Can the EU help prevent further conflict in Iraq and Syria? CEPS Commentary, 25 November 2016

Blockmans, Steven. (2016) Can the EU help prevent further conflict in Iraq and Syria? CEPS Commentary, 25 November 2016. [Policy Paper]

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Abstract

As the battles for Aleppo and Mosul rage on, the wider Middle East appears to be in free fall. So-called Islamic State (Daesh) and the proxy wars between regional powers in Iraq and Syria have drawn the US, Russia and European states into the vortex and up-ended former alliances. Grand visions about a new security architecture are utterly unrealistic because the forces that have been unleashed are beyond any power’s control now. Any intervention in the Middle East’s nation-building processes risk backfiring. Even those insisting on the two-state solution for the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have come to realise this. If the Middle East has indeed embarked on a thirty-year war, then the regional order established by the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement at the end of World War I has only just started to unravel.

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