From Cold War to War on Terror

From Cold War to War on Terror June 19, 2015

When the Cold War ended with the Berlin Wall being dismantled and the Soviet Union breaking up, the West breathed a sigh of relief. Prematurely, as it turns out. Islamicism rose hard on the heels of Communism’s fall. And, according to George Friedman, the fall and the rise are linked.

Two fault lines divided the Middle East in the twentieth century, Friedman says: One between between European secularism and Islam: “The Cold War, when the Soviets involved themselves deeply in the region, accelerated the formation of this fault line. One part of the region was secular, socialist and built around the military. Another part, particularly focused on the Arabian Peninsula, was Islamist, traditionalist and royalist. The latter was pro-Western in general, and the former — particularly the Arab parts — was pro-Soviet. It was more complex than this, of course, but this distinction gives us a reasonable framework.”

The other fault line was between the artificial states created in the Middle East by Western powers and the actual power structure of the region: “The states in Europe generally conformed to the definition of nations in the 20th century. The states created by the Europeans in the Middle East did not. There was something at a lower level and at a higher level. At the lower level were the tribes, clans and ethnic groups that not only made up the invented states but also were divided by the borders.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union had a double effect, encouraging radical Islamicists and undermining confidence in the secular socialist regimes that had modeled themselves, more or less, on the USSR: “Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the resulting collapse of support for the secular socialist states, the power of the traditional royalties surged. This was not simply a question of money, although these states did have money. It was also a question of values. The socialist secularist movement lost its backing and its credibility. Movements such as Fatah, based on socialist secularism — and Soviet support — lost power relative to emerging groups that embraced the only ideology left: Islam. There were tremendous cross currents in this process, but one of the things to remember was that many of the socialist secular states that had begun with great promise continued to survive, albeit without the power of a promise of a new world. Rulers like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Syria’s Bashar al Assad and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein remained in place. Where the movement had once held promise even if its leaders were corrupt, after the Soviet Union fell, the movement was simply corrupt.”

The Afghan defeat of the USSR led many to conclude that the state regimes were illegitimate, not truly Islamic. At the same time the victory of the mujahideen revived hopes for an Islamic resurgence. It was a potent mix, one that produced al Qaeda and now ISIS.


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