I spent 25+ years working as an expatriate corporate manager in the Arabian Gulf countries from 1993 through 2020. In my line of work I travelled to many countries across the Middle East — UAE through Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Turkiye, Morocco … And I worked with many colleagues there who were Saudis, Bahrainis, Kuwaitis , Egyptians, Sudanese, Lebanese. I lived and worked full time in Egypt for a couple of years too. I have interacted with Arabs coming from across many cross-sections of their society.
If there is one thing as pan-Arab reality that I can say I could observe very clearly in all those 25+ years spent living and working there, it is perhaps only this:
Underlying the American Middle East foreign policy, there has always been a keen desire to bring to the entire region lasting Peace through ostensible efforts to forge Stability. But underpinning those efforts, and that policy, is a deeply held conviction that stems from “Chaos Theory”. In the corridors of power in Washington DC, the politicians are consummate masters of the theory.
In other words, the DC chaos magicians try to create Peace through Stability and Stability by sowing the seeds of Chaos right across the entire Middle East and Northern Africa.
The video-clip of Sen. Ron Paul above is I think at least 10 years old . But the replay today only confirms to me, ever so more strongly, my observation of 25+ years of the lasting, tragic reality of the Arab world viz.: Chaos reigns !
The video also rings loud — you might say a tad irrational, but I don’t care if you do — alarm bells in my mind. It makes me acutely aware of the American “Chaos Theory” beginning to take shape in the Indo-Pacific and Indo-China geography and slowly creeping around my country to surround and envelop it with the good ol’ “peace through stability” theme-song.
From a US Foreign Policy standpoint, the playbook for this region might well be the same as the playbook used in the Middle East for well over a century since the end of World War-1 when the seeds of Chaos were first sown. The plot is the same, only the cast is different.
One simply has to imagine India Vs China in the place of Iran Vs Sunni Arab world — or else, Palestine Vs Israel — to understand how the Indo-China/Indo-Pacific theatre could easily be turned into Middle East Part-2 by the turn of the next century. If that sounds rather far-fetched, let’s just for a moment imagine the AUKUS and QUAD to be the State-sponsored Indo-Pacific counterparts of the non-State actors of the Middle-East such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Mossad and the Islamic Brotherhood …. and we will then begin to see the light of day and the full glory of the “Chaos Theory” shine. Add the BRICS too into the equation and you have created the fertile conditions all around the region, preparing it for the next 3 decades or longer to expect the potential for a 100 unimaginable Al Aqsa Typhoons to go on happening interminably — if not a full-scale, all-out war between the adversaries!
In the branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems, Chaos Theory studies their behaviour so as to determine how highly sensitive they are to slight changes in conditions, and why even small alterations in the conditions can give rise to strikingly great consequences. Now apply that to the study of how American Foreign Policy has worked in the last 100 years and one can easily understand its remarkable success in working the magic of the paradox: “Peace through Stability” and “Stability through Chaos”.
Sudarshan Madabushi