Ali al Shihabi analyzes the two most dangerous political fault lines running across the Middle East today: the Arab-Israeli conflict and Arabian-Iranian tensions. In Arabian War Games, the author proposes, through the use of fiction, a scenario where these issues all come to head in an explosive climax.
It is 2013, and the regime in Iran, by then nearly choking to death under sanctions, attempts to cut the noose around its neck by invading Arabia in collusion with its ally Iraq. At the same time, Israeli elites, increasingly obsessed with preserving their Jewish majority and visualizing the "Jewish state" as slowly drowning in a sea of Arabs, conclude that the time has come to forcibly expel their rapidly growing Israeli-Arab minority into Jordan. The U.S., fatigued by Middle East wars, confused by Iraq's collusion with Iran, overwhelmed by the resultant collapse of global financial markets, and impotent in front of a determined Israel, helplessly watches events play out.
Eschewing the tendency of professional predictors to avoid forecasting the "outlandish," Shihabi explores these potential scenarios in a granular fashion, paying particular attention to the mind-set and thinking of the ruling elites who are driving these events.
Far from mere sensationalism, Arabian War Games is a careful analysis of the stress points currently at play in the region. Not only does Shihabi dissect these fault lines and their possible outcomes with incisiveness, he also proposes alternative, creative solutions, in the hopes that such scenarios can be avoided.
Editorial Reviews
"Predicting the future in the Arabian Gulf is hard. Ali has done a fantastic job by taking all the real factors which will affect the region, but writing his prediction for the future as fiction. This allows him to speculate informatively without being trapped by the present. This is a must read for anyone interested in the Gulf" - Francis Mathew, Editor, The Gulf News.
"I started and finished the brilliant (futuristic) historic fiction "Arabian War Games" by @AliShihabi reads like a movie script" - Sultan Saud Al Qasimi
"The ruling elites of the Gulf states would do well to read [this] timely novel.....[Shihabi], the son of a Saudi diplomat, has written a provocative story that is meant to shock us into thinking unconventionally about important strategic challenges that continue to haunt the Gulf and the broader Middle East. Shihabi gently reminds us in the book's preface that his story is intended to be "outlandish" in order to provoke creative thinking about the "simmering political fault lines across the Middle East region that continue to present the greatest geopolitical risks" - Brandon Freidman, University of Tel Aviv."
Even the most limited subset of the "Arabian War Games" is too dangerous for the region to handle" -Roula Khalaf, Foreign Editor, The Financial Times
Ali is an author and commentator on Middle Eastern politics and economics with a particular focus on Saudi Arabia. After a career in banking based out of Riyadh and Dubai, he retired from finance to write. Ali has also authored The Saudi Kingdom: Between the Jihadi Hammer and the Iranian Anvil, published as part of the Princeton University Series on the Middle East. He is widely published in elite media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and Foreign Policy, among other publications. Ali is a graduate of Princeton University with a BA in politics and of the Harvard Business School with an MBA.
