The Region Post Syria’s Return to the Arab League

By Mohammad Youssef

The Arab summit in Jeddah last week has ushered in a new era in the Arab cooperation and their strategies.

It comes after years of feud, divisions, and even wars among the Arabs themselves.

It is anticipated that this summit will make major transformations in the common Arab work towards a more stable and prosperous region.

The return of Syria to the Arab League and the participation of Syrian president Bashar Assad in the summit has been the landmark development as it represents a major shift in the course of events.

After years of Arab and world war, conspiracy, and siege against Syria in an attempt to topple its regime and bring down its democratically-elected president, the conspiracy orchestrators yielded despair and failure from being able to make any progress in their sinister plots.

Syria under President Bashar Assad emerged triumphant and put into shame and humiliation all its enemies and adversaries.

The beginning of the change was centered in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom under Mohammad bin Salman has made a major shift on many levels whether inside Saudi Arabia, in the region, and even worldwide.

On the internal level, Riyadh has clamped down over the religious establishment thus bringing the deeply entrenched influence of the Wahabi establishment into end. This represents an unprecedented major development in Saudi Arabia after decades of Wahabi religious reign in the kingdom.

This has been associated with opening up to new kind of liberal freedom that gave wider and larger liberty to women which empowered them and gave them a distinguished weight inside the formula.

All these changes came against the backdrop of the strategic project of bin Salman under the name Vision 2030. His ambitious project wants to transform Saudi Arabia into a great regional country especially on the economic level with more international influence. This entails a necessary condition which is to have zero problems with the surrounding countries and ensure stability and peace.

On the regional level, Riyadh has led an apparent effort to calm down the different fronts, especially after its humiliating defeat in Yemen. This effort is being built upon the aforementioned strategy to freeze all divisions and start an initiative to start solving all its regional crises. Riyadh has launched a charm offensive on many fronts to normalize its relations with many Arab countries which culminated in inviting Syrian President Bashar Assad to the Arab summit.

This development came after Riyadh made a strategic rapprochement and normalization of relations with Iran.

On the international level, Riyadh has also made a surprising move, though shocking to its ally, the US, when it accepted Chinese mediation between Riyadh and Tehran which led to reaching a historic agreement between the two rival countries.

The new regional developments in the Arab world will have their impact and their repercussions, not only on the regional level, but also on the international one.

The future will unfold a lot of developments, hopefully positive ones which will make the regional scene with all its countries enjoy a long awaited stability and prosperity.