Valdai Club

Over the last 3-4 years, Turkey getting closer to Russia was considerably alienating it from the European Union and the Western camp, so now the Europeans perceive it as a complete outsider, suggests Dorothée Schmid, Senior Research Fellow, Head of Ifri’s Turkey and Middle East Program. Now, Turkey worries the West, because it is becoming more autonomous, and its policy - opaque and less readable.

For NATO, the challenge of Turkey’s policy goes third after Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency, says Dorothée Schmid, Senior Research Fellow, Head of Ifri’s Turkey and Middle East Program. However, its ambitions and strange behavior worries the alliance a lot. “Turkey seems to be very consistent in its willingness not only to autonomize but to be a big player, the dominant power in the Middle East,” the expert suggests.  

In the last decade, Algerian foreign diplomacy was mostly dead, because all control over it belonged to the President, asserts Yahia H. Zoubir, Senior Professor of International Studies; Director of Research in Geopolitics, KEDGE Business School, Visiting Fellow at the Brooking Doha Center. Recently, when the country had become fully aware of its losses at the world stage and the African continent, in particular, it began to return to foreign politics and to restart its diplomatic machinery.  

“Algeria is in a big crisis, because both of its political system’ sources of legitimacy, which are the war of independence and oil, have been contested by the population,” says Yahia H. Zoubir, Senior Professor of International Studies; Director of Research in Geopolitics, KEDGE Business School, Visiting Fellow at the Brooking Doha Center. According to him, the current protests exploded due to the long humiliation of citizens from the part of the sick president and the contract between the business and the state.

“There is still very high level of mistrust between the US and Russia about whether they can work together on counterterrorism or not, and there is a record of expectations that have not been met”, says Randa Slim, Senior Fellow and Director, Conflict Resolution and Track II Dialogues Program, Middle East Institute. She also emphasizes that the United States, Russia, and Turkey may work in the humanitarian sphere – for example, in establishing a special safe zone to host the refugees.

“At the moment, Libya has a competition between two blocks or currents, which are militarist nationalistic authoritarianism and Islamist religious authoritarianism”, none of which believe in democracy and civil society and does not respect the law, says Mohamed Eljarh, Co-Founder and CEO, Libya Outlook for Research and Consulting. According to him, there is also a “silent majority” of Libyan people, who must be represented in the effective government, but the international community prefers to support these “sectarian” groups with particular interests.  

The proposal, which Donald Trump calls “deal of the century” represents the positions of the United States and Israel and does not lead to creating a Palestinian state, asserts Amre Moussa, Secretary General, League of Arab States (2001-2011). “The negotiation process must be performed under the leadership of the Middle East Quartet, on the basis of legal documents, with the United Nations and, perhaps, also the African Union”, let alone the sides of the conflicts and local actors, he says.

The efforts of the international organizations to settle down the Libyan conflict are vain because they the UN Security Council is divided, it fails to make relevant decisions, reacts very late, and its decisions are often violated by both regional and external actors, asserts Mohamed Eljarh, Co-Founder and CEO, Libya Outlook for Research and Consulting. He adds that “there seems to be no mechanisms or tools to impose or implement the will of the divided UN Security Council, and that reflects very badly on its mission and envoy”.

The Middle East still has many prerequisites for the Arab Spring to return: the lack of leadership, bad government procedures, no getting advantage of new technologies, says Mohammed Ihsan, Senior Professor, College of War, King’s College London. “If the Arab societies will not get advantage and objectively analyze, why they reached these states, history will repeat again and again, and we are going to have more ‘springs’ or another wave of dictatorships”, he is convinced.

After the British rule collapsed, India was more of continental that maritime power, but when in 1991, it changed its orientation back to exports, globalization, and liberalization, the seas immediately became important, suggests. С Raja Mohan, Director, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. According to him, the current Indian Prime Minister managed to give this shift a real political form. “The essential role of maritime domain is built into India’s transformation, but we needed a big leader, who can actually give it a political voice – and Modi did it,” the expert says.