The Future Middle East Strategic Balance. Conventional and Unconventional Sources of Instability
This paper seeks to analyze the future Middle Eastern military balance of power, in a time horizon of five to ten years.
It attempts to map future key players, and to identify future fault lines and subjects of regional competition. It then analyzes what drives military effectiveness, and examines the military paradigms of the key players, highlighting the growing gap between these paradigms and the regional context in which they would have to be applied, resulting in the inability of key regional players to overthrow their peers using hard power and the challenges they face to shape most of the conflicts conducted on distant, third-party soil. Finally, in terms of non-conventional capabilities, the Iranian nuclear endeavor is likely to drive Sunni powers to the nuclear threshold either after or even before the nuclear agreement’s 10 to 15-year horizon, while rudimentary chemical, biological and radiological weapons might become the non-states’ weapon of choice for mass impact.
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The Future Middle East Strategic Balance. Conventional and Unconventional Sources of Instability
Security Studies Center
Heir to a tradition dating back to the founding of Ifri, the Security Studies Center provides public and private decision-makers as well as the general public with the keys to understanding power relations and contemporary modes of conflict as well as those to come. Through its positioning at the juncture of politics and operations, the credibility of its civil-military team and the wide distribution of its publications in French and English, the Center for Security Studies constitutes in the French landscape of think tanks a unique center of research and influence on the national and international defense debate.
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