Written Evidence Submitted by Policy Exchange (MENA0026)

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Summary

This report underscores the need to define the UK's strategic priorities in the Middle East based on criteria that are relevant to the reality of Eurasian geopolitical competition. Based on Policy Exchange’s recent paper The Iran Question and British Strategy, the below report builds a framework for thinking about those strategic priorities, building on enduring geographical and historical factors. Three strands of priorities emerge: preserving the geopolitical status quo, preventing state collapse and state co-option, and countering radical ideologies.

Those priorities in the Eurasian context make two countries stand out as critical partners in preserving the Eurasian balance, namely Turkey, as a balance to Russia, and Saudi Arabia, as a counterweight to Iran. Those priorities also mean that the UK must support Egypt due to its precarious financial situation which in turn carries the risk of igniting region-wide instability. Lastly, one country stands out, the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the region’s most capable and most committed revisionist state. It is important to see the Islamic Republic for what it is: as a theocracy with ambitions which are radical in the original sense of the word. Its array of proxies and its making common cause with Russia and China are natural outcomes of this disposition. To that end, it is high time for HMG to terminate its pursuit of a compartmentalized Iran policy based on the false premise that between Iran’s nuclear programme and its broader regional activity are distinct issues. Both policies are two sides of the same revisionist coin; the UK should tailor its policies to counter them.

The Middle East through a Eurasian Lens

1. “What are the main countries in which the UK should focus its efforts within the region?” This question camouflages a different one which is harder to answer: What are the interests of the UK in the Middle East? To focus on a particular set of countries is to admit the existence of a set of priorities. Those priorities should determine the distribution of attention that is given to a particular set of countries and issues—a large component of strategy is distribution of attention–rather than the inverse, namely picking a set of countries and subsequently apportioning attention.
2. The question of “interests”, for the purpose of this report, will be considered through the lens of security. It should be noted that this focus by no means contradicts the pursuit of economic interests and indeed is complementary to it. As colleagues and I argued in a recent paper for Policy Exchange, “The Iranian Question and British Strategy”, Britain’s security relationship to the Middle East should be conceived of in relation to a distinctly Eurasian geopolitical context.[1] The ‘Eurasian’ space, the vast landmass extending from Spain to Korea, and the sea littorals of that land mass, constitutes a single geopolitical whole.[2] Throughout history, the economic and security concerns of that space have been in constant interplay, from the Silk Road, to the Mongols, to the Age of Exploration, to the Second World War, to the Cold War.[3] This is in no small part due to the reality of geography. Geography, paired with history, helps provide a basic framework for considering those interests.
3. Within the Eurasian space, the British state exists on an island, affording the UK a degree of security while making it sensitive throughout history to continental domination.[4] Sensitivity to the prospect of hegemony—and the fact that the UK is a net beneficiary of the various iterations of world order since 1815—has typically pushed it towards a sort of conservativism, a partiality to the geopolitical status quo (or, to use a euphemism, “the balance of power.”)[5] Fairly consistent features of British foreign policy, corollaries of that conservativism, are resistance to secessionist movements and suspicion of ideologies that imply a need for sweeping territorial changes. Of course, humanitarian and other concerns have occasioned exceptions, the necessity of those exceptions being major crises in British foreign policy: the Iraq War in 2003 and the prospect of intervention in Syria and Libya in 2013 are two Middle Eastern examples. But exceptions they remain. More recently, the UK has swung back to its historic status-quoism: most visibly towards Russia, where the UK has steadfastly supported Ukrainian integrity against Russian attempts to revise the status quo since February 2022, and in the Asia-Pacific where, along with the United States and Asian allies, the UK has taken a more active role in guaranteeing the integrity of Taiwan. The tension between maintaining the status quo and allowing its re-adjustment is also a recurring feature in British Middle East policy.
4. Since the 19th Century, British “status-quoism” has been a uniting theme of British foreign policy in the Middle East.[6] This, too, has its roots in the distinctly Eurasian geopolitical context of British security. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the onset of the First World War, the majority of the Middle East was at least nominally ruled either from Constantinople, under the Ottoman Empire, or by various iterations of the Iranian (“Persian”) state, with the exception of several small principalities in the Persian Gulf. The status quo served numerous functions:

1. First, the Ottoman Empire—and to a lesser extent, Persia—served as a useful counterweight to Russia which, from the 1830s onwards was seen in Whitehall as a pressing threat to Britain in both the continental and the Indian contexts.[7] Were Russia to reach the Turkish Straits, a long-range Russian ambition since Peter the Great, Russia would become a formidable Mediterranean power, a headache for the Royal Navy. Were Russia to reach the Persian Gulf, which became a concern at the very close of the 19th Century, the approaches to India would be threatened. Were Russia to somehow break the Ottoman state through exploiting its “internal contradictions”, the land approach to India would similarly come under threat.[8]
2. Second, the existence of two coherent states protected the “approaches to India” from Britain’s imperial rivals, initially exposed in 1798-1801 by Napoleon Bonaparte’s abortive attempts to traverse Egypt and Persia.[9] A concern for India also meant a concern with the issue of piracy, one of several factors that drove early British engagement with the tribes and emirates of the Gulf.[10]
3. Third, the coherence of the Ottoman Empire—also the seat of the Sunni Caliphate—mattered due to the large Muslim population of the Indian Raj, a fact that grew in perceived importance under the Victorians and particularly under the premiership of Benjamin Disraeli and in the aftermath of the Russo-Bulgarian War of 1877-1878.[11]

5. The key point is this: long before energy became a concern for policymakers, British policy in the Middle East was already structured by a Eurasian logic that oriented the UK towards the status quo and in particular, towards the status quo powers of the time: Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire. Broader concerns on occasion prevailed—owing to humanitarian concerns or the primacy of other theatres over the Middle East. Nevertheless, the theme of preserving the status quo survived the collapse of the Ottoman Empire insofar as Britain’s replacement for the Ottoman Empire was, of course, to establish a set of geopolitically-conservative monarchies.[12] In the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States effectively assumed this pro-status quo disposition.[13] Those three interlocking priorities—excluding the geopolitical influence of Russia, preserving pro-status quo states, and excluding pernicious ideologies (this time pro-Soviet nationalism)—mapped well onto the Eurasian context of the Cold War. A fourth pillar of American policy—preserving the flow of oil to its European and Asian allies, lest they collapse economically—fit relatively comfortably into the status-quo role it assumed from the British Empire. Most of the region’s key oil producers were threatened by communism and by the late 1950s, by its local nationalist adjuncts, leading them to side with the United States.
6. A final historical point before returning to the present. The pro-status-quo policy of the United States—and by extension, of the UK—has been in a state of crisis since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The Revolution entailed not only Iran’s egress from the constellation of pro-status quo states. The Revolution propelled sectarian considerations to the forefront of regional politics, breaking an equilibrium between the United States and the Soviet Union that in 1979, all things considered, tipped in the favour of the Western alliance and its local allies. The Iranian Revolution furthermore established an Islamic Republic, a completely novel political form based on a supranational notion of sovereignty which entails a deep doctrinal hostility to monarchy, a deep doctrinal hostility to the West, and the continual pursuit of supranational ambitions. We will return to this point later.

The Modern Picture

7. For our purposes, the key function of the Islamic Revolution was to complicate the inclusion of the Middle East in any global strategic design. Insofar as the new polity refused to side with the United States or with the Soviet Union but nevertheless militated against the region’s geopolitical status quo, Western policy towards Iran has been characterized by a certain unintelligibility. As a consequence of a confused policy towards one of the Middle East’s oldest, largest, and most populous polities has been a concomitant confusion about how the region fits into the scheme of global politics. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the onset of American hyper-puissance compounded this confusion further still. Western policy from 2003 onward betrayed not only the fact that any coherent sense of global purpose, much less Eurasian strategy, now evaded the United States; but that the continuity between British imperial policy and American Cold War policy, a set of preferences around the status quo, had been decisively broken.
8. One need not flog the horses of that decade, which began with the Iraq War in 2003. But it bears mentioning the way that several debacles in particular brought the West’s historic partners in the region to realize the irreversible break that had taken place. The downfall of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in 2011, an ill-conceived intervention in Libya in 2012, and a haphazard Syria policy that culminated in the ‘Red Lines’ debacle of 2013, the rise of the Islamic State in 2014, and the conclusion of the JCPOA in 2015: all were heavy blows to the credibility of the West, which had time and again exhibited an understanding of the reason that was incommensurate with the amount of blood and treasure it had expended. These policies sowed the seeds of what we still see today: a deep mistrust within the reason and a desire by almost all its players to hedge their bets in the looming competition for the future of world order. The collective response of the transatlantic alliance has been lacking. New policies have emerged, to be sure, but there is still nothing in the way of a coherent strategy.

Britain in Eurasian Context

9. To return to the original question: What are the UK’s strategic priorities in the Middle East? As we proposed in our paper last month, and as a review of the last two centuries implies, the answer should be formulated in distinctly Eurasian terms. As is now common knowledge, China and Russia are the two most consequential threats to world order as it is currently constituted. That that ambition is a problem for the UK, a co-author and a net beneficiary of that order, comes as no surprise. The threat has political and military dimensions that need not be elaborated here. The geography of the threat, however, has an important bearing on our question. In material but also in purely geographic terms, there is little that the UK can do with regard to containing the threat that China poses. China is the largest and most pressing threat to the global system more broadly. But while the United Kingdom can make a meaningful contribution to the effort to contain it,[14] the United States and its principal regional allies are the bulwark of the world order in the Pacific in terms of geographic proximity, scale, and resources.
10. The sensible role of the United Kingdom in a Eurasian geopolitical context, one which follows from its role in the British setting, is to complement the efforts of another island: the United States.[15] The role of the United States vis-à-vis Eurasia is similar to the role that the UK has historically played in Europe. Just as the UK has resisted attempts at mastery of the European continent, the United States assumes the responsibility to resist attempts at mastery of the world-island. Owing to a number of considerations, coordination between the two countries is not only logical but necessary. Profound linguistic, cultural, ideological, and historical affinities are all grounds enough to articulate a solid case for the special relationship. Both countries benefit from the world order as it is currently constituted, for it is one in which their economic and political forms are most viable and in which their physical and political security is guaranteed. Both face a similar threat from the prospect of “a world unsafe for democracy.” This turn of phrase was used prematurely in the face of al-Qaeda, but now is the time to cry wolf: both Russia and China are founded on political systems that are deeply inimical to liberal democracy and hostile to the pre-eminence of the United States, a hostility in which the United Kingdom is by no means excluded. This does not mean to say that the UK should act as an American “lackey.” Rather, it should assume a role where it has the wherewithal to do so, picking up the slack. We have seen a textbook example in the events of the last year.
11. Far from China, on the other side of the Eurasian world-island, Britain’s location, materiel, and diplomatic standing have had a tremendous impact in paring down the other great threat to the Eurasian balance: Russia. British moral leadership and diplomatic finesse played an outsized role in rallying Europe to the defence of Ukraine, while the UK’s material contribution has played a hugely important role in determining outcomes on the battlefield that have allowed Ukraine to survive as a political unit– we shall likely not know the full extent of that contribution for many years. But the Ukrainian case should not be seen as a sui generis case. It should instead be seen as a textbook of example of how the UK can make a difference in its neighbourhood. Ukraine is, in an active sense, the frontline of Europe. But in a similar sense, so too is the Middle East.
12. In the same sense that Ukraine is Europe’s land frontier, the Middle East is a maritime frontier for Europe. As the very name suggests, and not by accident,[16] the region is a buffer zone separating Europe and Russia, and Europe from the rest of Asia. The Mediterranean alone offers insufficient protection, for a hostile land presence can become a naval or air presence, not to mention the whole gamut of asymmetrical threats.[17] The region is also not far from Britain. Donetsk, right on the Ukrainian front line, is roughly 1,700 miles by plane in a straight line from London. For comparison, Tripoli, over in Libya, is just over 1,400 miles. Istanbul is also closer, at over 1,500 miles. Tel Aviv and Cairo are further than that, at around 2,200 miles but like Istanbul are where Asia meets the Mediterranean. The stability of the Middle East matters in a Eurasian context because, as has been the case for the last two centuries, political instability presents an opportunity for revisionist powers that seek to change the Eurasian status quo, an outcome that would present risks to the future of Europe. In the same way that British resources have been used in a very concrete way to defend the territorial and political status quo in Ukraine, British resources should also be deployed to shore up the status quo on Eurasia’s Western flank.

Three Priorities

13. This framework gives us three priorities with which to think about British priorities in the Middle East:

1. The first priority is preserving the geopolitical status quo. Russia is, as it stands, the most obvious candidate. Despite its military and economic woes, it maintains an interest in the region both out of its extant interests in Syria and Libya as well as out of geographical proximity and historical habit.[18] Chinese engagement with the region is growing, but has not yet reached the level at which can reasonably be considered a priority of the first order. While China may have an interest in eventually expanding to the Middle East, given the role that the region could play in a future military contingency,[19] this is still in the realm of the hypothetical. What is clear is that the UK has a clear interest in avoiding the consolidation of Eurasian competitors in the region, through bases or formal agreements. Realistically, it is too late to prevent this completely, as the damage done in the aftermath of the Arab Spring cannot be reversed, and only the United States can make amends on the scale that is required to sway the region’s key powers back into a monogamous relationship. Nevertheless, the UK can have an impact on the Eurasian balance by preserving the local status quo in the Middle East, preventing the contestation of yet another front in the struggle for Eurasian order.
2. The second priority is avoiding state collapse and state co-option. A logical corollary from the need to preserve the regional status quo is the need to avoid state collapse. Here, state collapse is meant in its broadest sense: the failure of governance means that state institutions have been rendered redundant and are thus unable to exercise basic functions. Those functions—asserting themselves vis-à-vis external threats and the prospect of anarchy at home—are critical to any pro-status quo policy, opening up geopolitical vacuums. The strategic consequences of state collapse are still evident in Libya, Yemen, and Syria and in addition to geopolitical consequences, those three examples further demonstrate how state collapse carries grave humanitarian consequences, too. Similar to state collapse is state co-option, whereby state institutions are hijacked by revisionist parties that seek to reauthor the regional status quo. This was the case in Iran in 1979, and is to some extent the case in Lebanon and in Iraq.[20] In this case, the organs of the state remain intact, but it is in a sense reanimated with an entirely novel set of intentions which oftentimes involve neighbouring states. The collapse or co-option of any state in the region is a blow to our Eurasian strategy.
3. The third priority is countering the spread of ideologies that are inimical to our concept of world order. This is a difficult point to articulate, semantically as it comes with connotations of censorship and wrong-think, and politically as it implies a level of influence that is unrealistic if taken at face value. Yet this point is a key corollary of priorities one and two insofar as the spread of revisionist ideology is a key generator of discontent against states and against state systems. One need only mention the upheaval caused by Islamism in the domestic politics of various Middle Eastern countries as well as strategically, given the way it drove the West’s regional allies apart. One could equally mention the Islamic Republic, which we have yet to discuss in depth, and its founding doctrine of veleyat-e-faqih which posits that Iran’s Supreme Leader is the spiritual and political of the Islamic world—a claim that is accepted, implicitly or explicitly, by most of Iran’s Shi’a proxies in the region and one which lies at the heart of its malign intent towards Israel and the Arab Gulf states.[21] The UK should find ways to work with its regional partners to assuage the drivers of ideological discontent and to actively combat the spread of malign doctrines.

14. Before concluding with a specific set of recommendations, another disclaimer: support for the status quo does not mean a blank cheque for authoritarianism, in theory or in practice. Bad governance and corruption, two outcomes that often result from authoritarian forms of rule, are drivers of instability. Pragmatically, however, the UK should not overplay the extent to which it is equipped to effect change in authoritarian countries, not least through a policy of direct confrontation. In the medium to long term, and where it can, the UK should offer support to improve the responsiveness, credibility, and effectiveness of government in friendly countries. It is worth remembering, particularly given the UK’s rather limited ability to impose meaningful costs, that advice on these matters has a better chance of being heard in the context of friendly, productive relationships as opposed to the contrary.

Recommendations

15. Within a Eurasian context, and with these three parameters in mind, it is clear where the UK should focus its efforts.
16. Turkey is an obvious candidate for attention. Despite its fraught relationship with the bloc in recent years, its membership of NATO is the product of nearly five centuries of competition with Russia, centred around several issues: Turkey’s position as the barrier between Russia and the Mediterranean gives it an important geopolitical role, as does its role as a land bridge between Europe and Asia. Since the Arab Spring, Turkey has flirted with alternatives to the status quo, notably in Libya, Iraq, and Syria and until 2013, in Egypt. Turkey has broadly supported the aims of ‘Priority One’, acting as a counterbalance to Russia in Libya, to Iran in Iraq, and to both Russia and Iran in Syria. At the same time, it has done so in a way that seriously antagonized Saudi Arabia and the UAE, two critical allies on another front. The West failed utterly to reconcile the two sides, in large part due to the failure of the United States to lead on any of those fronts, Syria being the most egregious and damaging of those failures. Turkey is of most use to the UK in relation to Russia: a role it has played faithfully since the Crimean War and far before.[22] It is along this axis that the UK can most productively attend to its Eurasian priorities. Similarly, Turkey has potential as a counterbalance to Iran in view of its size and population; it is arguably the only country in the Middle East that can do so at scale. This does not mean to say that the UK should aim to stoke conflict between Iran and Turkey– a dubious prospect at best—but there is a question to be asked about how Turkey might act as a counterweight to Iranian influence in various areas of the region. More urgently, however, the UK must devote attention to Syria, which risks again becoming a point of contention between two sets of British allies. Another split between Turkey and the Gulf will serve as another driver of geopolitical hedging, which is inimical to British interests.
17. Saudi Arabia is in the midst of enormous flux. In the last two years, its economic and social modernization has been made a very visible priority and in the last few months has seemingly come at the expense of geopolitics. The Kingdom has, since March, reached a truce with Iran and has managed to maintain a ceasefire in Yemen. The two trends are likely interlinked. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that the truce—a term far more apt than ‘peace’ or ‘rapprochement’—will last beyond three to five years given the number of matters upon which Riyadh and Tehran ferociously disagree.[23] The UK should, however, take careful heed of the pitfalls of Washington’s Saudi policy in recent years. Beyond President Joe Biden’s censorious pronouncements about Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, the absence of an Iran policy has also made a significant contribution to Riyadh’s ostensive volte-face—including its flirtation with China and dalliance with third-worldist rhetoric. Without meaningful Western support in the effort to contain Iran, that effort cannot be sustained. Without Riyadh’s financial and ideological opposition, Iran is in a position to consolidate its position, militarily and ideologically. While Saudi Arabia will eventually bear the brunt of this, the UK’s interests suffer by extension due to Priority One. Saudi Arabia has enormous potential to be a status quo power, a role it has played since the onset of the Cold War. 
18. Egypt deserves particular attention because of Priority Number Two. Egypt is under unprecedented financial strain owing to high inflation and a looming FX shortage, and faces a serious risk of a default. A default would lead to even higher inflation among other economic consequences, which poses the risk of unrest or infighting within the Egyptian state. The alternative to default, the devaluation of the Egyptian pound (which in turn is meant to attract enough foreign direct investment to evade financial collapse), would likely lead to higher import prices and with that, higher inflation: another possible trigger for a surge of civil unrest. Egypt has long been considered too big to fail, but in the next six months this assumption will be tested unlike ever before. As the region’s most populous country, with over six million Egyptians living across the Arab world, this scenario poses a risk to the region as a whole—including the Gulf states. The UK should explore all available options to support the Egyptian economy and to avoid the outcomes of state collapse or state co-option.
19. Then there is Iran. Iran matters to the UK because of Priority Number One, maintaining the geopolitical status quo, and Priority Number Three, the spread of hostile ideology. The reason for all this is because in 1979 the West failed on Priority Number Two and allowed the Iranian state to be co-opted, then recrafted, into a polity entirely inimical to the idea of the West and with an abiding interest in co-opting other states. In a certain sense, it is not coherent to speak of ‘Iran’ so much as it is to speak about the ‘Islamic Republic.’ The distinction is an important one given the extent to which this peculiar, post-modern form of theocracy inflects every institution of the Iranian state and is in turn reproduced across all levels of Iran’s foreign and domestic policy. The essential point is that the Iranian state is a vehicle for the achievement of ends that go beyond Iranian sovereign territory and beyond the immediate needs of Iranian territorial defence. Iran’s presence in Lebanon extends back to 1982, when in the midst of a crippling war with Iraq, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, nevertheless dispatched some 1,500 members of the Revolutionary Guards Corps to fight Israel. To be sure, Iran now has a well-articulated forward defence, based on building a conventional deterrent against the United States and its regional allies.[24] But Iran’s concerted efforts to bring Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon under the penumbra of its influence have the same origins as Iran’s support for Russia in Ukraine and the longing of Iran and its proxies for a substantial Chinese presence in the Middle East. The point is to author a world safe not for democracy but for an Islamic Republic.
20. For Iran, this perforce requires the destruction of the State of Israel, which is perceived as a “terrorist garrison” of the West, in the words of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. To that end, there should be no illusion that Hezbollah or Palestinian Islamic Jihad operate independent of Iranian operational and strategic considerations: they share the same ultimate goal, with Hezbollah in particular buying into the deeper aspects of Iran’s broader intellectual and theological construct.[25] An Iranian role in the attack conducted against Israel on October 7 must be seen in the broader context of the activities of the Iran-led “Axis of Resistance” against Israel, against American assets in Syria, and against Western interests across the region.[26] Without an Iranian coordinating role, it is doubtful that an attack of such scale and sophistication could have taken place.
21. An additional point should be made about Iran, which concerns compartmentalization. The problem of compartmentalization—for instance, as the Call for Evidence does by separating Iran’s nuclear programme and support for proxies into two distinct buckets—betrays a fundamental misunderstanding, as we discussed in The Iran Question and British Strategy and as my colleagues discuss in a forthcoming paper on Iranian influence in the UK homeland. The Iranian state is an interface. Western categories cannot make sense of the distinction, which allows for such absurdities as permitting the existence of a school in Maida Vale which literally indoctrinates children with Khomeinism.[27] The coherence of British Iran policy, as we argue, relies on the ability of the British state to release itself from the illusion of compartmentalisation and to see the Iranian state for what it is: a holistic, autocratic interface in which the power of the state is deployed to the ends of ideological and political revision.[28]
22. The nuclear issue is complementary, if not entirely subordinate, to the question of Iranian grand strategy. Were Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, the immediate concern is not a ‘regional arms race’ or even an Iranian decision to fire several nuclear missiles in a millenarian Oppenheimer moment. The critical threat is that an Iranian nuclear weapon would open up a three-to-five-year window in which the Islamic Republic would in effect have free rein for proxy warfare, the scope of retaliation being limited by the shield of a nuclear deterrent. Given the advanced stage of the Iranian nuclear program and the manifest lack of will for the United States—the only country—to militarily act against it, it is high time to adopt an Iran strategy that goes beyond the narrow purview of the nuclear issue. The nuclear issue has served as little more than an excuse for the West to avoid a forward-looking strategy. Genuine reconciliation would require a complete reconfiguration not only of the Iranian state, but of the doctrines upon which the Islamic Republic is founded. We detail this, and a slew of concrete measures, in The Iran Question and British Strategy.

October 2023