HARALD MÜLLER Middle Eastern Threats to the Atlantic Community T he Atlantic community consists of democracies and market economies who share basic values and whose interests in a stable and peaceful Middle Eastern region coincide. In spite of these joint interests, politics on how to pursue them diverge sharply between European countries and the Uni­ted States. With regard to weapons of mass destruction, divergences include the relationship with the political actors, the imminence of the threat related to weapons of mass destruction, the instruments of their non-proliferation and the responses to proliferation. These differences signal a principal disagreement not only on non-prolife­ration and arms control, but also on broader issues of the world order. The Middle East: An Explosive Region The Middle East – extending from the Egyptian borders with Libya and Sudan to the Eastern boundaries of Iran – contains approximately two thirds of the world’s reserves of crude oil. With the Suez Channel, it links the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic, and it is the neighboring region to unruly Caucasus and resource-rich Central Asia. Beyond its essential role in the world’s energy supply, the Middle East thus must be recognized as an area of strategic importance in its own right. The region contains some of the most danger­ous and longest-burning conflicts in the world. The Arab-Israeli conflict overshadows the rest in virulence. This conflict has led to five hot wars and extended periods of bloodshed in Palestine proper. While Israel has succeeded in concluding peace treaties with two neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, Syria(and Iraq) remain enemies, and the Palesti­nian issue is far from being settled, as the present unrest documents. Southern Lebanon, where the radical Shiite Hezbollah militia enjoys tolerance by Syria and support by distant Iran, continues to be a source of danger to Israel. Whether a settlement for Palestine would pacify the region for good can only be speculated about: other conflicts could be equally explosive once energies are freed from the presently central Israeli-Arab contest. First, there are the disputes about supremacy in the Arab world, which drove Syria and Egypt into the Gulf War coalition against rival Iraq. The Arab-Iranian dispute has led to Iran’s occupation of a group of islands in the Strait of Hormuz that are also clai­med by the United Arab Emirates, provoked the eight-years-long, extremely bloody war between Iraq and Iran and feeds the arms race around the Persian Gulf. Arab-Turkish disputes concern a strip of territory in Turkey’s South and, more impor­tant, the waters of the Euphrates and Tigris, the most important lifeline of the»fertile crescent«. In addition, a dozen or more minor territorial, ethni­cal, religious and sectarian disputes adds to the volatility of peace and conflict in that area. The presence of weapons of mass destruction in that kind of region creates a most serious headache. Our experience with deterrence that functions – or at least does not explode into a conflagration in which Weapons of Mass Destruc­tion( WMD ) are used in significant numbers with catastrophic effect – is fairly limited. The East­West Conflict, to be frank, was fortunately soft in that regard. The two protagonists did not share contiguous borders, had no territorial dispute, did not compete for the same resources, had no reli­gious squabbles worth talking about, had no eth­nic differences and did not share a history of bloody wars against each other. For the countries in the Middle East, very few of these benign con­ditions apply. We must thus be most careful when transferring experiences from the East-West-Con­flict onto this very different region. Iraq, a state armed with WMD , dared to attack Israel, a nuc­lear weapon state in all but name, with inter­412 Harald Müller, Middle Eastern Threats to the Atlantic Community IPG 4/2001