Jafar Qanadbashi – Expert on West Asian Affairs

From America’s perspective, victory in West Asia, in addition to perpetuating this country’s domination over a large part of the region’s oil and gas resources, can also be utilized as an important factor in subsequent successes in Ukraine and Taiwan. Therefore, the Israeli regime absolutely cannot act as an independent force and, in the face of any operations in Iran, it faces such limitations from America.

But another very important issue that could be decisive in the future relations of the region is the intense and serious competition between Europe and America over weapons markets and energy resources to cover their budget deficits and solve their economic problems. In this regard, France has been expelled from wealthy West African countries with uranium and gold resources and has lost a large part of its income. Meanwhile, Britain is also, in its own way, facing severe economic problems that have led to serious political crises. Hence, Paris, London, and Berlin see the easiest solution to their problems as selling weapons and creating lucrative markets for this purpose. Currently, the Americans are pursuing the same policy by prioritizing militarism and are trying to cover a large part of their income shortfalls by creating lucrative weapons markets. A clear example and sign of this US policy, i.e., prioritizing militarism for income, is the renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Consequently, two major currents – namely, the competition among the three great world powers, China, Russia, and America, on the one hand, and the competition among European countries to find markets for selling weapons, on the other – are turning the global scene, even beyond West Asia, into a powder keg. In this context, a small spark could expand the conflict from the West Asia region to military conflicts and wars beyond it.

Therefore, what is said about the tensions between Iran and the Israeli regime is only a part of the political disputes that could turn into broader and larger-scale wars within a larger framework. Of course, the Arab countries of the West Asia region do not want Iran eliminated from these equations and, based on the latest estimates, are seeking to steer Western and Israeli policies in a direction where Iran is preserved as a reassuring security bulwark in the region.

In this context, another problem and concern for the countries of the region is their extreme vulnerability, including tourism shutdowns, oil well fires, the closure of commercial markets, stock market crashes, and other crises resulting from conflict. Therefore, from this perspective as well, they do not want to stoke fires in the region. Of course, this approach is much weaker given Western countries’ desire to compete for arms revenues, and it has reduced the opportunity to ease tensions. In other words, reducing tensions in the region and, consequently, in the world is unimaginable given aggressive policies and Trump’s volatile, unexpected decisions.