Political Islam now commands the Middle East

No sane American president takes office hoping for war. Woodrow Wilson, a 56-year-old Princeton academic, said it would be ‘the irony of fate’ if his presidency came to be dominated by foreign affairs. He spoke in 1913. Joe Biden came to office in 2021 promising to end the ‘forever wars’ of Iraq and Afghanistan. But as he boarded Air Force One on Tuesday, another irony of fate was in evidence: the American-enforced world order is crumbling, and the results are now becoming clear.

Iran, far from being neutered by US sanctions, was able to start a war using its Hamas proxies and their Hezbollah allies to attack Israel. At a stroke, the Arab-Israeli rapprochement America had wanted to nurture has been put on ice. Biden had hoped this week to meet his Egyptian, Saudi and Jordanian counterparts along with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. But the summit was called off when a hospital in Gaza was shelled (which Israel and a number of external open source intelligent analysts have blamed on a stray Palestinian rocket, and which Biden said was ‘done by the other team’ during his press conference on Wednesday). Containing this conflict might prove very hard indeed.

At the same time, Xi Jinping was keen to show off the other axis of allies at a gathering in Beijing to celebrate ten years of its Belt and Road initiative. Among the honoured guests were Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. The Russian media has been quick to contrast Xi and Putin’s multipolar vision of the world with the Biden administration’s floundering in the Middle East. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said Israel has already gone too far in its response to the Hamas attack and that Beijing and Moscow are working to ‘immediately energise the two-state solution as a fundamental solution’.

As demonstrations engulf the Middle East after the hospital attack, America’s moment appears to be over already.