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The return of Russia as a prime global menace has recently seized the attention of world governments, but another set of issues, collectively known as “the Middle East crisis,” will continue to dominate the American and Western agenda for at least the near future. It will also demand the energies of whoever occupies the White House after George W. Bush. The area, dubbed “the arc of crisis” by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, spans a vast region from Mauritania on the northwest African shores of the Atlantic Ocean to Pakistan on the southwestern Asian coast of the Indian Ocean. It contains almost two-thirds of the globe’s known oil reserves at a time when—as the battle over Georgia also reminds us—competition for access to fossil fuels is intensifying daily. The arc has emerged as the conduit for the biggest migratory waves in the contemporary world. It is, in addition, the busiest hub of international terror and the scene of several wars—in Sudan, Somalia, the Levant, Iraq, and Afghanistan. As the only part of the world where non-democratic, not to say proudly anti-democratic, regimes predominate, the arc represents a permanent threat to regional stability and world peace.

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