The salient geopolitical interdependencies are cumulating over time and seem to characterize the international landscape. From Venezuela to the Middle East, Ariana’s threads are weaving the various theaters around identical strategic plots. The leftist and Islamic dictatorships that were adamantly bent on building international counter-orders and rallying the Russian-Chinese neo-totalitarian axes are struggling to survive in their turfs at a time when their international power game is unraveling.
The Chavez-Ahmadi Nejad intercontinental canopy withered away, and the strategic backyards of Russia and China in the Latin American subcontinent are eroding with the fatal decline of Venezuela, the Cuban power broker, the vassal states (Cuba, Nicaragua…), and the string of narco-states and terrorist panhandles (Hezbollah and the drug cartels). In counterpart, the destruction of the “integrated operational platforms” of Iran throughout the smaller Middle East, the reshuffling of the strategic pillars, and the remapping of coordinates are the new givens that geopolitical actors have to reckon with while plotting their way. The changing strategic landscapes are paired with the rise of liberal and democratic reformist political agendas throughout the Latin American hemisphere and within the Arab region. These changes are echoing each other and arrayed along the same geopolitical and intellectual rationales.
The Venezuelan crisis is coming to a head between the strengthening of the domestic opposition and the open support of the United States for regime change. The handing of the Nobel Prize to Maria-Corinna Machado highlights the power of the lofty political humanism that guided her through and through while confronting the murderous dictatorship that smothered the velleity of political change. The emerging political profile featured by M.C. Machado marks a clear departure from the debunked leftist rhetoric and caudillismo, oligarchic political retrenchments, and Cold War political scenarios.
The wave of liberalization, constitutional governance, and ethical posturing in politics are the hallmarks of a new political era. The totalitarian propensities and organized criminality, which circumscribed the political horizon of the Latin American left and its geopolitical mapping, are merely discredited. The convergence taking place between internal reformists and the conservative revolution in the US is propelling the dynamics of change. The BRICS fallacy and its geopolitical projections have turned awry, and the ongoing changes have brought about a different complexion, which overcomes the binary representations and their mystifications. However difficult and hazardous the transition is, it is unlikely to be reversible.
The view from the Middle East is more complicated because the geopolitics and their shifting tectonics are in full swing. The implosion of the inter-Arab system has not reached its end yet; the reshuffling of the geostrategic chessboard by Israel after October 7th, 2023, and its overall reverberations, and the resuscitation of the inner political dynamics propelled by ethnopolitical grievances are decisively reshaping the geopolitical realm and the categories of political culture.
The regional power players, Israel, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, are in a state of open competition over the new configuration of the regional order. The Iranian is overruled, the Sunni power players are leveraging their religious and geopolitical trump cards, and Israel is instrumenting its strategic momentum to counter the relaying Islamic imperialisms and to empower the ethnopolitical grievances and propel its countervailing trajectories.
The Iraqi maelstrom is far from stabilizing as long as the confederation has not yet stabilized around final consensuses and the Islamic competing power politics are operating. Syria still has a long way to go before extracting itself from the pull and sway of the neighboring power players and the Islamic imperialism magnet. The stabilization process should be carefully negotiated before issuing forth working solutions and enduring consensuses.
Lebanon is still hostage to Iranian power politics and its domestic surrogates. One wonders whether Lebanese statehood has a chance to consolidate and set its gravity in the absence of a common political and civic culture. What’s questioned nowadays in Lebanon is its national legitimacy, liberal democracy, and anthropological predicates. The abrasive politics of domination of Shiite militancy are quite compromising internally and externally. The intentional weakening of the constitutionality of political life is the path to the sectarian domination openly advocated by Hezbollah, its clones, and associates.
The Palestinian scenery is still debating the right of Israel to exist after a hundred years of conflictual coexistence, five botched statehood proposals, decades of nihilistic violence, and the latest strategic upheavals induced by the Israeli counteroffensive. The renewed polarization doesn’t seem to subside within and between the two societies, and the chances of Palestinian statehood are relegated to an indeterminate future. Meanwhile, the prospects of democratization, political liberalization, and socio-economic reforms are fading from the political horizon for the sake of the enshrined open-ended conflicts.
We are undoubtedly in a new era that requires critical retrospection on every side of the political landscape, however difficult this might be in societies where the fundamental notions of a liberal democracy and constitutional statehood are either absent or challenged. The dynamics of political change are driven by societal transformations and strategic shifts that are overhauling the respective geopolitical landscapes.
The pending question is when effective transformations are going to meet the intellectual and epistemic shifts and create the conditions for a new awareness?