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This dismal election means that the UK now only has one choice in the Middle East

Any new government will have to indulge in a face-saving mission, rather than building a proper new strategy

Ahmed Aboudouh
Thursday 12 December 2019 16:01 GMT
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Jeremy Corbyn, left, and Boris Johnson
Jeremy Corbyn, left, and Boris Johnson

In August 2013, during an intense standoff in the Foreign Office in London, Ashraf el-Kholy​, then Egyptian ambassador to the UK, summed up the British fiasco in the Middle East. He suggesting to one of the British high officials that “Her Majesty’s government is risking another Suez crisis” in the region.

This meeting which included then-minister Alistair Burt, according to sources, had happened after what had been seen in Cairo as a British attempt to undermine the new Egyptian government’s legitimacy, following the storming of Rabaa square. That was where Muslim Brotherhood protesters had gathered - leading to hundreds of deaths.

The new “Suez crisis” was brewing, and the British decline in influence in North Africa and the Middle East was only going to get worse.

The UK's role is not something a new government can ignore. It is a problem for all. Assuming that the US abdicating its security role in the region comes down to President Donald Trump’s miscalculation is itself a distortion of the proposition. The US is living its own “Suez crisis” too.

Washington politicians on both sides of the party divide are dealing with a president that does not know what it wants, apart from following a contentious policy of supporting Israel, come what may.

Enoch Powell was right to warn the former British prime minister Anthony Eden after the Second World War that: “In the Middle East our greatest enemies are the Americans.” But this is not solely down to the US need for new leadership across the region in the post-war years. it’s also because of the UK’s diminishing power and lack of strategy.

Amid the uprisings shaking all the norms in the region, and with Islamism (especially the Iranian version) keeping a hold on parts of the region, both Washington and London are ready to stick to what they know well: authoritarianism. Whatever government that comes out of the UK election, it will have to face American short-termism in the Middle East. Its one new vision towards the region: backing up and leaving.

This American behaviour, which dates back to the Obama administration and will continue whoever the next president will be, led to a serious rift across the Atlantic. The US and the UK are at loggerheads over Iran and Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal, risking a military confrontation and the restart of Iran’s nuclear programme. On the Israeli-Palestinian issue the, Trump administration seems eager to turn the history and the truth upside down, and completely sideline the Palestinians, while granting Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu a free mandate of action that he would never have dreamt of. While the UK doesn’t appear to hold any great stake in the peace process, which has been out of service anyway since 2014, it isn't very fond of the White House’s plan which Trump has pegged as the American “deal of the century.”

In Syria, despite virtually wiping out Isis’s caliphate, both the US and the UK seem out of the loop on any possible future settlement, which has been left for the Russians to draw up. In Libya, the US policy of disengagement fuelled the European disunity and triggered fierce competition over resources and economic gains. The UK, which led, alongside France, the Nato operation to topple Muammar Gaddafi's regime in 2011, now looks rather too heavy, slow and out of touch. Since 2015, London has showed incompetence over the conflict in Yemen in convincing the Saudis to end the war through a UN-backed agreement. As well as its failure to pause its arms deals and military assistance to Saudi Arabia, a strategy that played a crucial part in triggering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis according to the UN. The US, on the other hand, has recently put pressure to end the war, and talks have finally started.

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While the UK was determined to push back against the American’s agenda after Second World War, Brexit will leave it this time completely paralysed. Leaving the EU will increase the importance of the US to UK’s security, economy, defence and trade. This reality will leave the new government with no other option but jump on the US leaving train.

The importance of the Gulf oil, which historically served as the honey to attract bears in the west, is declining. The US has become the world’s biggest producer, thanks to the shale oil industry, while the top five oil exporters to the UK include none of the Gulf monarchies. Trump does not even seem bothered about bearing the cost of the international shipping lanes security in the region’s volatile waters.

While the western presence in the Middle East has been focused on the military power, this belligerent approach has always been counterproductive. The more wars Britain and the US were involved in, the more influence and power they both lost.

In the UK, you get used to hearing that in the Middle East we are “punching above our weight”. But the next government will soon realise that the UK is leaving the ring all together. It might also realise that its interests and prestige in the region could well be the new punching bag.

After the end of the Cold War, the UK played a crucial role in setting the new rules in the region. While Brexit will ruin the UK’s influence in the Middle East and elsewhere, the rules of chaos Trump is now laying the foundations for will create a new long-term non-order. One within which the UK will wield no influence, and as a result will find itself forced out of the region.

The new government will indulge in a face-saving mission in the Middle East, rather than building a new strategy. Whether the Prime Minister is Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn, the UK has already fallen from the stage.

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