Extreme Inequality Will Fuel Middle East Turmoil in 2020

Posted: December 19th, 2019

By Emile Nakhleh

Dr. Emile Nakhleh is a retired Senior Intelligence Service Officer, a founding director of the CIA's Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program and the Global and the National Security Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico. Since retiring from the government, Nakhleh has consulted on national security issues, particularly Islamic radicalization, terrorism, and the Arab states of the Middle East. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

OPINION — As the Middle East bids farewell to 2019 and welcomes the new year, the peoples of the region have precious little to celebrate. Young and old — Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Kurds, and Israelis — view the coming year with trepidation, growing uncertainty, and a deepening mistrust of their leaders and governing institutions — economic, political, and social.

The social contracts that political entities — states and statelets alike — cobbled with their peoples in the last century have run their course. Because of diminishing state resources and endemic corruption, the varied ethnic and religious communities that worked collaboratively, albeit begrudgingly, under the 20^th century political structures seem to have reverted to traditional fissures and fault lines of destructive political and religious tribalism. Leaders that traditionally paid at least a lip service to inclusion and power sharing have abandoned all pretenses of the rule of law and, instead, are resorting to personalized politics whose sole aim is to keep them in power.

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