The Road to Middle East Peace Runs Through Doha
While the Israel-Hamas War is raging, Western leaders have a unique opportunity to plan a wholesale reconfiguration of the chessboard of Middle Eastern politics. Because there is no purely military outcome which can provide security or prosperity for either Israelis or Palestinians, failure to seize the diplomatic opportunity presented by this crisis will make future wars increasingly likely.
Diplomats must respond to events on the battlefield, but they should also try to shape them. Israeli leaders have made it clear that they have no novel concept for the day after and are trying to use the war to destroy Hamas and weaken Iran’s regional proxies. Their articulated strategy is simply a more drastic form of “mowing the lawn” and will allow the same regional dynamics to resurface post-war, just as they have after previous rounds of Israel-Hamas fighting or the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.
Hamas, Iran, and Russia do not plan to end the war by securing diplomatic objectives. Their goal is disorder. They intend to use the war to inflame regional and global tensions, so as to keep their adversaries divided. At the war’s end, the absence of a regional solution and a hardening of pre-existing fissures is a victory for Hamas, Iran, and Russia.
Western diplomats planning for the day after the conflict are thus confronted with a choice: push to use this war to merely weaken their enemies or seek to reshape the region’s existing power blocs?
The former would result in a hardening of the region’s existing three camps: pro-Iranian/pro-Russian (Hezbollah, Syria, Yemen’s Houthis), those willing to work with the Muslim Brotherhood (Qatar, Turkey, Western Libya), and those virulently opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood (United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Eastern Libya). The latter could achieve a conceptual reframing of the region into an axis of Orderers united in their willingness to collaborate to confront the Disorderers…
