The MENA, which has hesitated more than any other region of the world to adopt the reforms needed to benefit from the new international division of labor, is being pushed ever harder to adopt the Washington Consensus as its basis for formulating national economic policies. Global changes are breaking the cocoon that had once protected the region from major structural changes. Although the MENA continues to attract a disproportionate share of attention from external powers, notably the United States, it no longer receives the abundant strategic and petroleum rents that had previously insulated it from the need to reform. As a result, most of its states are compelled to seek to attract compensatory capital flows, which in turn is driving the process of economic structural adjustment. That this process is proceeding unevenly attests to those states' different internal capacities for reform, the topic that will be taken up in chapter 3.

Strategic rents: foreign aid and arms transfers

The end of the Cold War has had a more direct impact on the MENA than on any other region of the Third World. It simply reconfirmed the MENA's special vulnerability to external interventions rather than putting a halt to them. The United States-led military intervention against Iraq in 1991 would not have materialized without a weakened and complaisant Soviet Union and China's abstention in the Security Council. Nor could the United States have so easily attacked Iraq subsequently, striking without fear of political or military retaliation by any rival power.