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Joseph MicallefThe prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, and the steady expansion of Tehran’s influence, increasingly prompts the reorientation of Middle East politics along a Sunni-Shia axis.

A recent report claimed a secret agreement allows Iran to restore “its full uranium enrichment capacity,” on the 10th anniversary of signing the nuclear agreement. The leak came from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors Iranian compliance with the accord.

A number of intelligence agencies have since issued warnings that it “was highly likely” that Tehran will have nuclear weapon capability within 10 to 15 years.

The rise of Tehran’s power in the Middle East has often been conceptualized as an Iranian “arc of influence,” across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. There is potentially a second arc based on the large Shiite populations along the southern and eastern rim of the Arabian Peninsula.

How will the Sunni governments respond to what they see as the renewal of historic Persian imperialism? Look to the Syrian war.

Jihadism and its use for political purposes has been an integral aspect of Middle East history since the eighth century. Even now, jihadism is a recurring theme of Arab nationalism.

Contemporary jihadism burst onto the international stage when the United States and its allies funded and organized the Afghan mujahideen prior to and during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Called Operation Cyclone by the CIA, the campaign armed and trained over 100,000 insurgents.

The end of the Afghan war, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, made the anti-Soviet orientation of jihadist groups irrelevant. And the expansion of the American military presence in the Persian Gulf, during and after the first Gulf War, shifted the focus of those militant organizations to opposing the U.S. role in the Middle East.

This reorientation gave rise to al-Qaeda, and was further reinforced by the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, and the emergence of a deep-seated insurgency against the military coalition there.

Between the early 1990s and today, Islamic jihadism reoriented itself into a virulent anti-American and anti-western ideology that has sparked numerous terrorist attacks throughout the world.

Middle East politics increasingly moves toward a proxy war between the Saudi-led Sunni governments in the region and Iran and its Shiite allies. The fact that Tehran will eventually develop nuclear capability as well threatens to make the Middle East a larger version of the Indo-Pakistani proxy war in Kashmir.

Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies could increasingly look to jihadist organizations, as they have in Syria, to counter Iranian influence. If that happens, it may well set the stage for a third reorientation of Sunni jihadism to focus primarily on opposing Iran and its Shiite allies.

The Islamic State (IS) has been both anti-western and anti-Shiite. Consequently, IS has, to varying degrees, radicalized other jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda, to also target Shiites. A post-Islamic State Middle East, however, could be a very different place.

Islamic State has become largely self-financing. Stripped of its territorial domain, however, it would be, like other jihadist groups, dependent on outside aid. A stateless IS would likely prove no less anti-western. But a weakened IS could well be supplanted by a better-financed jihadist organization focused on opposing Iranian influence.

Al-Qaeda could seek to fill this role. Then IS will have inadvertently accomplished something inconceivable a decade ago: the partial rehabilitation of al-Qaeda in Washington’s eyes.

Al-Qaeda has given no indication it is prepared to abandon its anti-American/anti-western orientation. In fact, its leader recently urged militants to kidnap westerners and hold them hostage to exchange for jailed jihadists.

Al-Qaeda’s anti-Americanism is partly shaped by its competition with Islamic State. While the U.S. has decimated al-Qaeda’s senior leadership and severely constrained its ability to operate, the U.S. does not ultimately pose an existential threat to al-Qaeda. The Islamic State does.

Post-Islamic State, al-Qaeda could moderate its anti-western rhetoric. It’s also possible that after 20 years of continuous warfare with America, those views are so deeply engrained that they will never be abandoned.

If so, other jihadist groups, more focused on countering Iran’s power and less focused on attacking the west, may, with generous funding from the Gulf States, emerge in the Middle East.

Although unlikely to be publicly acknowledged by Washington, that would probably not be opposed either. This is, after all, Middle East politics. Stranger things have happened.

Joseph Micallef is a historian, best-selling author and, at times, sardonic commentator on world politics. 

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