At the start of this year, shortly after the US and other world powers reached an interim deal with Iran to negotiate further on its nuclear programme, The New Yorker magazine published a fascinating, discursive interview with Barack Obama. The US president floated the idea of a sort of competitive equilibrium in the Middle East to replace the sectarian struggle within Islam between Sunni and Shia, and the proxy wars across the region pursued by Saudi Arabia and Iran from each side of this schism.
If satisfactory safeguards could be agreed on Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, and a wider rapprochement and international reintegration of Iran were to follow, “you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran, in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare”, the president said. “If you can start unwinding some of that [hostility], that creates a new equilibrium”, which would “allow us to work with functioning states to prevent extremists from emerging there”, he went on.
Alas, almost as he was speaking, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the jihadi movement that hijacked the mainly Sunni uprising in Syria as the west declined to give mainstream rebels the means to fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime, started its surge into Iraq. In January, Isis took Fallujah and Ramadi in western Iraq. From June this seemingly elemental force seized Mosul, Tikrit and a string of towns in the north and centre of the country, pressing south to Baghdad and east into Kurdistan.