Protracted conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are marked by the destruction and deterioration of energy infrastructures that have contributed to public health crises in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories. Shortages of electricity hinder access to basic services, undermine livelihoods, create food insecurity, and help spread infectious disease, particularly among internally displaced populations (IDPs). Because water services (drinking water, wastewater, sanitation) depend upon energy, the lack of electricity leads to disruptions in water and sewage treatment, contributing to the spread of diseases such as cholera and diptheria. This paper presents early findings of an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration between political scientists and public health experts exploring the linkages between the targeting of energy infrastructures and human health. The health-related impacts of war on civilians from lack of energy access are difficult to assess, particularly as some public health impacts unfold over longer time-frames than civilian deaths in conflict. These effects often take the form of ‘slow violence,’ as health and environmental costs mount over time. Public health experts have begun to elucidate the effects of lack of energy access in protracted conflict and the outbreak of infectious diseases. However, a recent survey of humanitarian organizations working in the MENA found that while the reverberating effects of infrastructure damage on public health are widely acknowledged, the linkages are poorly understood and severely understudied. Since centralized, complex networks dominate the provision of energy, how do humanitarian organizations and others try to mitigate the spread of infectious diseases when these systems collapse? Do these interventions lay the groundwork for more decentralized and resilient systems of energy provision? How and under what conditions do public health issues inform reconstruction priorities in the energy sector? Our analysis draws upon multiple data collection methods and forms of analysis to analyze the public health impacts of energy infrastructure destruction and health-energy linkages in reconstruction efforts. We draw upon an original dataset on the targeting civilian infrastructure in the post-2011 wars to track the distribution of damage to energy infrastructures and related infrastructure. These sources will be combined with data from World Health Organization and our public health partners working on civilians in conflict, along with a new dataset tracking reconstruction efforts around energy infrastructures. We further draw upon ongoing interviews with humanitarian organizations, service providers, and technocrats involved in tracking and reconstructing energy infrastructures, including for refugees and IDPs.

China’s expanded global presence has increased the flashpoints where its interests are at odds with those of the United States. As the broader US-China relationship moves in a more adversarial direction, these areas of friction could easily escalate into conflict. This paper examines the prospects for growing tension and possible conflict between the US and China in the Middle East, and offers a path to peaceful coexistence in the region. The paper begins by documenting the dramatic growth in Chinese investment, construction, and trade in the Middle East. China’s energy needs, as well as its geostrategic plans to expand its influence in Central Asia and Southwest Asia, suggest that its presence in the Middle East will continue to grow. The paper also examines the US position in the region and analyzes the growing economic and political pressures that will likely lead to a reduced US presence in the future. Drawing on the theoretical literature on great power transitions in international affairs, the paper observes that the process of an incumbent great power accommodating a rising power in a region of strategic value to both can often lead to conflict. It traces how a great power conflict between the US and China might unfold in the Middle East, particularly with regard to Iran. It then proposes a strategy for reducing the likelihood of conflict through cooperation on issues of shared interest, including freedom of navigation through the region’s waterways and reduction of violence in Yemen. It explains how this cooperation could develop, based on previous examples of great power cooperation in the Middle East and elsewhere. It argues that gradually broadening cooperation on areas of shared concern could aggregate over time into a framework that manages the expansion of Chinese power in the Middle East in a constructive manner. The paper proposes a path toward structured competition and selective cooperation between the US and China in the Middle East, rather than unbridled and unpredictable rivalry. The paper utilizes a variety of US and Chinese sources including trade and investment data, speeches by senior officials, data on troop and naval deployments, and policy documents by both governments.

Oil has loomed large in the Middle East’s integration into the global economy over the last century. The discovery of oil hastened the external power’s entry into the region early in the twentieth century. The advent of state ownership over oil and establishment of national oil companies (NOCs) in the mid-twentieth century shifted the dynamics of economic and geopolitical competition, allowing states to gain greater share of oil revenues. In the last decade, as states across the region suffered breakdown and civil war, smuggling has become a major feature of the region’s war economies. While the media provide lurid details about unregistered ships, shadowy brokers, and armed assaults, a parallel clash occurs to control NOCs, central banks and other financial institutions tied to petroleum sales. Indeed, numerous rebel groups have launched their own parallel legal institutions to claim the authority to dispose of oil revenues. Such entities are distinctly outward, and indeed, international-facing, unlike conventional smuggling and freebooting. This paper examines three cases of rebel oil in MENA using a combination of news reports, interviews, and rebel propaganda material, including social media postings. First, the effort by the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq to sell oil from the northern fields outside the purview of the Baghdad-based Iraqi National Oil Company and Iraqi Central Bank. Second, the effort by the House of Representatives government, based in Tobruk and aligned with rebel General Khalifa Haftar, to gain control over the Libya’s national oil company and central bank. Third is the Houthi’s self-proclaimed Supreme Political Council in northern Yemen and its attempts to block the government’s control over fuel imports and issuance of credit and currency. Despite differences in the ways they claimed legal authority and linked oil production and oil financing, these cases highlight the distinctly extroverted nature of rebellion and the importance of flows of foreign finances to sustaining rebellions. Rebellion is a function not just of physical possession of oil, but of the legal and juridical ability to distribute it and derive value from it through access to international capital. Rebel oil is an important component in rebel’s governance and diplomatic strategies and serve as an interface between rebel zones and foreign powers that can enhance the durability and legitimacy of rebel rule.

Rather than being based upon the idea of mutual concessions, current US policy, including Trump’s “peace” plan, is a total embrace of Israel’s vision of Greater Israel. If this is the end of a US-led Israeli-Palestinian peace process based on mutual concessions, will US national interests suffer? While there once was a time when US interests were directly affected by the peace process, that era has passed. Israelis and Palestinians retain a deep interest in the future direction of their confrontation, but the presence or absence of peace negotiations has only a marginal impact on US national security. That underlying US indifference to the outcome was not always the case, as my archival and historical research makes clear in this paper. During and after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the United States faced two crises that directly undermined US national interests in containing the Soviet Union and in maintaining the flow of oil at a reasonable price from the Persian Gulf. US officials worried that US national interests would suffer as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. For the Nixon administration, archival documents make clear they felt the peace process could resolve these challenges by blunting Soviet meddling and avoiding splits with Arab states. Following a period of inaction on Arab-Israeli negotiations before the 1973 war, Henry Kissinger made shepherding Arab-Israeli talks a very high priority. By the early 1990s, US adversaries had changed. With the end of the Cold War, collapse of the Soviet Union, and Arab oil exporters’ reluctance to wield the oil weapon, the factors that mattered so much in the 1970s had disappeared. New possibilities that might undermine US national interests arose but never appeared as consequential as the Soviet and oil factors. In that case, why did much of the US involvement on the Israeli-Palestinian negotiating track take place only in the 1990s and thereafter? First, I contend US leaders did so only in a partial manner; they wanted a resolution but were usually unwilling to pressure Israel in material terms to compel the necessary concessions. Had a core US national interest been at stake, the United States might have pressed Israel harder. Second, I consider plausible explanations for why US administrations would lead a diplomatic process when US national interests were minimally engaged. For example, US presidents still appreciate the way big diplomatic wins could help them in domestic political terms.