In the last month of 2022, Qatar basked in the global limelight for being the first Arab country to smoothly and successfully host a spectacular FIFA World Cup football extravaganza. The 2022 World Cup not only brought great joy to football fans across the world, but also left a positive impact on the changing geopolitical landscape in the Middle East by boosting the momentum of rapprochement among regional rivals, Xinhua writes.
The rapprochement was also on display at the Nov. 20 World Cup opening ceremony: Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman warmly greeted each other, while Türkiye's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan shook hands with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi. "The first-ever football World Cup in an Arabian country has been timely and ended regional hostilities," commented an article published on the 2022 FIFA World Cup's official website. Qatar and Saudi Arabia only ended in January 2021 a diplomatic crisis that broke out in mid-2017, when Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain cut ties with Qatar and imposed a blockade on it. Likewise, before the Erdogan-Sisi handshake in Doha, the ties between Türkiye and Egypt had been tense due to their feuding over a number of issues.
Regional thaw
Facing the negative economic and political impacts caused by the food supply crisis, the Ukrainian conflict, and financial turmoil due to irresponsible U.S. monetary policy, major countries in the Middle East moved to sidestep their long rivalries this year for either security interests or economic benefits. Israel continued to improve ties with Arab states to follow up on the Abraham Accords it reached with several Arab states in 2020, by hosting in March a landmark foreign ministers' meeting with Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco and the UAE. It was agreed that the meeting will become an annual forum. Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited Bahrain and the UAE in December, becoming the first Israeli head of state to do so. In July, Saudi Arabia, which has no diplomatic ties with Israel, opened its airspace to all civilian flights to and from Israel for the first time.
Meanwhile, Arab countries continued to mend ties and strengthen unity to face regional challenges this year. In March, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad travelled to the UAE for his first visit to an Arab state since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011. Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim arrived in Cairo in June for his first visit to Egypt since the end of the 2017 diplomatic crisis. In December, UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan visited Qatar for the first time since the resumption of their relations.
Egypt hosted a summit in August with leaders of Iraq, Jordan, the UAE and Bahrain to consolidate regional cooperation. At the 31st Arab League summit held in Algeria in November, a declaration was adopted to jointly tackle regional and global challenges.
Türkiye, a major non-Arab state in the region, launched diplomatic initiatives this year to repair strained ties with regional powers, contributing to the easing of tensions in the Middle East.
In February, Turkish President Erdogan paid a visit to the UAE, marking a turning point in the Türkiye-UAE ties long marred by rifts. In March, Erdogan met with visiting Israeli President Isaac Herzog during the latter's ice-breaking visit to Ankara. The two countries announced in August to restore full diplomatic ties.
Erdogan visited Saudi Arabia in April to break the ice in bilateral ties caused by the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed reciprocated by paying a visit to Türkiye two months later.
Most notably, the rapprochement between Iran and Gulf Arab countries gained momentum in 2022.
On Dec. 21, Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian revealed that he held "friendly" talks with his Saudi counterpart Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud while attending a regional conference in Jordan. Before this meeting, Saudi Arabia and Iran, two arch-rivals, had already held rounds of peace talks, the last of which was in April.
Qatar's emir in May met with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raisi in the Iranian capital of Tehran to discuss bilateral cooperation. In August, Kuwait and the UAE announced separately to send their ambassadors back to Iran, in a dramatic policy reversal since the downgrading of their diplomatic ties with Tehran in 2016.
"With the concerns of food security, energy supply and other global challenges such as climate change, the linkage between domestic and foreign affairs for many Middle Eastern countries is becoming stronger, and they tend to solve problems at home more through regional cooperation," Nimrod Goren, president of the Israeli think tank Mitvim Institute (The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies), told Xinhua.
Waning US influence
The trend of reconciliation in the Middle East, in which more countries are seeking greater independence in foreign policy, comes amid the waning influence of the United States. The timing of the trend appears to be determined less by bilateral factors than by broader international shifts, said a policy brief published by the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, which added that the U.S. especially made a difference.
Analysts believe that reduced U.S. presence in the Middle East has shaken its regional allies' view of Washington as a sole security provider, prompting them to adjust foreign policies. The Middle East today looks rather different from previous eras when the regional order was heavily manipulated by Washington, which exerted its influence by sowing and then mediating rifts and conflicts to serve its own strategic interests. But Washington has shifted its focus away from the region in recent years as it no longer relies on its oil as before.
"The more that Washington moves to expand its military and political commitments to lead a new regional order, the less stable the region will likely become," wrote Marc Lynch, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, in an article published in July by the Foreign Affairs.
This July, U.S. President Joe Biden tried to regain the confidence of its allies by paying his first visit to the Middle East since taking office. But his visit achieved limited goals, as he neither succeeded in forming a regional military alliance against Iran, nor convinced Saudi Arabia to raise its oil output.
Biden's trip to the Middle East "ended not with a bang but with a whimper," wrote Lynch. "The United States simply does not have the resources or the political capabilities to play the role of hegemon in the Middle East. Regional powers no longer believe the United States can or will act militarily to defend them."
Uncertainty remains
Though the rapprochement has helped de-escalate tensions in the volatile Middle East, it is far from certain whether there will be more concrete, substantive progress. As the entanglement of various forces has complicated the whole picture, some intractable traditional rifts and conflicts remain, threatening to destabilize the region at any time.
Yemen's Houthi forces in January launched surprise drone and missile attacks on the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi. Israel has been conducting airstrikes on targets inside Syria throughout the year, while Türkiye has repeatedly threatened to launch a military offensive into Syria to crack down on anti-Turkish Kurdish fighters.
Uncertainty has grown over Iran's return to the 2015 nuclear deal due to stalled negotiations since August. The decades-long rivalry between Israel and Iran could become more pernicious as Israel's longest-serving prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to return to power with a far-right government.
Similarly, despite the Iranian-Saudi dialogue, the situation in Yemen is still worrisome. The Yemeni warring parties failed in October to extend a six-month ceasefire, dimming the hopes for ending the eight-year civil war soon.
Goren, also a senior fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, said that the situation of the conflicts-ridden Middle East is even getting more complex as many stubborn problems remain, while multifaceted cooperation and dynamic exchanges beyond economic consideration keep expanding the positive momentum. He said that more and more countries in the region are working together, "driven by common interests, despite the political differences that are still in place."
But, swift reconciliations are not enough to establish enduring stability and a genuinely cooperative regional order in the region, said the policy brief of the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies. "This requires a rational, pragmatic approach that grapples with the issues underlying the conflicts and makes a clear-eyed assessment of the specific interests of each major actor," it added.
