While Americans were eating turkey for dinner, Turkey the country was on the move. And the first domino to fall was the Syrian city of Aleppo.
Aristotle is credited with coining the phrase, “Horror vacui” — literally the horror of vacuums — but it’s commonly translated in English as “nature abhors a vacuum.”
Whether or not that’s actually true in physics, it’s absolutely, 100% true in global politics: the moment a vacuum appears, there’s a madcap race to fill it. The only questions are who, when, and how fast.
In the 1980s, the greater Middle East was balanced between Iran and Iraq. With their large populations and vast petro-resources, they were fully capable of unleashing all kinds of havoc on their neighbors — and so they did.
But after the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqis rolled into Kuwait and marched their armies towards the Saudi border, poised to claim the lion’s share of the Middle East’s oil. President George H. W. Bush built a worldwide coalition that neutered Saddam Hussein’s army; this, coupled with crippling sanctions — followed by the second Iraq War in 2003 — removed Iraq from contention as a regional superpower. […]
— Read More: pjmedia.com
