 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the IIEA and to this discussion this afternoon on a Middle East and North Africa theme. We're delighted to have as our speaker with us today, Dr. Hesham Eliyer, a senior associate fellow at the RUSI, the Services Institute in London, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a fellow at the University of Cambridge. So we're looking forward to his address just before we go to that, some of the housekeeping arrangements. So we have a number of people joining us online, and you, those of you online, will be able to join our discussion after Dr. Eliyer's address using the Q&A function on Zoom, which is on your screen. Please feel free to send in your questions when they occur to you throughout the session, and we will come to them once Dr. Eliyer has given his presentation. For those of you who are here in the live audience, simply raise your hand and we will bring a roving mic to you to take your question. Both today's presentation and the question and answer session that follow it are on the record, and you may join the discussion also using, via Twitter, using the handle at IIEA. Dr. Hisham Eliyer, FRSA, is a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a fellow of the Center for Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. He is concurrently a senior associate fellow in International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London. Dr. Eliyer has regularly been included in the scholarly section of the annual global list of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world. Following the 2005 London bombings, Dr. Eliyer was appointed as deputy convener of the UK government's task force on tackling extremism as an independent academic expert, and he served as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's first economic and social research council fellow in his capacity as a non-partisan independent scholar. In 2020, Dr. Eliyer was elected as fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London, due to his contributions to his subject areas, particularly in the international relations of the West and the Middle East, security studies, and relief. He's also a published author. I've been enjoying part of his book on Egypt, The Revolution and Done, and we're very much looking forward to his address to us today, which is under the title Middle East Axis and Poles, the geopolitics of the Middle East and North Africa in 2022 and beyond. So the floor is yours, Yashem. Thank you very, very much. From the outset, it's a great pleasure to be at the Institute. I'm very embarrassed about this, but this is the first time I've been to Ireland, and as someone who's half English, that's incredibly embarrassing to admit. I was passing by TCD on my way to the Institute today somewhere where 20 years ago, I was actually offered a job. I took too long to say yes, so they ended up giving it to somebody else. Otherwise, I might have had a rather different last 20 years. I can fully imagine not wanting to leave after being here for a few days. So it's a great pleasure to finally correct this misdeed by at least paying a visit. I hope the first of many visits. And I've heard a great deal about the Institute from afar, so I appreciate very much. Dr. Garekhofer for arranging today. Yes, without whom, I'm sure this would not be possible, so thank you. And of course, to you for that very kind introduction. Now, I had a particular image of how I was hoping today would go, which was really something as interactive as possible. I don't wish to bore everybody with sort of a 45-minute speech. I'm used to doing that, not necessarily boring to my hope, but giving these long sort of winding addresses. And what I was hoping for is to do something a little bit shorter than that, speak for 10 minutes or so, and try to engage as much with any questions that come online, or indeed, from those of you in the room, on any aspect of what I intend to engage with. And indeed, the topic, which I discussed before I came with Barry and his team, is about the geopolitics of the region and these axes, because it's something that I found incredibly fascinating over the past decade, precisely because they changed so much. I was in Cairo recently, a country that up until very recently had incredibly bad relations with Qatar. And I just saw a report a couple of days ago about how the Qataris are investing literally billions of dollars now into Egypt at a time when Egypt certainly definitely needs it, but would have been unthinkable a year ago. It's a region where you had the Turks on very bad relations with the Saudis, the Israelis, and the Emiratis. And of course the Egyptians and nearly all of that has completely flipped, again, very recently in the past year. So I used to say you can't understand how the Middle East actually looks, how its politics shift and change, without taking into account these sort of axes. And I think that's definitely true until today, but even when I gave speeches like that, which was only a couple of years ago, I also reminded people these are likely to change and change pretty quickly. It's one of the most consistent sources of flux. We used to only talk about the Iranians and the Saudis on two different sides of a conflict. That still exists, of course, it still does. I always thought the Shia Sunni sort of frame was quite lazy and inaccurate, even though there's some truth to it, but it's not really as useful. But particularly post beginning of Arab Spring, there are different axes that coalesce. They coalesce around ideological standpoints. That's definitely true, but also just pure power politics. So it would be very silly to put it down to, for example, these powers are more in favor of religion-based politics and these are not. It's a tempting frame to go with, because one wants to imagine that, for example, the Emiratis and the Egyptians are not very impressed with the religion and politics, whereas the Turks and the Qataris are. Of course, where does that leave the Saudis, which are essentially a theocratic state, right? Also, it's not really true. Legally speaking, Turkey is far more secular than any of those other examples. And when it comes to religiously speaking, both the Emiratis and the Egyptians have religion infused into public life at multiple levels and institutionally speaking as well. Some might want to talk about, okay, it's not secular versus religious in that case. It's what type of religion? And it's not Shian Sunni, but it's what type of Sunnism that they uphold. Again, not a very useful frame because religiously speaking, the Egyptians, the Turks, and the Emiratis are all pretty connected and uphold mainstream Sunni Islam, whereas the Saudis are obviously quite different because the official religious standpoint there is pure Salafism, which is incredibly similar to what exists in Qatar. But of course, the Qataris and the Saudis have been at loggerheads on a number of different issues, right? So I mentioned all this just to problematize the frames as much as possible so that we recognize that actually things are pretty complex and they don't stay there. They move around, right? So I'm not going to talk about Afghanistan today, but I want to give one small example that reflects this. It would have been expected, and I think it was indeed expected, that the airport in Kabul would be taken over by the Qataris, right? In the competition, it's the Emiratis that went out, which is very interesting considering that the Emiratis are so and are very international level as well as so opposed to political Islamism, right? But there are power politics that are at stake here and interests that are defined in particular ways that don't always necessarily mesh with what people say and what people put out into press releases and things like that. Religious soft power is something that all of these states try to use and promote and indeed misuse and abuse if you think about that sort of thing quite often, right? The Saudis did a great deal in the past. They do so less in today's world, but they did a great deal in the past. The Turks are very much involved in this game now, the Emiratis too. I suspect the Egyptians would want to be, but they don't have the money. So there are many competing interests in that regard. The axes that were most relevant up until recently would have been the Saudi, Egyptian, Emirati, Pol on one side and the Turkish, Qatari, and it's not a state, but let's say the Muslim Brotherhood Networks on the other, right? All of these, and I think that they still exist, okay? And I think they still matter in terms of understanding how things work, but it looks really different now. It looks really different now. The Muslim Brotherhood Networks that were so active in Istanbul essentially have been told to shut up or to leave. They're not being extradited. They're not being turned over to the Egyptians or the Emiratis or whatever, but they're certainly being told, you know, you want to stay, shush, because we have national interests with states that you're ticking off and we're not interested in that, right? There was a very interesting piece in an online magazine called Mada Musk, which is required reading for anybody that wants to follow Egypt. And Mada just published this really intriguing piece about how Cairo is engaging with Doha because they're ticked off with Abu Dhabi. I mean, when did this whole become normal? But indeed, it's been normal for quite some time that there are these international kind of rivalries on particular issues. It doesn't erupt into war or things like that, but it certainly has an incredible impact and effect in terms of how we understand other conflicts, right? The Saudis wanted Egypt to go into Yemen with them. The Qataris went into Yemen with the Saudis until they fell out. The Egyptians said, no, thank you very much, even though obviously the Egyptians were far more closely aligned with the Saudis as compared to the Qataris at that particular moment in time. In Libya, everything goes up in flames. Everybody's fighting about different things. And linements change quite drastically very easily. We have even touched Syria, so I think that that's all very interesting to keep in mind on one part of the geopolitical kind of dimension. The second part, which I want to allude to as well, relates to how external powers engage in the region, right? So the vast majority, by far, of Middle Eastern states would be considered to be within DC's security architecture, right? So they're generally Western aligned when it comes to things like that. Irrespective, by the way, of the flapping and the statements and the sniping that very often takes place, the capitals of nearly all of these countries, when they want to travel, their elites go to places like Paris and London and DC. When they want weaponry, they go there. They don't travel to Moscow or to Beijing. That's a sideshow. It's still a sideshow, but it's a sideshow, right? You also have, though, over the past, I'd say at least probably more than a decade, you know, starting from Obama too, you have DC messaging to the region that, look, we're redirecting. I think people are wrong, by the way, when they say that the U.S. is leaving the region, but I think it would be silly not to recognize that the bandwidth that is allocated to the region in what we call the Beltway in Washington, the policy establishment, has diminished tremendously. And you can see this being very clearly established in how many people, for example, exist on the National Security Council when it comes to the Middle East. Teams have shrunk tremendously because DC has simply lost enthusiasm for investing so much of its time and effort and bandwidth in that regard. And this can be good and this can be bad, but it's certainly what's happening. And that's in terms of trade as well, but they're not leaving. The bases that exist in the region, they're not going anywhere. Nobody's talking about closing down the base in Qatar or Bahrain or anything like that, right? The fifth fleet ain't going nowhere. And the reality is that the bandwidth has shrunk tremendously, yes, and they would prefer to redirect that bandwidth to places like China to the Far East and now, of course, with regards to Russia and Ukraine, but they won't, I don't believe that they're able really to pull out completely because they still have quite a lot in terms of national interest within the region. Now, at the same time, you have a lot of these countries recognizing, okay, so there's less bandwidth when it comes to us. And they've relied on the security architecture of the West for quite some time. So correctly in this regard, they identified that they need to consider what they do instead, right? And then that's where correctly ends and more debatable words start to get used because it's like, okay, if we're not going to be thoroughly within the American security umbrella, then what? What are we going to do instead? Oh, let's maybe we think about the Russians, maybe we think about the Chinese. And I think a lot of this is flirtatious. I don't think a lot of it is as serious as you can make out. But I do think that it's reflective of this concern within, particularly the Gulf, that they can't necessarily depend on American security guarantees in the same way that they thought they could in the past. Certainly when Afghanistan's pullout happened, that became even more evident to them. That's the discourse that they have. Okay. And on some level, that's positive, in the sense that, okay, so maybe you, maybe you all realize that you actually have to take care of your own business, as opposed to relying on things from outside. Of course, in practical terms, what have we seen? We've seen the war in Yemen, right? We've seen the GCC spats. So maybe on a principled level, yes, it's good that they start thinking about taking care of business at home. But there can be practical consequences to that that aren't always so positive. And you've seen really intriguing messaging over the last actual week, particularly when it came to the Saudis, and relations with DC, and relations with Russia, because of the decision over OPEC, right? A decision that, by the way, was really a Saudi decision. You know, I mean, I don't think that the other members of OPEC were necessarily on board, but sort of acquiesced, which is also something very interesting to see how people are making those calculations in a world that they correctly identify as not being unipolar. I'm just not sure if they correctly identify where the power then actually lies. It's one thing to say, it's not a unipolar world. It's another thing to imagine that the poles of the multipolar world are equal in terms of effect, in terms of impact, in terms of power, and in terms of benefit that you can derive as long as you play the game right. That's a very different discussion altogether. But of course, I'm in Neutral Island. So, you know, you guys have those discussions, I'm sure, on another level all the time. Now with that, I'm going to stop. And I could go on, but I'm very curious to get any questions from the floor, any engagement from the floor. And I will take this opportunity again to thank the Institute and to thank Barry. I'm really looking forward to the conversation. And again, my appreciation.