Any chance of an end to the carnage in Syria and Iraq, and a return to some level of stability, looks contingent on an international deal on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which unlocks US rapprochement with Tehran. That, in turn, would have to lead to a cessation of the proxy war across the Middle East, if not detente, between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. These rivals for regional hegemony would have to conclude that their poisonously sectarian tactics had rebounded — not least in the eruption of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or Isis, a deadly threat to them both.
But then what? Iraq and Syria have been shattered by the sectarian whirlwind howling through the Levant. Can these and other imploding mosaic states in the wider region, from Libya to Yemen, be put back together again? There is a slim chance of transmuting this fragmentation into an institutionalised devolution of power, within a new national compact to preserve a unitary but not uniform state.
Note how that last sentence dances around the word “federal”. For most political actors in the Middle East this word is so toxic it means “a foreign plot to dismember my country” — and there have been enough cases of that for the idea to take root. In the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, the British and French empowered local minorities in Syria and Mesopotamia to advance their imperial aims, adding layers of bitterness to sectarian antagonism. Yet one need not go back so far.