中文
By Abu Naser Al Farabi
Ever since the rapprochement agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran was sealed last month under the auspices of China to restore bilateral diplomatic relations between these two regional rivals, the Middle Eastern geopolitical landscape has been undergoing a series of auspicious diplomatic changes toward potential regional peace and stability.
The Middle East has long been used as a geopolitical battleground and infested with regional proxy rivalries fed by the geostrategic interests of powerful countries, most notably the United States. And unfortunately, every endeavor initiated so far by powerful Western geopolitical stakeholders was characterized by everything escalatory like wars, military interventions, illegal invasion, and proxy military patronization. Diplomacy as a means to settle down conflicts and restore sustainable peace and stability in the region has always been far-off thought.
Against this backdrop, China's mediation in reinstating the long-torn relationship between two Gulf rivals has worked as an inflection point, from which a host of diplomatic initiatives has been propelled all across the region. In fact, it was well-evidenced that fraught relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and their contrasting geopolitical positions on a number of regional conflicts have been one of the key inflammatory reasons behind regional chaos. But in recent days, we have witnessed two contrasting geopolitical scenarios being unleashed: one symbolized by increasing diplomatic endeavors toward regional stability and the other by potentially escalating military muscle flexing.
On April 10, 2023, Saudi Arabia persuaded the key players in the Yemeni coalition government to agree to a minimum eight-month ceasefire with Houthi rebels in conjunction with discussions on the country's future. As reported, this diplomatic breakthrough, seemingly unimaginable in the recent past, came on the part of Saudi Arabia to "capitalize on its new relationship with Iran," which has got a renewed boost after the China-brokered agreement in March. This peace-propelling initiative in resolving the eight-year-long civil war in Yemen has come on the heel of a landmark event: Saudi and Omani delegations held talks with Houthi officials in Yemen's capital Sanaa just a day before reaching the extended truce agreement.
But to our utter dismay and contrary to the recent flurry of landmark diplomatic endeavors toward ending the long-standing, multidimensional geopolitical tensions among middle eastern countries, another deteriorating geopolitical dimension has been taking hold in the region. On April 8, Reuters reported that the U.S. Navy has deployed a guided-missile submarine capable of carrying up to 154 Tomahawk missiles to the Middle East in support of the Bahrain-based U.S. Fifth Fleet. Though the spokesman for the Fifth Fleet based in the Gulf nation of Bahrain, Cmdr. Timothy Hawkins, acknowledged the deployment but declined to comment on the "submarine's mission or what had prompted the deployment." But it was reported that the deployment has been aimed at Iran as the triangular tensions between the U.S., Israel, and Iran have heightened recently.
For decades, even a century, the Middle East has been used as a battleground by the Western powers, particularly by the U.S., to play out their "vacuum-filling" power politics. Its people have been at the receiving end of constant wars, military intervention, brutal sanctions, and illegal invasion. According to the Cost of War estimates by Brown University, since 2001, at least 929,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. The number is far higher if indirect human tools are taken into account.
Moreover, millions of people living in war zones have also been displaced by war. The U.S. post-9/11 wars, as estimated, have forcibly displaced at least 38 million people in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria. This number exceeds the total displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II.
After decades of geopolitical wrangling among regional rivals instigated and strategically cashed on by the Western powers, the middle east has started to see an increasingly brighter ray of hope for sustained peace and stability under the conducive and constructive peace-promoting diplomatic mediation by Beijing, Washington's such destabilizing militaristic assertion will only create bumps on the diplomatic path to the peace.
The United States has frequently accused China of not playing its role as a "responsible global stakeholder." How does Washington claim its disrupting approach in the Middle East consistent with its much-touted "responsible stakeholder" role, at a time when the evolving peaceful atmosphere has been set in motion in the Middle East by the dint of China's constructive role as a peace broker?
Abu Naser Al Farabi is a Dhaka-based columnist and analyst focusing on international politics, especially Asian affairs.
