In the Blind Spot: The New Middle East

COMMENT:  Geopolitics – much like economics – follows the principles of supply and demand. 

The past 15 months of Israeli military actions against Lebanon, Syria and Gaza have fuelled anti-Israeli sentiment in the region.

This means that while Assad’s collapse and the eradication of Hezbollah’s leadership have weakened Iran’s influence in the Levant, Tehran has redirected its in-demand efforts to Jordan. This may be Jordan’s death knell, but it could be fantastic news for Lebanon.

This shift in Iran’s supply routes and proxies is evident on the ground. Reports from the Palestinian Authority, cited by Israeli media, revealed Iran-supplied rocket-propelled grenades, claymores and other heavy weaponry. These were found in seized arms caches in the insurgent hideouts of Jenin’s refugee camp. 

A glance at a map clarifies Iran’s strategy:

Tehran’s new supply route can still transit through relatively friendly territory. Part of Iraq’s Shia minority is still aligned with Iran – particularly after the Persians went toe-to-toe with Israel during this last year. 

WHAT’S THE BLIND SPOT? Israel’s focus will likely shift towards the West Bank after the Gaza ceasefire, collaborating with the Palestinian Authority to put down the jihadist buildup in Jenin. Groups like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, however, will be bolstered by increased Iranian weapons smuggled through Jordan. But the major blindspot is the weakness of Jordan’s monarchy and the likelihood of a Lebanese renaissance.

Lebanon’s conflict with Israel, and subsequent civil war, only started after militants from the Palestinian Black September movement clashed with Jordan’s King Hussein in 1970, nearly toppling this key Western ally. The monarchy was only saved by expelling the movement, and most Palestinian refugees, to southern Lebanon with the aid of Hafez al-Assad, who sought to increase his leverage over Lebanon.

Jordan’s monarchy, like those of Qatar or Saudi Arabia, was selected by former colonial powers partly due to their lack of internal legitimacy, making them inherently unstable and dependent on Western powers. As we will see in the coming decades, it renders them incredibly vulnerable to grassroots campaigns.

In the decade ahead, the Levant’s only surviving monarchy may end up fighting the battle of its life. 

On the other hand, Lebanon’s current financial crisis began in 2016 when Saudi Arabia pulled billions in aid and investment from Lebanon, throwing the country into Iran’s hands. A Lebanese renaissance may occur should Nawaf Salam’s Premiership convince the Gulf states they can sideline Iranian influence in Lebanon. 

COMMENT: Turkey’s growing influence in Syria, and Israel’s invasion, threatens to collapse relations between the two regional powers. But it also underlines the geopolitical quagmire that Israel’s military adventurism has plunged the Jewish state into. It also casts a pall on any notion of normalisation between Israel and the Middle East, collapsing Israel’s branding as the Mediterranean’s Silicon Valley.

Nothing is riskier in geopolitical terms than having a powerful and assertive neighbor. As the last decade has made obvious, Turkey and Israel have consistently been the two most powerful and assertive regimes in the area (besides Iran.) 

Turkish influence has been quietly spreading throughout the Middle East and Africa. The vast majority of Turkish FDI in Africa, which grew from $100 million in 2003 to $6.5 billion in 2021, went to North-Eastern Africa and the Horn.

(Source: CBE)

This places Turkey in direct competition with Israel’s influence in the Horn of Africa and Libya, both seen as critical to Israeli security.

Their new status as next-door neighbors in Syria, without their common Iranian foe, opens the door to a tense Turko-Israeli cold war.

WHAT’S THE BLIND SPOT? It’s not just a question of being troublesome neighbors.

Let’s pull out another map to underscore why the downfall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime has created brand new opportunities for Turkish enrichment that no longer include Israel:

 (Source: Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies)

As we’ve highlighted previously, Turkey and Israeli relations had been improving until Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7 onslaught. This was primarily due to their common enmity with Iran and involvement in mutually beneficial gas deals.

But with Assad out of the way, the logistics route for Gulf gas to end up in European markets can save a lot of time by routing through Syria rather than Israel. That’s why the collapse of Assad’s regime has revived several Turkish-led infrastructure projects with Qatar and the Gulf states to route gas through central Syria.

This challenge for Israel is compounded by the collapse in support for the Jewish state around the world, and particularly in the Middle East, since its ferocious campaign in Gaza – which even the former Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Yalon described as ethnic cleansing.

Israel’s 15-month assault on Gaza, Syria and Lebanon risks undoing decades of careful diplomatic policy by former Israeli leaders who sought to patch up relations with Middle Eastern powers like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Now, any normalization of relations with Israel for the Gulf countries would be strongly condemned by internal opposition, and may even open up challenges to their rule.

Thus, if this new Middle East sees increased tensions between two fearsome rivals, Israel and Turkey,  it’s not difficult to see what partner the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia will prefer to vouch for.

If nothing else, supporting Turkey doesn’t put them at risk of being overthrown and executed by an increasingly anti-Israeli population.

Israel’s branding as the Middle East’s Silicon Valley relied heavily on its increasing partnerships with Gulf states and companies. But this vision is now in doubt. Particularly since Israel finds itself engulfed in military and political conflict, with permanent damage to relations with the neighbours it was so confidently courting.  

COMMENT: ‘Egg-shaped’ UFOs aren’t commonly featured in mainstream accounts of this phenomenon. Historically, UFOs have been primarily observed as flying saucers or more recently, as ‘tic-tac’ shaped objects.

But that doesn’t reflect the historical record. The Blind Spot found an interesting line of research which shows that NASA’s Bureau of Oceanographic Studies and the U.S. State Department took an interest in a UFO that locals described as “egg-shaped” and about “four meters in diameter” which crashed into a Bolivian hillside in May, 1978 according to an unclassified telegram (Department of State Telegram, La Paz 03804 “Report of Fallen Space Object”). This crash took place amidst an ongoing UFO ‘wave’ in the region.

Bob Pratt, the National Inquirer’s UFO expert flew over the suspected crash site and identified signs of a recent landslide where rocks showed signs of searing – though he identified no debris or objects. Cables from the Bolivians to the US State Department and NASA described findings from an expedition on the 25th of May by Bolivian military officials, which found signs of a recent landslide and apparent searing and burn marks on large rocks nearby, but nothing else.  

As you can imagine, the incident was strewn with contradictory reports from a plethora of involved parties. Despite most witnesses describing it as an “egg-shaped object”, some claimed it looked “cylindrical in shape with a flaming tail”. The police chief of nearby Tarija in Bolivia agreed with these other reports, saying that his officers “discovered the object and inspected it (…) a dull metallic cylinder twelve feet long with a few dents,” suggesting the part may have been debris from American or Soviet space operations. No information linking this debris with the known crash of a NASA or Soviet space operation has been made public since the incident.

More curiously still, Leonard Stringfield was a UFO researcher who was contacted by an Argentinian UFO investigator named Nicolas Ojeda. He claimed that the first group of investigators who reached the site had mysteriously vanished and that a “huge” C-130 had carried ‘something’ away from La Paz, Bolivia shortly after the crash. Stringfield then asked a CIA source known to him as “Bob Barry” about the flight. While Barry confirmed the flight did take place, the supposed agent only replied “no comment” when asked what was on it.

WHAT’S THE BLIND SPOT? Suspend disbelief for a moment and consider the possibility that the whistleblower’s claims are completely true. Consider that even if he recovered an egg-shaped UFO, and even if this egg-shaped UFO crashed from the sky — as the May 1978 incident in La Paz did — there is no reason to call it extraterrestrial or ‘alien’.

Occam’s razor suggests that even if this technology isn’t ultra-advanced American engineering, or even if it was built by exotic creatures somehow unknown to us, it is more likely of terrestrial origin.

If nothing else, because in the extreme case that mysterious powers-that-be did want us to look out to the sky for answers, it’s more likely to be happening right under our noses.