The New Old Middle East

In many ways, the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran and the war in Gaza that preceded it seem transformative. After decades of shadow warfare, Iran and Israel have now attacked each other’s homelands directly. And Israel and the United States have joined forces in a genuinely novel way to wage war against Iran. The Islamic Republic has lost its supreme leader of 36 years and much of its defense infrastructure. The Gulf states, once largely able to stay out of harm’s way, have seen their energy facilities, airports, and hotels go up in flames. Hezbollah has dragged Lebanon, which was just starting to recover from its last war, back into conflict. The Assad regime, which had ruled Syria for nearly half a century, was swept away when its partners in Beirut and Tehran were battered and unable to offer any help. Israel, for its part, has flattened Gaza, tiptoed toward annexing the West Bank, reoccupied parts of southern Lebanon, and extended its control of Syrian territory beyond the Golan Heights.

All these changes are real and important, and they have caused millions of people to suffer. Yet overall, the Middle East emerging out of this upheaval looks a lot like the one that existed before it. Outsiders continue to play their balance-of-power games within the borders of weak Arab states, the Iranian-Israeli conflict endures, the Palestinian question remains unresolved, and the United States lacks the capacity or the will to impose order but is still too involved in the region to leave.

The cease-fire signed by Iran and the United States in June 2026 captures the Trump administration’s failure to fundamentally alter the region. After suffering a series of blows between 2023 and 2025, Tehran has affirmed its power by exercising a chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz and assaulting its Gulf neighbors. The prewar regime in Tehran is largely intact and is now dominated by members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who are just as committed as their predecessors to opposing Israel and meddling in weak Arab states. The U.S.-Israeli war that began in February 2026 was meant to sap Iran’s power, if not to eliminate its regime. Instead, it has given the Islamic Republic a new lease on life.

Despite two and a half years of fighting and the deaths of tens of thousands of people, mostly Palestinians, the situation in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank is largely the same as it was before the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. Hamas has been defanged, but Israel’s extraordinary use of force has not solved the fundamental problems at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although some Israeli officials favor the total expulsion of the Palestinians and the annexation of their territories, that has not occurred and will not occur any time soon. In the absence of a political settlement that involves some kind of Palestinian self-determination, the basic shape of the conflict remains the same. Israel shows no signs of contemplating the kind of compromises that might lead to such a settlement, and the United States has been reluctant to lean on Israel to make concessions.

The United States and Israel cannot bomb their way to a better region. A truly changed Middle East, one that could be the basis for a more stable regional order, would be defined by stronger central governments in Arab states such as Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Today, those places are plagued by civil war or domestic unrest, and the region will remain volatile as long as those governments are not able to police their borders and prevent nonstate actors in their territories from pursuing their own foreign and military policies. Weak states, after all, cannot make durable peace.

A transformed Middle East would also see an end to the efforts of regional and outside powers, most notably but not exclusively Iran, to encourage or fund militias. It would include a diplomatic process, broadly supported internationally and accepted regionally, focused on working toward a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would ensure Israel’s security and the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. And it might involve genuine regime change in Iran, carried out by the Iranians themselves and resulting in a government that respects its neighbors’ sovereignty and drops the ideological crusade against Israel.

The regional war that began in 2023 did not move the Middle East closer to that kind of transformation. At the time of this writing, Iran and the United States were alternating between negotiating and fighting each other, but neither was willing to escalate in a way that would change the fundamentals of the situation they’ve been in since February. Tehran will not allow free and unfettered shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, give up its nuclear program, or abandon its regional proxies. Washington seems unlikely to send troops to Iran, a prerequisite for externally imposed regime change. Unless the government in Tehran collapses by other means and is replaced by something radically different—an outcome that seems even less probable now than it did before the war started—then no matter how long the war goes on or how it eventually ends, the drama and bloodshed of the past years will amount to little more than sound and fury. And because there has been no meaningful change to the essential dynamics and interests of the Middle East, even if a more sustainable cease-fire is achieved, the countdown to the next war will have already begun.

STILL GOT IT

Between October 7, 2023, and February 28, 2026, Iran suffered so many blows that it began to look like a paper tiger. Its nuclear infrastructure was reduced to rubble by Israeli and U.S. strikes in June 2025. Israel disrupted Iran from within, killing generals and nuclear scientists on Iranian soil and assassinating the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran itself. Bashar al-Assad’s fall in Syria in December 2024 severed Iran’s land bridge to Lebanon. Israel devastated Iran’s most powerful proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. Persistent economic problems triggered a wave of protests against the Iranian regime in December 2025 that the regime brutally suppressed. According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, the regime’s security forces killed at least 7,000 protesters; other organizations put that number in the tens of thousands. Iran’s apparent weakness undoubtedly tempted U.S. President Donald Trump into thinking that more strikes could lead to regime change. When he launched attacks in conjunction with Israel on February 28 of this year, he urged Iranians to “take over” their government.

Yet Iran emerged victorious from this latest round of fighting. Of course, the country is still plagued by the same economic problems and social discontent that drove Iranians into the streets in December. But by defying a U.S.-Israeli onslaught and discovering its leverage over world energy markets, the Iranian regime has regained prominence. It will certainly continue with the fundamental elements of its regional policy of the past 47 years: opposition to Israel, resistance to American power, and involvement in the politics of weak Arab states. And it will have every incentive to do whatever it can to develop nuclear weapons as the ultimate deterrent to future attacks from Israel and the United States.

Iran’s allies, although weakened, still wield significant influence across the Arab world. In Iraq’s elections in November 2025, Shiite parties aligned with Iran and the Iraqi militias it backs performed well. In February, March, and April of this year, those militias lobbed missiles at U.S. bases in the region. The new Iraqi government under Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, like its predecessors, has filled impor-tant positions with many of Iran’s local allies.

Israeli assaults on Hezbollah between 2023 and 2025 opened a brief window for the historically weak Lebanese government to assert itself. Joseph Aoun, a Maronite Christian and former general whose election had been blocked for years by Hezbollah, was chosen as president by Lebanon’s parliament in January 2025. Lebanon subsequently made some progress on implementing the 2024 cease-fire agreement with Israel: Hezbollah, for example, had mostly withdrawn from the Lebanese border with Israel by the end of 2025.

But the task of restoring the state’s primacy in Lebanon remained unfinished business as Hezbollah joined in Iran’s retaliatory strikes in response to the 2026 U.S.-Israeli campaign. Israel, in turn, launched a ground invasion of southern Lebanon and an air campaign across the entire country, killing over 4,200 people and displacing one million others. Although Hezbollah is Israel’s stated target, the victim of the campaign is more likely to be the new Lebanese government, which condemned Hezbollah’s attack and offered to negotiate with Israel. Hezbollah has survived more than 40 years of conflict with Israel, including this latest assault. The Lebanese government, however, is likely to be discredited because it was unable to prevent yet another enormous disruption to the lives of ordinary people.

The Houthis, Iran’s ally in Yemen, snarled global shipping, ostensibly in solidarity with the Palestinians, in the Bab el Mandeb Strait between 2023 and 2025 but stayed above the fray in the first half of 2026, despite the attacks on Iran. The lull came from the group’s budding relationship with Saudi Arabia. Between 2022 and July 2026, the Houthis maintained a cease-fire with their neighbor, and during that time Riyadh paid the salaries of Yemeni civil servants, many of whom work under Houthi control. The Houthis remain ideologically and politically committed to Tehran and now seem to be reengaging in the fight in support of their ally. At the time of this writing, the Houthis had declared a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia, the effect of which on energy flows in the Red Sea is uncertain but unlikely to be good. Some kind of Yemeni political settlement would advance security in the Middle East, but the more likely outcome of recent events is for the Houthis to rejoin the regional conflict.

SHEIKH DOWN

From 2023 to 2025, the Gulf Arab countries were largely bystanders in the regional war. Qatar had hosted Hamas leaders and provided funding to the organization, with Israeli and U.S. approval, for a number of years. But no other Gulf state was particularly upset to see Hamas and Hezbollah weakened. The ferocity of the Israeli campaign in Gaza did, however, raise the salience of the Palestinian issue among Arab populations, making any overt support for Israel a risky proposition. As Iran became more vulnerable, Gulf leaders grew more worried that Israel would try to assert regional military dominance. Those fears were exacerbated in September 2025, when Israel struck a residence in Qatar in an unsuccessful attempt to kill Hamas officials who were there to negotiate a U.S.-backed proposal.

For years, the Gulf countries have favored stability in their neighborhood so they can focus on attracting the tourism, trade, and foreign investment needed to reduce their extreme reliance on energy exports. War is bad for business, which is why Gulf governments kept a low profile during the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran in June 2025 and lobbied the United States against attacking Iran in early 2026.

This restraint didn’t help the Gulf countries with Iran. When Israel and the United States began their war against Iran in February 2026, it was the Gulf that bore the brunt of Tehran’s retaliation. As these countries were battered, their mindsets began to shift. At the beginning of the conflict, Gulf leaders seemed annoyed with the United States for putting them in the cross hairs of Iranian retaliation. But eventually, many Gulf elites came around to the opinion that the United States should continue the war until Iran loses the ability to threaten its neighbors. They were disappointed on both ends of the conflict.

A portrait of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran, Iran, July 2026 Alkis Konstantinidis / Reuters

Mixed feelings are a common feature of alliances between a weak country and a strong one. Weaker partners often fear both entrapment in wars that the stronger partner initiates and abandonment by the strong partner in the face of their common enemy. The Gulf states offer textbook examples of this dynamic. The memorandum of understanding signed by Iran and the United States in June 2026, for example, raised fears of desertion because it neglected to mention the Gulf states or address Iranian missile and drone capabilities. All the Gulf states, however, supported the memorandum because they worried that further U.S. escalation would lead to renewed Iranian attacks on their territories. Their fears were realized when the cease-fire broke down.

Yet despite their frustration, the Gulf countries are unlikely to distance themselves from the United States any time soon. American technology and training underpin Gulf air defenses, which proved quite successful in fending off Iranian drones and missiles. Moreover, the Gulf states have no other security guarantor to which they can turn. China has shown no desire to play that kind of role and does not have the power projection capabilities it would need to do so. Russia has taken Iran’s side and is busy with its own war in Ukraine. And European countries and regional powers such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey cannot match the United States in terms of fighting capability.

What has changed over the past three years is the Gulf’s view of Israel. For years, Gulf countries had been slowly starting to embrace Israel as a potential ally against Iran. Even Saudi Arabia was considering warmer ties. But that trend has now reversed, and momentum for expanding the Abraham Accords—a series of agreements in 2020 that normalized relations between Israel and a number of Arab countries—has stalled. The Gaza war has made it more politically risky for Arab leaders to openly work with Israel. Israel’s strike against Qatar and its pursuit of war against Iran have led Gulf leaders to doubt that Israel cares about their security at all. The only Gulf state that has recommitted to its relationship with Israel is the United Arab Emirates, which already had the strongest ties with Israel.

LOVE THY NEIGHBOR

By the end of 2025, Israel rightly considered itself the victor of the regional wars. But the country has been unable to achieve its ambitious goal of bringing down the Iranian regime. The June 2026 U.S.-Iranian cease-fire left the Islamic Republic in power with enough military assets to assert itself across the broader region and without a concrete obligation to give up its nuclear program. Moreover, Washington agreed to Tehran’s demand that the cease-fire also apply in Lebanon, where Israel was continuing its assault on Hezbollah. Even when Israel did come out on top in the wars of the past three years, it showed no interest in converting its victories into diplomatic initiatives. Israel has decided to play regional disruptor, confident that its military prowess is enough to protect it indefinitely. That is a questionable bet, given that its hard power was similarly impressive before October 7.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been crystal clear that it will not accept a role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, making a solution to post-Hamas governance there nearly impossible to achieve. Violence continues in Gaza itself. Israeli forces have killed over 1,000 Palestinians since the cease-fire went into effect in October 2025. The international force that Trump’s 20-point peace plan proposed to provide security in Gaza has yet to materialize. The plan calls for a committee of Palestinian technocrats to administer Gaza; as of July 2026, Israel had not allowed them to enter the territory. Hamas refuses to disarm, despite its commitment to do so in the October 2025 truce, and Israeli forces still occupy about 70 percent of the enclave. The Gaza cease-fire looks more like a respite in the conflict than an end to it. There is certainly no hint of a long-term political solution that could change the current dynamic.

Other countries are hesitant to get involved in Gaza, either as security forces or development partners, without a reputable Palestinian partner with whom they can work. The Palestinian Authority, for all its faults, is the only plausible option. But far from encouraging the PA to play a role in Gaza, Israel is undercutting its administrative functions in the West Bank. During 2025, Israeli soldiers and settlers killed 240 Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israel approved 54 new settlements there—the highest yearly number since the signing of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, a series of agreements meant to lead to a two-state solution. In February 2026, the government adopted new legislation making it easier for Israeli settlers to buy land in the West Bank, a step that Palestinians say violates the Oslo accords and accelerates what they see as the momentum toward annexation. The current Israeli government prioritizes territorial expansion and the weakening of Palestinian institutions over any possibility of stable governance in the West Bank and Gaza.

Netanyahu believes that Israel is safer when its neighbors are weak and divided. But he misses the fact that Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, two consolidated states that can control their borders and prevent the rise of violent nonstate actors in their territory, have been the enduring pillars of Israel’s security for decades. Rather than embrace the prospect of a cooperative Lebanese government willing to work against Hezbollah, Israel renewed its war in Lebanon in 2026. In Syria, Israel captured a so-called buffer zone, encouraged Syrian Druze to resist the new government, armed Druze militias, and struck Syrian army positions—including the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense—in the name of protecting the Druze.

Netanyahu obstructs state-building efforts in Lebanon and Syria in spite of U.S. efforts to support the new governments in Beirut and Damascus. Although Washington has admonished Israel on this score, Israeli policy has not substantially changed. Only when Israel’s hubris led it to bomb Qatar in September 2025 did Trump bring Netan-yahu to heel, forcing him to apologize publicly to the emir of Qatar and finally pressuring him to accept a cease-fire in Gaza. Washington needs to similarly pressure Israel to allow the new governments in Beirut and Damascus to reassert their control within their borders and build stronger state institutions.

By far the most significant geopolitical change brought about by the past three years of war was the fall of the Assad regime in Syria and the establishment of a new government led by Ahmed al-Shara, who was once a member of al-Qaeda. Since taking Syria’s capital, Shara has cultivated support from the United States, Turkey, the EU, and the Arab world, distancing Syria from the Iranian alliance that the Assad regime had maintained since the 1980s. These changes have also considerably reduced Iran’s ability to affect Lebanese politics and threaten Israel from Syrian territory, a real blow to Tehran’s regional influence.

Shara has said all the right things since coming to power, pledging a tolerant, consultative, and eventually democratic regime. His reassuring words aside, Syria remains deeply divided and traumatized after 14 years of brutal civil war. The forces allied with the new government have clashed with the Alawite minority in the west, the Druze in the south, and the Kurds in the northeast. Syria continues to be a weak state. In the absence of effective central government control, the country will remain a plaything for the stronger states in its neighborhood, as it was during the civil war. If Syria’s weakness lures Iran, Israel, Turkey, or the Gulf states back into another round of civil war, the chances for regional stability could vanish.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE

The prospects for a new Middle East are dim. Iran and Israel—the two countries that have instigated much of the region’s strife in recent decades—are as powerful as ever, and their leaders seem even more set in their beliefs than they were before 2023. Many Arab countries still suffer from the political vacuums that lead to civil war, attract meddlesome outside intervention, and become breeding grounds for armed groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, that narrow the already slim prospects for peace.

The Trump administration has made it clear that it is not in the business of building states in the Middle East—a laudable position, given the failures of U.S. efforts to do so in Afghanistan and Iraq. Still, Trump clearly understands that the Middle East will become more stable only if weak Arab states get their acts together. He has lifted sanctions on Syria and embraced its new president. In February 2026, the United States handed over the base it had maintained for years at al-Tanf to the Syrian military, ending a U.S. presence in Syria that dated to 2014. American diplomats worked to de-escalate tensions between Israel and Syria and, before the latest round of fighting, tried to nudge the Lebanese government to take a stiffer stance toward Hezbollah. In June 2026, Israel and Lebanon agreed to a deal, brokered by the United States, that commits Israel to begin handing over control of certain parts of southern Lebanon to the Lebanese armed forces. If the United States tries more forcefully to roll back Israeli interference in Lebanon and Syria, while supporting those governments’ efforts to suppress armed nonstate actors within their borders, the prospects for a more stable region would improve.

How the Trump administration deals with an empowered and ambitious Iranian regime will determine whether the 2026 war is simply another data point in the decades of conflict between the two countries or the beginning of an effort to halt the region’s downward spiral. Any progress toward regional stability will require the United States to keep up its military power in the Gulf. Washington must maintain the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the 5,000 to 10,000 troops deployed in Kuwait, and access to bases in Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Without a U.S. military foothold, Iran can threaten military action against its neighbors at will. The American military presence also reassures the Gulf states of Washington’s commitment to their security after the damage they sustained. That reassurance is necessary to prevent them from simply succumbing out of fear to Iranian pressure on issues such as oil policy and relations with Israel.

But what would really calm the region is a diplomatic effort to reach a sustainable modus vivendi with Tehran. Oman’s foreign minister indicated that just before the U.S.-Israeli offensive against Iran began in February, Iranian diplomats had floated a deal under which they would never stockpile enriched uranium. Given that Iran has emerged in a stronger position since February, such a proposal might now seem unrealistic. But the Iranian government is so desperate for sanctions relief that the United States should still use it as a starting point for new nuclear negotiations. Even though American leverage in these talks is not what the Trump administration had hoped it would be, it is worth the effort to keep Iran at the table. The alternative strategy, regime change through war, has clearly failed.

Separately, the United States should lead a multilateral effort with other concerned countries, such as China, India, and the United Kingdom, along with European, Gulf, and Southeast Asian states, to design a framework for managing the Strait of Hormuz. The international conventions governing the Suez Canal and the Turkish Straits could provide some guidance for such an effort, as could the system for maintaining the Strait of Malacca, under which a private foundation collects voluntary contributions to fund hydrographic surveys, navigational infrastructure, and wreck removal. The global economy relies on free and safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, and most countries agree that it should remain permanently toll-free. Although Trump is allergic to multilateral diplomacy, he should leverage the weight of these other countries in negotiations with Iran and spread the responsibility for keeping the waterway open.

An even more transformative U.S. policy would require grasping the nettle of the Palestinian issue. The October 7 attack demonstrated once again that as long as Palestinian self-determination remains unrealized, Palestinian refusal to accept the status quo can blow up the Middle East. A truly stable region requires satisfying the basic Palestinian right to self-determination while also ensuring Israeli security. But no U.S. government has been willing to use the leverage on Israel that would be necessary to make a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict possible. Without that willingness, any hope for true, long-term stability in the Middle East is a fantasy. The region’s players have not changed: an emboldened Iran with scores to settle, Iranian proxies that are down but not out, and an Israel that instead of compromising has come to accept a state of near-permanent war. The stage is set for the next conflagration.

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