Written by: Andreas Beck
Disclaimer: This blog post solely reflects the opinion of the author and should not be taken to represent the general views of IPPR’s management team or those of fellow authors. Examining the Machiavellian influence in the Middle East in a time of covert action, proxy wars and switching alliances
In the middle ages, King Francis I of France embodied the architype Prince that Machiavelli envisaged when he wrote his pièce de résistance the Prince. King Francis was shrewd, cunning and utterly ruthless. As Niccolo Machiavelli said “Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.” King Francis was an expert at this, surrounded by the powerful Hapsburg empire of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, he was utterly ruthless in making alliances to undermine the Holy Roman Emperor, he continued the wars of Italy, aiding Lutheran German princes, particularly the Duke of Wurttemberg in the budding protestant movement against the Catholic Charles V, and most devilishly of all, making an alliance with the Ottoman Turks to destabilise the Holy Roman Empire. While Francis aided protestants abroad, his policy at home was of staunch Catholicism and Protestants were treated as heretics and at times burned at the stake, the Muslim Ottoman Empire was officially even worse than the Protestants as they were not Christian. And yet, Francis was able to forge these alliances with the Protestant and Muslims to undermine Charles V, his fellow Catholic.
The modern Middle East bears many similarities in the ways that alliances change, strange alliances formed based only the balance of power, where ideological enmity is cast aside for strategic gain. One of the similarities with Middle-age Europe is how often alliances change. Francis I would sometimes make peace with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and then the Protestant Lutheran princes would be his enemies, and then they would fall out and he would be back to aiding them. And so it is with the modern Middle East, with Saudi Arabia and Iran being pitted against each other. In the tragic ongoing war in Syria, the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, alliances change rapidly with states between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the ongoing proxy wars between them. Religious divides of Sunni and Shia, are not the simple demarcation of alliances and there is often divergence between the two. I will explore this relationship in detail in my next publication, Shifting Alliances, where few alliances are set in stone, and there are constant shifts and changes that take place that distort the balance of the region between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
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