Many Western accounts conflate Russian and Iranian support for the Assad regime as purposeful recalcitrance against US policy and interests. More nuanced analysis, however, reveals two agendas not really concerned with the United States: Russia’s support of Syria is motivated by global positioning, while Iran’s support is influenced by concerns for regional hegemony vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). In both these scenarios, sentiment against US policy is not the engine driving Russian and Iranian strategies. This is indicative of a somewhat myopic Western tendency to lens the agendas of other states through their relative positioning with the United States. In this case, the habit undermines properly understanding two important players in the Syrian crisis and beyond in the Middle East region. The tendency to make itself the sun in a Copernican foreign policy universe handicaps the United States by impairing its diplomatic vision and retarding options for real interaction. This analysis dissects the Russian and Iranian positions from their own perspectives, highlighting the consequences they may have not only on the Assad regime into the future, but on relations between Iran, Russia, and the United States.

The Middle East is a highly dynamic and unstructured regional system in which power relations are fluid and order is in short supply. Inevitably, the fluidity of power and the absence of a regional hegemonic power have invited external intervention. Furthermore, the region’s dynamism not only has exacerbated the subsystem’s fragmentation into sub-regions but also has afforded opportunities for the better-endowed small Arab states to play in the greater game of regional power politics. Yet, if one takes the long view, it is clear that only a handful of states have directly impacted the region’s power relations, and today only four of these countries -Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel -meet the minimum requirements of middle power status in the MENA regional system. Their position in this fragmented and strategically-placed subsystem will be discussed in some detail.

This article provides a conceptual lens for and a thick interpretation of the emergent regional constellation in the Middle East in the first decade of the 21st century. It starts out by challenging two prevalent claims about regional politics in the context of the 2006 Lebanon and 2008-09 Gaza Wars: Firstly, that regional politics is marked by a fundamental break from the ‘old Middle East’ and secondly, that it has become ‘post-Arab’ in the sense that Arab politics has ceased being distinctly Arab. Against this background, the article develops the understanding of a New Arab Cold War which accentuates the still important, but widely neglected Arab dimension in regional politics. By rediscovering the Arab Cold War of the 1950-60s and by drawing attention to the transformation of Arab nationalism and the importance of new trans-Arab media, the New Arab Cold War perspective aims at supplementing rather that supplanting the prominent moderate-radical, sectarian and Realist-Westphalian narratives. By highlighting dimensions of both continuity and change it does moreover provide some critical nuances to the frequent claims about the ‘newness’ of the ‘New Middle East’. In addition to this more Middle East-specific contribution, the article carries lessons for a number of more general debates in International Relations theory concerning the importance of (Arab-Islamist) non-state actors and competing identities in regional politics as well as the interplay between different forms of sovereignty.

Many expected the Arab uprisings to strengthen official and popular Arab support for Palestinian self-determination, and, for a time, they did. Since then, internal strife, the return in several Arab states of the ancient regime, and an intensified regional Cold War have left the Palestinians isolated and vulnerable. But historical precedent as well as existing tendencies counsel against despair.