Capital Without Illusions in the Middle East

Three years after the tragic violence of October 7, the geopolitical ledger of the Middle East offers a grim accounting. While Western commentators endlessly debate abstract moral equities, regional capital operates under far harsher truths. Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, chairman of Orascom Investment Holding, recently offered a brutally candid assessment of the regional chaos, cutting through diplomatic euphemisms with the detachment of a seasoned investor.

From the perspective of regional development, the Hamas attack was a catastrophic miscalculation that yielded precisely nothing for the Palestinian people beyond absolute ruin. The destruction of physical infrastructure and human lives achieved no political leverage. Yet the blame does not rest solely on violent non-state actors. Sawiris signaled equal skepticism toward the current trajectory of Israeli policy, warning against the ambitions of an expansionist government and pointing out the destabilizing influence of radical settler factions.

The conflict has expanded into a wider regional confrontation involving Tehran, Israel, and the United States, bringing immediate economic consequences. Financial disruption across the Middle East is no longer a prospective risk on a market assessment sheet—it is actively unfolding. While Tehran operates as a primary agent of regional instability, the diplomatic and military missteps of both Washington and Tel Aviv helped propel the region into an avoidable confrontation.

Where political leaders see intractable crisis, private enterprise must navigate survival and growth. Rather than executing a defensive retreat from the region, Orascom doubled its capital commitments in the United Arab Emirates. The decision serves as a calculated statement directed at Tehran: commercial development and investment will not allow themselves to be paralyzed by threats of state-sponsored disruption.

This cold-eyed pragmatism reaches into Syria as well. Having previously suffered the seizure of his telecommunications assets under the Assad regime, Sawiris chose not to litigate past grievances when meeting Syria's new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa. For an Egyptian Coptic Christian business figure to sit down with a former jihadist without demanding financial reparations demonstrates a fundamental lesson of Middle Eastern commerce: ideological purity is a luxury the regional economy cannot afford.

Written by Martina Kirchner martina.kirchner@alpineweekly.com