In August 2015, the Arab League in Cairo was the venue for a series of meetings to prepare the final draft of a protocol to create a “Joint Arab Force”, as it was called at the time. Prior to the meetings, Arab heads-of-state had instructed their joint chiefs of staffs to overcome all obstacles and propose practical solutions to a number of observations the heads-of-state had registered. The chiefs-of-staff spent the whole of June and July that year on this task and put the final touches on the protocol, readying it for the signatures of the states that had previously declared their approval of the joint force project and their willingness to take part in it. Two extremely important steps were involved here. One was to initiate an ambitious military/security project that responds to the dangers threatening our Arab states. The space here is insufficient to enumerate and describe the many dangers, although the most pressing at the time was the mounting terrorist threat that required military responses in many Arab countries on a number of fronts. The second was the process whereby Arab governments in support of this joint force worked to overcome all potholes and hurdles in the path to an Arab consensus on this project. Every stage in this process was characterised by a superb spirit of flexibility in order to reach that last juncture in which the project would receive the final seals of approval. But then, at that juncture, after Arab military officials and chiefs-of-staffs arrived in Cairo, the seat of the Arab League, developments took a surprising turn. Only hours before the crucial session convened, four key Arab states presented a request from Saudi Arabia to postpone the meeting so as to enable further consultations and study of the draft project. The states, here, were the four Gulf countries that had declared their support and took part in the preparatory work for the project: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar. As a result, Arab military officials left Cairo and returned to their various countries and the entire project plunged into a dark tunnel. A full year has passed since then and, if anything, the darkness in the tunnel has grown even denser. It was necessary to relate the foregoing events a full year later in order to better be able to assess the current moment and formulate a prognosis for the near future. What I mentioned above for the sake of refreshing memories appeared in the news reports of all media. What did not appear or was not stated explicitly had to do with the pressures exerted on some Arab governments throughout the period in which preparations for the project were underway. These pressures were upped at the last minute, producing the abovementioned debacle. That outcome that might be described as a deal with the flavour of an ultimatum. It was forged between the party that backed out of the project at the last moment, namely Saudi Arabia, and the party that had such overwhelming influence over Riyadh, which would be none other than the US. What happened was that Washington made it clear that it disapproved of the notion of a joint Arab military body and that if Riyadh pressed ahead with this project together with other countries from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the US would might no longer feel responsible for challenging any Iranian threats against the GCC countries. The other half of this “deal” consisted of an offer for an alternative to US guarantees for protection, an alternative that Gulf countries could deal with in the framework of regional formulas for joint military and security action. The party that Washington suggested was, of course, Turkey which, at the time, appeared to be standing on steady feet and which, throughout those precarious years in the life of the Arab world, was forever ready to involve itself in this region's many explosive issues. Turkey has, in fact, been embroiled to the hilt in this region's most salient crisis, Syria, where it had been working on behalf of Saudi Arabia and Qatar for several years before August of last year. However, the more crucial aspect of the Turkish readiness to play a role here is that it has consistently served to oppose and undermine any Egyptian progress and to formulate different views on conditions in the Arab world since 2011. Today, a year after that crucial juncture in August 2015, we can understand how the US approach combined with Turkish meddling succeeded in overriding the creation of the Joint Arab Force. The Saudi alternative, which was suddenly unveiled several months after that August setback, was the “Islamic coalition”, which included Turkey. It also included quite a few other countries as a way to dilute the Arab members and prevent them from being a central component. Here, of course, we can not delve into the details of the deformed birth of that alternative and how it had been driven to cot death within the space of a few months. All this we might call the harvest of a single year. Even though the four preceding years passed in much the same fashion, last year stood out for being particularly revealing. This is why it was necessary to revisit those developments and junctures. They are closely connected to “Arab national security equations”, which is to say the vital questions that compel us to assess where we stand now and what steps to take next after the many years of conflagration that has been raging throughout the Middle East in which we, as Arab countries, are at the centre. The Arabs desperately need to reformulate these equations, but to do so they need to bear in mind a number of important determinants. Firstly, according to preliminary strategic assessments, GCC countries, Jordan and Egypt are pitted against a range of similar threats and dangers. Due to the dictates of history, geography and shared fate, these countries, today, face a regional predicament that stems from the profound imbalances that have swept Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Any detrimental impact from these crises on any one of these nations compels them all to pay the price which, in fact, they have been paying for two years now. Secondly, and more importantly, the efficacy and influence of the general world order has receded in favour of the spread of regional orders. Some parties have picked up on this and begun to move in new directions while others are floundering, trapped in old frames of reference. The third determinant is that the state or states that try to ignore or circumvent the new frameworks will not succeed in gaining what they seek. In fact, they will have effectively condemned themselves to a position in which they are overtaken by events and are forced to scramble onto the tail carriages of the train. A new troika is emerging. Some describe it as surprising but it would be more precise to say that the heat of the current juncture in all its complicated details formed the catalyst. Russia, Iran and more recently Turkey cannot be described as a “complete” alliance but these are the parties that have been the quickest to pick up on the new signals and the fastest to lay out plans with a degree of unity of ranks that reflects a shared desire to occupy the front seats in this region and, accordingly, to push other parties to the back. The alliance also expresses the actual weight of other parties in the region, at least from the perspective of the members of the troika. What counts here is not so much the accuracy of their assessments but the fact that they believe they can impose their vision through various means. More importantly, the first steps in this process of imposition reside in the very components of the new alignment and the audacity of the vision for sharing the benefits among them. Russia, Iran and Turkey have already made great strides towards what they seek to accomplish. If this troika is not an entirely sudden development, it took the recent Turkish leap into Syria to manifest itself. Now, as the situation stands today, these three countries have sizeable military forces on Arab territories. More ominous is the degree to which they control the political decisions concerning these territories. The ways this is translated into new formulas for managing the situations there reflect the respective weight of each member of the troika. They simultaneously mirror a vast wasteland inhabited by the policies of the countries of this region, the huge disparities between them in how they translate the events that are unfolding around them and, hence, the considerable arbitrariness of their responses. The members of the new troika believe they are stronger and hold the winning cards that will enable them to determine regional fates. However, the world of politics is not a place in which one surrenders to the cards one is dealt. Cairo, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Amman need to contend with a task of the utmost urgency. Essentially it involves a collective assessment of the situation and the formulation of a modern strategy that sets its sights on various objectives to be accomplished through tactics and measures that should be put into effect immediately. This is the challenge the Arabs face today. The Arabs will pay heavily if they choose to resign themselves to arrangements made by others for this region. However, at the moment, there is still time to reverse the situation, but only if they reverse the optional fragmentation they settled for on the basis of faulty calculations and misplaced bets and set to work formulating a “new equation for Arab national security” that establishes a framework for purely Arab action driven by firm resolve and that aims first for mere survival, and then for success. The writer is director of the Cairo-based National Centre for Security Studies.
