Back in 2016, in an article evaluating Barack Obama’s legacy, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg explained Obama’s view of the contemporary Middle East.

One of the most destructive forces in the Middle East, Obama believes, is tribalism — a force no president can neutralize. Tribalism, made manifest in the reversion to sect, creed, clan, and village by the desperate citizens of failing states, is the source of much of the Muslim Middle East’s problems, and it is another source of his fatalism.

Obama was expressing a common view — the analytical lens of tribalism is widespread among both mainstream academics and the world’s most powerful decision-makers. To them, Middle Eastern society is unstable and anarchic, a Hobbesian world of unrelenting conflict. Things change, but tribalism persists.