Optional: Background Primer on the Middle East

This one is to help understand the interaction of macroeconomics and politics, especially in relation to the post that follows this one (or is closer to the top of the screen on a blog).

American students do not tend to have a very sharp view of why things work out the way they do in the Middle East. There's a strong tendency to presume they're all Arabs and/or Moslems.

This is not correct, in important ways.

And it's old school to think that it's always Israelis vs. Arabs. A lot of non-Israeli countries in the Middle East have, over the last 10-20 years, figured out that Israel is not their big problem currently or in the future.

First off, countries derive regional and global power from the size of their economies. Second, that size is a combination of the size and richness of that countries population.

So we can figure out a lot about who has power by looking at the size of economies. The big players here currently are Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. They are all roughly the same size, and each is about twice the size of Israel.

Ultimately, as country's economies grow, population will win out, and on that count the power of the future is Egypt. But Egypt is too poor and too badly governed right now, so they may not get to the top of the heap in your lifetime. But also, Saudi Arabia will probably fall by the wayside, due to the larger populations of Turkey and Iran.

OK, so there's 3 countries to pay attention to macroeconomically. But here the blinkered view of Americans becomes a problem. None of these countries like each other ... even a little bit. 

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A refresher on Europe might help. For example, France and the Germans fought for over 300 years. It was Austria leading the Germans first, then Prussia, then what were the German Empire and the Third Reich. 

Here's the thing: the French and the Germans aren't that much different. But they're different enough: different languages, different history of Romanization (the French were originally just Germans who crossed the Rhine to attack Rome), a bit of Celtic ancestry in France that Germany does not share, and the fact that protestant churches made much bigger inroads in Germany. Those differences were enough to create problems between comparable and competitive neighbors that lasted for centuries.

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Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia see things in much the same way.

All are Moslem, but Turkey and Saudi Arabia are Sunni, while Iran is Shia. This is as significant a divide as Christianity dealt with in the 16th and 17th centuries. 

All three countries use the Koran which is written only in Arabic. But that's not the language of Turkey and Iran. 

On top of that, there are ethnic and cultural differences that are huge. Turks are the most western part of the same group of peoples that stretches across central Asia to Mongolia. Iranians are Indo-European, and as near as we can tell are descended from the same hordes of chariot-driving horse people as most of us. And Saudi Arabia is mostly Semitic people who've lived in that area for millennia.

The bottom line of all this is that they don't need much of a pretext to treat each other badly. But ... money talks.