Are the interests in the Middle East of the great superpowers ,divergent?

Question

(Europe, Russia, China,USA).

Answer 1

They all want middle East oil and will fight over it.

Answer 2

First, my congratulations for not falling for the 'lone superpower' line.


Yes, certainly interests diverge, there. Each power wants to secure thier access to the strategic resources of the area. That means projecting 'influence' - maintaining military bases, cultivating allies, and so forth. Europe (particularly France) and Russia also have an important economic interest in selling to the middle east, which means that apeasing thier potential 'customers' is also a priority. Russia also has a very real concern in that it (or it's former-Soviet-republic allies) acutally border the region.

So, while it's in the interest of Russia or France, for insterest, for Iran to persue nuclear power (since they are major exporters of such technology - Russia because of the legacy of the Cold War, and France because it has a very successful nuclear power industry), while it is certainly contrary to the interests of the US to allow a hostile regional power like Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

Similarly, the invasion of Iraq was good for the US, since it allowed them to move military bases out of Saudi Arabia (thus quietly complying with a major Al Qaeda demand) and into Iraq, but bad for the Russians, who held substantial debts of the Iraqi government.

Answer 3

Why have the Middle East and North Africa been so inhospitable to democratic change, when much of the rest of the world seems convulsed by liberal revolutions? Many observers attribute the region's reluctance to democratize to its culture and traditions, particularly Islam. As Elie Kedourie writes, "democracy is alien to the mind-set of Islam. " Yet, the repeated demands for human rights, political liberalization and democratic government in the Arab world in the 1980s and 1990s --demands which actually yielded contested parliamentary elections in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen - belie uniform hostility to democracy.

Clearly, a substantial number of Arab Muslims supports the adoption of democratic procedures and institutions. The resistance of most of the governments in the Middle East and North Africa to democratization is striking, however, and if a common Arab and Islamic culture cannot account for the divergent attitudes of governments and their citizens, the reluctance of these governments in the face of the support of much of the citizenry for more liberal or democratic politics must be derived elsewhere. The argument advanced here suggests that the explanation may be found in the political economy of the region. The nature of the insertion of these states into the international political economy provides a powerful explanation of the strength of authoritarian governments and the frailty of their democratic opponents.

Many factors have contributed to the making of the political regimes of the developing world. They are partly reflections of local cultural predisposition, partly remnants of imperial impositions and partly the results of deliberate choices by domestic and international policy makers. As I hope to show, however, for most of the developing world, and particularly for the Middle East and North Africa, foreign related business transactions have been very important not only in the domestic economies but also internationally. It is therefore a must to examine the interaction of the Arab world's economic and political relations with the rest of the world

Answer 4

Yes. Every country is out there to maximize its own interest. Sometimes interests clash...