[Salon] A world of chance

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

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A world of chance

‘I seen my opportunities and I took ’em’

Talleyrand Feb 2

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The hysteria of outsiders about ‘the Middle East conflict’ recalls the old, crude joke about the enlargement of the European Union: leave it to the French to devise a procedure that reverses the order of the sexual act, that is, ‘deepening’ before ‘widening’.

Fears of a ‘wider’ conflict miss an important point. Conflict in this region does not always respond to a systemic logic of deterrence or containment. Talleyrand has already attacked these two concepts in other contexts but they don’t go away. Yet, the people mainly being deterred and contained right now in the Middle East are the Americans, whose capacity to assemble anything like a sensible policy of secure withdrawal is hindered by their own domestic politics, and by the fact of having as their closest regional ally the one country that has done more than any other to make conflict worse.

What animates violence from Gaza to the Gulf is, rather, a cruder form of opportunism. That means, for interventionists, the need to continually revise their calculations of Cui bono. One could ask, for example, whose opportunism is greater and, at the same time, whose is more malleable:

• The Chinese and Saudi shipping industries enjoying a comparative advantage in the Red Sea-bound trade, or the Houthis, whose political capital has also grown considerably?

• The Assad regime, having recast itself as a passive and undeclared neutral bystander in the Gaza conflict, or the Qataris and others of that ilk, having cast themselves as important intermediaries?

• Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies for squeezing every last drop of political and territorial advantage they can from what should have been a short, simple, and effectual punitive campaign, or Hamas and its allies, for continuing to ‘win’ by surviving?

• Iran and its alleged proxies, whose mutual prestige continues to grow interdependent, or America, the EU, and their few remaining clients, whose popularity has fallen as their dependence on the whims of opportunists has risen?

A pattern of opportunism describes many things in and about this region, from the moral triumph of the ‘Global South’ at the International Court of Justice, to the now quasi-permanent co-dependence of migration and politics throughout the ‘Global North’.

What Gavrilo Princip might have done with one or two armed drones! But that’s the thing about opportunism: he didn’t really need them to trigger a world war. Opportunism is not easily contained or deterred. That is true not only with pecuniary and political opportunists, but also and maybe even more so with ideological ones.

For opportunists, then, deepening and widening do not come in a prescribed order. Opportunism deepens as it widens and vice versa.

If there is to be a great big war, it will be easy to say that it was begun by a few hand-gliding opportunists, however long the fuse was. What everyone else should be asking now is, who is likely to be its Wallenstein, and how best can he be bought or eliminated?