The fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria shows that no country in the Middle East has a predictable future.
Almost all of them lack sustainable models of governance which could lend them political stability without resorting to excessive force.
The contours of the emerging Middle East in 2025 do not look very bright. Whether or not there is a domino effect of the fall of Assad, the ground exists in most Arab countries for disruptive crises.
The Gaza war has temporarily allowed Israel to grab more Palestinian land. However, it has also strengthened anti-regime sentiments in the region, for being mute spectators to the taking down of Syria, one of the most important countries in the region.
The external powers, the United States and Russia have already seen the limits of their unpopular interventions.
The Islamist political forces expelled from Egypt and the Gulf now have a ‘homeland’ in Syria. This is no less than a political earthquake in the region, which was relentlessly purging the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies.
The Arab governments are left with fewer choices and limited time to speed up political and economic reforms to calm down their unemployed, excluded and angry youth.
Collateral damage of Assad’s fall
The events that took place in 2024 in the Middle East would have normally taken decades to come about.
With iron-clad Western support, Israel’s occupation of Palestine has effectively neutralized any possibility of a two-state solution.
The Israeli occupation was a work in progress, but the abrupt departure of the Assad regime came as a bombshell to the region’s ongoing model of stability and continuity.
The region makes for the most complex geopolitics in the world, thanks to its being the battleground of three of the world’s major civilizations and their modern avatars, i.e. Islamism, Zionism and the Crusade (meaning the West).
The term “Middle East” was needed once the British and French colonial order was installed in the region, replacing the moribund Ottoman provincial system after the First World War. New boundaries were drawn, new identities imagined and new states propped up to form a unique regional order called the Middle East.
While many post-colonial states in Asia and Africa gradually joined what the West says is a democratic, secular, globalized international order, the Middle East had to perform a bigger duty: ensuring an uninterrupted energy supply to the world.
The interruptions, however, never came from outside; it was always internal forces that challenged the local dictators. From the East to the West, the industrialized and newly industrialized countries sacrificed democracy in the Middle East for stability and energy supply.
Despite wars, rebellions, economic crises, and waves of terrorism, the region resisted the change and transformation towards democratic and inclusive governance. It continues to be governed by an unelected tribal, military or sectarian minority.
Stability trumps change
Experts call it the Middle Eastern exceptionalism, which supposes that the region has effectively resisted every wave of change and democratic transformation. The resilience and stability of the authoritarian regimes in the region have always surprised scholars.
Policymakers in the West define the Middle East primarily in the context of the security of energy supply and maritime routes, keeping the stability of the regimes there as their top priority. This leads to defining all anti-regime voices as terrorism and reducing regional politics to a battle between radicalism and stability.
Robert Kaplan, the renowned scholar of geopolitics, traced the problem back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. To him, “an adequate solution to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire” has not yet been found.
The real successor(s) to the Ottoman Empire should have established a state system where state-society relations were based on a sustainable social contract. Instead, the successor states relied heavily on rents and the use of the big stick to buy legitimacy and loyalty. In this endeavor, they received military support from their major energy buyers, the US and Europe.
The region faces the challenge of a widening gap between social aspirations and political systems.
As of now, the region is unprepared and unequipped for the changes and opportunities that the global economy and the fourth industrial revolution have brought to many developing countries.
For example, the post-Arab Spring nations, Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria have the lowest numbers of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) graduates, according to a World Economic Forum report.
The winds of global change, however, will not leave the Middle East unaffected.
Changing global interests
As the US is no longer dependent on Persian Gulf oil -- the Asian economies are the new customers -- it has little incentive left in ensuring regional security except for Israel. The US and the Gulf nations have been in discussions to find a new mechanism, preferably through the Abraham Accords, which will ensure Arab recognition of Israel without allowing a Palestinian state.
The regional economy is in search of non-oil sectors as oil revenues have stagnated.
The efforts to diversify the region’s economy requires rationalizing its governance by welcoming market logic and youth participation in a competitive market. The older model of securing legitimacy and loyalty by distributing rents and promoting sectarian religiosity is no longer tenable.
The Gulf nations are trying to reduce the number of immigrant workers by imposing new taxes and localizing the workforce. As a result, remittances from Arab immigrants working in the Gulf nations are either declining or have been stagnant for some time. According to the World Bank, “remittances to the Middle East and North Africa fell by 3.8% to $64 billion in 2022 after posting strong growth of 12.2% in 2021.” The decline of remittances, for example, can deepen the economic crisis in Sudan, Egypt and Jordan.
The changing political economy of the Gulf countries, the declining American dependency on Gulf energy, and consequently, America’s declining interests in the Gulf’s security require the region to look beyond its traditional security mechanism and find alternatives. This is where China, India, and Russia and their economic groups – the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS – have found a new interest in the region.
In a rapidly changing political economy, with popular social media as the only available political space, violence and radicalism may become the new and dangerous expressions of the deepening mistrust between the state and society.
(The author teaches International Relations at Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University, Turkey. This article was originally published under Creative Commons by 360info)
