http://www.newstatesman.com/world/2016/11/multitude-rivals

A multitude of rivals

Unless Donald Trump is able to master geopolitical complexity, the trouble in the Middle East will get far worse.

By John Jenkins

Well, who’d have thought it? Another popular insurgency in the series that started in Tunis in late 2010. The gift that keeps on giving. Only this time it has hit the United States, to the bemusement of those who like their liberal internationalism neat and any populist revolutions a long way from home. The same people who misread the Arab uprisings of 2011 and continue to believe magically that movements based on the word of God will embrace tolerance and inclusivity seem shocked that some Americans have decided to have an uprising of their own.

None of this will be lost on the leaders or people of the Middle East. My guess is they will be a lot less shocked than commentators in the US and Europe are. After all, the blurring of business and politics, the instrumentalisation of identity, ambiguity about where the public good ends and personal advantage begins and an often casual attitude to facts are characteristic of the politics of the region. More fundamentally, relations between states in the Middle East and North Africa are transactional; most significant trade flows are in commodities; and conflict within and between states is endemic. The region politically looks far more like the Hobbesian world of early-modern Europe than it does the Kantian dream of the European Union. Donald Trump talks like a mercantilist: Barack Obama talks like a Rawlsian idealist. Most Arab, Israeli or Iranian leaders are more comfortable with the former than the latter. http://www.newstatesman.com/world/2016/11/multitude-rivals