The Middle East’s Westphalian Moment? From Chaos to Realism

Recall the image etched in memory: a bulldozer driven by fighters of the self-proclaimed Islamic State smashing through the earthen berm on the Iraq-Syria border, militants cheering atop the machine. That moment was not just a border violation. It was a bullet fired at the history of the modernizing Middle East. Western analysts lamented that the end of artificial states had arrived, while militants celebrated the end of history. They were all wrong. Today, that berm is back, standing in place as if exacting revenge. The line was not erased. On the contrary, it transformed into the region’s life raft. The developments we witness today represent the revenge of the state and the return of a bloody, indigenous process of state formation.

Since the turn of the millennium, the region has been treated as a laboratory for grand experiments — from the George W. Bush administration’s “freedom agenda” to the hopeful idealism of the Arab Spring. Yet, looking back from the rubble of Gaza and the calcified frontlines of the Levant, the claim that the region has drifted into endless chaos is a lazy reading. Instead, we are seeing a brutal, organic process of state formation. Europe needed the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War to understand the value of sovereignty. The Middle East is learning its own lesson on sovereignty in the bloody laboratory of the last quarter century, through the collapse of externally imposed dreams.

This is a belated, bloody Westphalian moment. We are witnessing the collapse of an externally imposed order and the painful birth of a local, realist ecosystem. In this new era, the currency is no longer the values or ideologies of the liberal international order, but raw capacity and the instinct for survival. This restoration is neither seamless nor guaranteed. It is built on deep socio-economic scars and fragile alliances, but it is undeniably real. For Western policymakers, understanding this shift requires discarding the mental maps of 2003 or 2011 and accepting a stark reality: The era of engineering the Middle East has failed. Now is the era of dealing with the survivors.