February 10, 2013
Is the Middle East entering a new Cold War? That
was a question posed at a recent conference at the AUC by Fulya Atacan,
a professor of political science at Yildiz Technical University in
Istanbul. She observed that the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey are
engaged in an effort to unite Sunni Muslim societies in an informal coalition
at the expense of the Shiite-majority nations of Iraq and Iran. Turkey’s
decision to join the effort, notably aimed at backing Sunni rebels against the
Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad, entails a realignment of Istanbul’s relations
with Baghdad and Tehran. Speaking in November at Regional Cooperation in a
New Middle East, a conference co-sponsored by the Council on Foreign
Relations, Atacan argued that the end of Turkey’s “zero problems with
neighbors” policy is not to its geopolitical advantage. “Turkey lost the
opportunity to lead or to help other Arab states to come together and to sit at
the table,” she said, “because Turkey now is a part of the conflict.” Iran,
too, may regret how it has played the sectarian card in the Middle East,
suggested Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute
for Near Eastern Affairs. While the Iranian regime had sought a
“pan-Islamic” approach to regional politics, he said, “Iran failed to form a
good relationship with opposition groups, putting the future of its
relationship with Syria at risk if Assad falls.”
Over the last twenty-five years, South Korea has
moved from a dictatorship to a fully-functioning modern democracy boasting the
fifteenth largest economy in the world. At The Arab Spring and Korean
Experiences of Political Transition, a conference held at the AUC in
December, Jang Ji-Hyang, director of the Middle East and North Africa
program at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul, offered some
advice for Egyptians experiencing their own transition. “In the Korean economic
success model,” she said, “it was quality state institutions that were the key
to determining Korea’s sudden growth.” She said that while the World Bank or
International Monetary Fund would favor “reform and adjustment strategies of
firing employees and shrinking the state,” the lesson from Korea’s experience
is to “stick to refurbishing the existing system rather than trying to create
something from scratch.” An effective reform process, she argued, should “focus
on short-term steps like instituting competitive, merit-based, and transparent
civil service exams.”