A Baghdad Pact Style Arrangement to Unite Arab States

The Arab world in the global Muslim imagination is home to Islam’s earliest civilisation while also being a region defined by the lack of sovereignty and political integrity. Its neighbours have always feared that the region’s volatility would export this unwanted political model to them. But today this model is dead and a new experiment in political order has begun.

Responding to the report of a British royal commission recommending the partition of Palestine in 1937, the Indian poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal saw in the impending establishment of a Jewish national home there a consequence of the Arabs “deserting the Turks in their hour of trial”. His reference to the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule during the First World War did not represent some Pan-Islamic nostalgia for a lost caliphate that Iqbal had never supported. Like many of his compatriots, Hindu and Muslim, he was concerned rather with how Arab nationalism naively set the Middle East up for European rule. Iqbal was in fact a critic of nationalism, which he saw as inherently violent and the force behind modern imperialism.

Unlike countries like Iqbal’s own India, where nationalism arose after and against colonialism, in places like the Levant it showed its contradictory rather than liberating character by preceding and indeed making way for European empires. Now this had to some degree also been the case for the Balkan territories that had freed themselves from Ottoman rule before the Great War. But many of them had powerful protectors in rival empires like the Russian, whose competitive relations with their British, French, German or Austro-Hungarian peers allowed these new states a measure of autonomy and eventually independence. The Arabs enjoyed no such advantage and in the view of many non-Arab Muslims have remained in a state of dependency as Iqbal predicted.

The region’s political integrity, Iqbal thought, was to be guaranteed not by the emergence of petty nation-states but only by a great power such as the Ottomans had been, with the Arabs likely better able to have negotiated their autonomy with the defeated Turks than the victorious British and French who replaced them. “Experience,” he therefore said, “has made it abundantly clear that the political integrity of the peoples of the Near East lies in the immediate reunion of the Turks and the Arabs.” Not the resurrection of the Ottoman Empire but some kind of regional rather than national political arrangement was crucial for the future of the Middle East, something he thought could be as little secured by Pan-Arabism as it had been by Pan-Islamism.

For Iqbal and many other Muslims outside the Middle East, the Palestinian problem was thus as much if unequally a product of Arab nationalism as of British colonialism. For even if they were to become independent in the future, these new states were too small and powerless to exercise sovereignty over the region and could in fact only deprive it of stability by their mutual fears and competition. The fate Iqbal predicted for the Middle East was he thought already evident in the proposal for a Jewish national home in Palestine, which he said would be nothing more than a home for British imperialism in a permanent mandate that would inhibit the sovereignty of any other state in the Arab world. This role would later be taken on by the Americans.

“Far from being a solution of the British problem in the Mediterranean,” Iqbal thought that the founding of a Jewish national home was “really the beginning of the future difficulties of British imperialism.” In other words, the effort to prevent the establishment of sovereign states in the region would always be contested. Yet, Iqbal also warned that the Arabs “must further remember that they cannot afford to rely on the advice of those Arab kings who are not in a position to arrive at an independent judgement in the matter of Palestine with an independent conscience.” Already a celebrated Muslim thinker in his own lifetime, Iqbal was not alone in his deep suspicion of Arab nationalism and the Arab state itself as a political form lacking sovereignty from its very inception. It represented for him the malign side of nationalism more generally.

Such critical views of Arab states interestingly do not distinguish between their institutional or ideological forms. Prevalent even today among non-Arab Muslims in particular, these views derive in part from a mixture of resentment at those who claim Islam as their cultural inheritance and the embarrassment of seeing its would-be heirs rendered so powerless. But their prejudices are also paired with the keen recognition that Arab states have rarely enjoyed sovereignty. Many of them moved from Ottoman to European rule after the First World War and to American stewardship after the Second, with the Cold War’s great power competition eventually allowing some to claim a measure of autonomy for themselves.

But the ideological states of the Cold War, from revolutionary Algeria, Nasser’s Egypt and Ghaddafi’s Libya to Baathist Syria and Iraq or communist Yemen, were dismantled by a combination of internal protest and external force in its aftermath. And with these republics weakened or destroyed, the conservative and capitalist monarchies of the Persian Gulf came to the fore as the region’s chief political actors. In some ways they were compelled to occupy a stage left vacant by the collapse of a string of Cold War states, starting with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 during the War on Terror, proceeding to the bombing of Libya as part of the upheaval of the Arab Spring in 2011, and culminating with the fall of Asad’s Syria in 2024. Egypt, another casualty of the Arab Spring, had long been shorn of its once-formidable regional role.

Though each of the Gulf states relies on American protection and none has successfully fielded an army in battle, they have the financial resources to fight proxy wars with each other through insurgents and mercenaries. Their very lack of sovereignty permits them to perform its simulacrum under the US security umbrella. A country like the UAE is much like Israel in this respect, small and dependent for its security on the US but, perhaps for this very reason, willing of late to exercise military force across the region and even beyond. Both possess large populations of disenfranchised residents, Palestinians for one and a mixture of expatriates and migrant workers for the other. Yet each also stands in its own way as a social, political and economic model for many around the world.

The loss of sovereignty does not make for peaceable relations of dependence, as Iqbal realised, but leads to even more violence within and between states. Their weakness also serves as an invitation for external powers to intervene in the Middle East. Apart from the Americans with their European and Israeli allies, these include non-Arab states in the wider region. The most important are Turkey and Iran, two large countries competing for hegemony in the region with each other and Israel. Tempted by the region’s apparently easy pickings, both have sought to create proxies, alliances and zones of influence within it, either to forestall threats from the insurgencies plaguing its weak states or to expand their own power over them.

The outcome of such interventions, like those by the US, has been mixed at best. Interfering in a region lacking political integrity reinforces and indeed spreads violence there rather than containing it. This is because their proxies and partners are unable to serve such interventionist powers effectively. Their weakness is signalled by constantly shifting strategies which therefore lack institutional depth. Saudi Arabia and the UAE may be partners against Yemen, Libya, Qatar or Sudan one day and rivals the next; they may shift from wanting Turkish to Pakistani protection. Only their American defence links possess any depth, and these have also proven inadequate in the war on Iran.

Like all Arab states, those in the Gulf are internally fragile. Invested in preventing military coups from the top and popular uprisings from the bottom, they centralise power and weaken their own institutions in the process. Though provisioned with expensive military equipment, they do not trust their own armies, which are rarely deployed in conflicts such as the recent one with Iran. The majority of their populations (or roughly half of it in Saudi Arabia) are made up of non-citizens and so cannot be counted upon to defend these states. Even to call the smaller Gulf principalities nation-states is questionable, as they are more like corporate entities or special economic zones, representing in this way a new and futuristic kind of social form.

The most significant economic relations the Gulf monarchies have are with Asia, Europe, or North America rather than with the rest of the Middle East. This suggests that the region’s lack of political integrity is compounded by the absence of its economic equivalent. All of which means that efforts by external powers to redefine the region or claim hegemony over it result in them being pulled into a morass of ever-changing relations with no strategic depth. Iran’s strategy of building an outer line of defence in the Arab world by way of allies like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis ended up making them into liabilities that forced the Islamic Republic into a damaging war it had not planned on to protect its would-be defenders.

Under their American security umbrella many Arab states can pioneer new social models and generate great wealth despite lacking sovereignty. The Gulf monarchies, for example, are like Israel remarkably diverse societies shaped by massive immigration while also housing an underclass that is desirable for the former but not the latter. Yet like Lebanon, once also a success story as a pro-Western centre of Middle Eastern banking, publishing, and culture, these non-sovereign states are vulnerable to attack and disruption. Carved out of Syria by the French to give its Christian populations a significant voice in the new country, Lebanon even looked for some time like a more successful if demilitarised version of Israel.

But Lebanon was unable to play the neutral role of the region’s Switzerland. As a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it came to house a large refugee population alongside the PLO expelled from Jordan in 1970. A state within the state, the PLO helped shift the demographic balance of the country to minoritise Christians. The civil war that followed set the stage for an Israeli invasion that resulted in the PLO’s departure. It also permitted the rise to power of Shia movements and eventually Hezbollah, which took the political place of the PLO. Syria and Iran then came to influence Lebanese politics in competition with Saudi Arabia, while Israel repeatedly disrupted these relations militarily.

Similar stories of state fragility, military intervention and civil wars supported by external forces can be told about Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Syria, each illustrating the region’s lack of political integrity. While in the past these events might have had the movement of refugees and spread of terrorism as their main international consequences, today we see them exporting the loss of state sovereignty itself beyond the Arab world. The war on Iran was made possible by that in Gaza and had as its goal the dismantling of Iranian sovereignty to make it more like an Arab state. To raise the cost of war for its enemies, Iran retaliated against their bases and allies in the Gulf and Israel but was unable to deter them entirely.

The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, occurring simultaneously with the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, had already carried Arab politics and funding to the other side of the Persian Gulf. The subsequent war on terror in Afghanistan was also defined by Middle Eastern concerns regarding Al-Qaeda, and now in Iran we have yet another example of the way in which the violence proceeding from the Middle East’s loss of sovereignty and lack of political integrity has expanded its reach in Asia. There it can only lead to the further loss of sovereignty, as was the case in Afghanistan, with consequences not only for Iran but Pakistan and India. The best conclusion to the recent war for them would therefore be the survival and even strengthening of Iran’s sovereignty.

When Iqbal attributed the Palestinian problem to the emergence of Arab nationalism, he was himself a colonial subject. That allowed him to speak with authority about European imperialism, while also fostering a politics for which sovereignty but not nationalism was crucial. And yet Iqbal’s vision of India as a future great power providing South Asia with political integrity never came to pass. Instead, he was claimed by the movement for a Muslim national home in India that opted for the kind of partition Iqbal had criticised in Palestine. But despite the Subcontinent’s division allowing the Americans and Chinese to interfere in its affairs, both India and Pakistan are fixated on preserving their sovereignty and have not turned their region into a version of the Arab world.

Yet the war in Iran had threatened to follow the Arab model in destabilising parts of Asia and even the Caucasus. A much larger and economically more important country than Afghanistan, it would not have been possible to manage or isolate Iran as the former continues to be. And the presence of American bases and troops in the country would have compromised the autonomy of all its neighbours far more significantly than was the case in Afghanistan. While none of this has come to pass, the Iran war showed how Arab politics is no longer confined to its own geography, serving as both motor and model for a future that threatens other parts of the world with the loss of sovereignty and political integrity.

Iran’s survival is important because it represents the non-Western state’s sovereignty and so the ability to secure and chart its own future. The comparison between the recent war focussed on Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Crisis of 1956 about Egypt’s control of the canal is often made. While it is true that Suez marked the end of Britain’s imperial power just as Hormuz illustrates the limits of America’s, there is a crucial distinction between them. The Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt was halted by the Eisenhower administration, whereas it is Iran itself which has prevented the US and Israel from overturning its sovereignty without having to fight an insurgency against occupation as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Vietnam.

Outside the familiar talking-points of Euro-American debate, the war in Iran is not seen by Asians or Africans as being either about religious authoritarianism or nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Discussion is dominated instead by the importance of sovereignty at a time when the international order forged during the Cold War as part of a balance of power is coming apart. The loss of that balance with the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a unipolar moment characterised by the indiscriminate use of American violence in places like the Middle East, Southern Europe, and North Africa. Iran is the last of the Middle East’s ideological states, emerging late during the Cold War and able so far to survive it as an industrial, scientific, and military power.

In addition to permitting the expansion of American violence globally, the end of the Cold War also resulted in the promotion of economic globalisation. And this made for the inadvertent rise of non-Western powers in Asia. Today the US seeks to reassert its monopoly of violence internationally while dismantling the unequal benefits of globalisation with sanctions and tariffs. But the war in Iran tells us that it is already too late. President Trump is concerned by the relative decline of his country’s military and economic power. But he also serves as the most visible symptom of that decline which he cannot therefore reverse. Meant to export the Arab model to Iran, his war might have ended by destroying that model altogether.

The politics of the Middle East is now defined by what might replace this failed model of competitive dependency, with Iqbal’s idea that only the reunification of the Arabs and Turks is capable of guaranteeing sovereignty in the Middle East suddenly taking on a new life. For in the wake of the Cold War and certainly during and since the Arab Spring, Turkey has tried to expand its influence and authority across the region in political and economic ways. Moving beyond the popular Turkish notion that Arab ‘betrayal’ had resulted in the Ottoman defeat of the First World War, this expansion seems dictated as much by the desire to stabilise a volatile region as to see off any potential competitor who might become its hegemon— Israel and Iran being the most important.

From its sponsorship of Ahmad al-Sharaa’s new government in Syria to efforts at creating trade corridors linking Asia to the Mediterranean, Turkey’s efforts to play a hegemonic role in the Middle East are clear enough but insufficient by themselves. After all, Iran has emerged strengthened in some ways from the war and capable of threatening its Gulf neighbours, while Pakistan has re-emerged as an important diplomatic and military partner for it. These non-Arab countries are the only ones with the geographic and demographic scale to house significant manufacturing, military, and scientific establishments of the kind necessary to claim sovereignty in and for the region. And so far they seem to be operating together, with Egypt as a kind of symbolic or sleeping Arab partner in their diplomatic efforts to bring about a new Middle Eastern order after the Iran war.

The co-ordinated actions of these countries during and after the war suggest that it is not any Ottoman precedent that is crucial for the Middle East but rather one from the Cold War. The Baghdad Pact had brought together Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Britain, ostensibly to form an anti-Soviet front protecting the Arab world from revolutionary Marxism. But each member of the Pact had its own vision of what it was meant to do. Pakistan, for instance, saw it as a way of asserting leadership in the Muslim world partly as a way of escaping India’s gravitational pull. But of course, it was also there as the heir of Britain’s colonial Indian army, which had been used to conquer and pacify large parts of the Middle East, a role Pakistan has intermittently continued to play at the behest of countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

In some ways, then, this updated version of the Baghdad Pact might be truer to the original aims of some of its members than the Cold War one. It remains an open question whether these states can continue to act in concert for much longer, but the very differences between them makes for a relationship with the region that cannot simply be one of either singular or shared hegemony. Iran and Turkey are as much rivals as partners, while Pakistan competes with neither. Having broken free of the South Asian region which India tries but fails to dominate, Pakistan can play a new global role in the Middle East, also connecting it to Central Asia and China.

Ever cautious in its foreign affairs, India, for its part, has chosen a Middle Eastern policy that belongs in many respects to the past. The military and commercial links it has forged with the US, Israel, and the UAE suddenly look fragile, with divisions appearing between all these countries. It now seems highly unlikely that IMEC, the India-Middle East-Europe corridor linking India to Europe via the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel will go ahead. Neither does the I2U2 strategic framework bringing together India and Israel with the UAE and the US look viable after the Iran war. Unless it extricates itself from these failing projects, India will look on as its neighbours rearrange the commercial and strategic chessboard of the Middle East.

Was Iqbal correct, after all, in seeing the Middle East stabilised neither by Arab nationalism nor dependence on an imperial power and its regional agents, but instead by way of collective arrangements in sovereignty? Let us recall that Europe, too, has long been made up of big and small states, with many like Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland unable to exercise sovereignty without the permission or restraint of their neighbours. Indeed, these small countries exist precisely because they have proven so useful in managing and mediating the relations of the larger powers around them. With any luck, such might also be the fate of the Middle East as a region no single power can dominate, but which several can protect from the desire of any hegemon. As in Iqbal’s day, however, the biggest threat such a project faces is neither from a great power nor its agents in the region. It is rather from the active connivance of Arab states in their own subjugation by their mutual competition for selective advantage.

Faisal Devji is Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of, inter alia, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea and The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptations of Violence, both published by Hurst.

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