When we compare the world of 1918 and 2018, we find that there are some similarities and differences in the Arab, Middle Eastern and international scenes.

When world leaders celebrated the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War in 2018, they celebrated the end of the world between the two wars, and perhaps they are about to enter a new international era, with which they may leave the post-World War II world.

The presence of Putin, who cunningly stole the lights of the celebration from Macron, demonstrated this possible transition, and Trump reinforced his tweet against Macron on this day of celebration, Putin's theft of the spotlight, and confirmed the series of possible transition from the era of 2018 when he linked in one tweet the world of 1918, 1939 and 2018.

Trump responded to Macron’s proposal to build a European army to protect Europe against the United States, China and Russia, saying, “It was Germany that fought you in the first and second wars, so what was the benefit of this army to France? You started learning German in Paris, before the United States came, so pay NATO, Macron, or no American protection.”

Trump’s tweet also cunningly linked the world before and after the first war, with the world after the second war, and the world today. Trump’s tweet and Macron’s proposal indicate that the world today is about to leave it. It also confirmed that America did not withdraw from the next era as it retreated in the world between the two wars.

The periodic transition from one international era to another within a hundred years raises fundamental questions about the future of the world order and its foundations of reference. The Secretary-General of the United Nations warned at the annual meetings of the United Nations that the world order today is becoming increasingly chaotic.

The important question is: Is the international system facing a crossroads, pushing Trump today to lead it in a dangerous stage away from two dangerous options: American retreat or chaos, both of which may lead the world to a third world war, which is the most dangerous option.

And the answer is yes. The post-World War II world may enter a world of chaos without borders, if America turns against itself, or lets it enter this chaos, if it does not remedy it by moving under control from one era to another.

International relations change according to the change of units, patterns, relationships and axes of the international system, when factors arise that can be a sign of the beginning of a historical interval that transfers it from one case to another.

Usually, changes to the international system are due to an unexpected development that changes the nature of the international system, changes the main objectives of the units of the system, or changes in the pattern and form of conflict between the constituent units of the system.

The abundance of everything and its movement across borders and the development of minds and the erosion of power from the armies to the gangs, the theories say of the inability to control, the change of the international system.

The black swan theory also predicts the unexpected, and the international system changes as it changed before with the internet, nuclear and the laws of movement before.

And the zero-group theory says about chaos, the absence of global leadership, and the expected zero-sum clash that may come in the context of America's abandonment of its role (regression).

After this introduction, we turn to talk about the similarities and differences between the world of 1918 and 2018, one of the important phenomena in which 2018 is similar to the world of 1918 is the way international politics dealt with the similarities of Ottomanism yesterday and Iran today, and the rise of nationalism against the world of empires 1918 and the globalization of 2018.

While we find experts divided in the interpretation of this interaction, we find that international politics did not consider the Ottomans yesterday, nor the Iranians today, as part of international politics, except in practice.

The Ottomans were not included in the European system in a well-known agreement except the Paris Agreement of 1856, which ended the Crimean War between the Russians on the one hand, and a rare British-French-Ottoman alliance.

Like the Ottomans, Iran has failed since 1979 to conclude any international agreement, but rather lived under packages of sanctions, as soon as it exits from it until it returns to it, with the exception of the 2015 Lausanne agreement with the 5+1 group, which Trump withdrew from in 2018.

Despite the failure of Ottomanism and Iranization to integrate into the international community, the practical handling of international politics, and Western ones in particular, granted the Ottomans two centuries, and the Iranians four decades, despite the factors of internal and external weakness that both sides suffered from.

Although the Europeans and the Russians, each separately, were waiting for the opportunity to share the legacy of (the sick man), especially after the Russo-Turkish war in 1774, the European-European (French and British) dispute on the one hand, and the European-Russian dispute on the other, has caused In granting the Ottomans a long life, despite the factors that disintegrated the Ottomans.

And just as the Europeans supported the Ottomans against the Russians, Britain stood against the French campaign on Egypt, and supported the Sultanate against Muhammad Ali, who tried to invade Constantinople, and the Peace of Kutahya was 1833.

The Europeans’ standing with the Ottomans was due to a purely European need (primarily British) to maintain the balance of European powers, as America did when it accepted Khomeini as an alternative to its ally the Shah after the 1979 revolution, or as the European Union does today when it violates Trump in his sanctions against Iran.

But when the West’s need for Ottomanism ceased, and the Russians withdrew due to the Bolshevik revolution, and the Ottoman Empire allied itself with the Germans, and America entered the battle, and the opportunity came to change the pre-World War I regime, the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the Austrian Empire collapsed.

The Ottoman scene with Iran may be repeated today and an international opportunity has come to change the post-war regime, with the end of some or all of the (5+1) countries’ need for Iran, while Trump is fighting to isolate Iran from the world’s countries financially and in oil.

And one of the similar stations between the world before the first war and the world today, is the rise of patriotism, nationalism and the world of the nation-state against globalization and Iranization, as was the case against the Ottoman Empire and the world of empires, after it threatened or almost threatened the nation-state model that was brought by the agreement Westphalia 1648.

And as is the world today in the shadow of globalization and Iran, few European countries were sovereign when the First World War broke out, at a time when the Ottomans were dominating most of the countries of the Middle East.

And if the Greek revolution was one of the European examples of the rise of the spirit of independence with European support from the Ottoman Empire in 1832, the birth of the first, second and third Saudi states and the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in alliance with Great Britain, are an example of the rising spirit of independence in the Middle East.

But the intellectual backgrounds of the Arab rebellion were divided against the Ottomans. Some of them asserted that the Ottoman sultans were not legitimate caliphs, and that the Islamic caliphate belonged to the Arabs and should return to the Arabs, and some of them believed in the limits, concept and model of the nation state outside the scope of any caliphate.

At a time when Saudi Arabia and Jordan adopted the nation-state model, then Egypt joined them after Camp David, this model failed in Iraq and the Levant due to the background of the idea of ​​the caliphate on the one hand, and the emergence of the idea of ​​Greater Israel and Greater Kurdistan, and the return of the idea of ​​the Islamic caliphate at the hands of factors Political Islam and jihadist Sunni and Shiite, then was globalization.

These international phenomena have prompted the rise of a global right-wing tendency that demands the preservation of national and national identities against the factors of non-state and globalization, similar to the nationalism of the world before the outbreak of the First World War.

And if the world of 1918 pushed the world towards a League of Nations system, and the Middle East towards the Lausanne Agreement of 1923 with the model of a nation-state away from Ottomanism, the world of 2018 may push the world of today towards a new international league, just as our Middle East pushes again to consolidate the nation-state in another balance, Far from the Irish era.

The differences between the world of 1918 and 2018, may lie in the fact that America did not withdraw today, unlike what it did after the world of 1918, and in the change of the scene of the Middle East 2018 from the Middle East of 1918, whether with regard to Israel, which was born with the Balfour Declaration and Sykes-Picot, or in the scene of the Arab-Arab conflict that Follow that.

Just as the twentieth century witnessed an international conflict in the form of the international system and the Middle East, it witnessed an Arab-Arab conflict and an Arab-Israeli conflict as an echo of the international conflict during or after the Cold War phase.

The world of 2018 is witnessing perhaps or almost the end of the Arab-Arab conflict and the Arab-Israeli conflict, after the nation-state model adopted by Arab kings triumphed over the Arabs’ revolutionary national and religious models.

The nationalist models that allied themselves with the Soviets and fought with the Arab kings and Israel in favor of the Soviets, ended with Camp David in 1978, and the religious Arab models that allied themselves with Wilayat al-Faqih, have faced, since 2011 until today, unprecedented international, regional and local targeting.

The United States’ control of the directions of the international compass led to the end of the Arab-Arab and Arab-Israeli conflict, and the rapprochement of the Arab and Israeli parties in the face of the Iranian era under the auspices of the United States, just as the Jews and Arab kings did 100 years ago to confront the Ottomans under the auspices of Great Britain.

The conclusion of the similarities and differences between the world of 1918 and 2018, is that it may indicate, among other things, that the conflict over the model of the international system and Europe and the Middle East is also a Russian-Western conflict.

And that the Russians are a war project that is expanding outside the borders in every direction, unlike the United States, whose model, born in 1789 and which entered the international scene for the first time in 1917, succeeded in controlling the directions of the international compass.

And last but not least the failure of the models of mentalities, systems, and revolutionary, authoritarian trans-border regimes, whether intellectual, national, religious, local, regional or international, Arab, Kurdish, Iranian, German or Russian, in the face of the globalized human scramble, whether this scramble with globalization or against it.

Writer Dr. Omar Abdel Sattar Mahmoud