This is an opinion article. The views expressed belong to the author.
The emerging Middle Eastern order led by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey, signed as the Makkah Pact and nicknamed the "Islamic NATO", took over a century in the making. It began with the fall of the Ottomans after World War I. Britain inherited much of the strategic space left behind, but after World War II, Britain was exhausted.
For generations, British power followed waterways. The Mediterranean, Suez, Red Sea, Aden, Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf formed the strategic highway connecting Britain with its empire in Asia. Control of these waterways helped make Britain a global power until the reckoning came at Suez.
In 1956, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. Britain and France, working secretly with Israel, invaded Egypt. On the battlefield, Egypt was comprehensively outmatched but politically, Nasser won.
US and Soviet pressure forced Britain and France to withdraw. An Egyptian military defeat became an extraordinary political victory. Nasser emerged as the hero of the Arab street, while Britain discovered that it could no longer decide the future of the Middle East.
This set in motion the first domino.
Nasser did not merely celebrate his victory. He wanted to export it.
In 1962, military officers overthrew the centuries-old Zaydi Imamate of North Yemen and declared a republic. Nasser eventually sent tens of thousands of Egyptian troops to keep the new republic alive.
Across the border, Saudi Arabia watched nervously. Nasser was exporting the idea of a republic, and republic was a dangerous word if you happened to be a king. Saudi Arabia therefore backed the Zaydi Shia Imam.
Here comes the contradiction. A staunch Sunni monarchy was supporting a Shia monarch against a republic backed by predominantly Sunni Egypt. Saudi Arabia would rather have a Shia monarch on its border than a republic.
After Egypt's defeat against Israel in 1967, Nasser increasingly needed to get out. But while Yemen demonstrated how religion could bend before political survival, another country was approaching an explosion of its own.
Lebanon divided power between religious communities, with a Maronite Christian president, Sunni prime minister and Shia speaker of parliament.
For a while, it worked. Beirut became a commercial and cultural centre of the Arab world. But underneath sat an old political settlement struggling to accommodate a changing society. After the PLO was driven from Jordan in 1970–71, Lebanon became its principal base. By 1975, accumulated tensions exploded into civil war.
Describing it simply as Muslims versus Christians misses what was happening underneath. Broadly, right-wing Christian factions confronted an alliance containing Lebanese leftists and Palestinian organisations.
Syria soon entered the war. Hafez al-Assad sent troops into Lebanon in 1976 and initially intervened against the Palestinian-leftist coalition. A supposedly socialist state was effectively preventing the defeat of right-wing Christian forces. Though, his position later changed after Israel entered Lebanon in 1982.
While Lebanon descended into civil war, the US was constructing its new security system in the Gulf.
As Britain withdrew, the US wanted the waterways protected but did not want to replace every departing British soldier with a US one.
So it outsourced the job.
In 1953, the US orchestrated the overthrow of democracy and strengthened Shah's monarchy. Iran subsequently became the principal US military proxy in the Gulf with Saudi Arabia acting as the other proxy. Its relationship with Washington was symbolised by the 1945 meeting between King Abdulaziz and President Franklin Roosevelt aboard the USS Quincy.
The Iran and Saudi Arabia proxy arrangement later became known as the "Twin Pillars" strategy.
Then came 1979.
The Iranian Revolution flipped one of the US's most important allies into one of its fiercest opponents. Ayatollah Khomeini spoke of exporting revolution, and the Gulf monarchies confronted the same fear Saudi Arabia had faced when Nasser entered Yemen 17 years earlier.
The US and Saudi Arabia needed somebody to contain the revolution.
The help came from Saddam Hussein.
Iraq invaded Iran in 1980. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait poured billions into Iraq, while the US increasingly tilted towards Baghdad, providing intelligence and other assistance.
Iraq became the western wall containing revolutionary Iran. Pakistan became the eastern wall of this containment strategy.
Then the war reached the waterways.
Iran and Iraq began attacking commercial shipping in the Gulf. Kuwait, which had financed Saddam's war, found its tankers vulnerable under Iranian fire. The US responded by reflagging Kuwaiti tankers and sending warships to escort them.
This marked the transition towards direct US policing of regional security. The US had managed the balance through its proxies, first Iran and Saudi Arabia, then Iraq as a counterweight to Iran. Now US warships themselves were protecting the waterways.
Then Saddam made the fateful decision that killed the proxy model altogether.
In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. The US assembled an international coalition and expelled Saddam's forces during Operation Desert Storm.
US military presence across the Gulf expanded. The former British naval facility in Bahrain eventually became home to the US Fifth Fleet. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait hosted US forces while, "coincidentally", Qatar experienced a bloodless palace coup in 1995 in which the son toppled his father. A year later, Qatar built Al Udeid Air Base at a cost exceeding $1 billion despite possessing a small air force. The base would eventually become the nerve centre of US air power in the region.
By the 1990s, the architecture was complete. Iran was contained, Iraq was contained, the Gulf monarchies were protected and the US sat above the waterways, much like its British predecessor, as the ultimate guarantor of the regional order.
Looking backwards, these conflicts are often described as Sunni versus Shia, Muslim versus Christian or secular versus Islamist.
But look again.
Religion was frequently invoked in this chessboard, but it was a mere tool in a wider geopolitical struggle. Underneath we repeatedly find monarchy versus republic, left versus right, revolution versus status quo and, ultimately, power versus power.
We find contradictions everywhere.
Saudi Arabia supported Shia monarchists against republicans in Yemen. Socialist Syria intervened against leftists in Lebanon. The US helped overthrow an elected government in Iran. Iraq invaded its own Arab neighbour.
By the 1990s, the US had established an imperfect, violent and frequently hypocritical order.
It was not a natural equilibrium. It was a geopolitical patchwork holding different centres of gravity in place – Iran, Iraq, the Gulf monarchies, Israel and the wider Arab world. The contradictions had not disappeared. They had merely been contained.
The system was waiting for something to disturb the balance.
And in 2003, that disturbance came from none other than the US itself.
The US invaded Iraq and set in motion another domino effect. One that would eventually produce the Iranian challenge to the very order the US had created.
About the Author: Waqas M. Awan is a Luxembourg-based corporate professional and the author of Power of Sage: An Anti-thesis to Machiavellian Prince. He writes on economics, geopolitics and power systems at his Substack publication Perspectives (waqasperspective). He has held senior finance roles at Amazon, Kraft Heinz and KPMG.
