The Absolutely Fascinating- and Unnerving- Middle East

We are witnessing the newest chapter in the saga of the Middle East, and the light at the end of the tunnel lies in our own American history.

Where to start, where to begin? The Middle East is an awfully fascinating region to study and understand, and the more one does so, the easier it becomes to feel overwhelmed by senses of wariness and pessimism. With seemingly unorganized and unfocused foreign policies by Western governments, and constant news of explosive and infectious extremist political entities, the only natural solution one may feel is to curl up in a ball and perhaps build a nuclear bunker hundreds of feet underground… Don’t worry, this blog post will become optimistic eventually, I hope.

A common assumption many in the West and in America make is the dangerous notion that Arab and Middle Eastern countries are inherently unable to construct democratically free societies and to live in peace amongst each other. I get it, and it’s easy to fall back on this. It is only human to perceive one’s own perspective as the truest reality, and thus engage in an ethnocentric viewpoint in which everything that is different is ultimately inferior and incomparable to one’s own experience. Reading Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, which chronicles the lucid resemblances between financial collapses throughout human history, and how these trends constantly get ignored by contemporary “experts”, is a great example of this ethnocentricity and I believe its same underlying principles relate to Western perspectives on the Middle East. What is happening across the Middle East happened to us in the West.

It is true that the current Middle East is largely no nursery for democracies with Israel being the lone flower in the region.  However, when looking at European and American history, did democracy simply sprout up with the snap of ones fingers and “poof”, it become the great human force it currently is today? No, the great democracy I find myself in today (the United States of America) was constantly being built and restructured, often with periods of intense instability and gloomy outlooks on the horizon. Our democracy is founded and grounded in our history, constantly being amended and adapted as the times change. So when I look at the Middle East, I battle the urge to want to label it a failed garden project. I remind myself that my great nation was once thought to be an unrealistic and unattainable dream. Periods of struggle led to our progress towards a brighter future- thanks to our forefathers who shared a similar vision.

With all that said, there are an awful lot of forces in the region that are not pointing in the direction of freedom and democracy. With the rise of the Islamic State gruesomely conquering city after city, and the continuous Syrian civil war causing immense suffering internally and in neighboring countries, the need for Western leadership has never been more apparent. The United States must continue its support of forces for good in the region. Those who vehemently speak out against the very existence of Israel, and thus American support of Her, simply are not grasping the bigger picture at play. Democracy is not only in America’s best interests, but the world’s. The free world must water the seeds of democracy so that they may grow and be fruitful.