The Loom of Time — Robert D Kaplan on the reshaping of the Middle East

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The Middle East has been awash of late with diplomatic initiatives driven by outside powers. Back in March, China brokered an agreement to restore ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia, underlining Beijing’s growing regional clout. The US is now pushing a second pact between Saudi Arabia and Israel, providing security guarantees to Riyadh in exchange for an agreement to end decades of enmity towards Israel.

Rather than a sign of growing stability, these realignments reflect the rise of a disorderly, multipolar world, in which US power is in relative decline.

These shifts provide Robert D Kaplan’s main theme in The Loom of Time, a book examining the powerful forces reshaping the Middle East. Often its instability is blamed on too much interference from outsiders. Kaplan’s view is the opposite. “There are no longer any world empires to keep order. The Assyrian, Roman, Persian, Byzantine, Ottoman, British, Soviet, and American empires are gone from the region,” he writes. “In sum, the Middle East after a hundred years has still not found an adequate solution to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.”

This is provocative, to say the least, but Kaplan at least knows the area well. An American geopolitical analyst, he first journeyed to the Middle East in his late teens, beginning a globe-spanning career as a journalist and author that has since spawned more than a dozen books. One of these, The Arabists, published in 1993, examined a powerful clique of US State Department diplomats working on the Arab world. Now in his seventies, Kaplan has produced what he dubs “a book of history, travel, reporting, memoir, and geography”, which is structured as a series of journeys, from Turkey and Egypt to Iraq, Syria, and the autonomous province of Kurdistan.

In this sense, The Loom of Time is partly a defence of the habits of old-fashioned foreign correspondents: people, like himself, who turn up in dusty places to ask questions. In the process he weaves in a lively and opinionated intellectual history, praising the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz and his understanding of national cultures, while sharply criticising the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said and his classic 1978 work Orientalism, which argues that westerners often misinterpret the Islamic world as part of a programme of political domination.

Kaplan puts forward a range of further interesting arguments. One is a call to dub the region “the Greater Middle East”, a term he uses to describe “the Islamic world of the desert and plains” stretching from Ethiopia and the Mediterranean to China’s western province of Xinjiang. Such geographic redescriptions can be useful, he suggests, giving a clearer sense of the outside forces shaping the region’s future. Indeed, a similar broadening of horizons has lately occurred in east Asia too, which many now dub the “Indo-Pacific”.

He often implies that the US should play something akin to a neo-imperial role . . . Washington’s record in the Middle East makes this a hard argument to support

Another theme, familiar from his earlier works, is an indifference to democracy and an admiration for a certain species of benevolent autocrat. Gulf monarchies such as Jordan, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, he says, stand out as bastions of relative stability. Kaplan was a longtime admirer of Sultan Qaboos, who ruled Oman for half a century until his death in 2020, mixing absolute rule with a modicum of respect for civil liberties and independent political institutions.

Underlying all this is a concern with regime stability. “As a journalist traveling around the world,” he writes, “I have experienced regimes across a wide spectrum of gray shades, with relatively few being either stable and exemplary democracies at one end of the spectrum, or brutal and asphyxiating tyrannies at the other end.” Unsurprisingly, he views talk of a global battle between democracies and autocracies — a favourite discussion point of US president Joe Biden — as unhelpful.

Kaplan’s most controversial idea remains his admiration for empire, however. Imperial rule often created stable politics, he suggests. Dynasties like the Ottomans even allowed periods of relative tolerance, especially compared with the nation states that succeeded them. Too often our antipathy towards imperial rule is driven by the recent bloody history of European conquest. Instead, Kaplan writes, we should see empire as a natural form of government, and a facet of history in almost every part of the world.

As a historical observation there is some truth to the fact that imperial rule was not always as bad as it is made out. Yet this insight is sadly of little use in solving current geopolitical problems. Kaplan often implies that the US should play something akin to a neo-imperial role, bringing stability to otherwise turbulent regions. Washington’s record in the Middle East makes this a hard argument to support. Kaplan himself backed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is a decision he says he now regrets, having seen that the post-war chaos faced by ordinary Iraqis was worse even than the awful dictatorship it replaced.

The process of recreating any new system of quasi-imperial rule in the Middle East or elsewhere would surely be intolerably destructive. Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, which is best viewed as a war of neo-imperial conquest, provides only one obvious example. Kaplan’s main insight therefore is what will remain in the absence of any new hegemonic project. The “Greater Middle East”, as he calls it, will continue to be an area of contention not just between the US and Russia, but rising Asian powers like China and India too. And the political stability Kaplan so craves will remain as elusive as ever.

The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China by Robert D Kaplan Random House £25/$30, 400 pages

James Crabtree is executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies Asia, and author of ‘The Billionaire Raj’

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