The "New Cold War" in the Middle East

The successes of the extremist Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria, and the dangers the group pose to the West, have reactivated the United States' interest in the Middle East.

For many months, basically since the re-election of Barack Obama as president in 2012, the U.S. has slowly been moving its gaze away from the region and more towards Asia, in particular towards China.

IS, however, has changed that calculus. American media talking heads and politicians seem energized by IS, denouncing it at every turn. Basically, "If you thought al-Qaeda was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet..."

This approach was reinforced by Obama's recent speech after the murder of journalist James Foley, where he said the gloves were off as far as IS was concerned, setting the stage for many more airstrikes in both Iraq AND Syria.

As Americans have started to pay more attention to IS, they've also started to pay more attention to the underlying dynamic at the heart of much of the political situation in the region: the battle for regional influence between Saudi Arabia and Iran. And a recent paper by F. Gregory Gause III, entitled "Beyond Sectarianism: The New Middle East Cold War" has been increasingly cited in reference to this battle by other experts and media figures.

In the paper, published by the Brooking Doha Center in late July, Gause argues that  while most people see this struggle for influence as sectarian – Sunni Saudi Arabia versus Shia Iran – "Riyadh and Tehran are playing a balance of power game. They are using sectarianism in that game, yet their motivations are not centuries-long religious disputes but a simple contest for regional influence."

Gause also says that rather than seeing this struggle for regional influence as a "a top-down phenomenon driven by two states animated by sectarian rivalry, it is more accurate to view it as a bottom-up dynamic".

This dynamic is driven by the number of weak states – Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon - in the region. The last time such a situation was evident was the late 50s and early 60s when the influence of then-Egyptian President Gamal Nasser - his personality, his use of the media of the time, and the weakness of surrounding regimes – allowed him to play an over-sized role in determining national fates. (The two times he tried to do this militarily, however, he failed, including the 7-day war with Israel which basically ended his regional influence.)

During the next three decades, regimes in the region build much stronger states, not democratic ones, but ones that were able to keep the lid on their populations. So when outside influences tried to interfere (such as Iran after its revolution in 1979) the only place it was able to achieve any traction was Lebanon, which has always been in a weakened condition.

Gause argues it was the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that started the ball rolling towards today's  daunting reality, stating that in Iraq, America proved that it is much better at "state destroying rather than state building".

"The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 shifted this pattern, starting the reversal of Arab state strengthening that had begun in the 1970s," Gause wrote in the paper.

"The capacity of the Iraqi state had eroded severely after the Gulf War, but the American invasion was the coup de grace. Washington chose to tear down the authoritarian state's three major pillars—banning the ruling Ba'ath party, dissolving the military, and purging the bureaucracy of experienced cadres who were members of the party—in a misbegotten effort to build the state anew. What followed was an opening of the Iraqi political system to outside political influence, most notably from Iran."

As with Iraq after 2003, both Saudi Arabia and Iran rely heavily on more regional domestic actors to be their surrogates in this contest for influence. And with the number of weak states there is much opportunity for them to support various players in the region.

IS has upset this to a degree. In the beginning of the Syrian war, Saudi Arabia supported groups like IS (then the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) as a means to overthrown Bashar al-Assad, and strike a blow at Iran's influence. But IS has taken the situation so far that you now have the two sides working towards the same goal – if doing so separately -  the downfall of IS. You even have the odd spectacle of the U.S. and Iran exploring working together to accomplish this.

But Gause says there is another important question.

"The Saudis, the Muslim Brotherhood and its regional allies like the Justice and Development party (AKP) government in Turkey, the Salafi jihadists of al-Qaeda, its affiliates and its ideological counterparts like the Islamic State, and other Sunni groups are locked in a conflict over what the proper political role of Islam should be in the Sunni world."

How that role of political Islam is determined, will go a long way towards determining the wider contest of influence between the two powers, the fate of the region as a whole, and the kind of role the United States will play in the Middle East going forward.