Looking East: A Changing Middle East Realigns with a Rising Asia

Description

Major Mideast nations are looking east, showing an accelerating tendency to forge closer ties with the quickly rising Asia. This may represent a different sort of geo-magnetic reversal, as this time the poles flip from West to East, with potentially the same shocking reverberations of a North-South polar reversal. This work reviews the "Look East" approach that Iran, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq and Egypt have pursued in recent decades. The work concentrates largely on the critical contemporary aspects, while providing some references to important historical developments for context. With a doctorate in Political Science and International Relations, Shirzad Azad has studied and worked in East Asia for close to a decade, including five years in South Korea (ROK). He has published a series of scholarly books in English, including Koreans in the Persian Gulf: Policies and International Relations (Routledge, 2015), and several other academic studies with a special focus on Iran-East Asia relations.