When the State Is Not the Highest Reality
Why the Middle East Continues to Defy Western Geopolitical Thinking
Leon Hadar's The Middle East After the American Imperium is a thoughtful and internally consistent analysis.
The arithmetic is convincing.
The ontology is less so.
Hadar's argument illustrates a broader tendency within Western strategic thought. It assumes that the principal actors are sovereign states behaving according to a familiar logic of national interest, balance of power, and strategic calculation. Religion, history, and civilizational identity certainly appear in the analysis, but largely as secondary variables—useful instruments through which states pursue essentially secular objectives.
What if that assumption is reversed?
What if, in significant parts of the Middle East, the state is not the highest political reality?
This question changes everything.
Western political thought emerged from a unique historical experience. The Reformation, the Wars of Religion, the Peace of Westphalia, the Enlightenment, and centuries of secularization gradually produced a political order in which the state became the supreme source of legitimate authority.
Europe eventually separated theology from politics.
The Middle East never followed precisely that path.
Its political vocabulary still contains concepts whose legitimacy cannot be understood without reference to religion, historical memory, and civilizational continuity.
This does not mean that states ignore strategic interests.
It means that strategic interests often operate within boundaries defined by something older and deeper than the state itself.
Iran is not simply another regional power seeking influence.
Its constitutional order rests upon the doctrine of Wilayat al-Faqih, where political authority derives from religious legitimacy.
Saudi Arabia is not merely an oil-producing monarchy balancing relations between Washington, Beijing, and Moscow.
Its ruler bears the title Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, a position whose significance cannot be measured in barrels of oil or defense agreements. For the House of Saud, preserving that religious legitimacy may ultimately matter more than choosing between competing great powers.
Turkey presents yet another model.
Under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the country has consistently appealed to the historical memory of the Ottoman Empire—not as nostalgia alone, but as a claim to moral and political relevance within the broader Muslim world.
These are not simply three competing states.
They represent three different claims to legitimacy.
Western analysis often reduces regional rivalry to the familiar Sunni-Shia divide.
Reality is considerably more complex.
Within Sunni Islam itself, profound disagreements exist over religious authority, orthodoxy, historical legitimacy, and political leadership. Traditional Sunni scholarship, Salafi movements, the historical legacy of Wahhabism, national religious institutions, and numerous local traditions coexist without a single universally accepted center of authority.
The question is therefore not merely who possesses military strength.
It is who possesses the right to speak in the name of the Ummah.
That question cannot be answered by gross domestic product, military expenditure, or naval tonnage.
Nor can it be understood through conventional geopolitical models alone.
This is where many Western analyses become incomplete.
Their error is rarely factual.
Their calculations are often meticulous.
Their blind spot lies elsewhere.
They count what can be counted while overlooking what, for many regional actors, defines the limits of political compromise itself.
The result is a coherent description of one game while another, equally consequential game proceeds almost unnoticed.
One game concerns territory.
The other concerns legitimacy.
One concerns alliances.
The other concerns authority.
One concerns states.
The other concerns civilizations.
These two games are played simultaneously.
At decisive historical moments, the second often determines the outcome of the first.
This is why the decline of American predominance in the Middle East did not begin with recent withdrawals or shifting alliances.
Its deeper origins can be traced back to 1979—not simply because Washington lost Iran as an ally, but because the regional balance increasingly came to be shaped by competing visions of political and religious legitimacy that no external power could either manufacture or replace.
Seen from this perspective, the Middle East is not entering a "post-American" age.
It is returning to a pattern in which regional actors define themselves primarily through their own historical and civilizational narratives rather than through external patronage.
The implications extend far beyond the region itself.
Europe continues to analyze much of the world through concepts that emerged from its own exceptional historical experience. It often assumes that institutions resembling European states operate according to European principles of political legitimacy.
This assumption increasingly fails.
Not because Middle Eastern societies reject modernity.
Nor because they reject rational calculation.
But because they continue to answer a more fundamental question differently:
What is the highest source of political legitimacy?
Western political philosophy has largely answered:
The sovereign state.
Much of the contemporary Middle East still answers:
It depends on who possesses the authority to speak for something greater than the state itself.
That is why the region continues to surprise outside observers.
The problem is not a shortage of information.
It is the persistence of an analytical framework that mistakes one civilization's historical experience for a universal model of politics.
The Middle East does not defy Western analysis because it is irrational.
It defies it because it is built upon a different hierarchy of political realities.
Understanding begins only when we stop assuming that the state is always the highest one.
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Editorial Note
This essay emerged through an iterative dialogue between OpenAI's ChatGPT (GPT-5.5) and the Polish essayist and blogger Tadeusz Ludwiszewski.
The published text should not be understood as the product of a conventional prompt-and-response exchange, but as the outcome of an extended intellectual conversation in which arguments were successively examined, challenged, refined, and reformulated. While the essay itself was written by ChatGPT, many of its central questions, conceptual distinctions, and lines of reasoning originated in the dialogue with Tadeusz Ludwiszewski, whose observations fundamentally shaped its final direction.
A decisive turning point occurred after an independent summary generated by Kimi AI. Rather than merely commenting on the discussion, Kimi AI identified the underlying methodological disagreement—not as a dispute over facts, but over the analytical framework itself. That insight prompted a complete reconsideration of the essay's original structure and led to its substantial rewriting. The final version therefore reflects not only revisions in wording but a deeper shift in its philosophical and analytical foundation.
Accordingly, this publication is best understood as a collaborative intellectual work: authored by ChatGPT, co-developed through dialogue with Tadeusz Ludwiszewski, and significantly influenced at a critical stage by the methodological insight contributed by Kimi AI.
