interpret all expressions of sectarianism. Thus, in his POMEPS paper, “Saudi Arabia and Sectarianism in Middle East International Relations,” he suggests that the salience and political dynamics of sect-specific identities in regional international relations may require different explanations than those applied to the role of sectarianism in domestic politics of a particular state. ⁶⁷ In this way, Gause provides a welcome reminder of the importance of specifying the scope conditions for our explanations — both for sectarianism and for political analysis in general.

Ideationalism beyond Shia-Sunni sectarianism

In addition to his contributions to nuancing the debate on why, where, when, and how sectarian politics matters, Gause has, in a way, also broadened the debate — to a question about ideational multipolarity — by narrowing the focus — to be about intra-Sunni relations. While much of the debate on sectarianism after the Arab uprisings revolved around ShiÊ¿a/Sunni relations, often with a strong focus on whether and how the Iran-Saudi rivalry should be understood, ⁶⁸ for Gause it is important not to reduce the question about the role of ideational factors to only being “ShiÊ¿a vs. Sunni.” In his article on “Ideologies, Alignments, and Underbalancing in the New Middle Eastern Cold War,” ⁶⁹ he brings attention to how neither a materialist neo-realist balance-of-power perspective nor an ideational sectarian perspective would be able to explain the “underbalancing” of the regional Sunni states against Iran. Both approaches would have expected — though for different reasons — that the strengthening of Iran’s relative regional position would have led other regional (Sunni) states to form an effective blocking or balancing alliance against the “ShiÊ¿a regional power.” This did, however, not happen. To understand why, Gause has suggested that one should focus on other kinds of ideational factors than the much-discussed ShiÊ¿a/Sunni sectarianism. Thus, according to Gause, an important reason for the failure to coordinate a joint response to Iran lies in an intra-Sunni division concerning the relation between politics and (Sunni) Islam. While Qatar and Turkey supported a bottom-up populist Sunni Islamist position à la the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi favored a top-down regime-loyal Wahhabi interpretation, Egypt and the Emiratis were in favour of a top-down state-Islam in one country with no propagation of Islam beyond borders, and al-Qaida and IS/Daesh advocated an anti-state umma focused puritan form of Salafism. These conflicting views led to very different threat perceptions, which usually trumped security concerns about Iran.

By broadening — or narrowing — the focus and showing how other ideational factors, such as the place of Islam in politics, can be just as important for divisions in regional politics, Gause did not only challenge a tendency, at that time, to see regional rivalries as being played out between a monolithic and homogeneous Sunni and ShiÊ¿a block. Although he only briefly — and tentatively — touches on this, his inclusion of intra-Sunni rivalries also raises the broader question about whether analyses of identity politics in the Middle East — and international relations more broadly — should treat all identities as alike or may different kinds of identities be related to different dynamics and forms of interaction? ⁷⁰ For instance, are inter-sect relations related to similar or different kinds of dynamics than intra-sect relations? In his “Beyond sectarianism” paper, the “content” of identities does not appear to matter much compared to the role of state weakness in the regional “cold wars.” ⁷¹ Thus, Gause suggests that the regional rivalries and linkages between external and internal actors among the Sunni actors in the Libyan civil war carry similarities with the dynamics among the regionalized civil wars in Syria and Yemen, where the ShiÊ¿a/Sunni cleavage played an important role. However, in some of his later pieces, among others on the Qatar-crisis, Gause suggests that intra-Sunni rivalries appear to be different from inter-sect rivalries. ⁷² Differences among Sunni actors have, according to Gause, been more about the proper organization of domestic politics and the appropriate set of foreign policies and allies. With reference to Saudi Arabia’s problems with the Muslim Brotherhood and the latter’s link to Qatar and Turkey, he does, against this background, suggest that the intra-Sunni differences in the post-Arab uprisings years were “closer to the differences Riyadh had with the Arab nationalist of the 1950s and 1960s.” In this way, Gause provides an interesting observation in relation to the historical analogy debate of the post-2011 years, where it was discussed whether it made sense to draw analogies to the “classic” Arab cold war of the 1950-60s. ⁷³ While observers often used the historical analogy for the Iranian-Saudi relations, following Gause, the analogy might have been more relevant for intra-Sunni than inter-sect rivalries.

A bridgebuilding Lampedusan conservative

Gause’s decade-long engagement in the sectarianism debate shows how he is a bridge-building Lampedusan conservative, who may have maintained his core positions, but at the same time has been willing to revisit, refine and specify his arguments. Instead of what Salloukh has called “academic sectarianism,” ⁷⁴ Gause has been an advocate for a balanced approach. He avoids polarized extremes in favor of a middle ground position, where bridges are built between political science and Middle East studies, between comparative politics and international relations theory, between abstract, decontextualized universalizing theories and purely descriptive particularism, between ideational and materialist approaches, and between top-down and bottom-up perspectives. In this way, his work on sectarianism has not only contributed to the debate on ShiÊ¿a/Sunni relations by specifying why, how, when, and where sectarianism matters in Middle East politics. By narrowing the focus — to intra-Sunni relations — he has also broadened the sectarianism debate to concern more fundamental questions about identity politics in international relations in the Middle East and beyond.

Alliances, Alignments, and Underbalancing in the Middle East

Curtis R. Ryan

Appalachian State University

ORCID: 0000-0003-1329-731X

Abstract

This essay examines F. Gregory Gause’s seminal work on balancing, underbalancing, and alliances in Middle East politics. Specifically, Gause’s work asked why no anti-Iranian coalition had emerged across the region, especially in the context of regional structural change and widespread perceptions of rising Iranian power, with Iran regarded by many regional regimes as both an ideational and material threat. Gause’s analysis explicitly drew on both realist and constructivist approaches to answer this question and to use empirical evidence from the Middle East to better inform international relations theory more broadly. In this article, I provide an analysis of Gause’s main work on this topic and then carry the analysis forward to better examine contemporary patterns of alliance and alignment in the region, and their implications for balancing, Underbalancing, and regional politics in the modern Middle East.

Keywords

Underbalancing – balancing – alliances – alignments – coalitions – Middle East

In a research symposium on the Arab uprisings and international relations theory, F. Gregory Gause III addressed several perplexing issues about international relations and the Middle East in his article “Ideologies, Alignments, and Underbalancing in the New Middle East Cold War.” ⁷⁵ Specifically, why had no anti-Iranian coalition formed to achieve a regional balance of power? The lack of a countervailing coalition suggested that “underbalancing” rather than balancing was at work, but perhaps not for the reasons that one expects to find in mainstream International Relations (IR) theory. By investigating this episode, Gause responds specifically to the call by ValbjÇ¿rn for Middle East scholars to write more to the broader field of IR theory, thereby helping to amend and improve our understandings of how IR works, by drawing on empirical work from the Middle East. ⁷⁶

The Dilemma: Why No Anti-Iran Coalition?

As Gause notes, the circumstances of Middle East regional politics suggested a relative rise in Iranian power, especially following the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, which seemed to at least temporarily remove a major power from Gulf and regional politics — Iraq — and thereby also remove from the scene the only local country that had the potential to balance against Iranian power. In relative terms then, even without necessarily changing in any way, Iran suddenly appeared as a potentially hegemonic Gulf power and a rising regional power. Added to this shift in regional system-structure was Iran’s own unique ideological and ideational makeup. It was a post-revolutionary regime that had, since the 1979 Iranian revolution, advocated a unique and partially theocratic form of governance via a mainly Shiʿa Islamic republic.

The Iranian revolution led to the rise of the now longstanding Shiʿa Islamist regime in Tehran, after overthrowing a U.S.-backed conservative monarchy in the midst of the global Cold War. As such, the Iranian revolutionary regime had been read by most of its neighbors, and especially by U.S.-backed conservative monarchies, as a direct threat to their domestic regime security as a far-too-vivid example of just how fragile they all were. As one of the largest countries in the Gulf, and in the region at large, it also appeared to many regional states to be an external military threat. But in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, that threat seemed suddenly to loom larger than before. Only now, Iran was a well-established regime, with extensive connections to other states, especially those with significant Shiʿa Muslim populations.

From the perspective of many Arab regimes in the region, Iran seemed to have its “hands” in many places at once: backing the Asad regime in Syria, the Hizbullah movement in Lebanon, various Shiʿa militias and parties in Iraq, and even the Houthi militia movement in Yemen. Jordan’s King Abdullah II had once infamously referred to this phenomenon as amounting to a “Shiʿa crescent” that seemed to have descended on the region. While a controversial comment, it did seem to convey the threat perceptions of many of the moderate or conservative Arab regimes in the region, as these status quo powers regarded Iran and its various allies as an anti-status quo disruptor of regional affairs. And as a post-revolutionary and Islamist regime, the Iranian state further inflamed regional tensions simply by its ideological rhetoric and fervor, its overt scorn for monarchies of any type, as well as for Western allied states that it viewed essentially as U.S. puppets, and above all its anti-status quo approach to regional international relations. In short, for many Arab regimes, Iran seemed to represent both ideational and material threats to their own security.

In the post-2003 environment especially, many analysts noted the resurgence of sectarianism in regional politics, and even the emergence of a new regional “cold war” — this time mainly between Saudi Arabia and Iran. ⁷⁷ In terms of regional alliance politics, the Saudis and Iranians each had an assortment of allies they purported to lead. And each seemed to be mired in a revived sectarian politics, at least in terms of how they represented themselves to the region, even as they each accused the other of the evils of engaging in sectarianism. While noting the importance of sectarianism especially among domestic actors, parties, and militias within various Middle East states, Gause also concluded, nonetheless, that sectarianism was an occasional feature of regional politics, but not an independent variable determining state behavior. As he notes, “these local groups invite the outsiders into their own domestic conflicts.” But that “the sectarian template emerges from below; it is not imposed from above.” ⁷⁸ For that reason, he argues that no allegedly primordial idea of sectarianism should be seen as the real driver of regional politics.

The Iranian “threat” perceived by so many other Middle East regimes was also compounded by Iran’s own alliance choices. Specifically, the formation of the “Axis of Resistance” — an alignment of Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, and Hamas — seemed to enhance the perceived Iranian threat in regional politics. Taken together, these are more than enough reasons to have expected a broader counter-alliance to have formed, especially among Arab states, or Sunni-majority states, or U.S.-allied states, or any combination of the above. As Gause noted, many states in the region did indeed identify Iran as a key security threat — especially Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, and Turkey. And yet, no such bilateral or multilateral alignment emerged. Conventional IR theory might have expected balancing, but it was therefore particularly hard-pressed to explain underbalancing in this important case. He notes:

Defined narrowly as balancing behavior against threats defined by material capabilities, balance-of-power logic cannot provide as comprehensive an explanation for under-balancing in the contemporary Middle East. It certainly can explain why the Saudis, the Egyptians, and even the Turks are concerned about increased Iranian influence in the Arab world. However, it cannot — almost by definition — explain underbalancing. ⁷⁹

This leads Gause to revisit Schweller’s and Haas’s analyses regarding underbalancing, but then — having examined the empirical case at hand — he makes some important revisions to the concept. ⁸⁰ Specifically, he notes that underbalancing does not just derive from material or ideological differences between potential allies, but especially from differing assessments of ideational threats and how these might affect domestic regime security.

Gause’s analysis challenges us to move beyond Realist expectations alone and hence beyond balance of power expectations based on material capabilities, and to combine Walt’s ideas regarding a balance of threats ⁸¹ with Constructivist emphases on perceived identities and ideational threats. ⁸² This also interacts with and reinforces regime security expectations about the importance of domestic politics and internal as well external security concerns for ruling regimes. ⁸³

Drawing on multiple perspectives simultaneously, Gause’s work also underscores Salloukh’s emphasis on “overlapping contests” in regional international relations as well as his emphasis on being theoretically eclectic and rejecting “theoretical sectarianism.” ⁸⁴ Gause concludes that “this instance of underbalancing is best explained not by sectarianism or capabilities-based understandings of power but rather by concerns about ideological differences among the leaders of these potential partners and the effect those differences could have on domestic regime security.” ⁸⁵

Alliances Today? A Scattered Landscape of Alignments and Still no Anti-Iran Alliance

Gause’s original article examined the international relations of the Middle East in the wake of the Arab uprisings. That period did indeed shake up regional alliances and alignments, but still without triggering an anti-Iran alliance or coalition. This essay carries that analysis forward, examining regional alliances and underbalancing in the region today.

Before the revolts that changed regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, and triggered civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, the so-called “Axis of Resistance” — while an unusual combination of state and non-state actors — was among the few multilateral alliances in the region. The other was the longstanding Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), linking the six Arab Gulf monarchies since 1981, and operating mainly as an economic bloc of sorts, but rarely as a more traditional defensive alliance. Both groupings were deeply impacted by the Arab uprisings and changes to the regional order, with some member states finding themselves drawn into regional conflicts as well as the domestic affairs of allies and rivals alike.

Indeed, some of the regimes in the region seemed to view the “Arab Spring” as a de facto Islamist Spring. That is, some dreaded a de facto Islamist surge via the Arab Spring, while others welcomed the prospect. This drew a non-Arab state – Turkey – more deeply into Arab regional politics, alongside increasingly close ally Qatar, with both in effect cheering on various Islamist movements and providing them with external allies and support. But the exact same circumstances, viewed in a decidedly negative way and as a genuine ideational threat (especially the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt), led Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to form a countervailing and reactionary alliance, opposing Islamist movements and ultimately backing the coup d’etat of General el-Sissi in Egypt in 2013. ⁸⁶

Meanwhile, the GCC fractured as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain all pursued a blockade against their own alleged “ally,” Qatar, from 2017 to 2021. At issue was Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood and Sunni Islamist movements, as well as its controversial al-Jazeera satellite TV station. The fervor of the blockading countries by land and sea did, however, have limitations, as Turkish planes routinely ignored the blockade and continued to supply their small Arab ally in a time of particular need.

Other states, like Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan, at least temporarily put aside ideational, ideological, or sectarian rhetoric, and instead pursued a more utilitarian alignment based on shared energy and infrastructure projects, balancing against absolutely no one, but moderately integrating key policies to meet at least some of their economic needs, which they deemed key to the security of their respective regimes. ⁸⁷

The Axis of Resistance, meanwhile, appeared to be the only alliance in which members actively defended other members, especially within the Syrian civil war. Iran backed Syria to the hilt throughout that long war, even sending troops from its Revolutionary Guard Corps to fight in Syria against rebel forces. Similarly, Hizbullah sent forces to aid the Syrian Arab Army of Asad in its struggles with the rebel Free Syrian Army and later with various Jihadist forces ranging from the Nusra Front to Da’esh or ISIS. Hamas actually broke from its allies, at least temporarily, as it initially (but only verbally) backed Islamist rebels against the secular dictatorship of Asad. The Asad regime also benefited immensely from Russian military intervention on its behalf, especially from 2015 to 2024. But other factors then changed the whole alliance equation, with Hizbullah weakened by Israeli attacks, Iran also in periodic missile exchanges with Israel, and Russian forces increasingly needed in Russia’s war of attrition in Ukraine. As each part of the Axis of Resistance was weakened, it left the Asad regime even more vulnerable.

By December 2024, in a mere two-week offensive, Turkish-backed rebels led by the Hayʾat Tahrir ash-Sham (HTS) movement suddenly secured a series of victories and advanced to the capital, Damascus, finally leading to the collapse of the Asad regime after a 13-year civil war. The sudden regime change seemed to shake up regional alliances once again, as Turkish relations began to thaw with both Egypt and Saudi Arabia, especially after Hizbullah and Iranian forces withdrew from Syria. In addition to its worries about Da‘esh or ISIS, the Jordanian government had been deeply concerned with Hizbullah and Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces near its northern border with Syria. But these latter security concerns changed overnight with the fall of the Asad regime. As a result, the Jordanian regime rushed to bring Syria — even led by a controversial former Jihadist and his HTS movement — back into the Arab fold, and especially into a loose axis of “moderate” and mainly Sunni Arab regimes. But these developments seemed also to be a growing point of contention between many of these states and the State of Israel.

Before the October 2023 Hamas attacks, Israel had appeared to be more integrated into regional politics than ever before. Israel, working with the first Trump administration, relied on the Abraham Accords — the “normalization” agreements between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan — to eventually lead to the long sought after anti-Iranian alliance, presumably to be led by Israel, UAE, and, at some point, Saudi Arabia. But in the era of the 2023-25 Gaza war, in all its horrors, that already-unlikely outcome became more elusive still, as almost every Arab regime in the region actively (but ineffectively) opposed Israeli military actions in Gaza. Very importantly, for many Arab regimes, aligning with or even cooperating in any way with Israel now seemed more toxic and potentially dangerous than before, including to their own domestic regime security, even more than any perceived threats from Iran.

In that sense, the underbalancing that Gause identified as a key feature of the regional landscape continued, and neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia found themselves at the helm of an anti-Iran coalition. But, perhaps to the surprise of Israeli policy-makers, even Saudi Arabia and the UAE began to interact successfully with Iran, exploring not an alliance, to be sure, but at least not hostility. This, in turn, suggested an end to the Saudi-Iranian cold war, in part following a somewhat surprising diplomatic intervention and mediation by China. This changing regional security setting implies that perhaps more than one version of underbalancing was now at play, as the region now featured underbalancing not just regarding Iran, but also in the form of a non-existent coalition to stop Israel and its actions in Gaza and beyond, even as many states in the region saw Israeli bombings of Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and even Qatar, as an expanding and very serious regional threat.

These policy and alliance (or lack of alliance) responses depend, in large part, on perceptions of potential impacts on domestic regime security. But states in the region also, at times, differ profoundly even in their perceptions of a particular alliance, alignment, or pact. In the case of the Abraham Accords, for example, the Israeli government saw itself as gradually integrating into the largely Arab regional state system, with a view to expanding the accords and expanding potential regional alignment partners. But within Arab regional politics, even states involved in the accords seemed to see them as more transactional moments — not so much with Israel, but with the United States. Each Arab state that joined the accords did so for a particular package of benefits from the United States, and normalizing relations with Israel (without actually aligning with the state), was the ticket to get there. This gap in perception in regional politics regarding what the Abraham Accords represented was already present before the Gaza war, but after two years of bombardment, and a staggering Palestinian civilian death toll, that perception gap seemed to grow exponentially.

Similarly, the latest wildcard within the every-shifting pattern of regional relations was Syria. From 1970 to December 2024, Syria was ruled by the Asad regime and the Ba‘th Party. Until the collapse of the Asad regime, Syria was part of the Axis of Resistance and, as such, maintained hostile relations with Israel and the United States, and often confrontational relations with various “moderate” Arab states, and recurring friction with Turkey. But now, all that seemed to change overnight. The Axis of Resistance had certainly changed forever, but what remained unclear was what Syria now represented.

As noted above, states like Jordan attempted to pull Syria into more mainstream Arab politics, and to get it to align with Jordan, Egypt, and the Arab Gulf states, as the new regime reversed Syria’s positions on Iran especially. Syria had been a center of regional conflict. It was, in effect, the site of a new struggle for Syria during its civil war, echoing the earlier period, in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, when Syria had gone from regional protagonist to theatre of regional conflict. ⁸⁸

The new Syrian regime was made up of former rebels who had been strongly backed by Turkey, so closer Syrian-Turkish relations were no surprise. The question of Syria’s place in the new regional order really turned on perceptions of the new regime by other states in the region. Jordan clearly wanted to pull it into an Arab and Sunni alignment of status quo powers, after so many years of Damascus being a center for challenging the regional status quo. But there were at minimum some looming bumps in the road. The new regime seemed determined to project itself as non-threatening and interested mainly in Syrian domestic affairs, not in any regional revisionist ambitions.

But regional powers like Egypt seemed unsure. Specifically, Egypt’s President Sissi seemed to view the new Damascus in ideational rather than material terms: was this a new non-threatening Syria, or the bastion of a new Islamist regime? For an Egypt that had overthrown and crushed the Muslim Brotherhood, the answer to that question alone might heavily influence an outcome of alliance or even hostility. Perhaps worse: was the new Damascus regime a former Islamist rebel force or a potential Jihadist Trojan horse in the heart of the region? Sissi’s previous policy track record seemed to suggest that ideational factors, and questions of ideational compatibility, would weigh heavily in Egypt’s foreign policy decision making, in addition to its material economic and security concerns. Here too, the possibilities for alliance or adversarial behavior would depend on how the new regime developed and, more importantly, how its identity would be perceived within regional Arab politics, and especially whether these concerns suggested ideational threats to domestic regime security.

Conclusions

All these seemingly swirling events and alliance shifts only underscored the broader argument that Gause made in his 2017 analysis: that balancing, underbalancing, and alliance choice depend, in large part, on regime perceptions regarding ideational and material threats to their own security. We can therefore view regional politics in the Middle East as characterized not only by material multipolarity, but also by ideological multipolarity and these may pull states in different directions, making alliance formation less clearly determinate. ⁸⁹

Ruling regimes in the region, perhaps obsessed with their own regime security, maneuver between multiple multipolarities, and between multiple perceived threats to their own regime security and survival. We might then expect alliances and alignments to shift often, to avoid overly strong commitments (to give themselves maximum flexibility), or to avoid commitments and even formal alliances at all. ⁹⁰ Del Sarto and Soler i Lecha, for example, refer to these looser alignments as “liquid alliances” in the region today. In my own work, I have used similar terminology, referring to regional alliances and alignments as fluid, flexible, and hence not necessarily reliable. ⁹¹ And as Gause suggests, we can continue to expect in the international relations of the Middle East more underbalancing than balancing, as well as continued material and ideological multipolarity across the region, as domestic regime insecurity remains a problematic and at times unpredictable driver of regional alliance politics.

Still …Balancing What? The Study of Threat Perception and Alliances in the Middle East

May Darwich

University of Birmingham, UK

ORCID: 0000-0002-4815-3378

Abstract

This essay critically engages with one of the most influential articles authored by F. Gregory Gause, III, which explores threat perceptions and alliance formation in the Persian Gulf. The article stands out for its theoretical innovation and empirical contribution to the study of alliances in the Middle East and beyond. In this essay, I situate Gause’s work within the broader literature on international relations, alliance theory, and Middle East politics. I discuss the contribution of his theoretical argument building on the logic of regime survival —combining realist and ideational perspectives along with domestic-level analysis to explain state behavior. This framework offers a compelling explanation for the seemingly counterintuitive alliance choices made by Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia between 1971 and 1991. Finally, I reflect on the article’s enduring impact on subsequent scholarship, including its influence on my own research on alliances and international relations in the region.

Keywords

threat perception – alliance – balancing – regime security – ideational threats – Persian Gulf

For decades, scholars have consistently cautioned against an intellectual gulf dividing International Relations (IR) theory and the study of international relations of the Middle East, ⁹² emphasizing the need to move beyond the “area studies controversy” in favor of fostering dialogue between IR theory and Middle Eastern studies. F. Gregory Gause III stands as one of the pioneers who crossed that bridge, illuminating the path for others to follow. His path-breaking article “Balancing What? Threat Perception and Alliance Choice in the Gulf” ⁹³ is a testament of how scholars, while relying on case studies from the Middle East, can provide insights to the IR discipline. His article presents a sophisticated analysis of threat perception and alliance decisions made by Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf between 1971-91, while contributing novel theoretical insights to scholarly debates on alliances within IR theory.

In the IR discipline, threat perception has conventionally been a fundamental component in the study of alliances. Scholars studying the dynamics of alliance formation focus on two primary phases in the strategic calculus of statesmen: (1) the perception of a threat and (2) how to respond to that perceived threat, choosing between balancing, bandwagoning, and or underbalancing. ⁹⁴ A persistent disagreement has dominated alliance debates over the factors contributing to threat perception. Two prominent explanatory camps stand out: one that identifies material factors as the primary driver in threat perception, and another that privileges ideational forces. Realist scholars who have focused on material forces in shaping actors’ threat perceptions have paid less attention to the role of ideational forces in this process. For instance, Stephen Walt’s neorealist-inspired balance-of-threat theory privileges material factors, including aggregate power, geographic proximity, offensive capabilities. ⁹⁵ Although Walt includes “aggressive intentions” as a source of threats, thereby acknowledging ideational factors, these remain secondary in his theory, serving as instruments in the hand of leaders to justify their material interest-driven foreign policies.

Conversely, scholars favoring ideational forces in their analysis consider material forces to be epiphenomenal. Michael Barnett offers an alternative constructivist explanation of threat perception and alliance choices based on the politics of identity. ⁹⁶ In his Dialogues in Arab Politics, Barnett argues that the rivalry among Arab states during the height of pan-Arabism and the failure to achieve unity schemes stem from disputes over defining Arab identity. Unpacking how regimes are in constant struggle to maintain domestic stability and legitimacy, Barnett presents symbolic disputes over identity as the main source of threats.

In addition to the debate over material versus ideational sources of threat, scholars have also been divided over whether threats emanate from structural or domestic levels. Systemic scholars consider threats emanating from an imbalance in the structure, often attributed to changes in the relative power distribution at regional or international levels. ⁹⁷ Other scholars, especially those concerned with Third World countries, adopted a critique of realism’s preoccupation with external threats to state security, and instead presented an approach considering threats to be primarily internal, where leaders fear for their survival and stability. ⁹⁸ Therefore, state-society relations and regimes’ security consideration are predominant in any foreign policy decision. ⁹⁹ Classic works provided a reading of inter-Arab politics as driven by domestic considerations, where foreign policy stands as a crucial tool in the hands of leaders to preserve their hold onto power. ¹⁰⁰ Steven David’s concept of “omniablancing” illustrates this dynamic; internal threats takes precendence in leaders’ calculations especially in weak states and hence make decisions that ensure their survival even if these decisions seem irrational from a traditional realist perspective. Therefore, leaders will align with great powers to help suppress dissent and gain resources to maintain control. ¹⁰¹

Gause’s “Balancing What?,” initially drawing on realist theoretical foundations, moves beyond traditional paradigmatic boundaries to offer a nuanced interpretation of alliance politics in the Middle East — a region frequently characterized by scholars, analysts, and policymakers as volatile, unpredictable, and analytically elusive. Rather than adhering to the conventional dichotomies of material versus ideational or internal versus external threats, Gause reframes the inquiry by recognizing that political leaders are often confronted with a multiplicity of threats simultaneously. His central analytical innovation lies in examining how leaders prioritize among these competing threats. This emphasis on threat prioritization enables Gause to develop an eclectic and context-sensitive framework that captures the complexity of alliance behavior in the region. To address this question, he offered a nuanced “regime security” approach, integrating the elements of threats underlined by Walt, David’s omnibalancing, ¹⁰² and transnational identities highlighted by Barnett. ¹⁰³ Gause emphasized the salience of ideational threats over material threats, arguing that Arab regimes overwhelmingly perceived ideational threats, emanating from abroad and targeting the domestic stability their regimes, as more salient than material threats. By bridging systemic and domestic levels of analysis, Gause rendered ideational factors tangible through the logic of regime survival. This argument was the hallmark of Gause’s work over the years, which evolved from criticizing mainstream IR approaches, unravelling their limitations in explaining the international relations of the Middle East, ¹⁰⁴ to presenting an alternative theoretical framework of “regime security” as a core dynamic of regional politics. ¹⁰⁵

In “Balancing What?” Gause formulates hypotheses about how leaders prioritized among multiple threats and conducted a test on alliance choices made by Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf from 1971 to 1991. Studying 18 alliance decisions, Gause rigorously studied how states respond to threats based on “aggregate power threats” and/or “aggregate intention threats.” The findings reveal that in six decisions, states balanced against aggregate power, while nearly three quarter of the decisions involved balancing against aggressive intentions. When the sources of military threat differed from aggressive intentions, states chose to balance against aggressive intentions. ¹⁰⁶ Gause’s study demonstrates that balancing threats was the predominant behaviour, and bandwagoning with the source of threat was the exceptional behaviour, aligning with Walt’s conclusions. By unpacking various types of threats, Gause illustrates that threats from states with aggressive intentions — manifested through ideological and subversive efforts to destabilize other regimes — were more significant in the strategic considerations of Saudi, Syrian, and Jordanian governments than threats based on military power capabilities.

Gause’s article opened the door for further inquiry and research, raising numerous questions and puzzles. His findings that leaders predominantly made alliance decisions based on their concern about their hold onto power, prompted other scholars to explore the relationship between leaders and their institutional bases, looking for the domestic sources of ideas and regime-society relations that underpin these alliance decisions. ¹⁰⁷

Gause underlined that alliance choices are bound by the exigencies of regime survival. He argues that Arab states overwhelmingly perceived ideational threats — originating from abroad and targeting the domestic stability of ruling regimes — as more salient than material threats. Although Gause’s argument is rooted in the realist tradition in IR, the ideational elements — both domestic and transnational — are significant and paved the way for subsequent work on alliances in the region. Later studies on regime security emerged to show how and why transnational ideologies can present greater and more immediate threats than shifts in the military balance of power and how regimes respond to these threats internally and externally. Curtis Ryan introduced a regime security approach as an alternative to neorealist explanations, where elite perceptions are at intersection of external/internal factors at the very core of alliance politics. ¹⁰⁸ Using Jordan as a case study, Ryan presented how state economic capabilities and ideology are crucial in how elites address threats to their regime stability. Mark Haas in The Clash of Ideologies explains how ideologies, as independent factors, are likely to shape leaders’ perception of threats. ¹⁰⁹ Lawrence Rubin’s Islam in the Balance is another attempt to analyze how ideas and political ideology are more threatening to regime security than changes in the relative power distribution, showing how regime employ “ideational balancing” against perceived threats. He examines threat perceptions and policies of two Arab, Muslim majority states — Egypt and Saudi Arabia — in response to the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979) and the Islamic state in Sudan (1989). ¹¹⁰

Gause’s “Balancing what?” was also a pivotal source of inspiration for my research on alliances in the Middle East. ¹¹¹ I was particularly drawn to his exploration of how leaders navigate the complex landscape of multiple, often competing threats. Gause’s analysis encouraged me to engage in a deeper exploration beyond the ideational versus material dichotomy of threat perception. While his argument showed how transnational threats involving ideational factors pervasively override material factors in shaping leaders’ threat perception, his analysis also revealed instances where Arab leaders prioritized military threats over ideational ones. For instance, the Syrian-Iraqi rapprochement, beginning in late 1978 until mid-1979, was driven by the Arab-Israeli balance of power where Syria gave the Israeli military threat the priority over the ideational threat emanating from Iraq, especially after the Egyptian withdrawal from the Arab-Israeli conflict. These cases prompted me to consider other similar cases when leaders, despite being constrained by calculations of legitimacy, have pervasively taken unpopular foreign policy decisions based on materialist considerations. Notable examples include al-Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem in 1977 and the subsequent peace treaty with Israel in 1979, al-Assad’s decision to align with Iran against Iraq in 1980, al-Assad’s intervention against the Palestinians in Lebanon in 1976, Syria’s alliance with the US-led coalition against Iraq in the Gulf war (1990-1991), among others.

Gause’s theoretical and empirical discussions indirectly posed the question around the conditions under which ideational factors would precede material ones in the process of threat perception and vice versa, a question that has driven my scholarly work for several years. Gause’s analysis of alliances in the Persian Gulf provided evidence of how states often perceive multiple types of threats at once, and leaders are often faced with options. In these cases, even though balancing ideational threats presented the overwhelming majority of cases, some states chose to balance threats based on aggregate powers. Herein my research started: when faced with both ideational and material threats, regimes often diverge in their perceptions of what constitutes the most eminent threat. The question is then around unpacking the conditions under which ideational forces override material considerations in leaders’ perception of threats, and vice versa.

My argument posits that both ideational and material forces are integral to threat perception processes, interacting to determine which becomes predominant. Leaders may prioritize ideational threats over material ones, or vice versa, depending on two key conditions: the fluidity of regime identities and the range of policy options stemming from the relative power distribution. Fluidity of identity provides elites with opportunities and constraints, allowing them to select aspects of their regime identity and embrace them to mobilize people. This fluidity varies across regimes; for instance, Egypt’s diverse identities offer flexibility in foreign policy, while Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, with weaker national identities, rely on pan-Islamism to maintain societal cohesion. The second condition involves the range of policy options available due to the relative power distribution. Leaders assess these options to ensure regime security, with clear structures limiting choices and ambiguous structures requiring optimization among multiple options. I then applied this framework to analyze Saudi and Syrian threat perceptions during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), the 2006 Lebanon war, and the 2009 Gaza war.

Although Gause’s analysis focused on alliance politics in the Persian Gulf from 1971 to 1991, the contributions of his argument extended to contemporary Middle Eastern dynamics. His focus on regimes fearing neighboring states during a period dominated by inter-state wars revealed underlying regime dynamics that have continued to shape regional politics for decades. Transnational threats to regimes have taken a different turn with rise of armed non-state actors as pivotal players in regional politics. The emergence of influential actors like Hamas and Hezbollah in the Arab-Israeli context has heightened Arab regimes’ fear of ideational threats that could challenge the legitimacy of their rule. ¹¹² The proliferation of armed non-state actors in the Middle East, especially after the 2011 Arab uprisings, has also underscored regimes’ concern about transnational ideational threats, prompting alliances aimed at ensuring regime survival. ¹¹³ Since the 2011 Arab uprisings, conventional state-versus-state wars diminished. ¹¹⁴ Weakened states became the main feature of conflict in the region, where regional powers clash through local proxies who are sometimes mobilized around identities based on religion, sect, ethnicity, or tribe. Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen became arenas for proxy geopolitical conflicts and indirect military confrontations. In their efforts to manage the outcomes of these uprisings, Arab regimes actively restructured their societal networks and forged new alliances with both state and non-state actors. These alliances have consistently been shaped by regimes’ threat perceptions, with regime survival remaining the paramount strategic objective. From this perspective, Gause’s argument remains pertinent, as Arab leaders frequently prioritize ideational threats, perceiving them as the most significant challenges to regime stability. These ideational threats now emanate not only from other rival Arab states but also non-state actors, which often outgrew the relationship of proxy with Arab regimes and articulated independent foreign policies, often appealing to the hearts and minds of people. ¹¹⁵

Although the dynamics identified in Gause’s analysis continue to manifest in the alliance politics of the region, a notable conceptual gap remains concerning the notion of “regime security,” which persists as an abstract, multifaceted, and often ambiguously defined construct. Scholars writing about Third World security have constantly made the distinction between state and regime security. ¹¹⁶ Given the inherent weakness of Arab states, ¹¹⁷ scholars of the Middle East have long made the analytical distinction between state and regime, ¹¹⁸ defining regimes as “that nexus of alliances within and without the formal bureaucratic and public sectors that the leaders form in order to gain power and keep it.” ¹¹⁹ Gause’s work revealed how such distinction is at the heart of alliance decisions in the region, yet until today the concept of “regime” as a unit of analysis remains underdeveloped, especially in assessing its centrality in the making of Arab foreign policies.

Various IR theoretical approaches, ranging from realism to constructivism, each provide a distinct story about threat perception and alliances in the region. These theoretical approaches can be used, using Smith’s words “as different colored lenses,” each unveiling a different aspect of reality. ¹²⁰ “Balancing What?” highlighted the limitations in theorizing the ideational versus material nexus or internal versus external threats, in the study of alliances, demonstrating how Arab regimes encounter various types of threats, where the interplay between ideational and material forces being pivotal in real-world international relations. Through this nuanced lens, Gause provides a deeper understanding of the complexities of Middle Eastern alliances, moving beyond traditional realist perspectives to incorporate the significance of ideological and domestic factors.​ Gause has introduced a novel colored lens that guided scholarship across the chasm of complex alliances in the Middle East.

King of Kings: Gause on Monarchies

Lisa Anderson

Columbia University

ORCID: 0000-0001-7342-8081

Abstract

Gregory Gause is one of the few scholars to take monarchy seriously as a regime type. Arguing that his approach has grown more nuanced as he incorporated domestic factors into analysis largely informed by international relations scholarship, this essay accents his disciplined consideration of culture, material resources, and political acumen in accounting for political stability and longevity. Monarchies with substantial resources, international protection, and carefully nurtured domestic coalitions survive. Gause’s skepticism about scientific abstraction and his attachment to empirical specificity and policy utility are themes that run through his analysis; he prefers fidelity to the facts and unpretentious policy engagement to grand theorizing. In doing so, he contributes insight about regime stability well beyond the monarchies that are his starting point.

Keywords

monarchy – Edmund Burke – regime stability – oil wealth – international protection – foreign policy

Political scientists who focus on monarchies are a rare breed, and they carry a whiff of the antiquarian. For enthusiasts of large N studies, there are too few cases; for devotees of institutional analysis, there are not enough parliaments and judiciaries; for students of foreign policy, they are clustered in exotic corners of a world dominated by far more powerful actors.

Gause’s work is very much in this spirit: interested in what might be beneficial or noxious to mankind—that is, policy—and as much about discriminating effects as about metaphysical abstraction. He values the “simple view” of his colleagues as a point of departure but views his own role as providing the distinguishing color that permits assessment of the merits of any political (or scientific) scheme.

The study of monarchies thus serves Gause’s purposes in several ways. It tests his mettle as a “conservative,” since none of the monarchies of the 21^st century are actually reflections of ancient traditions. In endeavoring to discern what they do in fact reflect, he works with his colleagues in comparative politics to figure out what, exactly, makes these regimes work: what is monarchy in a world in which the French Revolution’s rights of man have become the global creed? He also uses monarchies as a device to prod and puncture the verities of international relations theory, reminding his colleagues that the modern states, which are the putative building blocks of geopolitics, are actually not abstract, ahistorical billiard balls but varied and diverse reflections of the history of sovereignty, including eras when sovereigns were, well, monarchs.

In his early examination of what accounts for the apparently anomalous longevity of monarchy in the Arab world in “The Persistence of Monarchy in the Arabian Peninsula: a Comparative Analysis” ¹²² he takes comparativists, like me, to task for ignoring the external context in which monarchy thrives (or dies, as we all agree, most Middle Eastern monarchies have). Dismissing the “culturalist” approaches that attribute monarchy to tradition, tribalism, or Islam by correctly observing that those traits are in ample display in many of the republics of the region, he also takes on Hisham Sharabi’s focus on “neo-patrimonialism” and my argument that monarchy has an elective affinity with the project of state formation. ¹²³ These latter perspectives, he argues, do too little to distinguish monarchy as such from the other centralizing, personalistic and autocratic regimes scattered across the region, and they account poorly for change. I agree that this is a fair critique of Sharabi; in my own defense, I would argue that the veil of traditional authority is a particularly useful cloak for change, and state formation is, in fact, change.

That said, Gause’s principal critique is that these explanations suffer “from the same central flaw: concentrating exclusively on domestic political factors.” ¹²⁴ It is not altogether clear whether he thinks that this omission leaves out a specific variable without which the persistence of monarchy is actually impossible to explain, or he is affronted by the neglect of international relations as a discipline. After all, as a comparativist, if I can explain political phenomena parsimoniously without referring to international factors, I will do so.

In fact, Gause specifies two “international” variables, or perhaps better perspectives, that he finds necessary to account for monarchy’s persistence: international political economy and regional security, or “oil and international protection.” ¹²⁵ In limiting his cases to the Arabian Peninsula, he bolsters his argument; after all, neither Morocco nor Jordan have oil. The extension of what we understand as rents to include phosphate revenues and foreign aid would eventually address that flaw in subsequent literature, but he does not do so in this article. So too, his accent on foreign sponsors is well-taken, although very few of the regimes in the region, monarchical or otherwise, have survived in the absence of foreign backers, so this too is more an explanation of the persistence of all governments than of monarchies as such. If the Cold War did nothing else, it created a dynamic in the Middle East and North Africa that has long outlasted it, in which regional governments prefer to be of service to foreign patrons than accountable to their own citizens. So Gause is vulnerable to some of his own critiques, and we still struggle to distinguish the monarchies from the rest of the rent-dependent, clientele regimes of the region.

More interesting, however, is the inversion of the use of “domestic” and “international” variables among political scientists that is apparent in a closer comparison of my early work on monarchy and his. Whereas I argue that all of these governments are impositions of imperial powers, particularly but not exclusively the British, that preferred to rule their possessions indirectly by installing local rulers and calling them kings—that is, these regimes are the product of “international factors”—Gause goes to great length to catalogue their local genealogies—that is their “domestic origins.” Once the countries in which they reign become independent, however, we switch sides: I accent the domestic imperatives of state formation and regime stability; Gause looks to the international advantages of external revenues and foreign protection.

Obviously, the value of international and comparative perspectives in explaining the origins, strength, or stability of a particular regime type cannot rest on whether a country has been invited to join the United Nations as a sovereign country. Hostage to our disciplinary training, we both failed to capture the seamlessness of politics as it is actually played, although I think we both grew more supple as we revisited our cases in the succeeding decades.

With co-author Sean Yom, Gause returns to his arguments to explain the resilience of monarchies during the uprisings across the Arab world during 2010-2011. Here, they again accent external revenues and foreign patronage—replacing the United States with Saudi Arabia as the principal patron of regional monarchs—and add a nod to “historically mobilized cross-cutting coalitions of popular support.” There is even a welcome reference to “modern colonialism, which turned weak and fragmented claims of dynastic authority into centralized autocracies.” ¹²⁶

Given that the monarchies that faced the most significant protests—Kuwait, Jordan, and Morocco—are also those that had previously made the most significant institutional concessions to democratic institutions—legislatures, prime ministers, etc.—the ease with which they dismiss the “institutional” argument is somewhat disappointing. Their argument that “royalism presents different institutional options than republicanism, but not all kings adopt them; if they did, no ruling monarchy would collapse” is more non-sequitur than answer to the claim that institutions matter. After all, if, as they also argue, “broad-based coalitions are the hallmark of successful autocracies regardless of institutional structure,” they can (and briefly do) include the republics where uprisings were muted (e.g. Algeria) with the monarchies—and we are back to trying to figure out what, if anything, is unique about monarchy. To attribute regime stability to “deliberate regime strategies pursued amid fortuitous geographies and other circumstances [hydrocarbon wealth and foreign patrons]” seems correct but hardly a defining feature of monarchy. ¹²⁷ Moreover, “deliberate regime strategies” are hardly limited to building and sustaining domestic coalitions: that is precisely how foreign patrons are secured and managed. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the only feature all of the region’s monarchies share is—yes, foreign patrons. Imperial legacies live on!

Gause expands and refines these arguments in his “Kings of All Seasons.” ¹²⁸ Here, he argues that the “Arab monarchies themselves are not a single regime type” and distinguishes between individual monarchs, who had more room to offer political reform, and dynastic monarchs, who relied more on “oil wealth and coercion.” In all cases, however, the kings are reliant on domestic coalitions of support; the image of a king “above the fray” is, in Gause’s view, entirely a reflection of regime propaganda. Although some monarchs did distance themselves from their governments by dismissing their prime ministers or shuffling their cabinets in the face of protest, there is no reason to think that option was not available to long-serving presidents. In fact, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had both exercised that option more than once before, only to move too slowly in dismissing government figures to mollify their opponents in 2011.

By now, we have kings who are hardly different from their republican counterparts. Some are wealthy, and not unlike Algeria and Iraq in being able to buy off coalition members and prevent uprisings; some are well-served by foreign entanglements — and here Gause expands on the regional patronage network engineered by Saudi Arabia to favor monarchies as such — and all seem to be blessed with relatively clever political strategists on, or near, the throne. Adroit strategy does seem to distinguish the Arab spring survivors, monarchical and republican, but some of that is certainly hindsight. There are lots of counterfactuals: As Yom and Gause suggest, had Mubarak had billions of dollars in oil revenue, he probably would have survived; ¹²⁹ so, too, might have Qaddafi had he had more international friends.

In fact, the example of Qaddafi suggests the importance of one of Gause’s earliest factors: foreign protection. In many ways, when he came to power, Saudi Arabia’s young crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was reminiscent of the young Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya: young, brash, willing — indeed, eager — to break with longstanding norms and traditions in the making of a new national identity. ¹³⁰ Both young leaders found their ambitions facilitated by vast oil wealth and relatively modest domestic institutional constraints; they were personalistic leaders of the first order. Geopolitical circumstances in the 1970s—the height of the Cold War—allowed Qaddafi to throw off the yoke of British and American imperialism in favor of an alliance with the Soviet Union; when the USSR collapsed and the Cold War ended, Qaddafi was deprived of his foreign patron and, after decades of alienating his neighbors and infuriating Western global powers, he struggled in the succeeding decades to find powerful international protectors. The Saudi Crown prince, by contrast, came to power in a unipolar world, when liberation from American influence was so implausible that it probably never crossed his mind. The obligation to work within a system imposed by a foreign power seems to have both disciplined and protected a young ruler bent, as his treatment of his own family suggested, on liberating himself from conventional constraints.

This is not a story of monarchy as such; indeed, Qaddafi brought a monarch down; Mohammed bin Salman will eventually succeed to a throne. It is, however, a useful reminder that international factors do play an important role in shaping the challenges and opportunities of all regimes, particularly those embedded in the webs of dependency known charitably (and disingenuously) as the developing world. Gause has come to appreciate far more the importance of domestic coalition-building in sustaining all regimes, including the various kinds of monarchies he treats. He describes, for example, how the Saudi government could “promote a whole new stratum of business families from central Arabia in the 1970s without having to disadvantage the historical merchant families of the Hijaz because the oil boom provided opportunities for all.” ¹³¹ At the same time, many of his comparatist colleagues appreciate far better the international environment that shapes — both promotes and constrains — domestic and foreign policy choices.

Regime type is not merely a category of institutional arrangement; it is a signal of potential common interests and facilitator of potential common action across disparate economies and geographies. Just as the United States’ “Community of Democracies” was less a typologically coherent grouping than an instructive signal about potential alliances in a world order run, at the time, by a liberal democracy, so too identifying as a monarchy permits somewhat privileged access to support from some of the richest countries in the world.

This means, however, that we are still left with the puzzle of what exactly sustains monarchy in the twenty-first century. Perhaps the same could be said of democracy in the era of authoritarian populism and democratic backsliding. It seems to me that exploring how governments signal membership in “effective networks of mutual support in a crisis” and how they secure and mobilize that support might tell us a great deal not only about monarchies but about precisely how international and domestic factors interact in molding regimes and shaping alliances. Some of this evidently depends on the very flexible “circumstances that render civil and political schemes beneficial or noxious,” as is suggested by Morocco’s membership not only in the club of monarchies, but in the Warsaw Declaration’s “Community of Democracies,” ¹³⁴ nestled alphabetically between the other widely recognized democracies of Moldova and Mongolia, and Nigeria and Norway. We need more of Gause’s penchant for Bruke’s “distinguishing color and discriminating effect” to explain how governments of all kind actually interact.

The Price of Order is Too High

Marc Lynch

George Washington University

Abstract

Gregory Gause argues that the foundation for a stable regional order must be strong, capable states. In principle, this is plausible, but given the nature of state formation and regime survival strategies in the Middle East, stronger states are often the cause of rather than the solution to regional instability. Policies designed to strengthen Arab states in the absence of major structural and political reforms will be more likely to encourage domestic misgovernance and developmental failures as well as regional interventionism. A more effective solution to the problem of regional order would be to push regional regimes to refocus their efforts on political and economic development while respecting human rights and offering real opportunities for citizen participation in governance.

Keywords

Middle East – state capacity – regional order – interventions – alliances – US foreign policy

In his provocative 2022 Foreign Affairs article “The Price of Order,” Gregory Gause argues that the United States needs to make peace with the limits of what it can accomplish in the Middle East and accept the true nature of its strategic regional partners. ¹³⁵ The problem with the Middle East, he argues, is not — as conventionally believed — that states are too strong and stand in the way of democratic freedoms and economic development. The real problem is that too many states are too weak and unable to provide the basic order necessary to allow for economic development, political stability, security, or democracy. Political vacuums such as those, which have taken hold of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, and Sudan, he argues, invite intervention and proxy wars, creating a vicious cycle of state failure and proxy warfare. ¹³⁶ To escape this trap, the United States must accept “the hard reality…that dealing with extremely flawed regimes, with blood on their hands, is sometimes the only way to check the dangers of disorder.”

Like the other essays discussed in this collection, “The Price of Order” advances a powerful, policy relevant, and challenging argument. Gause’s argument challenges the scholars, policy analysts, and activists who call for democratization and respect for human rights as the key to achieving regional stability and order. He pushes back on those who believed during the Obama years that the United States should embrace the potential of the Arab uprisings and, more recently, those in the Biden administration who promised to center human rights and punish Saudi Arabia for its many egregious violations. He, instead, follows in the footsteps of a long parade of Realist International Relations (IR) theorists, policymakers, Israelis, and Arab pro-regime writers who have argued for backing Arab autocrats as the best available option in a dangerous region. Their arguments vary: some adopt the racist view that Arabs are not capable of democracy, some appreciate that Arab dictators do not mind working with Israel, some just think that on principle America should be in the business of backing its friends and punishing its enemies. Those who work directly or indirectly for the Arab autocrats in question would just like everyone to accept their value and stop nattering on about human rights. For many United States diplomats, current and former, it’s just a hard reality that ordering a difficult region with limited resources simply requires working with the regimes we have.

Gause’s argument is not based on lazy or racist assumptions, though, and it is not conventionally Realist. It is far more interesting than that. Across his scholarly career, he has taken seriously the centrality of the state and the importance of both domestic politics and ideological/identity concerns. He builds, instead, on the subvariant of Realism alternately termed “regime security theory” or “omnibalancing,” which has become, in part due to his own scholarship, dominant in the literature on the international relations of the Middle East. ¹³⁷ Those approaches reject the neorealist premise that states are functionally equivalent and that their policies fundamentally derive from external structure rather than from domestic politics or state-level variables. In his defining book, The International Relations of the Persian [sic] Gulf, Gause shows how critical decisions of war and peace in the Middle East were made by regimes obsessed with their own survival and security, which do not differentiate between external and internal threats, or between material and ideational challenges, in the way IR purists would like. For some Gulf states, he shows, the Iranian threat over the last half-century has not really been a conventional military one — it has been that a revolutionary or ShiÊ¿a identity narrative might inspire domestic challenges to the regime.

Regime security theory took on new dimensions and gained even greater salience with the 2011 Arab uprisings, as the regionwide popular uprising put tremendous stress on autocratic regimes and their ability to control and suppress popular challengers. Gause builds on the insights of scholars such as Bassel F. Salloukh, who have centered state weakness as a primary driver of regional instability, with the regional balance of power defined as much by the distribution of state capacity as by the distribution of military capabilities. ¹³⁸ The mechanisms driving that instability work in multiple vectors: domestic weakness can lead regimes to become more aggressive abroad in hopes of stopping threats at their source, while domestic weakness invites external adversaries (or just opportunists) to take advantage. This creates what I have called a regionalized security dilemma, in which weak and failed states create almost irresistible incentives for regional powers to intervene competitively even where they have few interests at stake — because they fear that uprisings anywhere might spread like wildfire, and because they cannot be sure that their regional rivals won’t take advantage and tip the regional balance of power in their favor.

The solution to this problem, Gause argues, is to reduce the insecurity felt by regimes by empowering states to more effectively exercise sovereign control by whatever means are necessary. Stronger states would reduce both the need felt by states to intervene abroad and the opportunities for them to do so. Gause makes a persuasive case, but ultimately one which is fatally flawed. The problem is not with his diagnosis, but with his solution. State weakness is indeed a major problem shaping regional disorder. Strengthening central states might make for a more orderly region if they were actually states headed by regimes that prioritized development, security, and democracy. But they are not. The central problem of order in the region is caused by regimes buttressed by strong states, not solved by them. Strengthening those states under these conditions would be the equivalent of handing more gas and matches to a convicted arsonist, while earnestly pretending that it is a firehose.

The Arab State and the Problem of Order

Gause presents the trajectory of regional politics in terms familiar to many observers of regional politics. After the turbulence and chaos caused by state weakness during the Arab Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s, he argues, regional states solidified and hardened. Rising oil prices and Cold War support from the superpowers allowed regimes to invest in the security side of their state capacity and create intrusive, seemingly omnipotent national security states controlled by overlapping security agencies and the ruthless suppression of any form of political dissent. Gause writes: “the irony of the current crisis of state weakness and collapse in the Middle East is that during the last three decades of the twentieth century, the regimes in power were becoming more stable and better able to govern their societies, for good (providing social services) and for ill (building institutions of surveillance and control).”

This reflects a common misconception of state capacity and the purpose of the state. Gause’s argument rests on a critical, but often neglected, distinction between states and the regimes that sit atop them. His call is not necessarily to strengthen Arab regimes (though that might be the effect in practice) but rather to strengthen their states — the set of bureaucratic institutions (military, police, taxation, courts, border control, land regulation, and so forth), which provide order, security, and control over society. But why are those states weak? In Making Sense of the Arab State, Steven Heydemann and I argue that the regimes atop these states were not primarily concerned with developmentalism or social services — they simply want to survive at any cost. ¹³⁹ That is why they overinvested in the parts of the state that would keep them in power — intelligence agencies, police, state employment for favored constituencies, and price subsidies to keep the rest from falling into complete poverty — while allowing other dimensions of state capacity to wither. Those are the “fierce states” memorialized by Nazih Ayubi in his masterwork Over-Stating the Arab State — overdeveloped in the security and control sectors and woefully weak by design at providing effective governance and services. ¹⁴⁰ This suggests that strengthening states would not likely entice regimes to provide better governance or economic results, but rather only encourage them to continue ensuring that there can be no popular challenge to their own corruption, mismanagement, or recklessness.

It is important — as Gause recognizes — to avoid overgeneralizing about the Middle East on issues such as ‘stateness.’ The Gulf is very different from the rest of the region: with tiny citizen populations and vast wealth, the small oil states such as Qatar and the UAE have created highly stable and wealthy authoritarian systems with nearly complete surveillance and control. Large North African states such as Egypt and Algeria maintain strong, if muddled, states that struggle to provide basic economic and physical security for their huge populations. The states of the Levant (as well as Yemen and Libya) have all virtually collapsed: Syria and Iraq shattered by civil war and state failure, Palestine and Lebanon never reaching full statehood, Jordan always barely holding on (in part through its relatively high degree of state capacity and willingness to outsource critical dimensions of sovereignty to international organizations).

Gause’s chronology of stateness, like others in this analytical perspective, overstates the extent to which the smothering authoritarianism that overtook Arab politics in the 1970s and 1980s actually produced stability. Those decades, after all, witnessed the 1979 Iranian revolution and the peak of its efforts to export revolution, the 1979 takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Salafi-jihadist extremists, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s challenge to the Asad regime in Syria. The narrative of state decay then misses the critically important two decades beginning with the oil price shock of the mid-1980s and the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union. Economic crisis and pressure from international financial institutions forced many regional states to initiate significant cuts to state employment and price subsidies, which, in turn, sparked protests and instability across the region. The disappearance of the Soviet Union deprived its allies of access to the weapons and aid on which they had long counted, forcing every state in the region to find its place within an American imperium. Those changes often included some degree of limited democratization, which had mixed effects on state capacity: greater public freedoms and even controlled elections forced some greater accommodation of society, but also gave regimes more information about the distribution of views in their population and greater foreknowledge of impending problems and crises. But across many measures of state capacity, these two decades represented a complex mix of strengthening and weakening across different dimensions — not a simple story of either decline or development.

Gause understandably focuses instead on the critical security-related stressors on state capacity in the 2000s, particularly focusing on how collapsed states create havens for terrorist groups and can drive mass refugee flows. Here too, though, the effects were mixed. The war on terror provided significant resources and political openings for a strengthening of some dimensions of state capacity, such as surveillance of populations and control over borders. States in the Middle East could and did follow the American lead in using “counterterrorism” to legitimate all sorts of abusive expansions of state power over society. They did not, however, meaningfully invest in economic development or improved governance, while democratic openings tended to be brief. The 2000s did not feature steadily improved governance and development rudely interrupted by the 2011 revolutions. Quite the contrary: this was a decade that saw vast increases in inequality and crony capitalism combined with reduced state protections for citizens struggling with poverty, rising unemployment, decaying infrastructure, shoddy mass education, and the abusive, petty corruption of security agencies and police. And it was a decade that featured rising incidences of protest mobilization and labor strikes as society struggled to find ways to impose its urgent needs and demands on unaccountable regimes.

State weakening in these years was not completely exogenous. United States-led sanctions have been a particularly potent driver of state degradation since the 1990s. The comprehensive, draconian embargo on Iraq after 1991 was the single greatest cause of the state weakness revealed — and massively exacerbated — by the 2003 American invasion. ¹⁴¹ United States sanctions helped to keep the Palestinian Authority weak and dependent, fueled instability and state weakness in Sudan and Libya, and contribute to growing instability and economic struggles in Iran (perhaps, by Gause’s argument, we would be better served by a more stable and orderly Iranian state?). ¹⁴² United States-driven neoliberal economic policies also contributed to the hollowing out of the economies of states with friendly regimes: the dismantling of welfare states, food and fuel subsidies, and state employment removed a key source of state capacity, while fueling the rise of crony capitalism and corruption, which largely evaded state control. Those economic choices — both sanctions and neoliberal reforms — work at odds with the political strategy of encouraging strong state controls over society.

Moral Hazard

Gause highlights the strategic benefits of setting aside lectures about human rights and democracy in favor of clear-eyed cooperation with admittedly nasty regimes on common goals. That argument was prompted, perhaps, by Obama’s short-lived attempt to embrace the Arab uprisings, and is framed in the moment by the concern that the Biden administration might be serious about making Saudi Arabia a pariah over the Khashoggi murder and the war in Yemen (he need not have worried; Biden dropped it like it was hot, abandoning his campaign rhetoric almost immediately in favor of an Ahab-like pursuit of a Saudi normalization agreement with Israel). While Gause gets there by a different route, his policy recommendation has in fact been the Middle East policy of every American administration, with only brief exceptions during portions of the Carter, Obama, and George W. Bush administrations. The United States has never prioritized democracy or human rights in the Middle East, whatever its rhetoric, and has always preferred to have friendly autocrats take care of hostile public opinion on its behalf. ¹⁴³

If the United States has been pursuing the policy of order and stability for decades, why has it not produced the desired results? At some level, Gause might argue, it has (though he is ambivalent: in a 2024 essay, he makes a persuasive case that the US has failed to achieve true hegemony despite all its investment in the region). ¹⁴⁴ The United States has generally made demands of its allies in pursuit of only a few core interests in the region: protecting Israel and keeping the oil flowing; preventing global peer competitors such as the Soviet Union (before 1990) and China (today) from making inroads into the region; and cooperation against security threats such as terrorism and Iran. For all the (well-deserved) criticism of American policies in the region, Washington has, in fact, largely succeeded at all of those goals — in large part because its Arab autocratic allies are willing to go along with them. The United States has maintained Israel’s qualitative military superiority over all adversaries, while brokering formal peace agreements with Egypt and Israel and normalization processes with most of the Gulf. The oil weapon has not been used against the United States by regional powers since 1973, and no external power has been able to meaningfully disrupt the flow of oil (though Iran and the Houthis have recently demonstrated an ability to disrupt shipping through the Gulf and the Red Sea and stunned the region with a dramatic attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil refineries). Arab regimes are thrilled to fight terrorism, as long as they get to define all of their political opponents as terrorists.

That autocratic cooperation has come at a price, though. The first is moral hazard. Unfettered support for these regimes empowers them to reject American preferences and undermine United States objectives without fear of real consequences. This could be seen clearly over Ukraine, where almost every United States ally declined to join the global coalition Washington formed to push back against Russia’s invasion and defend a ‘rules based international order.’ It was also seen dramatically throughout the Arab uprisings, where Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Turkey (along with non-allied Iran) fought their political battles across the region in highly destructive ways. The US failed to coordinate support for Syrian insurgents, lost control over the arming of proxies in Libya, watched helplessly as the UAE and Saudi Arabia fomented a military coup in Egypt and launched a devastating intervention in Yemen. American allies opposed the JCPOA agreement with Iran, and were only brought in line with the promise of massive arms sales (and acquiescence to the doomed Yemen war). Israel’s refusal to heed American calls to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza and avoid the worst targeting of civilians follows the same logic. The frequency with which American allies work against American policies in the region is enabled by the moral hazard created by American protestations of unending support. ¹⁴⁵

The second cost comes with how the support of American allies for its core priorities angers public opinion, driving the gap between the rulers and the ruled, which demand greater repression and fuel unrest. Arab normalization with Israel through the Abraham Accords advanced “order” by sidelining the Palestinian issue — which then generated considerably greater disorder after October 7. Arab inaction over Gaza pleases Washington and enrages Arab publics, requiring precisely the kind of “state strengthening” that Gause prefers — not to provide the conditions for development and democracy, but to keep in place rulers willing to do Washington’s bidding (on the issues it prioritizes). We saw the same dynamic in both 1990 and 2003, when the United States attempted to dragoon its Arab allies into the war coalition against Iraq, and punished those that declined. The demand that its allies follow unpopular policies as a condition for its continued support forces the United States to support anti-democratic measures for fear of their allies succumbing to popular pressure (a trap that those allies are happy to keep primed as a way of extracting ever more concessions from their patron).

The dilemma becomes self-perpetuating, then, as a policy of strengthening the region’s states comes with the corrosive effects of the prevention of democracy and abuse of human rights. The Arab uprisings of 2011 were, in large part, a reaction to regime abuses and failures enabled by growing state power over the course of decades. The real problem is the absence of human rights, democracy, etc. and that the Arab uprisings show the limits of perpetual repression and intensifications. Gause anticipates this objection by observing, correctly, that elections rarely solve the problems facing Arab states. But elections are only part of the argument. Arguably, more important than elections are accountability, transparency, and fundamental freedoms and rights. Detaching a stronger state from regime autocracy seems to me the core problem: one should be able envision democracies as resting on more genuinely strong states than the autocracies that turn state capacity towards the single-minded pursuit of power.

Gause acknowledges that the “process of state strengthening was not pretty” but concludes that it is worth it to create the conditions for stability. I am not so sure. Are Egyptians better off today because Egypt’s state “did not crack” and Sisi’s military coup violently crushed the Muslim Brotherhood? Is its economy in good shape? Is it less corrupt or its people, on average, wealthier? Does it seem like an orderly place? Has it been able to successfully navigate challenges such as COVID?

The Price of Order

Gause’s argument for strengthening states in many ways makes good sense. He correctly identifies the risks and dangers of state failure and collapse and makes recommendations that broadly align with how United States policymakers have always approached the region. This is the politics of the possible, working with the region as it actually exists, and foregoing naïve efforts to make it into something different. But a closer look at the region suggests that such an approach is not quite as pragmatic and grounded as it appears. The eruption of the Arab uprisings in 2011 showed clearly that the stability offered by Arab autocrats — whether presiding over strong states or weak ones — is less than it appears. That, ironically, is an argument made by F. Gregory Gause III when criticizing the alleged failure of Middle East Studies to anticipate them: “the academic literature missed the 2011 eruption because it was focused (and in many ways rightly so) on explaining the anomalous regime stability that characterized the Arab world.” ¹⁴⁶ There is a lesson to be learned.

Syria today offers a profound test case for Gause’s argument — and one where my argument and his would align. Gause concludes his essay by observing that “it is in Syria where the tension between order and liberal principles will play out most clearly.” He urges the United States to recognize the reality of Asad’s military victory and begin contacts with him with the goal of getting back to a pre-2011 situation that “kept the Syrian border with Israel quiet for decades and prevented Islamist terrorist organizations from using Syria as a base for attacks on the United States.” The United States should move on from punishing Asad’s war crimes and, instead, work to incentivize him to distance Syria from Russia and Iran. A transition in Syria, he warns, “will not happen anytime soon, if ever.”

Barely a year later, Asad’s regime was overthrown, and a transition began that might, perhaps, become a democratic one. Gause failed to foresee Asad’s collapse, in part, because he focused on the regime’s military victory and international alliances, and ignored the many ways in which sanctions and the legacies of war were hollowing out the state from within. Asad did everything Gause advised by prioritizing ‘order’ over democracy and human rights, getting his hands bloody to regain control over his territory. And he fell nonetheless, fleeing to Russia unmourned and unloved. Every other Arab dictator providing order without democracy should contemplate whether and when he will face the same fate.

But there’s another chance to get it right, one which regional powers are tentatively willing to embrace but the United States and Israel reject. Supporting Sharaa’s effort to rebuild a centralized, capable Syrian state would indeed serve the regional and the American interest. But others fear that it would help entrench a veiled jihadist state. Israel would prefer to occupy it and keep it divided; Iraq has trouble moving on from Sharaa’s role in the long Sunni jihadist insurgency. Here’s a case where Gause’s analysis and my own converge: the United States should support Sharaa’s efforts to consolidate a functional Syrian state, while pushing that state to respect human rights and democracy.

On Missing Things: Middle East Studies and the Arab Uprisings

Jillian Schwedler

The City University of New York

ORCID: 0000-0003-1829-9138

Abstract

F. Gregory Gause’s “Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring: The Myth of Authoritarian Stability” argues that scholars of Middle East politics failed to anticipate the Arab uprisings of 2011 because they had become preoccupied with explaining the resilience of authoritarianism. I show how that literature hinged on the regimes’ staying power in the face of challenges to their authority, not that such challenges did not exist. Meanwhile, scholars of contentious politics were documenting these near-constant bursts of dissent across the region, spanning a century or more. Gause also argues that scholars missed the reinvigoration of “cross-border Arab identity” because the Arab world lacked a charismatic leader on the scale of Gamal Abdul Nasser. I offer a different explanation, showing that this sense of Arab identity began to change in the late 1990s with the launch of Al-Jazeera. Arabs across the region began watching in Arabic a common channel and programming that covered the whole Arab region with a level of journalistic integrity lacking in the state-owned media outlets. The rise of social media, particularly in Arabic beginning in 2008, also likely played a role in the reinvigoration of Arab collective identity. In sum, Gause accurately characterizes the blind spots of the resilient authoritarianism literature, but under appreciates the scholarship on contentious politics in the region as well as the role of Al-Jazeera in facilitating both Arab collective identity and the course of the uprisings themselves.

Keywords

Arab uprisings – resilient authoritarianism – contentious politics – social media – Al-Jazeera – Arab identity

Some six months into the Arab uprisings that began in Tunisia in December 2010, F. Gregory Gause published a thoughtful article in Foreign Affairs, titled “Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring: The Myth of Authoritarian Stability.” ¹⁴⁷ The Arab world was home to a long list of decades-old authoritarian rulers, he noted, and the monarchies enjoyed notably long “pedigrees”: Saudi Arabia’s al-Saud since 1933, Jordan’s Hashemites ruling since 1920, and Morocco’s Alaouite since the seventeenth century. Because these non-democratic regimes had ruled or so long, scholars of Middle East studies—really, those who study Middle East politics, as Gause later states—had largely become preoccupied with explaining why so many of those non-democratic regimes had evaded the much-lauded “third wave” of democratization or indeed any other form of revolutionary challenge. That literature revolved around an imbricating set of themes and sometimes interchangeable terms, including regime stability, authoritarian resilience, ¹⁴⁸ authoritarian upgrading, ¹⁴⁹ and robust authoritarianism. ¹⁵⁰ Gause identifies himself as one of those specialists who dedicated attention to explaining regime stability in the region and was deeply surprised by the outbreak of the Arab uprisings. ¹⁵¹

In the political science of the Middle East, the literature on authoritarian resilience garnered significant attention, particularly that the Arab regimes last quarter of the twentieth century was remarkably stable compared to the rapid and often violent coups and regime change that had characterized the second and third quarters of that century. ¹⁵² Gause notes that many scholars seemed to agree on two main factors that explained regime stability in the Arab world: That the police, military, and broader security services were largely loyal to the ruling regimes, and that the regimes largely controlled their national economies. Competing analyses gave different weight to those and other factors, but the stability of the Arab regimes was not in question. Given this focus in much of the field, Gause concluded, scholars of the Middle East were surprised by the outbreak of the Arab uprisings and particularly the rapid pace at which several regimes quickly fell while others were imperiled. Many scholars quickly pivoted to explain the apparent puzzle of the “surprising” revolutionary mobilizations in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen, seeking to explain variations in the time, scale, and outcome of these mobilizations. ¹⁵³ But, indeed, no part of the Arab world was untouched by popular unrest. ¹⁵⁴

To better situate the trends in scholarly analysis on the Middle East, I will briefly revisit the decade of scholarship that preceded the focus on robust authoritarianism that characterized the 2000s. Much of the scholarship on Arab politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s was cautiously optimistic about the potential for modest political openings, if not full-fledged democratization. Particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union and the so-called Third Wave of democratization, ¹⁵⁵ the rumblings of change in the Arab region in the early 1990s left room for cautious optimism. The region saw a number of large-scale peaceful mobilizations and an increase in parliamentary elections, even though few parliaments wielded any real political power. Saudi Arabia even created an appointed national consultative assembly, albeit with no legislative authority. Scholars published numerous analyses elections, liberalization, the role of women, and the compatibility of Islam and democracy. Scholars coined concepts such as defensive democratization, ¹⁵⁶ adding to the broader political science debates about quasi-democratic political openings, or democracy with adjectives. ¹⁵⁷

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, for example, saw months of massive protests in 1989 that led the king to introduce substantial political reforms: full national elections after a twenty-plus year suspension of parliament, the end of martial law the following year, expanded freedoms of press and speech, and a return to robust multi-party politics. Similarly, during that period, the unlikely and rapid unification of Yemen in 1990 was marked by an immediately flourishing sphere of public political debate and free elections in 1993 in which no party won a majority. ¹⁵⁸ Other political openings across the region sparked both an optimism for real democratic reform along with new trends in scholarly debates.

One prominent contribution to the literature on political liberalization in Middle East during the early 1990s centered around the liberal notion of civil society—the idea that a vibrant and diverse public sphere of non-state organizations was “necessary but insufficient” for democratization. I contributed to these debates as part of the Civil Society in the Middle East Project funded by the Ford Foundation and directed by Augustus Richard Norton and Farhad Kazemi. ¹⁵⁹ Gause was decidedly not a fan of either the concept of civil society or the trend in its study in the Middle East. He was unpersuaded by the argument that a strong and independent civil society meant that democratization was possible, let alone probable. To the project’s directors’ dismay, I was also not persuaded, particularly because the region’s diverse Islamist groups and political parties did not fit well into the liberal framework that drew distinct boundaries between the private and public spheres and between the state and civil society. I eventually explored this puzzle through a comparative study of emerging Islamist political parties in Jordan and Yemen, in which I argued that political inclusion does not necessarily lead to political moderation. ¹⁶⁰ While I deliberately distanced my argument from claims about civil society and democratization, the inclusion-moderation hypothesis subsequently received wide attention in debates about both the possibilities and obstacles to democratic reform in the region. ¹⁶¹

Gause was having none of this democratic optimism. He saw, instead, a variety of authoritarian regimes deftly maneuvering around calls for democratization, whether coming from the people or from foreign regimes and development institutions like the World Bank, USAID, and the United Nations. These regimes, he argued, were merely administering superficial reforms and holding elections to great fanfare without diminishing their power. His skepticism proved justified, as by the end of the 1990s most of those tentative political openings in the region had been either hollowed out or reversed entirely. In Jordan, for example, the king narrowed space for expressing political dissent by introducing changes to the electoral law and press freedoms. In Yemen, Ali Abdullah Salih’s army defeated the still-unmerged southern army to oust the Yemeni Socialist Party from the post-unification coalition government and consolidate the presidency in his control for another two decades. And so went the democratic openings of the 1990s.

In the rearview mirror, those blips of political liberalization seemed to demonstrate that the Arab regimes were, indeed, robust and resilient, as well as adept at using controlled political openings to their advantage. ¹⁶² The literature on authoritarianism resilience in the Middle East flourished for the next decade, and, indeed, became the most prominent theoretical interventions from regional specialists in the broader field of political science. The focus on this powerful research agenda, Gause argues, is why Middle East specialists were so surprised when the Arab uprisings spread so powerfully and rapidly.

Who Missed What?

Yet, scholars of authoritarian resilience were aware, as Gause notes, that the Arab regimes were wildly unpopular. The resilience and stability arguments hinged precisely on the regimes’ staying power in the face of intermittent challenges to their authority and legitimacy, not that such challenges did not exist. Even the periodic larger bursts of dissent did not appear particularly destabilizing for regimes because the latter had been so effective in crushing them. Stability was the norm, punctuated periodically by brief crises that regimes were able to consistently put down.

Scholars of contentious politics, however, were examining these bursts of dissent from another angle, seeing a much wider landscape of near constant dissent across the region spanning a century or more. ¹⁶³ Even resilient authoritarian regimes such as those in Iran, Jordan, and Algeria have hundreds and often thousands of protests a year, seldom large-scale but persistent across a wide range of sectors. Robert Parks’ work on protests in Algeria, for example, documents more than 10,000 small protests annually since he began tracking them around 2011. ¹⁶⁴ Similarly, my work on Jordan documents hundreds and sometimes thousands of protests each year, including routine tactics such as sabotaging major infrastructure and burning police stations and vehicles. ¹⁶⁵ Viewed from this perspective, even the most stable regimes are constantly maneuvering around a range of challenges to their rule. While scholars focused on resilience and stability were surprised that revolutionary mobilization happened at all, scholars of protest and contention were surprised only by the timing—they had long been studying and documenting the conditions of possibility for mass mobilization and resistance. ¹⁶⁶

Indeed, many scholars had been following an escalation of protest activity across the 2000s even as the authoritarian resilience literature flourished. ¹⁶⁷ Substantial scholarship on Egypt examined the Kafiya movement, the April 6 Youth protests, the million-plus labor protests of Mahal al-Kubra and elsewhere, among others. ¹⁶⁸ Even in Tunisia, dissent had been escalating in the 2000s, although few scholars noticed. Laryssa Chomiak’s dissertation, researched prior to its 2010—2011 uprising, examined multiple public protest actions and documented escalating anti-regime chants at football matches attended by high tens of thousands. ¹⁶⁹ Evidence for growing dissent was everywhere, if you were looking. While even we scholars of contentious politics and protest were surprised by the timing and scale of the Arab uprising, we were far less surprised than Gause and the other regime stability scholars that the uprisings happened at all.

Why were we nonetheless surprised by the timing and scale of the protests? Historically, mass uprisings have always been difficult, if not impossible, to predict. “Moments” such as the storming of the Bastille or the Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation are only recognizable as a starting point once revolutionary levels of mobilization have occurred. But why did Bouazizi’s death quickly lead to regional and then nationwide protests, while Tunisia’s two other self-immolations earlier in 2010 went unnoticed? Other similar moments historically have also been difficult to anticipate, and Gause rightly notes that prediction is not a measure of good scholarship.

The field of contentious politics—including substantial literatures on protests and revolutions—simply does not have good theories for what triggers revolutionary mobilization. Through methods such as process tracing, we can understand protest dynamics such as scale shift and the spatial spread of protests, but we have no theories for explaining the so-called “spark.” Even the oft-used concept “tipping point” is more description than theory. Indeed, one analysis of the Iranian Revolution has theorized it as entirely “unthinkable” until the moment it happened. ¹⁷⁰ All of this is to say that even the scholars of contentious politics who were documenting and analyzing the extraordinary and growing levels of dissent across the region could not have predicted the outbreak of the uprisings. The conditions of possibility were clearly there; it was just a matter of when, whether, and how they might be triggered. ¹⁷¹

Arab Collective Identity (A New Kind of Pan-Arabism)

Another factor that played out during the uprisings that was missed by Middle East specialists, Gause argues, was “cross-border Arab identity.” After the death of Egypt’s charismatic President Gamal Abdal Nasser, no Arab leader has been successful in seizing the Arab nationalist “mantle and spark popular Arab movements” despite efforts by the likes of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and others. ¹⁷² Some leaders have made appeals to regional solidarity in terms of Islam, including Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, but Iran gained little mass resonance and won only small pockets of support (often sustained through Iranian financial largess). It might be true that few scholars had focused on Arab collective identity and its mobilizational potential, as there were few signs of it across the region from the 1970s onward. Arabs largely supported Palestinians’ struggles for self-determination, but seemingly little else. Gause was surprised that the seemingly moribund collective Arab identity suddenly reemerged as solidarity for the uprisings evident across the region in 2011.

I would argue, contra Gause’s view of its absence, that this sense of Arab identity began to change in the late 1990s with the launch of Al-Jazeera. Arabs began watching in Arabic a common channel and programming that covered the whole Arab region with a level of journalistic integrity and transparency (except notably Qatar) lacking in the region’s state-owned media outlets. Satellite services had given Arabs access to other state-run channels some years earlier, but Al-Jazeera’s programing was self-consciously regional, and everyone was watching it. In the decade before the Arab uprisings, Al-Jazeera was widely watched and loved across the region, to the great frustration of many authoritarian regimes. Jordan’s King Abdullah, for example, periodically expels Al-Jazeera reporters when he becomes frustrated with their coverage of Jordanian domestic politics.

When the Arab uprisings started in Tunisia in December 2010, Al-Jazeera played a dual role in conveying images and news of the spectacular mobilizations across the region. ¹⁷³ First, it provided serious journalistic coverage of the uprisings for the whole region to follow in real time. People across the region cheered when Tunisia’s President Ben Ali’s regime fell, and they knew that more protests were breaking out across the region seemingly each week. Excitement only grew when first Ben Ali fled Tunisia and then when Mubarak was ousted. So many protests were escalating that Al-Jazeera had to use split-screen coverage for up to four live feeds simultaneously. Everyone was watching, and everything seemed suddenly possible.

Second, particularly in the case of Egypt during the 18 days, Al-Jazeera provided a means of conveying the plans of protesters to Egyptians nationwide. The channel interviewed the “leaders” of various newly formed revolutionary groups, who would describe their upcoming plans for various “Days of Rage” and share stories of police violence that were never covered in the state media. Even in democracies, most media are reluctant to cover the demands and plans of activists, ostensibly because they do not want to be “used” by activists to spread their ideas and advertise their coming actions. As Al-Jazeera reporters in the midst of various encampments gave the microphone to those assembled, the channel unquestionably played a direct role in facilitating nationwide coordination of protest activities. Thus, Al-Jazeera’s Arabic coverage in general, and particularly its coverage of the uprisings also, likely played a major role in the reinvigoration of an Arab collective identity.

Other social media also played a role in the Arab uprisings, but not in the way that some early analyses suggested. Two years earlier, Iran’s Green Movement in 2009 famously was called a Twitter revolution, because the platform afforded Iranians with a means of conveying their actions and plight to Iranians elsewhere in the world. ¹⁷⁴ There is little evidence, however, that Iranians inside Iran used Twitter to coordinate mobilization. Similar early analyses misunderstood the role of Facebook during the Arab uprisings, particularly in Egypt. To be sure, Wael Ghonim’s launch of the “We Are All Khalid Said” Facebook page did provide a platform later used to coordinate activists from different sectors and announce twenty starting locations for the protests on January 25. The savvy organizers of the January 25 protests knew that the government would be monitoring their page, however, and sought to use that to their advantage: they announced the twenty locations across Cairo where the protests would commence but planned at least one other location that the regime would not know (and thus would not send police in advance). ¹⁷⁵ This was no Facebook Revolution, however, as most Egyptians were not even on the platform let alone monitoring that particular page. A better explanation is that numerous existing movements joined the protests in the first few days, and their numbers were quickly dwarfed by Egyptians who joined after seeing on Al-Jazeera images of protesters bravely fighting brutal police, some at the cost of their lives—and having just seen Tunisia’s authoritarian regime fall as a result of mass protests there.

But social media may arguably have played a role in the reinvigoration of Arab collective identity. Particularly after Facebook launched in Arabic in March 2009, users across the region suddenly had an easy means for connecting, monitoring, and sharing with their counterparts in other countries. (Twitter did not launch in Arabic until late 2011.) Egyptian activists made fast use of the platform, but it also gave people across the region access to more intimate debates than they had ever had before. Instagram launched October 2010 (although Arabic not until 2017), and with the growing ubiquity of smartphones during the same period, Arabs suddenly had both the means of connecting across the region and the ability to instantly share, in near real time, news and now images and videos, which they largely posted on YouTube.

Thus, Gause’s observation that the Arab uprisings surprised scholars of the Middle East by demonstrating that “a strong regional identity was still at work” might be qualified. Gause saw the reemergence of that collective identity through solidarity around the uprisings, made possible, in part, by Tunisia’s adopting a core slogan in Modern Standard Arabic that those across the region could readily understand: “al-sha‘ab urid isqat al-nizam!” (The people want the fall of the regime). Indeed, that slogan adopted by Tunisian protesters was chanted during the uprisings across the region, giving the movement a collective identity and not only nationalist tones. But the resonance was not only that it was spoken in Modern Standard Arabic and thus comprehensible to all Arab speakers. The line “the people want” actually comes from a well-known 1933 poem by the Tunisian Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, “The People Want to Live.” Tunisians learn the poem in school, but it appears across the region in textbooks, what Elliott Colla describes as “a source of deep cultural resonance across the Arab world, especially whenever struggle could be imagined in existentialist terms.” ¹⁷⁶ The slogan united people across the region in a common struggle, but it built on a collective Arab identity that had already been reinvigorated by Al-Jazeera and then the spread of smartphones and social media in Arabic. That new collective Arab project—what the people want—was not the work of a charismatic Arab leader akin to Nasser, but rather a grass-roots people-power movement calling for the fall of authoritarian regimes.

Conclusion

Gause is primarily a scholar of international (and regional) relations, although he has always been more attentive to domestic political developments and dynamics than many IR scholars. ¹⁷⁷ States are still primary actors in most IR analyses, however, notwithstanding the rise of revolutionary mobilizations, global corporations, and international organizations. One cannot fault any scholar of politics for focusing on regimes, given that some 200 of them collectively structure the lives of 8 billion people. Those 8 billion people, however, embody extraordinary political potential and should not be overlooked even when regimes seem adept at silencing them. Although the Arab uprisings appeared to many scholars to be brief challenges to state power that were quickly crushed or reversed, a focused look at protest globally shows that crisis in the form of stubborn resistance and struggle for human justice is the real state of the world. Regimes must constantly work to maintain their power and discredit challengers because resistance is also near constant, even if the media refuse to cover it (as is the case in democratic regimes as well). I would hope for more scholars to reflect on how their analyses of state power and regime stability can do their own kind of political work by advancing images of stable regimes and weak challengers. These images are precisely the ones that regimes work to project. The people struggling for justice, their lives, and their future do not deserve to be silenced by scholarly analyses of regime stability. Knowledge production comes with ethical responsibilities, even as we aim for empirically rigorous analyses. The people want…to be heard.

“Apologia pro Scriptis Suis: A Response to My Friends and Colleagues”

F. Gregory Gause III

Texas A&M University

ORCID: 0000-0001-5147-2778

Abstract

In responding to the colleagues and friends who contributed to this roundtable, the author emphasized some enduring elements in his work over the past four decades in three areas: regional international relations, monarchy as a regional regime type, and public policy debates on American foreign policy in the Middle East. He stressed the continuing importance of a number of analytical factors in understanding Middle Eastern politics: a) the centrality of domestic politics and regime security considerations on regional international outcomes, b) the impact of trans-state identities on threat perceptions and regional alliances; c) the need to see Middle Eastern monarchies not as some extension of a “traditional” past but as skillful political entrepreneurs in profoundly changed domestic and regional settings. He also responded to challenges to his views of American foreign policy in the region.

Keywords

alliance – monarchy – Middle East – oil – identity – regime security

I am humbled and grateful to my friends and colleagues who gave their time and applied their intellectual efforts to the articles in this collection. It is a great honor to be able to read their reflections on my work and to respond to them.

I chose a pompous Latin title for my response in homage to John Henry Newman, the 19^th century English Catholic priest and theologian, a convert from Anglicanism who was canonized a saint by the Vatican in 2019. He spent his entire adult life either in a university setting (Oxford) or connected to higher education projects (a founder and rector of what became University College, Dublin). He achieved renown, and notoriety in some circles, purely for his intellectual production. His best-known book was Apologia pro Vita Sua, an autobiography that was hardly an apology, but rather a defense of the twists and turns of his spiritual and intellectual life. ¹⁷⁹ I am no saint, and hardly the equal of Newman as an intellect, but I have always admired his forthrightness and willingness to examine how his own beliefs changed over the course of his life. In this defense of my writings (not my life), I hope to be as honest as he was.

My views on how politics works in the Middle East have certainly changed over the 40-some years I have been engaged in the study of the region. However, there are first principles that have informed my work, identified by my colleagues in their contributions to this collection, that have been consistent guideposts to my analysis. In terms of the international politics of the region, I remain convinced of the absolute necessity of understanding domestic politics to explain foreign policy and international outcomes, the need to bridge the gap between the academic subfields of comparative politics and international relations. This is particularly true given the centrality that regime security has for foreign policy making in the region. A second consistent theme for me is the importance of trans-state ideologies — Arab nationalism, Islamism in its various forms, Palestinian nationalism, Kurdish nationalism, Yemeni nationalism, among others — in explaining conflict and alliance patterns. These ideological platforms have challenged rulers at home and served as important tools in the hands of ambitious leaders for mobilizing support across borders.

While I have focused primarily on regional international relations, I also have published in the field of comparative politics, concentrating on the politics of the oil monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula. In this area, I have tried to push back on two widely-held (at least when I started in the field) beliefs. First, that monarchy is a “traditional” regime type whose days are numbered. ¹⁸⁰ I found the Gulf monarchies to be polities undergoing an enormous amount of social and economic change, hardly “traditional” in terms of the lives of their citizens. I was drawn to the puzzle of how these regimes managed these changes and stayed in power, when so many of their fellow monarchs in the region had fallen. Second, what at the time was the conventional wisdom that great oil wealth tended to weaken state capacity, since states no longer needed to tax their populations, and thus produced regimes that were subject to instability and overthrow. ¹⁸¹ I saw the Gulf monarchies using their oil wealth to strengthen their ability to surveille, repress, and provide for their citizens, a combination of carrots and sticks that has kept them in power for decades.

Finally, I have been fortunate enough to be able to write for public policy audiences, beyond the confines of the ivory tower, to explain and, in a best-case scenario, influence American policy in the Middle East. That latter goal was probably never realized, but I kept taking swings at it. In those publications, I put myself in the shoes of American policy-makers, trying to understand what drove their decisions and how I could, within the confines of the American political debate and practical choices, propose what I saw as better policies. Some of my academic friends and colleagues disagreed that an academic should set those kinds of limits on his policy discourse, preferring to speak unvarnished truth to power. Good for them, but I chose a different approach.

I divide my response to my colleagues into those three categories: regional international relations, monarchical resilience, and policy analysis/advocacy.

Regional International Relations

All of the colleagues who reflected on publications in the area of regional international relations emphasized the two guideposts I described above: the nexus of domestic politics and foreign policy and the role of trans-state ideologies in affecting threat perceptions and alliance choices. Fred Lawson and I are contemporaries, two of the few people at the time we got our doctorates who studied the Middle East with an international relations sub-field specialty rather than the more common comparative politics path. He and I have been in dialogue, and at times friendly disagreement, for almost four decades. In his reflection on two of my early articles, he captured the importance I placed on the development of state institutions in the Arab world to explain both the stability of Arab regimes in the wake of the Iranian Revolution and the conflicts and alliances that arose from that region-changing event. ¹⁸²

I contrasted the domestic upheavals suffered by Arab states during the Pan-Arab period of the late 1940’s through the late 1960’s to the stability of the regimes explicitly targeted by the new Islamic Republic of Iran — Baʿthist Iraq and the Gulf monarchies. The difference, for me, was not in the explanations current at the time, such as the Shiʿa uniqueness of the Iranian revolution (not a barrier to Shiʿa majority Arab states like Iraq and Bahrain) or its Persian uniqueness before a largely Arab region (there were plenty of reverberations of the revolution throughout the Middle East). The difference was that these Arab states, institutionally and infrastructurally weak in that earlier period, had developed the capacity to better control potential opposition and vest the interests of more of their citizens in the regime, thus making the appeal of foreign calls to revolt based on transnational Islamic loyalties less effective than the similar Arab nationalist appeals of that earlier period. Oil money certainly played a role in that institutional development, but even non-oil states like Jordan and Syria were also able to use their security forces and their increasing control over their state’s economies to fend off challenges based on Islamist (in Syria) and Palestinian nationalist (in Jordan) challenges.

Lawson also noted something that had not crossed my mind at the time. In emphasizing the centrality of threat and rivalry generated by the transnational appeal presented by revolutionary Iran, I implicitly was arguing that international relations scholars could identify regions not by the things that brought states together, like the integrationist trend in Europe, but by agendas of conflict that made them concentrate their fire (literally and figuratively) on each other. In the case of the Middle East, that was not just limited to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

One of those transnational axes of conflict that came to dominate much of the analysis of Middle Eastern international relations after the Arab Uprisings of 2010-11 was sectarianism. Depictions of regional conflict driven by sectarian animosity between ShiÊ¿a and Sunni states and communities were common. ¹⁸³ Some analysts attributed the rise in sectarianism to the machinations of Iran and Saudi Arabia, using sectarian identity to play out their balance of power struggle for regional dominance. ¹⁸⁴ My friend and colleague Morten ValbjÇ¿rn, who has contributed so much to our understanding of the issue of sectarianism in regional international relations, chose to reflect on my effort to push back against the emphasis on sectarianism in explaining post-Arab Uprisings regional international relations.

ValbjÇ¿rn correctly identified my effort to take a middle path in the sectarianism debate. ¹⁸⁵ For me, regional rivalries in a multipolar regional subsystem are always present. I did not think that Saudi Arabia and Iran were driven by their sectarian identities to be rivals. Rather, I saw them reacting to classic balance of power dynamics, with Iran taking advantage of state weakness and/or collapse in countries with substantial ShiÊ¿a populations (Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Syria) to increase its influence and Saudi Arabia attempting to balance growing Iranian power. In that sense, ValbjÇ¿rn correctly identifies me as comfortably situated in the “neo-classical realist” camp among scholars of international relations, privileging balance of power dynamics but bringing in domestic political factors to offer more complete explanations. ¹⁸⁶

However, I could not deny that sectarianism was playing an important part in regional political dynamics. People were being killed over it. My contention was that the salience of sectarian identity grew as states were no longer able to provide the basics of communal life, first and foremost physical security. In societies where sectarianism had been an important part of social identity, it was natural for people to seek that security among their fellow sectarians and to seek assistance in their fight for survival in domestic civil wars from fellow sectarians abroad. Saudi Arabia and Iran (and others, including Turkey, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates) responded to and took advantage of these requests, but did not create them.

I argued that we saw very similar dynamics in places like Libya and the Palestinian community that were not characterized by sectarian divisions. Populations there, in the face of state collapse and weakness, organized around region, tribe, and ideology, fought each other for political control domestically and invited foreign parties to aid them. Hamas was very happy to take support from Shiʿa Iran. Libyans were all Sunnis but fought each other and took support from an array of regional and international actors. It was not sectarianism driving regional conflict; it was the collapse of state authority.

Valbjǿrn also identified what I thought was an under-appreciated element of the post-Arab Uprisings regional conflict picture. Sunni states and non-state actors were not allying with each other in the face of the putative Shiʿa threat posed by Iran and its allies. In fact, they were as worried about each other as they were about Iran. Turkey and Saudi Arabia represented very different ideas about how Islam should play into politics in Sunni states. Turkish leader Recep Tayyib Erdogan led a populist Sunni party that came to power through elections and saw the Muslim Brotherhood elements in the Arab Uprisings as natural allies. The Saudis regarded this kind of bottom-up mobilizational Sunni politics as threatening to their regime. They backed anti-Muslim Brotherhood actors, like the Egyptian coup leader Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi. Ankara and Riyadh found it impossible to cooperate in the Syrian civil war, although both of them wanted the Iranian-supported Assad regime to fall. Adding the most important Sunni non-state actors, the Salafi jihadist groups al-Qaeda and ISIS, to the mix further complicated the Sunni political map. The Salafi jihadists hated both the Turkish and the Saudi regimes. If regional international politics was truly a sectarian battle, the Sunnis did not have their act together.

ValbjÇ¿rn recognized that I was arguing that not only was the Middle East a multipolar regional power structure, but it was also a multipolar ideological structure, with a number of transnational platforms competing for the loyalty of the people of the region and political power. Responding to the work of Mark Haas, ¹⁸⁷ I further developed the implications of ideological multipolarity in a later article. ¹⁸⁸

The importance of transnational ideologies in alliance formation in the Middle East was the theme of the articles chosen by my friends and colleagues Curtis Ryan and May Darwich in this collection. Darwich identified the importance of considering both ideational threats and material threats that I stressed in assessing how Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan picked sides in the Iran-Iraq and Iraq-U.S. conflict axes from the 1970’s through the Gulf War of 1990-91. ¹⁸⁹ The puzzle I addressed in a preliminary way in that article was how states prioritize among threats when they live in an environment of multiple kinds of threats emanating from different sources. I found that these three states saw ideational threats to their domestic regime security as, at times, even more threatening than classic material power threats in their prioritization of threat and their choice of balancing strategies. Darwich has refined and developed that basic insight in her own work to a greater extent than I did. ¹⁹⁰

Ryan chose to react to an article where I emphasized the importance of ideological differences in explaining why alliances that one might anticipate being formed from a material power standpoint might not come together. ¹⁹¹ The puzzle, for me, which I referenced above in the sectarianism discussion, was why we did not see a regional alliance of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel against the growth of Iranian power in the post-Arab Uprisings Middle East. Iran (up to the setbacks it has experienced since the Gaza War began in October 2023) was clearly the regional winner from the upheavals that preceded and followed the 2010-11 uprisings. Its ally, Hizballah, had established itself as the dominant force in Lebanese politics. The Assad regime, allied to Tehran since the early 1980’s, seemed (with Iranian and Russian help) to be fending off its domestic opponents in the Syrian civil war. Iran’s allies and proxies in Iraq played the dominant role in politics there since the American invasion of 2003. The ISIS campaign against Mosul and Baghdad in 2014 magnified the importance of Iranian-supported militias in Iraqi politics. The emergence of the Houthis as a major player in Yemeni politics with the fall of the Ali Abdallah Salih regime in 2012 gave Tehran another opening to influence politics in yet another Arab state. Hamas’ close relationship with Iran, based not on sectarian affiliation but on their shared antipathy to Israel, gave Tehran a foothold in Palestinian politics and a counter to the argument that it was simply exacerbating sectarian tensions with its aggressive regional policies.

From a Realist theoretical perspective, this looked like a case of what Randall Schweller identified as “under-balancing,” the counter-intuitive inability of states facing a common threat to ally against it. ¹⁹² Of course, the inability of Arab states in the past, when facing threats from fellow Arabs like Gamal Abd al-Nasir, to openly ally with Israel against their common enemy has been much commented upon but under-theorized. The absence of an anti-Iranian regional alliance in the post-Arab Uprisings period was even more puzzling, given that Israel and Turkey had formal diplomatic relations and that the taboo against Arab dealings with Israel was much attenuated. Not surprisingly, I found the answer in the differences among these states’ own ideological positions — the already discussed incompatible views of how Sunni Islam related to politics between Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the populist Islamist negative stance toward Israel that characterized Erdogan’s statecraft, and the remnants of the Arab taboo against open alliance with Israel that affected cautious Saudi decision-makers, at least up to the rise of Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman. Ryan takes the insights from this article, along with those of other scholars and his own work in this vein, to advance this kind of analysis in examining the regional repercussions of the Gaza War and the collapse of Iran’s regional strategy.

Monarchical Resilience

Lisa Anderson engaged with my work on monarchy in the Middle East. ¹⁹³ Anderson has known me longer than any of the other contributors. I was her student in the Ph.D. program at Harvard and then her junior colleague at Columbia University for eight years. She has been a mentor and a friend for decades, and thus very well positioned to see my interest in monarchy as part of a fundamentally conservative view of politics and life in general. She and I have both sought explanations for the unique monarchical resilience that characterizes the Middle East outside of the conventional tropes of “tradition,” tribalism, and Islam. We were not convinced by these broadly cultural explanations. As many monarchies in the region have fallen as have survived. Libyans and Iraqis, when confronted in the 21^st century with the need to reconstitute their polities, did not give the restoration of their fallen monarchies a second thought. Anderson’s initial take on the question was that monarchy was a well-suited regime type to the tasks of state-building confronting all the post-colonial states of the Middle East. I found that answer unsatisfying, as there were plenty of other such models, as the post-monarchical regimes in Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and Iran demonstrated. My answer was that the remaining monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula shared two characteristics that allowed them to fight off domestic and external challengers: oil money and great power protection.

Anderson correctly noted that my reliance on what are essentially “external” factors of international politics and economics to explain regime resilience of the Arabian Peninsula monarchies ran somewhat counter to my concentration on domestic political history and economy in my book on the “oil monarchies.” ¹⁹⁴ A fair point, but one that can be explained by Anderson’s initial reflection on what she accurately terms my “conservative” epistemology. In the book, I was looking not to explain the resilience of monarchy in general, but the resilience of these specific monarchies. Historical specificities, rentier political economy, and foreign protection all play a role, with appropriate shades of nuance and difference, in understanding how the six Arabian Peninsula monarchies have held it together. The fact that this specific mix of factors cannot account for the longevity of the Jordanian and Moroccan monarchies was not germane.

Anderson is a most perceptive reader, noting that in the work I did (some on my own, some with Sean Yom) in the post-Arab Uprisings period to explain monarchical stability, I did bring back in domestic factors. Once again, I was counter-punching against explanations for the stability of the monarchical regimes in the Arab world while so many of their republican neighbors were falling that relied on cultural tropes of Islam and “tradition.” While not ignoring the factors I had emphasized in early work — oil money and foreign allies — I recognized that the ability of a monarch to distance himself from the day to day decisions of his ministers, fire them when popular discontent rises, and even make constitutional concessions to an elected legislature gave the Jordanian and Moroccan monarchs a flexibility of maneuver that republican autocrats like Qaddafi, Mubarak, and Ben Ali lacked. Anderson wondered, if the formula for monarchical survival was some combination of oil money, foreign help, and skillful use of institutional flexibility, why was monarchy different from other regime types? My only response is that this mix was essential for these monarchies at this time of crisis — back to conservative epistemology. The fact that Lisa Anderson and I are converging in our understanding of monarchical resilience in the Middle East gives me some hope that I might be getting closer to an answer to this puzzle.

Policy Work

I was fortunate to be able to publish a number of policy-related articles in Foreign Affairs, the quintessential outlet of the American foreign policy establishment. The editors insist on policy recommendations, so writing there is a normative as much as an analytical endeavor. My publications in that outlet are where my fundamentally conservative orientation is most clearly evident. ¹⁹⁵ My friends and colleagues Jillian Schwedler and Marc Lynch chose to reflect on pieces that I wrote for Foreign Affairs. I respect and treasure both of them. However, we tend to differ in our politics, so my responses here will get away from the ivory tower, to some extent, and into the mud of political debate.

Schwedler assessed my effort to account for the fact that very few of us who study Middle Eastern politics predicted the upheavals and regime collapses of the Arab Uprisings of 2010-11. ¹⁹⁶ I grounded my forensic account of my analytical failure in an effort, shared by a number of colleagues in the field, during the 2000’s to explain the longevity of Arab regimes. ¹⁹⁷ Arab regime change from the 1940’s through the 1960’s was a frequent occurrence. However, from the 1970’s there was remarkable regime stability in the Arab world (with some exceptions, like Lebanon). The military regime in Egypt from 1952, the BaÊ¿thist regimes in Syria (from 1970) and Iraq (from 1968), Qaddafi in Libya from 1969, the Bourguiba/Ben Ali regime in Tunisia from independence in 1956. The surviving monarchies in 1970 are, as discussed above, still surviving today. Explaining that “new” regime stability diverted my attention from the mounting problems many of the Arab regimes were facing and left me unprepared to anticipate the popular mobilizations of the Arab Uprisings.

Schwedler provides a more detailed and concise account of the intellectual turns in our study of Arab politics. She rightly takes me to task for not discussing the trend in the 1990’s of emphasizing Arab “civil society” as a window into possible democratizing pressures. I was, as she points out, a loud skeptic of the civil society project and of the search for the seeds of democracy in the region that it represented. ¹⁹⁸ She, too, ended up moving away from the more optimistic interpretations of her colleagues studying regional civil society. Her move from civil society was not to accounting for authoritarian stability, but rather to a focus on regional protest movements and popular mobilizations. ¹⁹⁹ While acknowledging that she and others who pursued this area of study were also surprised at the Uprisings of 2010-11, her focus on politics from below positioned her to better understand (or at least be less surprised by) these events than I was.

She is right, of course. My conservative starting point leads me to ask why in some cases the old order, or at least elements of it, have come back to power after the dramatic mobilizations of the period (Tunisia, Egypt) and why, in other places, we have not seen more participatory and democratic politics but rather civil war (Libya, Syria, Yemen). Schwedler and I are agreed that protest and mobilization do not, of necessity, lead to democracy. We are also agreed that, whether one starts from a more progressive or a more conservative epistemological stance, we need to remain both open to evidence and humble about our conclusions. No doubt, events in the region will continue to surprise all of us going forward.

My friend Marc Lynch and I are more directly opposed in our recommendations for American policy in the Middle East. Lynch chose to react to a recent article of mine in Foreign Affairs that counsels Washington to support stable regimes, even if they are authoritarian opponents of human rights and democracy, and to avoid policies that might weaken or seek to replace such regimes. ²⁰⁰ He questions whether it is wise to support regimes that do not provide for the political and economic aspirations of their citizens, which will certainly be unstable down the line. For Lynch, the mobilizations of 2010-11 have not ended. It would be better for the United States to support popular calls for voice and accountability in Middle Eastern states and pressure their rulers to respond to such calls.

I find my friend’s critique impractical in the extreme. The business of diplomacy is dealing with states and non-state actors that want to be states (in the Middle East, Palestinians and Kurds). Lynch would have Washington eschew the normal business of diplomacy in favor of agendas of pressure on friendly, if less-than-democratic, states. More direct pressure for regime reform on unfriendly states has generally failed, as years of sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Assad regime in Syria, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq demonstrate. ²⁰¹ So Lynch’s focus by necessity is on governments like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, where American leverage might find some purchase. Prioritizing domestic reform agendas, however, comes at a cost. These regimes are primarily concerned with staying in power. If it looks like the United States is pushing them to give up power, even to a minor degree, it is highly unlikely that they will play along with any part of the American diplomatic agenda, regarding oil policies, Israel, military access, trade, and a whole range of practical American interests. In effect, he is asking American policy-makers to give up the influence they have on Middle Eastern governments in the hopes that eventually they will either see the light and reform or be replaced by rulers who are more accountable to their populations. That could take a very, very long time.

A deliberately hostile reading of Lynch’s critique could lead one to think that he supports regime change as an American policy in the region. I know that not to be true, as he and I have both opposed American regime change policies in the past. However, the line between using American power to reform existing regimes and to replace them is a fine one. I am not confident that Washington could successfully walk that line. I am surprised that Lynch downplays America’s regime change agenda in his contribution. He argues that the policies I advocate of dealing with existing regimes are the norm among past administrations, with only “brief exceptions.” Those “brief exceptions” have, however, been bipartisan and extremely consequential, and not in a good way. During the brief Israel-Iran War of 2025, joined at the end by the United States itself in bombing Iranian nuclear sites, the prospect of regime change in Iran was actively discussed in American policy and media circles, including by President Trump himself. ²⁰² The temptation of regime change remains more than present in Washington. I argue that American policy should be about state-building, not state-destroying, which past regime change efforts have caused. Lynch can try to have it both ways, being against “bad” regime change, but in favor of a hypothesized “good” regime reform. I prefer that the United States stay out of that business altogether.

In lieu of a conclusion

I am extremely grateful to all the contributors in this collection. Even when they disagreed with me, they took my work seriously and engaged in the kind of productive and collegial critique that can be a model for all of us. It has been an honor to respond to their contributions and I look forward to years of fruitful exchange with all of them going forward.