The tides are turning, the sun is setting, the sands are shifting – whatever expression describes it best, the reality is that the Middle East as a geopolitical and sociological theatre of action is undergoing its most profound transformations in generations.  These transformations are distinguishable because of their universalizing features, crossing what were previously rigidly demarcated national boundaries and blending peoples, communities and societies together in a web of increasing complexity and fluidity.  While the nature of these fundamental alterations to the Middle Eastern system of politics can be debated and expanded upon much further, a few brief examples will suffice to clarify the point being made here.

International politics is by its very nature characterized by shifting alliances, offensive military posturing, and secretive diplomatic intrigue.  Generally speaking, international relations theories differ on this point: realists recognize this state of affairs while liberals work to pacify it and constructivists build critiques of it, not to mention the whole slew of scholarship opposed to the dominant positivist epistemology.  In the Middle East however, most would agree that political realism best sums up the region’s geopolitical relationships.

Prior to 2010, it was possible to speak of rival blocs polarized by America’s role in the Middle East.  The pro-American bloc consisted of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Turkey, Egypt and other regional players, while the anti-US bloc comprised Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.  The composition of these blocs suddenly began to unravel in the summer of 2010 when Turkey engaged Iran (with Brazil’s help) on a nuclear fuel-swap deal and shortly thereafter broke off relations with Israel over the now-infamous flotilla incident.  Then, in quick succession, the Arab Spring of 2011-2012 deposed pro-US leader Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and installed an Islamist government under the aegis of the Muslim Brotherhood, a party that has been traditionally critical of US policies.  The ‘new’ Egypt has flirted with the idea of improving its relations with Iran and Hamas.  At the same time, Syria has been severely weakened by a 19-month (and counting) insurrection that has drawn its allies Iran and Hezbollah in, while worsening its ties with Hamas.  The battle lines in Syria are being drawn between pro and anti-Assad factions, which do not run parallel to pro and anti-US ones.  Potential wildcards to watch in the future are a weak Lebanon, a destabilized Iraq, and Iran, following its 2013 presidential elections.

Acceptable forms of governance are also rapidly changing in the region.  Dictatorships are the bane of the Middle East’s existence. Tyrannical regimes for long were able to paint their repression with ideological brush-strokes  legitimizing the savagery of their rule with Arab nationalist or Islamic fundamentalist images, language, and symbolism.  Nationalist dictatorships have already fallen in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen.  What they will be replaced with is another question entirely, but similarly oppressive regimes are on the defensive in Syria and Iran.  As democratization becomes the modus operandi of governments in this part of the world, a more inclusive system of governance and more progressive governance mechanisms will begin to emerge and change the Middle East’s geopolitical relations from the inside-out.  In today’s age of mass mobilization, citizen participation, and popular representation, dictatorships are no longer justifiable governance structures.

The power of protest has made itself manifestly clear in the past two years as the relationship between people and power, the governed and their governments, is forced to adapt to the changing times as well.  Civil society has been distorted for decades and the strength of the majority of the population has long simmered under the surface of dictatorial policies and structures.  Now that people have begun to act on their demands, governments must react appropriately or be swept aside by the tide of the masses.  It was the protesting throngs of disaffected Arabs that toppled Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Saleh, in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, respectively.  Ousting Gadhafi in Libya necessitated NATO intervention and the arming of the country’s rebel forces, similar to what is taking place today in Syria, minus NATO’s involvement (for the time being).  In 2009, Iran witnessed its biggest protesters since the ouster of the Shah and the rise of Khomeini’s followers, and the very same political revolution could certainly happen there during and after next year’s elections.  Even minorities can express themselves more effectively today than ever before, with Coptic Christians in Egypt standing up for their rights under an Islamist-dominated regime, while secularists and liberals likewise demand a say in the drafting of the future Egyptian constitution.  When people organize and mobilize, governments must respond appropriately.

Finally, the advent of new and improved technologies and the relentless onslaught of globalization mean that people are increasingly empowered, while governments can either repress further or democratize further than they have before. Individuals armed with smartphones can now broadcast to the entire world what is happening before their very eyes, whether it be human rights atrocities or artistic and cultural exhibits. Satellite television networks, global news media outlets, and broadband Internet connections have all allowed for virtually instantaneous communications between communities, continents and societies.  Communications equipment was vital to the effort to oust Qaddafi, with rebels establishing their own telephone networks to counter state-sponsored propaganda.  In the midst of the Egyptian Revolution, Mubarak’s officials briefly disabled the country’s Internet but were forced to relent after massive opposition.  While a similar struggle is underway in Syria and Iran against government-enforced censorship and control of information and communication, technology and globalization can either work for or against an entrenched power structure such as an authoritarian regime.  The power of the people might be enough to overthrow this edifice, but what replaces it is a much more complicated story.

What is the difference between a government’s domestic and foreign policies?  From a public policy point of view, the foreign ministry is just another department in the bureaucracy of government.  In this sense, foreign policy is comparable to housing policy, environmental policy, transportation policy, and so on, all of which are traditionally thought of as domestic policies.  From an international relations perspective, on the other hand, foreign policy is a murky realm in which countries interact with one another and issues of sovereignty, legality and morality arise that tend not to happen with domestic policies (where one sovereign power usually monopolizes authority). 

International relations theories, as unfortunate but as necessary as it is, are laden with meta-theoretical, philosophical and methodological assumptions that would bore most readers to tears and prevent 9 out of 10 of them from finishing this short article.  Therefore, in the interest of readership and feedback, the qualifying remarks that would normally slow the reader down are removed at this point.  Instead, some of the interesting tensions, contradictions and observations within the nexus of domestic and foreign policies are made in as brief and parsimonious a manner as possible.

Foreign policies in democracies are different from those in dictatorships.  They face different pressures, react to different stimuli and assume different qualities altogether (although some process analysts and systems theorists would discount this fact since the state is just a conceptual ‘black box’ to them).  Consider one of the rationales for the democratic peace thesis (DPT), which is derived from Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace” and states that war between countries is much less likely when their citizens – the ones that would become soldiers in any such war – are tasked with deciding whether to engage in it or not. 

The DPT hypothesizes that wars between democratic states should not exist, but the evidence shows that democracies declare war on dictatorships just as often as these dictators do on each other.  Non-democracies do not cycle through foreign ministers or foreign policy priorities as quickly as the democratic governments do, they do not debate the costs and benefits of such policies openly in their societies and no logical justification is needed since propaganda is used to gain the public’s support.  Finally, they seldom worry about courting enough favourable public opinion to become re-elected, which is a convenient segue into the effects of elections on foreign policies.

A passing glance at the 2012 presidential elections in the United States is proof enough of this fact.  How many Republican contenders have attacked the incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama for his (mis)handling of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or for the Iranian nuclear problem and its effects on the US-Israeli relationship?  Elections are like referendums on ruling parties; it is normal to debate these complex foreign policy issues – and a whole host of domestic policy concerns – before elections, exactly when they are most vulnerable to shifts in policy direction.  Needless to say, dictatorships lack these intense and often divisive policy debates, and often follow suboptimal policy pathways as a result.

What is fascinating about this overlap between foreign policy practices and electoral competition is the way that national destinies seem to hinge at times on the outcomes of these seminal moments.  Jimmy Carter infamously lost the 1980 elections for president of the United States because of the hostage crisis in Iran and Ronald Reagan’s skillful exploitation of the Carter Administration’s failure to deal with it.  The 1988 federal election in Canada was perceived at the time as a referendum on Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s negotiations with the United States and Mexico on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); Mulroney won and NAFTA became a reality.  In another example, elections in Israel in 1996 were directly affected by the Arab-Israeli conflict: Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish extremist for making peace overtures to the Palestinians while Palestinian militants initiated a spate of bombings in the early months of 1996 to derail peace talks in their own way.

All these examples demonstrate the extent to which foreign policies and domestic politics are interconnected.  It is foolish to try and place them in separate categories as theoretically distinguishable public policies when in practice they intersect in so many ways and in so many places.  In some places they seem to operate independently of one another, like in Russia, for example.  With elections there set to take place in less than two weeks, Russia confidently flexes its foreign policy muscles in oil and gas markets in Europe and Asia as it defends Iranian and Syrian intransigence in the United Nations Security Council, all while mass protests in major cities have complicated Vladimir Putin’s inevitable return to the presidency and 12 more years of power in Russia.  What seems to be an anomaly can be understood with the argument that the Russian foreign policy establishment is overcompensating for the doubt being expressed by the citizenry within Russia by acting aggressively and exploitatively abroad.

This overlap between domestic and foreign policies is neither good nor bad, it just is.  The lesson to take away from this set of examples is that they are inseparable, administered by the same government and therefore coordinated in some way – even when coalition politics hand one party the leadership post and another party the foreign ministry, that coalition still binds the government together within a tacit regime structure.  Learning how to detect these points of overlap can be analytically very interesting, but knowing how to use them to one’s advantage by exploiting them effectively is something else entirely.

Abstract:

The recent intensification of enmity between Iran and Israel has been the focus of political analysts, pundits, practitioners, and critics alike.  As Iranian-Israeli relations have progressively worsened over the past few decades, this wide-ranging conflict has come to encompass countries of all kinds: traditional-great powers and peripheral-minor states.  This conflict has become so polarizing in part because it evokes issues of geopolitical security, strategic energy resources, nuclear weapons proliferation, identity politics, human rights and the global ‘War on Terror,’ among others.  By utilizing two of the most prominent International Relations theories, Waltzian Structural Realism (WSR) and Wendtian Social Constructivism (WSC), this paper seeks to simultaneously explain and understand the 30-year period of Iranian-Israeli friendship and cooperation from 1948 – 1979 as well as the subsequent 30 years of hostility and conflict from 1979 – 2010.  The most likely projection for the future relationship between these two countries remains one of continued conflict, discord and hostility.

This major research paper was originally published at the University of Windsor in April 2011 as part of the Master of Arts in Political Science program.  It is now a featured essay at e-ir.info.  To read the paper in its entirety, click here: http://www.e-ir.info/2012/02/08/the-enigma-of-iranian-is%E2%80%8Braeli-relations/