I haven’t noticed Donald Trump making noises about
bringing peace to the Middle East. Maybe he has the good sense to realize he
can’t do it.
Why is there such enmity in that region? It is
popular to blame it on the artificial national borders that were arbitrarily
drawn through ethnic regions, splitting clans apart and mixing peoples who aren’t
comfortable with each other. Maybe that helps to explain ISIS, but it doesn’t
explain the Old Man in the Mountain or any of the other pre-1900s struggles
there.
Who can bring peace to the Middle East? Only God can
do that. Look at the main powers today. The USA has lost interest parallel to
oil losing its high price, and has never been able to pull off a peace there. Russia has some interest, but lacks the
economic capacity to do anything significant.
The 5 main regional powers are Israel, Iran, Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey. Israel has no
interest in empire or in uniting the Islamic world. Iran’s internal troubles
are too much for her to do anything; ditto for Egypt. Plus Iran is being
watched carefully by the USA. Saudi Arabia has economic trouble and is caught
up in its effort to have a real Arabian makeover: new leadership, new
industries. Maybe hard to do for a
country where one octogenarian king is succeeded by another octogenarian. The
Crown Price is young though.
Turkey is the only power with a chance of bringing
the region together. It might not be a peaceful peace, but it would be a peace
of a kind ---- the Ottoman kind. Turkey has the biggest economy of any Islamic
country except far-away Indonesia. Turkey has a focused and seemingly capable
leader. George Friedman may well be
correct when he predicts the resurrection of the Ottoman Empire.
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