ABSTRACT
The MENA region forms the very heart of the GME, and is caught between the two most powerful regions in military, economic and political terms outside the Americas: Europe and the Far East. It cannot afford to neglect either, nor can it afford to become an exclusive periphery of one. Not for the first time in its long history, grand geopolitics is emerging as a powerful tool in the shaping of the MENA regional system. While it is true to say that the region’s destiny in the twenty-first century is still in the grip of the allpowerful ‘intrusive’ power (the USA), the force of strategic changes taking place in postcommunism Europe and post-Soviet Asia is likely to drive the region’s agenda in the decades to come. As shown below, clear patterns are already emerging that demonstrate the tremendous pulling power of Eurasia for the GME. But, at the same time, Eurasia’s own importance as the world’s largest continent and its ‘axial’ geopolitical role, to use Brzezinski’s term, is ensuring that the Middle East will find itself at the centre of the struggles for domination of this vast geopolitical entity. This is the chessboard, he argues, on which the game for global supremacy is played. ‘A power that dominates Eurasia’, Brzezinski states, ‘would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions … control over Eurasia would automatically entail Africa’s subordination [as well] … About 75 percent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about 60 percent of the world’s GNP and
about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources’.1 It is not surprising, then, that the Middle East should inescapably be caught in the post-Cold-War geopolitical grand games of Eurasia.
