Variable 7: Great Power Flashpoint and Regional Ordering

Today, three regional flashpoints exhibit the risk of a major war involving the great powers. In Europe, following Moscow’s invasion on February 24, 2022, an interstate war already rages between Russia and Ukraine and continually threatens to escalate into a direct NATO-Russia clash. In the Middle East, the Israel-Hamas war has become regionalized, and reciprocal strikes have escalated to the interstate level — events that are destabilizing in their own right but could also drag great powers into an even broader regional conflagration. Finally, tensions between the United States and China continue to rise over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the broader shape of order in East Asia.

A better order requires mechanisms to render regional flashpoints more predictable and less subject to the effects of rival visions of regional order. The following three proposals posit ways to inject a greater degree of stability and predictability into the European and Middle Eastern regional security complexes over the coming years.

Much of the future of the international order will undoubtedly turn on the course of relations between Washington and Beijing in the coming years. However, due to the wide-ranging nature of this bilateral relationship, an agenda for stabilizing U.S.-China relations would require its own project. It would also exceed the parameters of this project, which focuses on a select number of key variables pertaining to the international security order. While some of the irritants in U.S.-China relations are related to the Western Pacific, others transcend geography and the security realm, strictly defined, such as trade, technology, climate change, and pandemics. This distinguishes U.S.-China relations from U.S.-Russia relations, which are more centered on hard security issues and the wider European neighborhood (e.g., Ukraine, Syria, frozen conflicts, and strategic stability).

For this reason, our report does not propose pathways for the United States and China to avoid a clash over Taiwan or reconcile their competing visions of regional order in East Asia.¹ Still, our proposals for enhancing security in Europe and the Middle East would have the added benefit of reducing the likelihood that those two regional theaters would fall victim to U.S.-China competition. They do so by allowing states in both regions to reach understandings that could reduce the risk of conflicts erupting that external actors could exploit or prolong.

Our proposed measures may even help stabilize U.S.-China relations. If some theaters are taken off the table as areas for U.S.-China competition, outstanding disagreements between Washington and Beijing are less likely to become entangled with separate issues, allowing both capitals to address them more productively. Given that crucial global issues from artificial intelligence to climate change are increasingly being held hostage by mounting U.S.-China tensions, stabilizing regional orders will play an important role in building a more secure international order at the global level.

Strengthening stability in Europe

Although high-intensity warfare in Ukraine may end over the coming months or years, the risks of an unrestrained confrontation between Russia and the West have become clear. The danger of an even more severe military clash in Europe remains alarming.

To prevent a dangerous situation from worsening, it is crucial to rebuild trust and cultivate more predictable habits of interaction to underwrite stability from Vancouver to Vladivostok.

Despite the evolving character of Washington’s strategic priorities, NATO will likely remain the preeminent security organization in Europe for the foreseeable future. Given mutual threat perceptions between Russia and the collective West, the NATO-Russia frontier will remain tense, unstable, and prone to escalation. Political developments inside the United States, Russia, and Eastern European states will consistently risk upsetting what will likely be a fragile and tenuous equilibrium following the current phase of hostilities in Ukraine. As a result, Eastern Europe will remain a dangerous flashpoint and prone to flare-ups for years to come. 

Reconciling the rival visions of order held by different actors in the wider Euro-Atlantic region may not prove possible. To prevent a dangerous situation from worsening, it is crucial to rebuild trust and cultivate more predictable habits of interaction to underwrite stability from Vancouver to Vladivostok. 

Proposal 18: A European crisis consultation mechanism

The current standoff between Russia and the West stems partly from the application of competing principles over how to organize European security. These include the right to choose one’s geopolitical orientation (including membership in military alliances) and the notion of indivisible security, the latter of which posits that one state should not increase its security at the expense of another. Indeed, many of the Helsinki Decalogue’s principles, although built on the foundation of the U.N. Charter and international law, are in tension with one another (e.g., sovereignty/non-interference and human rights; territorial integrity and self-determination). It may not be possible to overcome such tensions in their entirety. As such, they must be carefully managed.

A European crisis consultation mechanism should be established to assist with this task.² This mechanism, in which actors can game out and prepare for crises in advance, would also aim to reduce their negative impact should they erupt by providing a less public-facing setting for adjudicating competing principles and the disputes that flow from them.

The crisis consultation mechanism would function as a contact group aimed at forging new habits of action among its members and assessing threats to continental stability more collectively.

This new entity would be a mechanism — not an institution. It would boast no permanent secretariat, although its members could request that the expertise and toolbox of existing bodies, such as the Conflict Prevention Centre of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), be placed at their disposal on an ad hoc basis. The crisis consultation mechanism would be developed gradually from the ground up, ideally flowing from the terms of a regulated ceasefire and eventual negotiated settlement to the current war in Ukraine in which no side is likely to emerge as an absolute winner. 

Absent a negotiated settlement, one might imagine a deconfliction mechanism aimed at avoiding clashes between Russia and the West in the context of the Ukraine war and beyond as an initial step toward birthing the crisis consultation body. The history of the Helsinki Final Act’s adoption in the 1970s shows how vociferous competition can take place alongside the compartmentalization of common interests. However, deconfliction alone will not sufficiently address the more fundamental issues plaguing Russia-West relations.

The crisis consultation mechanism would function as a contact group aimed at forging new habits of action among its members and assessing threats to continental stability more collectively. In so doing, it would foster a sense of shared responsibility and imbue the lengthy frontier between NATO and Russia with an added degree of predictability.

The mechanism’s purpose would be to shape norms of behavior for geopolitical crises, not to definitively resolve crises in a fashion that goes against the interests of any country without its input. Nonetheless, it would fill a significant gap in the post-Cold War European tapestry. 

Concerns over appearing to accord Russia, a non-NATO member, a veto over NATO decisions have long been common, partly because it would stand to undermine the alliance by conflicting with the principle that only membership in the club should come with such privileges. At the same time, as NATO has enlarged to include much of the continent, Russia — one of the continent’s most powerful states — has become one of the few countries excluded from what has become Europe’s preeminent security decision-making body. The new mechanism would help all sides save face, with Moscow obtaining recognition of its status without NATO formally conceding the principle of states’ right to determine their own security arrangements.

The creation of this mechanism will likely depend on several prerequisites, including determining Ukraine’s political and security status in the European security architecture, clarifying the long-term degree of closeness between the U.S./Western and Ukrainian military and intelligence communities (a task that will require ongoing attention and that the mechanism could continually address), reckoning with such issues as war crimes and reconstruction in Ukraine, and restoring a degree of trust and the conditions for dialogue between Russia and NATO states (including a political commitment from all sides to use the proposed mechanism in the event of a crisis). 

The mechanism will help ensure that future conflicts are either averted or, at the very least, prove less dangerous. The creation of this mechanism would represent a qualitative change to the de facto situation that prevailed on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There would be (a) a contact group that boasts flexible methods and composition, and (b) a political commitment to talk through crises, incidental or otherwise. Existing dialogue mechanisms prior to February 2022 were beset by various shortcomings. From Russia’s perspective, for example, the NATO-Russia Council did not offer Moscow a meaningful say over matters it believed held significant implications for its security. For its part, the U.S.-Russia Strategic Stability Dialogue featured no European representation, nor was its creation aimed at addressing core political principles and their application.

By its nature, the new mechanism would have to be nimbler than the OSCE, which operates based on consensus among its 57 members. Yet it would still need to balance efficiency and representation. The precise composition of its permanent and ad hoc membership would depend on several factors, many of which are unknown at present, such as how committed the United States will remain to European security over the coming decades and how much the European Union will have emerged as a strong security and defense actor worthy of representation in its own right alongside select EU member states.

With time, the mechanism could come to embrace issues beyond hard security. In doing so, it could eventually segment its dealings with broader confidence-building measures from its crisis mode engagements, thereby contributing to rebuilding aspects of Europe’s security order. Shared rules of engagement could also gradually be forged, although short of the rigid and overly formal procedures of other institutions. 

The mechanism will help ensure that future conflicts are either averted or, at the very least, prove less dangerous.

None of this changes the importance of preserving the OSCE as an inclusive body for rebuilding certain parts of the European security order — and although they feature contradictions and have sometimes been egregiously transgressed, the Helsinki Decalogue remains the optimal basis for this. The purpose of the crisis consultation mechanism is somewhat different: It is aimed at managing confrontation and stabilizing zones of conflict rather than forging a common continental security architecture. Still, by reducing the chances that they will be subject to further violations, this new mechanism can increase the odds that the Helsinki principles will lie at the core of a more ambitious project to rebuild cooperative security in Europe when the time is ripe.

Ordering the Middle East

The deteriorating conditions between Israelis and Palestinians (even before October 7, 2023) and the absence of a security architecture in the Middle East are two key contributing factors to the region’s instability. 

The U.S.-led peace process has failed. The Palestinians are no closer to realizing their rights and freedoms or achieving statehood. And Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian land has brought it neither peace nor security, as the October 7 attacks brutally demonstrated. The Trump and Biden administrations’ de facto attempts to forgo resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in favor of pursuing partial economic and security integration in the region have arguably aggravated the situation further.

At the same time, the Middle East does not have an equivalent of an OSCE, ASEAN, or any other inclusive, standing security body. Efforts by extra-regional powers have primarily focused on quasi-bloc formation rather than movement toward cooperative security. Existing organizations such as the Gulf Cooperation Council or the Arab League are exclusive by nature; the former is purely a subregional organization that also excludes Iran and Iraq, while the latter excludes non-Arab states. 

If these two issues remain unaddressed, the Middle East will likely see insecurity reach new levels. The violence would probably further spill over and destabilize neighboring states, the risk of war between key regional powers would shoot upward, militarization and the use of force would increase, global energy flows would be disrupted, and migration flows would be exacerbated, adding new instability to bordering regions.

The U.S.-led peace process has failed. The Palestinians are no closer to realizing their rights and freedoms or achieving statehood. And Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian land has brought it neither peace nor security.

As global unipolarity continues to diminish and an increasing number of powers develop a growing stake in Middle East stability, the need for and the opportunity to establish an inclusive security architecture that rejects containment-based logic and enables the region to transcend its current spiral of instability and adversity will grow. At the same time, failure to end the Israeli occupation threatens further deterioration of the situation, which may culminate in widespread ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, with devastating consequences for the entire region and, by extension, the global order.

The aforementioned facts underscore the urgency of bringing the Israeli occupation to an end — and of gradually building the fully inclusive regional architecture that an end to the occupation would facilitate. Achieving this, however, will require abandoning the broken Oslo model for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, the end date for which expired a quarter century ago. The Oslo process provided little accountability for failing to achieve a two-state outcome and failed to put the onus on the occupying power. The ICJ has confirmed that this process did not absolve any party from its obligations under international law and does not make the ending of occupation and breaking of international law conditional or contingent upon negotiations.³ The international community must advance a clear cost-benefit structure — including, if necessary, sanctions and an arms embargo — so that Israel clearly understands the downsides of failing to end its occupation and the upsides of its potential participation in the regional architecture.

Having played an instrumental role in creating the State of Israel (including through United Nations Resolution 181), it is incumbent upon the international community — now comprising a much larger and inclusive global order — to ensure the Palestinian people are finally endowed with a state of their own. The right to self-determination is one of the most inalienable and enduring concepts of the international order, a peremptory norm of international law.⁴ Palestinians and Israelis inherently have equal national and individual rights and must be allowed to realize them. Regrettably, relying on the parties to the conflict to reach a two-state solution through direct bilateral talks has proven impossible. As a result, the international community is now duty-bound to forge ahead with a solution of its own design. 

The international community must advance a clear cost-benefit structure — including, if necessary, sanctions and an arms embargo — so that Israel clearly understands the downsides of failing to end its occupation.

The circumstances in place today are rife with settlement policies in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The World Court has determined that Israel’s unequal treatment of Palestinians under its control contravenes the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination by violating the prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid.⁵ Israel should take note that if it fails to end its occupation with haste, international opinion will become increasingly focused on achieving equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians within the single-state reality being created on the ground.

The connection between the two proposals below is as follows: They should be pursued in parallel — progress on the security architecture should not be held hostage by a lack of progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front. However, until the implementation of the steps outlined in Proposal 19, Israel cannot formally join the proposed security organization.

Proposal 19: Ending the occupation and establishing a viable Palestinian state

Given the longevity of the conflict, it has become evident that incremental stop-gap efforts will not suffice to deliver self-determination for Palestinians or security for Israel. The necessary prerequisite is to end the occupation. The severity of tensions and the profound distress prevailing today urgently call for bold, ambitious, and creative diplomacy. Anything less will only perpetuate the cycle of violence. The International Court of Justice has held that Israel’s occupation of the occupied Palestinian territory is illegal, a reality predating the events on and after October 7, 2023. Not only is Israel under an obligation to end its illegal occupation, but all states are obliged not to abet the occupation and to ensure that no impediment to Palestinian self-determination remains.⁶

The alternative to de-occupation is no longer a continuation of the status quo but rather a continuously deteriorating violent conflict that may result in further ethnic cleansing and regional destabilization. The existing (Oslo) model for negotiations reinforced asymmetries of power and is inherently unbalanced, with the Palestinian Authority shedding credibility for its enforcement of the Israeli occupation and the Israelis facing few consequences for its perpetuation. Moreover, the approach based on incremental steps lacking a defined destination has led to grave violations of human rights rather than progress.

With time running short before additional and even more devastating consequences are felt, the international community must act decisively to alter Israel’s incentive structure. Several powers, particularly the United States, have not used their significant leverage. Irrespective of how the current Gaza conflict ends, given the regional and global consequences of the existing conflict alongside the potential for further deterioration, responsibility for ending the occupation can no longer rest with the parties alone. 

The alternative to de-occupation is no longer a continuation of the status quo but rather a continuously deteriorating violent conflict.

Therefore, building on U.N. General Assembly Resolution ES-10/24, adopted on September 18, 2024, the U.N. Security Council should unanimously adopt a resolution under Chapter VII encompassing the following action plan: 

1. International reaffirmation that a viable and sustainable Palestinian state alongside Israel should be realized within three years in accordance with the following steps:
   1. Israel must undertake irreversible and tangible measures toward ending the occupation.
   2. Within 12 months, the Israeli government — in conjunction with the permanent members of the Security Council — must produce clear parameters for dismantling the occupation based on 1967 lines, with Jerusalem as a shared capital (or East/West Jerusalem as respective capitals), with the process of de-occupation occurring over the subsequent two years.
   3. Subject to Palestinian approval, these parameters could include the possibility of land swaps negotiated and completed simultaneously with the de-occupation process. Arrangements within Jerusalem’s Old City would require the agreement of both parties while acknowledging existing precedent and practice on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif.
   4.  Early in this process, Israel should recognize a Palestinian state.
   5.  Israel’s failure to implement these measures will result in the international community taking action to impose various costs on Israel to hold it accountable, including an arms embargo. 
2. Arab states and Iran should commit to recognizing Israel and including it in the regional architecture once the process of de-occupation is complete.
3. Although not a substitute for de-occupation, the U.N. Security Council should adopt a resolution admitting Palestine as a member state of the United Nations early in this process.
4. A Palestinian government endorsed by Palestinians in an open, inclusive process should govern Gaza and the West Bank as one single entity.
5. A joint Palestinian-Israeli declaration should be submitted to the U.N. Security Council, endorsed by all relevant actors, committing to recognizing one another’s borders and abiding by international law in all subsequent interactions. 
6. The Israeli and Palestinian governments will each select three countries to form a six-member Contact Group. The Contact Group will assume responsibility for overseeing the implementation of these measures under the guidance of the U.N. Secretary-General. Of the three countries selected, at least one must be a permanent member of the Security Council, and at least one must come from the Middle East and North Africa region. If either government fails to fulfill its obligation to submit its nominations to the Contact Group within two months, the Security Council will decide on the group’s membership.
7. The Secretary-General and the Contact Group should submit monthly reports to the Security Council on the implementation of this resolution.

A complimentary mechanism should also be created to address other outstanding issues, including refugee rights. Completing these steps would go a long way toward normalizing relations with Israel, pursuant to the objectives of the 2002 Arab League Beirut Declaration.

If the above steps do not lead to de-occupation and two states, the international community will have two choices: to resort to sanctions or return the question of Palestine to a U.N. commission. The latter would require establishing a new entity with a remit to propose solutions guided by the need for equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis in addition to past U.N. resolutions.

Proposal 20: Establishing a Middle East security architecture

In parallel with the efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a U.N. Security Council-endorsed process should begin to develop a cooperative regional security architecture for all states in the Middle East, inclusive of Turkey, Iran, and — once a Palestinian state has been created — Israel and Palestine. 

Learning from the mistakes made in post-Cold War European history, during which time NATO became the continent’s preeminent security body while the OSCE was seemingly relegated to managing “softer” issues such as election integrity and media freedom, the new architecture should explicitly aim to transcend bloc logic — and will ultimately become the region’s leading hard security institution. 

The principles guiding the cooperative security order will be as follows:

• The centrality of states and non-interference in the internal affairs of others. 
• The inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force and the ensuring of equal security for all.
• Initial confidence-building measures should be geared toward replacing existing alliances with a comprehensive system of cooperative security over the coming 10 to 15 years.
• The regional architecture should explicitly reject containment-based logic.
• It should embrace collective approaches and focus on the regional common good, particularly on transnational challenges like climate change.
• The responsibility for the region’s security should fall primarily on the shoulders of regional states rather than on extra-regional powers.

The architecture should be structured as follows:

• A permanent, formal organization should be set up to facilitate diplomacy and manage the region’s security. The organization will eventually become the preeminent hard security body in the region, although it will also address issues such as migration, climate change, and development. The organization and its mechanisms should be structured around three basic pillars:
  • Conflict Prevention and Resolution
  • Crisis Management and Disarmament
  • Regionwide Socioeconomic and Climate Challenges 
• Following the principle of regional ownership for the establishment of regional order and the importance of prioritizing the security concerns of the states in the region, an initial quintet of key Middle Eastern states — Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq — should lead the inclusive efforts to establish the new architecture that responds to the interests of all participating regional states.
• Initial steps should focus on integrating more countries into existing economic and political arrangements, such as trade agreements and energy collaborations. 
• Absent the necessary steps toward the creation of a Palestinian state outlined above, Israel’s inclusion in this process would be delayed, although conditional understandings and outreach with Israel could be explored in the meantime.
• Extra-regional powers could potentially participate as observers.  

To further jumpstart this process, regional states should adopt a Middle East Declaration on Regional Security and Arms Control. This would entail a commitment to significant disarmament and reduction of military expenditure across the region, with the eventual goal of a Middle East free of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

1.  The Quincy Institute’s East Asia program addresses this crucial issue in great depth. QI has and will continue to produce extensive intellectual products identifying pathways to avoid a U.S.-China clash. ↩︎
2. A similar proposal for a European crisis consultation mechanism originally appeared in Samuel Charap, Jeremy Shapiro et al., A Consensus Proposal for a Revised Regional Order in Post-Soviet Europe and Eurasia (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2019), https://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/CF410.html. ↩︎
3.  International Court of Justice, “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,” Advisory Opinion (July 19, 2024), 102, 140, https://www.icj-cij.org/case/186. ↩︎
4. International Court of Justice, “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,” Advisory Opinion (July 19, 2024), 233. ↩︎
5.  International Court of Justice, “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,” Advisory Opinion (July 19, 2024), 229; Declaration of Judge Tladi, 36. ↩︎
6. International Court of Justice, “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,” Advisory Opinion (July 19, 2024), 267, 278-79. ↩︎