George Friedman
Last week, I wrote on the Middle East and promised a follow-up piece would come next. The U.S. election intruded. Now I’ll return to the second part on the Middle East.
We tend to view unrest as an internal event, usually contained in a given nation or region. But sometimes there are cases in which unrest spreads through fear or greed beyond a nation’s terminus, thereby changing the region and even the world beyond. Such is the case in the Middle East.
The process goes something like this: Internal unrest in a country creates fear in another country that the unrest will spread there. The fear then is that the unrest will generate military action in the other country. Both nations may adopt a defensive posture or be frightened enough to act aggressively. Fear and hope are the foundation and engine of war. Unrest is the generator.
It is commonly said that war is unlikely in this region because its nations are weak. Strength and weakness are relative, and these nations should be compared not to the United States but to each other. How strong one nation is relative to the other determines the outcome. Terrain and geography are constants, but fear has a remarkable historical ability to overcome them and does not make war impossible. Wars are the most possible human thing.
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