Arabic News

Arab opinion reflects regional changes

The Arab World has seen a significant juggling of relationships. After the debacle of Iraq and 20 years of dizzying, often incoherent shifts in American policy, the US is no longer the sole dominant player. Russia and China have entered the region’s calculus as global powers of influence. And Iran, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have emerged as local powers.

The region faces a number of unsettling challenges, particularly destabilisation from several internal conflicts, threats from Iran’s sectarian meddling and Israel’s brutality and acquisitiveness in occupied Palestinian lands.

With the US doing little to calm these troubled waters, or actually roiling them, Arab countries have had to establish their own paths forward to protect or project their interests.

In 2020, to forestall a potentially imminent Israeli formal annexation of much of the Palestinian territories, the UAE launched the Abrahamic Accords. Other countries have since joined. Meanwhile, several Arab countries have met with and begun opening up to Iran and normalising relations with Syria. While Israel and some US hawks thought Arab ties with Israel would establish a regional bloc against Iran, the UAE and now Saudi Arabia, with help from China, have moved toward normalising ties with Tehran.

These regional shifts and independent Arab initiatives have caught the US off-guard. Its outmoded play book stars Israel as the region’s centre of gravity and Iran and Syria as pariahs to be shunned and confronted. Following Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and China’s emergence as a threat to US global hegemony, Washington has resurrected the Cold War’s cry of “democracy versus authoritarianism.”

To assess Arab views of these developments, Zogby Research Services has, in recent years, conducted polls in over a dozen Arab countries. Here is what we have found:

Long alienated by the US and its policies and despite blaming Russia for Ukraine, Arabs do not want their governments becoming involved nor following the US. They view the conflict as a European/US matter.

In most Arab countries China is seen as the emerging power. Acknowledging that today the US is still more powerful, they see the gap closing in the next decade. In 20 years, majorities in every country see China emerging as the world’s power.

Important, but often overlooked by US policymakers, is that Arabs see America’s strong suit in competition with China as its “soft power”, cultural values and education. Arabs like the US and its values but feel the US does not care about them.