Toward a Sunni NATO?

It all goes back to 1998 — May 30 to be precise, the date on which Pakistan conducted its last nuclear test in the sands of Kharan, in Balochistan. The program, from the bomb to its entire development chain, had been financed by Saudi Arabia, with American and Israeli approval. Both capitals had consented to Islamabad joining the nuclear club in order to establish a strategic counterweight in the India-China-Pakistan triangle, at a time when Beijing and New Delhi had already crossed the threshold of nuclear armament.

It was then that speculation multiplied around Iran's intention to develop a military nuclear program under civilian cover — a prospect that Tel Aviv and Washington deemed unacceptable. The Pakistani bomb, Sunni, was meant to impose a balance in the Far East; an Iranian bomb, Shia, would create an unprecedented balance of power in the Middle East, a region where Israel considers itself the foremost strategic actor. The directive imposed itself: Iran could not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. Tehran, for its part, never ceased to reaffirm the peaceful nature of its ambitions, with no military objectives in this domain.

The question of a "Sunni NATO" resurfaces today with renewed insistence, in the wake of the Sharm el-Sheikh Peace Summit, where some one billion three hundred million Muslims gathered to proclaim the end of armed conflict with Israel, in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state. This dynamic was part of the initiative launched by Donald Trump in the aftermath of the Gaza war — an initiative conceived in several phases, the first of which was to be the cessation of hostilities, before a civilian government could be established in Gaza. The process stalled there, unable to move beyond this first stage.

A conviction then took hold, within the Saudi Kingdom in particular and the Sunni world in general: that Trump and the Israeli right do not genuinely desire the emergence of a Palestinian state, that the latter had convinced the American president not to go too far in his concessions to the Islamic states of the region, for fear that they would impose their conditions in the future — and that striking Iran remains the real priority.

Internal tensions within the Republican administration are also visible on the question of the role the Gulf states might be entitled to play in the region. Trump and part of his inner circle were unsettled by the agreement Mohammed bin Salman reached with the Houthis in Yanbu without informing Washington; and then by his trip to Beijing, under the Biden presidency, which had resulted in an Iranian-Saudi rapprochement under Chinese auspices. Today, the crown prince and the Sunni actors of the region — joined by Egypt and Turkey — seek an end to the fighting and find in J. D. Vance, and in the Republicans who support him, allies committed to this cause.

The idea of a Sunni NATO is therefore not without substance: it could pave the way for a degree of regional balance once the war is extinguished. If the Sunnis fare well in the region, the region as a whole will fare well. In the period preceding the Assad family, the Syrian Sunni bourgeoisie had brought Fares al-Khoury, a Lebanese from Kafr, to the presidency of the Damascus government; and Chawkat Choucair, father of Ayman Choucair, the Druze from Arsoun in Mount Lebanon, had been appointed chief of staff of the Syrian army. And of course, if the Christians — and with them the Shia of Mohammad Hussein Shamseddine's movement — fare well too, it is the entire region, and Lebanon with it, that will fare well also.