The Middle East seeks new leadership in a world in transition

Ximena Torres

The neoliberal political and economic model that has guided the world order in recent decades has worn thin, and with it, American hegemony, asserts Moisés Garduño, an academic at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). This does not mean that the United States will cease to be a military, economic, and energy power, but it is experiencing a crisis of confidence and legitimacy that has led to a loss of international popular support.

Beyond the various reactions this analysis provokes, Garduño states that the decline of American leadership is bad news because “according to the communicative theory of power, when persuasive power fails, it is compensated for by coercive power, [...] which leads to the use of military surveillance, artificial intelligence, and policing.”

The erosion of the neoliberal order will have consequences in all regions of the world, some of which have garnered particular attention in recent years. Iran, Palestine, Israel, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia are among the countries that have made international headlines and that Garduño has studied throughout his career. The specialist presented his analyses on this topic at the third session of Polílogos, the ongoing seminar on global politics at ITESO.

Globalization, democracy, and human rights

In his lecture “The Global Authoritarian Turn and Its Impact on the Middle East,” Garduño explained that the world’s transition can be attributed to the weakness of three pillars of neoliberalism: the economic, the political, and the ideological. The first was based on globalization, which promised more egalitarian societies. However, statistics from the International Labour Organization show that 58.2 percent of the world’s population worked in the informal sector as of 2024, and the Pew Research Center reported that 79 percent of adults in various countries believe their economic system needs to change.

“A member of the precariat frequents city centers, but lives on the periphery. [...] Their community is very aware of what is available in the world and how painful it is not to be able to access it. Their precarity and limbo are supposed to be temporary conditions, or at least that’s what we’ve been told, but in reality they become permanent conditions,” Garduño said, referring to the Iranian sociologist Asef Bayat.

Regarding the political and ideological pillars, the speaker addressed democracy and human rights. According to the speaker, the crisis in both dimensions is evident because their benefits are only realized when circumstances align with the interests of powerful nations. Consequently, the validity of an electoral process and the condemnation of crimes against humanity do not depend on a universal ethic, but rather on the geopolitical expediency of dominant nations.

The emerging powers of the Middle East

The erosion of the three pillars results in an international hegemonic vacuum. The Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci used the concept of “interregnum” to characterize a situation like the current one, in which the old order has not completely collapsed, but the new proposal has also failed to take hold.

“At the regional level, we also don't have a single actor that can, on its own, generate an economic, political, and ideological model in the Middle East. I would say that there are at least three projects that are interacting, and that this interaction is what, unfortunately, is generating the wars we are experiencing in the region,” Garduño added.

The first example is Israel, where a maximalist government has been installed, operating under a concept of fluid borders and occupying territories in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. The second example is Turkey, which maintains a global network of 130 military installations at the expense of its own social spending. It also maintains troops in Iraq and Cyprus and is criticized for its repression of the Kurdish people. Finally, there is Iran, “a rich country whose young population lives in precarious conditions” because it invests heavily in its strategic nuclear and missile programs, argues Garduño.

The paradox, according to the academic speaker, is that the military projection of these three countries is their greatest weakness: in their respective regions, each one replicates the crisis of legitimacy that the United States faces globally. Even so, the other Middle Eastern countries are forced to align themselves with one of the three emerging power centers to form alliances.

Analysis without reductionism

During his presentation, Garduño clarified that he does not intend his analysis to be an apology or a nostalgic discourse for the liberal era, although he does consider the circumstances problematic because "there is no other 'ism' to guide us in choosing one or another way of life."

A key to navigating the transition is to combat reductionism, since the ideologies that guide social organization under that principle also have an "exclusionist" character.

In response to the debate about whether a global hegemonic power is inevitable, the UNAM academic pointed out that, while he doesn't consider it essential, international studies demonstrate that economic and political forces are structured with greater stability under the leadership of a regime. Ideally, he emphasized, this regime should not establish its influence through coercive power or the brutalization of one or more social groups.

The Polílogos sessions, like the one Garduño participated in, arise from the intention to generate training spaces in the university community about international reality and geopolitical conflicts.