[Salon] America’s Suez and the looming "Civilisational Divorce" - ArabDigest.org. Guest Post

America’s Suez and the looming "Civilisational Divorce" Summary: the current conflict with Iran represents a "Suez moment" for a declining United States, potentially leading to a "Civilisational Divorce" with implications that would accelerate the collapse of Western hegemony. The current conflict involving Iran, Israel and the United States is more than a regional skirmish; it is America’s “Suez moment”. Just as the 1956 Suez Crisis signalled the end of British imperial hegemony, the present war is a similar history shifting event. Donald Trump’s ‘war of choice’ marks a much larger blunder than even the Iraq War. While that war cost massive amounts in lives and treasure, the current trajectory threatens a total strategic defeat. America was already a slowly declining power before this ill-conceived conflict began. If war is the “locomotive of history,” then the attack on Iran is the engine speeding up that decline and the longer it continues, the faster the descent. Central to understanding this collapse is the work of the late Egyptian scholar and general coordinator of the opposition movement Kefaya, Dr Abdel-Wahab Al-Messiri (1938–2008). Al-Messiri was the intellectual architect of the “Functional” framework, a systemic sociological theory explaining how Western modernity utilises human beings and states as “tools” rather than ends in themselves. Initially, the “Functional Group” is a “parasite” depending on the host’s resources. Over time, the group takes over vital organs (finance, security, or intelligence), making the host’s survival dependent on the parasite’s health. Al-Messiri defined a “Functional State” as a geopolitical entity created not for the benefit of its citizens, but to serve as a “buffer,” “base,” or “market” for a distant power, what he called the “Metropole”. These states appear sovereign, with flags and UN seats, but their sovereignty is hallucinatory: their core decisions are made to satisfy their foreign patrons. The success of this arrangement historically relied on two factors: A cohesive international system designed by the West to guarantee its influence. The civilisational decline of the Islamic world, a state the Algerian thinker Malek Bennabi termed “colonisability”. Bennabi argued that nations are not just conquered by force, but by an internal cultural and psychological readiness to be dominated. An Iranian missile and drone attack badly damaged a U.S. Air Force (USAF) E-3G Sentry airborne warning and control aircraft at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia on Friday, as well as two other aircraft, and wounded 12 US personnel Al-Messiri argued that Israel is the most sophisticated example of a functional state in history. It was established via a “Colonial Contract” to solve Europe’s “Jewish Question” (anti-Semitism) by exporting the population that survived the Holocaust to a different geography. Its function is to be a Western bridgehead in the heart of the Islamic world, serving as a highly motivated local military that is more cost-effective for the West than stationing millions of its own soldiers in the Arab world. Beyond Israel, many Arab monarchies, such as Jordan and most Gulf states, function similarly. Jordan was deliberately established by Britain as a limited-resource buffer to protect Israel. Most Gulf states were created by colonialism to protect maritime navigation and later evolved to control global energy wealth. Saudi Arabia and Oman are notable exceptions; Oman possesses a deeply rooted political history and the components of a truly independent state while Saudi Arabia established its modern state in 1931. The current war has reached a tipping point because Iran is not going to capitulate, as anyone with a cursory understanding of Iranian history knows. The Iranians have the upper hand a point that the Economist has acknowledged. This shift does not necessarily mean these functional states have ceased to be useful to the Western project; rather, it signals that Al-Messiri’s Metropole has reached the limits of its power. When the Metropole can no longer project the force required to defend these “tools” against a resilient and ascendant adversary, the “utility clause” is effectively rendered void by exhaustion. If the US faces a strategic defeat, it could lead to a “Civilisational Divorce”: the total collapse of these regimes once the protection that is the sole reason for their existence vanishes. The disappearance of these entities is inevitable if Western hegemony collapses. For the Gulf monarchies, this could mean being absorbed by neighbours: analysts are discussing Kuwait becoming part of Iraq, Qatar joining Saudi Arabia, the UAE being subsumed into Oman, and Bahrain returning to Iran. A retreat by a patron like the US could cause these functional states to fall like dominoes. The most dangerous phase of this divorce occurs when a Metropole tries to terminate the contract. Terrified of becoming obsolete, functional states often become radicalised, attempting to prove they are “more royal than the King” by creating crises that lock the sponsor into the conflict. Al-Messiri described this as “Reversed Functionalisation,” where the “tool” begins to dictate the policy of the “creator”. The Israeli lobby in the US is not just an external group; it is an internal component of the Metropole’s political system. This has been achieved over the years through many means, from the Epstein files to epistemological capture, where the colony’s values (like “frontier” values) are sold back to the Metropole as “shared values”. This makes it politically impossible for the Metropole to “terminate the contract” because the Metropole’s public now views the colony’s interests as their own. Al-Messiri identified a specific weakness in the “modern western mind” that allows this to happen: it looks at the relationship in fragments - military, economic, political - rather than tallying the total cost of its lost sovereignty. History is littered with examples of colonies turning on their Metropoles after feeling abandoned. Between 1780 and 1833, Caribbean sugar planters used their wealth to buy parliamentary seats, holding the British economy hostage to delay abolition. Their manipulation ensured that when the Slavery Abolition Act finally passed in 1833, the Metropole was forced to pay a £20 million ransom - £17 billion in today’s money - nearly 40% of its annual budget to the slave owners. In 1835 Boer settlers fled the British Cape Colony to establish independent republics after the 1833 abolition of slavery. Their radical exit and subsequent military resistance dragged the Metropole into the costly Boer War (1899–1902), ultimately compelling London to abandon the liberal principles of racial equality to appease the settlers in the 1910 Act of Union. In the early 20th century, Protestant settlers signed the Ulster Covenant in 1912 and formed the UVF paramilitary in 1913 militantly to oppose Irish Home Rule. By lobbying the Conservative Party and threatening armed resistance, they effectively paralysed Westminster’s legislative agenda before the outbreak of World War I. The most prominent example of a “tool” turning on its “creator” was after France hinted at Algerian independence in the late 1950s. European settlers launched the 1958 coup and formed the OAS paramilitary in 1961 to conduct terrorist attacks and multiple assassination attempts against Charles de Gaulle. This campaign of violence brought the French Fourth Republic to total collapse, forcing a complete restructuring of the French government to contain the insurrection. As Israel senses it is being abandoned by America, it will inevitably turn to increasingly extreme methods of control and manipulation to save itself, from false flag operations to political assassinations. The “Samson Option” logic remains the ultimate form of geopolitical blackmail: “If I am to be discarded, I will pull the whole temple down with me”. Al-Messiri’s final warning was that “Reversed Functionalisation” is the ultimate sign of a Metropole’s civilisational decline. When a radicalised, extremist “tool” in a distant land can manipulate a Great Power, that Power has already lost its status as a true sovereign. America’s insistence on fuelling this war may not save its functional partners and it will almost certainly accelerate its own eclipse.