Winners and Losers in the ‘Arab Spring’

Yossi Alpher is a former Mossad official and served in the Israel Defense Forces Intelligence. He was director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (today INSS) at Tel Aviv University. Now retired, he researches and writes about Middle East strategic issues. His book Periphery: Israel’s Search for Middle East Allies (2015), won two awards in Israel for best book in the security field.

• Preface: Two Images Introduction I. Abetting the Chaos: Western Losers 1. Presidential Blunders: Bush (and Blair), Obama, Trump 2. Hapless Political Philosophers, Counterproductive Social Media 3. Interim Summary: US Post-Cold War Intervention and Arab Collapse II. Reaping the Benefits: Local Winners 4. Qasem Soleimani and the Quds Force 5. Putin: Russia Returns to the Middle East 6. Netanyahu Leverages Arab Chaos 7. Erdogan and the Kurds: the Jury is Still Out 8. The Arab Monarchies and MbS’s Reformist Mayhem III. Conclusion: Understanding a Global Grand-Strategic Event Timeline of Arab Chaos through December 2018

'At 125 pages, the book is slim but peppered with anecdotes and almost epic in dimensions. Alpher traces “Arab state fragmentation and chaos” to the 2003 Iraq invasion. He examines the role of individual Western and regional leaders in creating or reacting to events and argues Arab collapse has had global consequences, partly through a refugee crisis. Alpher said he’s been repeatedly informed the “Arab spring” isn’t over: “This is all open-ended but I think I was able to draw some fairly stable conclusions.”' — Gareth Smyth, The Arab Weekly