Between President Biden’s presidential campaign and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman recent courting of China, much has been written in the Western and Gulf media about major “tectonic” changes in the “Middle East”, or to use the region’s non-colonial name, West Asia. These changes are pivoted around two major simultaneous geopolitical events. Firstly, there has supposedly arisen a rapture in the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, which had hitherto held firm for close to 70 years. Secondly, there is now an open alliance between some British-created Gulf rentier states and Britain’s Zionist project in Palestine, “Israel”, which culminated in the signing of the “Abraham Accords”. 

The current geographical partitions of the West Asia region are rooted in the British and French imperialist divide and rule carve-up of the region after World War One. The carve-up, known as the Sykes-Picot agreement divided the region into Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and some of the Gulf States. The British Empire had also committed to a Zionist settler-colonial project, i.e. the Balfour Declaration, in Palestine (which eventually materialised into the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947-8). This imperialist partition of the region and Britain’s Zionist colonial entity were rejected by the masses in the region, and both colonial enterprises were rightly in the crosshairs of decolonisation, third-world nationalism, and anti-imperialist movements during the 1950s and 1960s.

The anti-imperialist struggle against the British & French order in the Middle East during the decolonisation era was led by Gamal Abd al-Nasser, the leader of Egypt. In theory, what Nasser wanted was a united Arab region with its resources prioritised to the region instead of British and other European economies. Other Arab nationalist and left-wing movements also challenged the imperial order in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in West Asia. Their vision was the same as Nasser’s in the sense that they hoped to revive a new civilisation out of the rubble of imperialism and colonialism. They had imagined to revive the old cities of Baghdad, Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo, Beirut. As such, some British and western-backed rulers were challenged and overthrown and a few republican states were established. The republican states also set the political agenda for the region, with the liberation of Palestine central to their aims. 

These movements may have succeeded had the United States not thrown its weight behind the British colonial order after World War Two on the pretext of thwarting the spread of “communism”. After liberating western Europe and its elites in WW2, the United States needed to guarantee and establish western European prosperity.  In order for western European economies to be once again be prosperous their extractive global Empires and interests needed to be maintained. Therefore, the United States accepted that French, British, Belgian Empires and interests needed their support in the post-war period because continued American prosperity also depended on it. The United States needed to export its goods to western Europe and Europe needed the means to pay for them. The US militarily maintaining the British and French divide-and-rule order in West Asia should be initially seen in this context. More so, from another perspective, the British had brutally kidnapped and enslaved millions of Africans, earning billions in today’s currency, had violently extracted trillions from India over a 200-year period, with its policies impoverishing and killing tens of millions, therefore there was nothing left for the British to pillage and plunder in India. So after WW2 Britain turned elsewhere to economically maintain its Britishness, among them, West Asia. 

Since the high tide of decolonisation, Egypt has capitulated with the signing of the Camp David Accords in the late 1970s with Britain’s Zionist colonial project, Lebanon was repeatedly bombed and then invaded by the Zionist colonial entity in 1982, killing tens of thousands, the Iraq state was bombed to smithereens in 1991 under the pretext of liberating one of Britain’s client states, Kuwait, from Iraqi occupation. Iraq’s essential infrastructure was militarily targeted by the American and British, and then was placed under a United Nations economic sanctions regime for the entire 1990s, which hindered any rehabilitation efforts, and according to some reports took the lives of 500,000 children. Not content with the economic sanctions, the Americans and British led an invasion of Iraq in 2003 and reduced the country to a sectarian hellscape, killing upwards of a million people. In Syria, under the guise of supporting “moderate rebels” to overthrow the Syrian government, Britain led the charge to call for more American-led military intervention. The Americans never relented to British demands for a No Fly Zone but did provide at least $1 billion in a clandestine arms program for Syria’s “moderate rebels”.     

As such, the capitulation and smashing of the traditionally republican states by the United States and British military has allowed the British-created and nepotistic Gulf states (now grouped in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)) to prosper and flourish unimpeded. Simultaneously, the once agenda-setting republican states of the Arab hinterland states are internally divided and destitute, and slowly reduced to reservations and refugee camps in all but name. As a consequence, the hinterland’s once-unique social and cultural mosaic has come under immense threat. The unifying vision of the republican states has been rendered unrealistic and even immaterial and obsolete, while the GCC states, because they served British and Western interests, have prospered by virtue of the fact that they were never singled out for economic sanctions, regime change, and war. The GCC, that is the resource rich, predominately small nepotistic states, are now economically and militarily secure and far removed from any kind of anti-imperialist or decolonisation threat. The threat being they’ll be absorbed into a wider anti-imperialist national project instead of bankrolling all aspects of the British economy, and offering a lucrative labour outlet for hundreds of thousands of British citizens. 

As the geographical partitioning of West Asia is rooted in British colonialism, it is perfectly rational to delve into British and American colonial history so to map the trajectory of the perceived “tectonic” shift. This perception was originally triggered by the notion that America’s military is in retreat from the region. For example, in 2011, the United States was initially hesitant to militarily intervene in Libya, which enraged the British establishment and its media. Another is that then-President Obama’s rapprochement with Iran, which materialised in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was opposed by some of the Gulf states, and as mentioned, his refusal to establish a No Fly Zone in Syria during the Syrian civil war drew the continued ire of many. Of course, the main reason for the United States’s perceived military hesitancy is that the Iraq invasion and occupation of 2003 truly backfired on the United States in terms of the thousands of troops killed by the resistance, and its justification (ridding Iraq of “Weapons of Mass Destruction”) proved to be indubitably false. 

In this trajectory, one can see parallels in the North American settler-colonial revolt in 1776, commonly referred to as the “American Revolution”. Professor Gerald Horne, in his book “The Counter-Revolution of 1776”, convincingly argued that leading figures in the British Crown settler colonies of North America were aware of the debates in London about the abolishment of the slave system that their plantations were dependent upon. Specifically speaking, a certain Lord Mansfield in 1772 ruled in court that a formerly enslaved person, James Somerset, could not be further imprisoned and enslaved in England and was taken to the Caribbean. According to Horne, this ruling gave the “perception that served to fuel anti-London sentiment [among the North American colonialists], which was to detonate in 1776.”  

Furthermore, there were indications that the British Crown was looking to establish peace treaties with indigenous peoples in North America, and therefore stymie any further colonialism and its attendant ethnic cleansing across the continent. The argument placed before our hands by Professor Horne is that leading American settler-colonialists then rebelled against London in 1776 in order to continue with slavery, settler-colonialism, and its attendant ethnic cleansing. Similarly, the British-installed Gulf puppets (with Britain no doubt pulling the strings in the background) want to move ahead with the further sectarianisation and cantonisation of the region to further consolidate the British-created Sykes-Picot partitions in West Asia. 

The Saudi-UAE led war on Yemen launched in 2015 can be seen in this light. The modern Saudi clan is a British endeavour. The founder of the Kingdom, Ibn Saud, re-established themselves in Riyadh with British weaponry in 1902. The Saudi clan then spread across the peninsula with British approval and it’s a British official working in the Foreign Office, George Rendel, who laid claim to have named Ibn Saud’s territorial acquisitions, the “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”. As such it is no surprise that when the Saudi bombing campaign commenced on 26th March 2015, the then-British foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, was at hand to offer full support for the Saudis, and if need be he hinted at direct British involvement.

Hammond briefed reporters on Friday 27th March from Washington that Britain supports the Saudi military intervention, “in every practical way short of engaging in combat.” He confirmed that the British are “not directly” (my emphasis) involved. However, this could change because the UK has a “long-standing relationship with the Saudi armed forces, particularly the Royal Saudi Air Force.” He acknowledged that the Saudis were bombing Yemen with British-built aircraft and the British have “significant infrastructure supporting the Saudi air force.” On the same day, the London Times chimed in with its support for the Saudi aggression and insisted that it was important for the United States to support the Saudi offensive so “to reassure the Sunni world that it is not selling out to the Iranian regime, then it must be firm in its support of the Saudi offensive.” Stopping Iran has now replaced the stopping the spread of communism as the modus operandi for maintaining the Sykes-Picot order in west Asia.

Over 6000 British Aerospace (BAE), Britain’s largest military manufacturer, employees are based in Saudi Arabia. A BAE employee told an investigation program for the UK’s Channel 4 that “We [Brits] have to do all their [Saudis] work, from the ground up. The Brits don’t touch the bombs, but that’s the final 5%. If you didn’t do the 95%, that final 5% couldn’t happen.” More so, the Saudis have never used their air force en masse, so the Yemeni landscape is in effect a training ground for it. Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have died as a result of this war, but  British colonial history tells us this is of no concern to the imperial metropole, its media or people. Whether the Saudis will now step out alone and bomb other countries in the region on their own accord with or without British guidance remains to be seen. Needless to say, the estimated $20 billion that BAE has pocketed during the course of this war, could’ve easily established peace between the warring parties in Yemen, as well as developed the basis for rejuvenated national Yemeni infrastructure.

The United States’ supposed military reluctance has compelled the GCC states to attempt to geo-politically ‘triangulate’ the West Asia region. That is to make sure no other vision for the region, besides the original Sykes-Picot divide and rule one, is ever considered by internal or external actors. Hence, the GCC courting of China is about consolidating this British-created order. Chinese trade and investments in the GCC bloc will inevitably commit it to the British-Gulf order if they wish to see a return on their investments. The Chinese, by virtue of the billions they trade and invest in the GCC, will hopefully then not look elsewhere in the region to further their economic interests.   

In conclusion, as the settler-colonialist in North America came to the fore to continue slavery and ethnic cleansing in the 1770s, and performed an “American Revolution” in order to do so, the Gulf states are now coming to the fore to consolidate the Sykes-Picot colonial order in West Asia. The social, economic, and military shattering and weakening of the largely Arab hinterland has allowed some of the Gulf states to overtly align with Britain’s Zionist-colonial project in Palestine. Based on previous colonialism, British imperialists, working through its Gulf puppets, will seek to wage more war in the region and to reduce usage of the Arabic language on the pretext of “stopping Iran”. This has partly been achieved in the Gulf itself where the lingua franca is English. The vaunted “tectonic” shifts in West Asia are simply the British-installed nepotistic puppets of the GCC, unopposed and unfettered, confidently taking matters ostensibly into their own hands with, no doubt, their British overseers pulling the strings in the background. Even if the United States completely withdraws from the region (highly unlikely), the Sykes-Picot divide and rule order now looks secure enough to withstand this eventuality.