NYT Article: In the Arab Spring, Watch Turkey

My Article with Van Creveld in the New York Times entitled “In the Arab Spring, Watch Turkey”. It attacks the view that the West is involved in a Cold War with Iran as incorrect and demonstrates how Turkey is the primary victor of the Arab Spring.Moreover, Western observers have missed the primary thread of events — namely, the ongoing asymmetric Turkish-Iranian “soft” partition of the Arab republics. Concomitantly, the American position as regional hegemon is vanishing. Today, only the Arab monarchies and Israel continue to look to the United States as their primary patron.To investigate how these changing dynamics are seen by actors within the region, one of us (Jason Pack) spent his Christmas holidays in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government, or K.R.G., in Iraq. Following the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, K.R.G. officials bemoaned their need of a regional patron to protect them from dominance by Baghdad.