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Arab populations have heard a variation on Washington’s long-standing theme: “The Obama administration seeks to encourage political reforms without destabilizing the region.” That sentence, taken from the National Security Network’s January 27 press release, says it all: Democracy is great in theory, but if it will cause any disruption to business as usual, Washington prefers dictatorship.

The reasons for this stance have changed little over the decades since the US became the superpower in the Middle East. Strategic interest number one is the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the world economy, unimpeded by a rival hegemon or a regional upstart that might raise prices dramatically or deploy the oil weapon to extract political concessions from the West. Number two is the security of Israel. But third -- not to be confused with tertiary -- is the stability of satrapies that Washington can trust to safeguard its other interests and initiatives, whether the US-sponsored “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians (and the blockade upon Hamas that Egypt helps to enforce) or the campaign to curtail Islamist movements for which Tunisia’s Ben Ali so eagerly signed up. The US rewards its clients with cash and copious armaments, with scant regard for their records on democratization or human rights. After the Yemeni regime canceled elections in 2009, its aid package was quintupled. There have always been numerous dissenters within the US foreign policy apparatus who know the damage that is being done, but they are resolutely kept out of positions of real authority.

Amidst the hand wringing in the mainstream media over Obama’s “limited options” in Egypt, through whose Suez Canal cruise oil tankers and the warships of the US Fifth Fleet, the truth is that the entire debate over democracy promotion in the Arab world and greater Middle East has been one long, bitterly unfunny joke. The issue has never been whether the US should promote democracy; it has been when the US will stop trying to suppress it. The bargains with tyrants lay a “commitment trap” for Washington, which must solemnly swear allegiance to each strongman lest others in the club have second thoughts about holding up their end. The despots, in turn, assume that the Marines or their equivalents will swoop in to the rescue if need be. Most, like Ben Ali, are mistaken, if nothing else because an ambitious underling is often waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, just as Iranians have not forgotten the Carter administration’s eleventh-hour loyalty to the Shah some 32 years later, neither will Pakistanis soon forgive the US for standing by Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

The almost 11,000 square mile total project is to be designed and supervised by US, German, Japanese and possibly other western experts. It represents the largest single component of the Saudi Crown Prince's "Vision 2030", by which he intends his country to diversify its economy away from dependence upon oil. Egypt, in other words, is being harnessed to Prince Mohammad bin Salman's project to consolidate his personal political power, transform the Kingdom into a centre of high tech development in what heretofore has been a relatively peripheral region within the Middle East, and exert yet greater Saudi influence over both Jordan and Egypt.

The most immediate, tangible potential benefits are to lend support to the effort to convert the Suez Canal Zone into a globally important logistics hub, combined with opening up the Red Sea and Gulfs of Suez and Aqaba to a new surge of tourist development.

Suez Canal revenues and numbers of ships transiting have been essentially flat since the parallel channel was opened amidst great fanfare in February 2016 following a two-year, $8.4 billion upgrade

The ban on the Ülkü Ocaklari (Idealist Hearths), also known by the moniker “Gray Wolves,” is framed by various national parliaments as a crackdown on Turkish far-right extremism. In its annual Turkey report released last month, the European Parliament urged the EU and its member states to consider adding the Gray Wolves to the EU terrorist list and to ban their associations. This constitutes the first official bid to link the organization to terrorism. Firing back a rapid denunciation, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tanju Bilgiç described the Gray Wolves as part of “a legal movement, which is associated with a long-established political party in Turkey.”

The Ülkücü movement is the outgrowth of the far-right Nationalist Action Party (which later became the Nationalist Movement Party, MHP) led by the party chairperson Devlet Bahçeli, a seasoned politician who has commanded do-or-die loyalty among the party’s rank and file since taking over from Alparslan Turkes after his death in 1997. The Idealist Hearths or Gray Wolves began as the party’s youth movement in the 1960s but gained notoriety for its daredevil brand of Turkish nationalism and nefarious role in armed violence in the Cold War modus operandi of the 1970s and 1980s that targeted so-called internal enemies in the murky underworld of the Turkish “deep state.” Among the more notorious members of the Gray Wolves is Mehmet Ali Ağca, the gunman behind the assassination attempt 40 years ago against Pope John Paul II, said to be “in revenge” for an attack on the Grand Mosque of Mecca.

Legend, folklore, and a romanticized history of conquest and victory are central to the Ülkücü worldview, not unlike other ideologically organized movements elsewhere. In Turkic mythology, a gray wolf in pre-Islamic times led ancient Turkish tribes out of the wilderness of Central Asia, where they had been trapped for centuries following military defeat, and into salvation.

In Qatar, the country with the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world and the biggest producer of liquid gas, the outdoors is already being air conditioned.

The Gulf States are still highly reliant on oil and gas exports, which remain more than 70% of total goods exports in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman, and on oil revenues, which exceed 70% of total government revenues in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. In Vision 2030, published in 2016, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, promised to turn the country into a diversified industrial power house. The reality is very different. The World Bank shows Saudi Arabia is still 75% dependent on oil exports for its budget.

The Middle East is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world. By the end of the century, if the more dire predictions prove true, Mecca may not be habitable, making the summer Haj a pilgrimage of peril, even catastrophe