A Better Future for the Middle East

I greatly appreciate the three responses to my essay, “The Great Arab Implosion and Its Consequences.” Although David Pryce-Jones, Martin Kramer, and Amos Yadlin come from different directions, all three raise fundamental objections to my main thesis—namely, that the Sunni Arab regional hegemony has irretrievably collapsed—as well as to my main conclusion that, rather than attempting to resurrect that hegemony, or allowing Iranian or Turkish dominance, it would be better to let the region’s various nations, sects, and tribal confederations pursue a path toward self-definition.

Where the three respondents vary is in their evaluation of particular points and in their own scenarios for the future. Thus, David Pryce-Jones concedes “the absence” in the today’s Sunni Arab world of “anything to be triumphant about” and stipulates that some of the groups in the region, from Kurds to Alawites and even Christians, might indeed end up with their own states or at least autonomous statelets. But he also sees the possibility of some kind of Arab retrenchment or regrouping, perhaps as part of a Sunni rebirth, and therefore warns that my assessment of implosion or collapse might yet turn out to be premature.

Martin Kramer, for his part, regards what is occurring in the region since 2011 as nothing less than a Sunni “revival” after a century-long process of steady erosion. “From Riyadh to Raqqa,” he writes, we are now witnessing a struggle among those aspiring to control and channel this revival—a struggle likely to be won, and deserving to be won, by Saudi Arabia, which in Kramer’s view represents “the most successful instance of Arab state-building in the 20th century.”