The new Cold War has arrived in the Eastern Mediterranean. At the strategic level, Chinese economic and Russian military assertiveness have led the U.S. to think twice about its mistakes, which opened up a power vacuum in this strategic geopolitical realm. Until today, the U.S. has seemed to use three axes of alliances that have emerged as Israeli-based, flexible, and benefit-oriented alignments at the level of regional rivalry. These alignments, especially in the context of the Abraham Accords, are unfortunately expected to reinforce pre-existing divisions in the region unless a radical change occurs. This study examines how and why Washington must embrace the logic of alliance axes to shape the Eastern Mediterranean and explores the projected impact of the U.S.-initiated Abraham Accords on regional geopolitics.
Since the end of the Cold War, the discourses and practices of the EU towards the Mediterranean have emerged as an important area of study with regard to attempting to explain and analyse how Europe and the Mediterranean are reconstructed. This mutual reconstruction of two selves in the so-called Mediterranean relationship appears as a new type of praxis, a broadened self, following the model of European success in forming a regional security community. However, since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Mediterranean idea has been constructed by exploiting the new threats facing the West and Europeans. In this paper it is assumed that the discourse and practice of the EU in constructing the Mediterranean self can be seen as an extension of long-standing European policies of constructing Europe as an area of security. In the light of this evaluation, this paper focuses on the threat perceptions of the EU, the related power asymmetries in the Mediterranean relationship and the enduring asymmetry in the perception of the European and Mediterranean self in the face of 'new' insecurities.'We are who we are'; since the 1980s, the old Biblical idiom has been questioned by some IR scholars 1 by taking the definition, nature and constituents of 'threats' into consideration. This intellectual effort coincided with the broadening and deepening of the meaning of security within the field of security studies. In this vision, threats, dangers or insecurities are assumed to be 'the products of processes of identity construction in which the self and other, or multiple others, are constituted'. 2 Hence, as Connolly points out, just after the construction of 'difference' between self and other, the self is threatened not by the action of the other but by the 'visibility of its mode of being as other'. 3 Therefore, 'threats' are storytellers of the relations through which the collective self and power hierarchies between self and other emerge.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.