Pax Americana and the Dissolution of Arab States: The Humanitarian Consequences (1990–2019)
<p class="first" id="d377023e74">This article provides an assessment of three decades of US hegemony over the Arab-majority states of the Middle East's Gulf region. Since its direct military intervention in the 1990 war over Kuwait, the US incre...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Pluto Journals
2020-01-01
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| Series: | Arab Studies Quarterly |
| Online Access: | https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/arabstudquar.42.1-2.0025 |
| Summary: | <p class="first" id="d377023e74">This article provides an assessment of three decades of US hegemony over the Arab-majority
states of the Middle East's Gulf region. Since its direct military intervention in
the 1990 war over Kuwait, the US increasingly engaged itself as an architect forging
the region through deployment of its neoliberal economic and financial coercion, Janus-faced
support for authoritarian regimes while promoting democracy, human rights and individual
freedom rhetorically, as well as repeated direct military interventions into Arab
states in an effort to bring about regime change. At the base of diplomatic and public
justification for the 1990–91 intervention—or the Gulf War as it became known to Americans—was
the assertion that the war was defensive in nature, protecting the territorial integrity
of Kuwait as well as the enshrining the norms of non-intervention and the sanctity
of borders. Over the following years, however, US military forces came to be active
in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya with an expanded coterie of bases littered across
the states of the Gulf (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE and Oman). While
the US and its allies had been engaged in the region's politics throughout the Cold
War, from 1990 through 2019, the US escalated its role to preside over regional politics
through a hub-and-spoke latticework of relations between itself and regional states.
From the perspective of nearly three decades since 1990, an appraisal of this coercive
relationship, focusing on the humanitarian impacts it has wrought upon the region's
peoples, suggests it has failed according to these criteria. Many of the region's
peoples have experienced a marked decline in their economic well-being, personal safety
and health, while the state apparatuses established following the retreat of European
imperialism now lie in ruin in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. The populations of these
states now face a precarious future, without the protection of state institutions,
against a range of predatory actors. Moreover, these actions have contributed toward
the decline of US global influence, thereby encouraging further change in an environment
where popular sovereignty and inputs into governance by regional peoples has been
frustrated through the exercise of US power.
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| ISSN: | 0271-3519 2043-6920 |