Like nature, politics abhors the void: Price of Abdication

Amir Taheri has just penned the most important and far-reaching analysis of the ME conundrum:

American Abdication and Iranian Hubris

Excerpts:

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Ahmadinejad's analysis of Bush as "an aberration" and an atypical American leader who is ready to stand and fight is beginning to look credible. However, even if Bush's successors do not turn out to be as spineless as Ahmadinejad hopes they will be, it is only prudent for the GC nations to take into account the possibility of an American abdication.


The truth is that, despite President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hubristic sloganeering, the Islamic Republic is a ramshackle and unstable regime with its internal contradictions that cast a shadow on its future. In other words the Islamic Republic lacks the economic power, the political influence, the military might and the accumulated experience needed to act as the regional "superpower." What it has is a denial power, a negative power that could be used to sabotage the work of others. However, it lacks the positive power without which no new equilibrium is constructed. Far from emerging as the core of a new stability in the Middle East, the Islamic Republic may develop into the vortex of a new and much bigger crisis in the region.

Because of its strategic location and the fact that it contains almost two-thirds of the world's oil and gas resources, the greater Middle East region is of vital importance to the entire world. This is why almost everyone has a direct interest in this region's stability. Those who wish to see the Americans leave and those who think the Iranians lack the wherewithal to generate stability must come up with alternatives. The American abdication, if it happens, and the Iranian weakness, when it is exposed, could create a vacuum that would suck the region into a generation of violent instability and war. Like nature, politics abhors the void.