Middle East: Fire and Powder

The political and electoral promises of President Donald Trump have evaporated, particularly in the realm of foreign policy, and the glittering headlines about ending wars have come to nothing — he who boasted, upon his election, of bringing “eight wars” to a close — while in return he has ignited two new ones, in Venezuela and Iran, and is now seriously threatening to make Cuba his third. The arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro did unfold without triggering any notable domestic reaction, as the regime abandoned its own leader and adapted with considerable pragmatism to American pressure, but the situation with Iran is an altogether different matter.

Events on the ground have belied American and Israeli expectations, for it quickly became clear that eliminating the head of the regime, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with several senior commanders, had not caused the Revolutionary Guards to lose their grip on the country or loosen their iron hold over it. The bet on a popular uprising erupting from within Iran the moment war broke out has also proved a failure, for while a considerable segment of Iranian public opinion harbors genuine hostility toward the regime, it has no desire to ride the American wave.

The role played by the United States and its CIA in overthrowing the Mossadegh government in the coup of 1953 remains deeply embedded in Iranian popular and collective memory, having likely entrenched the conviction that relying on the Americans cannot succeed or contribute to real change, especially since Trump himself has no genuine interest in political transformation for reformist reasons, but exclusively on the basis of self-interest. The American administration would have had no difficulty dealing with a new Supreme Leader had he shown the flexibility Washington expected, and it would not then have concerned itself in the least with the Iranian people’s aspirations for freedom, democracy, and human rights.

The Venezuelan example remains vivid: Trump sidelined the opposition leader even after she had sought to flatter him by nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize, apparently believing that lending her name to the world’s most prestigious award might increase her standing in his eyes. He simply ignored the gesture and continued working with the very pillars of the Maduro regime, which he keeps in a cell at the federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York, while securing what he wanted on the oil front. The Venezuelan people’s dreams of change have accordingly crumbled as well.

Trump is now threatening Cuba, the island that has unsettled Washington for decades and long served as a thorn in its side, and appears determined to sweep away all the efforts at engagement and reconciliation undertaken by his predecessor Barack Obama to turn the page on the past, opening a new front against it instead. This confirms Washington’s indifference to the most elementary principles of international conduct and to any obligation to act through the United Nations. More than that, a clear drive is underway to undermine and weaken the international order built after the Second World War, of which the “Peace Council” (still faltering) established in the wake of the Gaza war is but one telling illustration.

But who says that Washington’s disregard for the real interests of peoples actually serves its own? And who says that reinforcing its alliances with most of the dictatorial regimes in the Middle East and beyond serves them either? It is true that democratic systems do not come into being overnight, and it is true that democracy imported from the West may not take root in every society, but it is equally true that the repression of peoples invariably produces, at one point or another, a political and social explosion.

If the experience of the Arab revolutions ended in painful outcomes, it did so because of complex circumstances, some related to the seizure of the revolution by regimes themselves (Syria being the clearest example), others to the inability of the revolutionary forces to organize, an inability itself attributable to the fact that dictatorial authorities had tamed their societies and drained them of the elites capable of leading a project of change. None of this, however, justifies the West’s retreat toward a policy of rehabilitating existing regimes or replacing them with others no less repressive than those they displaced.

As for the Middle East, the question no longer concerns solely the nature of the political societies of the Arab region, but also Israel’s relentless pursuit of war, and, something new, its success in dragging the United States along into its multi-front conflicts, even when no real threat to American national security exists, contrary to what Israel works hard to sell. The latest of these wars is the one waged against Iran, which has itself not refrained from harming its neighbors in the Arab Gulf states, something that will make future coexistence a lasting challenge.

This Israeli insistence on averting its gaze from any idea of peace, indeed on destroying it through wars and occupations, will have profoundly negative repercussions across the entire region for generations to come. On the Palestinian front, Israel does not content itself with destroying Gaza and bombing it daily even after the ceasefire (reaching a terrifying number of martyrs approaching 75,000!); it also pounces on the West Bank, planting settlements there that definitively foreclose any peaceful solution and bury the historic two-state project, which will never see the light of day if Israel persists in its regional policies.

This policy of imposing facts on the ground is one Israel applies equally in southern Lebanon and southern Syria, portions of which it has occupied following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, in addition, of course, to its occupation of the Syrian Golan since 1967, a territory it refuses to relinquish and has formally annexed, with no intention of reversing that annexation.

Unless the region manages to hold Israel to firm rules, including sustained pressure to abandon the policy of permanent and rolling wars and a genuine recognition of the Palestinian people’s legitimate rights, Israel will not be able to sustain its occupation project indefinitely. The Abraham Accords have shown that they did not defuse tensions in the region, on the contrary they exacerbated them, and that they did not provide Israel with the security it pursues from one war to the next.

The smell of fire and gunpowder fills the Middle East, and new approaches as well as new policies are now inescapable.