THE EFFECT OF COVID 19 PANDEMIC IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE POSSIBILITY OF GLOBAL POWER SHIFT ABDULKADIR TUKUR tukurafulbe@gmail.com & WADA LAWAL eljakada@gmail.com KADUNA STATE UNIVERSITYFACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCESDEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE Page 92 Lapai International Journal of Politics ABSTRACT The objective of the paper is to appraise the Effect of COVID 19 Pandemic in the Middle East and the Possibility of Global Power shift. The paper adopts content analysis approach to explore data available for the study and used realist theory for the paper's framework analysis. The paper concludes that regional powers such as Turkey and Iran have in recent years sought to harness the prevailing fragmentation of the global order by asserting leadership role in their respective regions and beyond. For these states, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an opportunity to bolster their regional and global presence. While Saudi Arabia and Israel reliance on US protection eclipsed their prospect of been part of newly emerging regional powers in the region. Keyword: Covid-19, Power, Pandemic, Order, Region, Shift. Introduction The advent of Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 brings to fore the ever-known biggest global health crisis in a century as observed by the United Nations Secretary General.According to the International Monetary Fund.since World War II Covid-19 pandemic posed the harshest economic downturn since the Great depression as International trade is projected to fall by 24% in 2020 (Jorge, 2020). Since its identification last December in Wuhan, China, the corona virus (Covid-19) pandemic has spread to 195 countries around the globe infecting as many as 5 million persons and killing over four hundred thousand individuals worldwide. The fast-spreading virus clearly knows no geographic, ethnic, or political boundaries. Like other regions of the world, the Middle East has had its share of reported cases. As a result of this, world politics has been confronted with an increasingly serious confusion while the desire for global governance have grown, the international order that is supposed to provide this global order governance has fall into dilemma (Hannss, 2018). For instance, since the end of cold-war era in 1991, the United States' unipolar hegemonic moment, the international order it presides over is now threatened as a result of multi-faceted issues and phenomenon which include among others the Covid-19 pandemic while at the same time has been, in part, self-inflicted as the United States engaged in unmanageable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as numerous foreign policy missteps (Duncombe & Dunne, 2018). According to Fareed (2011:159), the erosion of US predominance and the shift of power 'from the West to the rest' has damaged the authority and effectiveness of the liberal international order championed by the United States couple with the fact that domestic challenges in many Western democracies and the disastrous effects of the international financial crisis of 2008 –2009 have undermined its legitimacy. Consequently, the present international order has been decisively challenged and is now being superseded by the emergence of many state actors which is unconsolidated but much less robust order that seems likely to complicate the tussle in global governance (Hanns, 2019). In the new international environment, the United States will no longer have the capability to continue to behave the way and manner it used to be as the world's 'benign hegemon power' in the post-covid-19 world politics (Ellis &Hanns, 2020:159). In casting glances at the Middle East geopolitics and considering the poor political and economic conditions facing the region including the daisy security situation in Iraq, Israel – Palestine status quo, and civil war ravaging Yemen and partly Syria, it is therefore expected that efforts to respond to the variables that the US as superpower is used to will be more hard to achieve. In order words, the Levant countries of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan with exception of Jordan were enmeshed in crises before the Coronavirus outbreak that include regional conflicts, large numbers of refugees, and inadequate public Vol. 6 No 2 December, 2020 ISSN: 2756-5149 (Online) ISSN: 1594- 3586(Print)