During his visit to the
Middle East in May, US President Donald Trump did several things that few would
have predicted months or even weeks earlier. One was his surprise meeting with
Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Shara, and the subsequent lifting of US sanctions
on Syria, notwithstanding Shara’s history as a leader of a militant Islamist
group.
Another was his decision
not to include Israel on the itinerary, despite his administration’s ongoing
efforts to end the war in Gaza. The trip followed the administration’s decision
in early May to sign a bilateral cease-fire with the Houthis in Yemen, without
consulting or including Israel.
Along with Trump’s
initiation of direct talks with Iran—a step that Israel adamantly opposes but
Arab leaders in the Persian Gulf welcomed and even helped facilitate—these
developments suggest how much the regional balance of power has changed since
Hamas’s October 07, 2023, attack on
Israel.
The war in Gaza has
altered the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East. In the years before the
October 07 attack, Saudi Arabia, the
United Arab Emirates (UAE), and other Gulf states shared with Israel the
perception that Iran and its alliance of proxy forces were the region’s
overriding threat. They supported the first Trump administration’s “maximum
pressure” campaign on Tehran, and they began to normalize relations with
Israel. Today, the situation has dramatically shifted. Twenty months into the
war, Tehran appears far less of a threat to the Arab world. Meanwhile, Israel
looks increasingly like a regional hegemon.
Amid these developments,
Washington’s Arab allies and Israel are now in opposite camps on the merits of
a new nuclear deal. Israel still sees a deal as a lifeline for the Islamic
Republic and has been urging the Trump administration instead to take
military action to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. The Gulf states, by
contrast, dread a new and potentially uncontainable war on their doorsteps and
view a diplomatic resolution with Tehran as vital to regional security and stability.
They are also wary of
creating a Middle East in which Israel has free rein—even in a future in which
normalization with Israel can move forward. In their effort to achieve a new
balance between Israel and Iran, the Gulf states have become primary players in
Trump’s push for a new nuclear deal. Together, they aim to become the fulcrum
of a reconfigured regional order.
To grasp the extent of
the Gulf states’ shift on Iran, it is crucial to recall Saudi Arabia and the
UAE’s reaction to the first US-Iranian nuclear deal a decade ago. When Iran and
the United States signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, in
July 2015, the Gulf states shared Israel’s concern that it would bolster Iran’s
regional influence. At the time, the Arab world was still recovering from
popular uprisings during the 2010–11 Arab Spring, which had toppled once
powerful rulers and sparked civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen.
Iran had profited from
the tumult, carving a sphere of influence stretching from the Arabian Peninsula
to the Levant. In a speech before the US Congress in March 2015, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned, “Iran now dominates four Arab
capitals—Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, and Sanaa.”
The Gulf Arab states,
like Israel, worried that the United States, in its push for the nuclear
accord, was ignoring the growing regional threat posed by the Islamic Republic
and its proxies. The same month as Netanyahu’s speech, Saudi Arabia announced
it was leading a military intervention in Yemen against the Houthis, the
insurgent group that was expanding Iran’s sphere of influence into the Arabian
Peninsula.
=============
Israel and
Washington’s Gulf allies may have overstated the prospect of Iranian hegemony
in the Middle East, but there was no denying that the turmoil in the Arab world
had tilted the regional balance of power in Iran’s favor.
To its Middle East
detractors, the JCPOA was not just about Iran’s nuclear capabilities but also
about Iran’s relative influence. According to the terms of the deal, Iran got
sanctions relief just for agreeing to limit its nuclear program; it was not required
to rein in its proxy forces in the region.
As a result, the deal
threatened to increase Iran’s sway even as it curbed the country’s pursuit of
nuclear weapons. Arab states thus joined hands with Israel to underscore this
flaw and used it in a high-profile effort to undermine the JCPOA. In addition
to aggressively lobbying members of Congress—an offensive symbolized by
Netanyahu’s 2015 speech—this effort included a public and media campaign
against the deal.
During his first
administration, Trump concurred with the deal’s critics. The United States unilaterally
abandoned the JCPOA in 2018 and placed Iran under “maximum pressure” economic
sanctions. At the time, the Trump administration expected that this pressure
would weaken Iran and shrink its regional influence in favor of a new regional
order centered on Israel and Washington’s Arab allies.
The administration
promoted expanded Arab-Israeli security and intelligence cooperation,
culminating in the 2020 Abraham Accords—the agreement that normalized relations
between Israel and a series of Arab and North African states, including Bahrain
and the UAE, and subsequently Morocco and Sudan.
It also took a harder
line toward Iran’s support for proxy forces across the region, to the point of
making the highly unusual decision to assassinate Iranian General Qasem
Soleimani, the powerful head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in
Baghdad in 2020.
The tougher US strategy
toward Iran continued under President Joe Biden. Contrary to expectations, the
Biden administration did not restore the JCPOA and eschewed engaging with
Iran—agreeing to talks only after Iran raised the stakes by accelerating its
accumulation of highly enriched uranium.
Biden’s focus, much like
Trump’s, was instead on forging an Arab-Israeli axis. Normalization of
relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia thus became the lodestar of Biden’s
Middle East policy. Indeed, at the time of Hamas’s October 07, 2023
attack, the administration thought it was on the cusp of an Israeli-Saudi deal
that would bring lasting peace to the region. As events would soon make clear, that assumption was terribly misguided.
The Trump-Biden strategy only aggravated regional tensions.
Iran responded to US
pressure by expanding its nuclear program and its support for the Houthis in
Yemen in their war with the Gulf states. It also began directly attacking US
and Gulf interests, most notably Saudi oil facilities, in 2019.
Even before the October 07 attack, the Gulf states had lost confidence in
Washington’s strategy. In March 2023, Saudi Arabia broke ranks to normalize
ties with Iran—in a deal brokered by China. One immediate benefit was an end to
Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Gulf states remained committed
to expanding ties with Israel, but maintaining a balance between Iran and
Israel would prove difficult.
Then came Hamas’s attacks
and Israel’s blistering war in Gaza, which derailed normalization between
Israel and Saudi Arabia. A resurgent “axis of resistance,” backed by
Iran—including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, who, along with
Hamas saw the prospect of Israeli-Saudi normalization as an existential
threat—was now at open war with Israel.
The Biden administration
assumed that this new regional conflict would strengthen the case for an
Israel–Gulf state security alliance, but the Gulf states were loath to be
dragged into that conflict. In January 2024, when Biden resolved to respond
militarily to the Houthis’ attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea,
Saudi Arabia and the UAE assiduously avoided getting involved, despite their
years-long struggle against the group.
Arab states also had to
account for the growing anger among the Arab public about the treatment of the
people of Gaza, which precluded any further tightening of Arab-Israeli security
cooperation.
Then, in the fall of
2024, a series of Israeli successes turned the tide of the war. In late
September, Israel eliminated Hezbollah’s top leadership, including the
organization’s longtime leader, Hasan Nasrallah, in a targeted bomb attack—a
strike that followed on the heels of a successful undercover operation that
decimated the group’s command-and-control structure using exploding pagers. The
following month, Israeli forces killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who had
masterminded the October 07 attack.
And in early December, the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, a longtime close
Iranian ally, collapsed. Meanwhile, dangerous exchanges of missiles and drones
between Iran and Israel raised the stakes but also further dented Iran’s aura
of power, with Israel claiming to have neutralized many of Iran’s air
defenses.
By the end of the year,
the axis of resistance had been diminished, and Tehran found itself largely cut
off from the Levant. Even Iran’s defense of its homeland looked vulnerable.
With Trump, a strong backer of Israel, poised to return to the White House, a
confident Netanyahu government in Israel saw a rare opportunity to deal a
decisive blow to Iran, destroying its nuclear facilities and devastating its
economic infrastructure in an attack that would push the Islamic Republic to
the brink.
Yet Trump has not
followed the expected Israeli script. Worried that military strikes on Iran
will pull the United States into a costly war, the president has thus far
resisted Israeli pressure to dispense with diplomacy and wage open war on Iran.
Instead, he has pushed for a new version of precisely the thing he repudiated
during his first term: a nuclear deal. In doing so, he is backed by the Gulf
states, which, despite their opposition to the earlier deal, also now favor
diplomacy with Iran.
Since Trump took office,
Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have all counseled against war and acted
as intermediaries and mediators between Tehran and Washington. The most obvious
reason for this shift is fear of what war in the Gulf would do to their
economies. At a more fundamental level, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states see
a nuclear deal as central to achieving a new balance of power in the Middle
East.
In part, Gulf support for
an Iran deal has to do with Israel’s own changed position in the region. Even
as it continues its offensive in Gaza, Israel has already begun to emerge
triumphant, confident in its absolute military superiority, and ready to use it
to assert domination over the Middle East.
In addition to expanding
its occupation of Gaza, which Israeli leaders have suggested could be put under
indefinite military rule, Israel has been imposing its will on south Lebanon
and is occupying and carrying out military incursions into large swaths of
Syria. And now it wants to extend its victorious campaign in the Levant to the
Gulf, with a military attack on Iran. In addition to provoking Iranian
retaliation that could soon include targets on the Arabian Peninsula, such an
attack could disrupt world energy supplies and cast doubt on the long-term
viability of the economic boom in the Gulf.
The Middle East’s main
power brokers, including the Arab states, Iran, Israel, and Turkey, have
historically resisted domination by one regional actor. When the Arab world was
reaching for primacy under the banner of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s,
Iran, Israel, and Turkey banded together to contain it. Even after the Islamic
Revolution in 1979, Israel was not reflexively hostile to Iran if regional
power balancing dictated otherwise: in the early years of the Iran-Iraq War of
the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was gaining an upper hand and posing as a
claimant to leadership of the Arab world, Israel supplied revolutionary
Islamist Iran with intelligence and war materiel. Later, as Iran emerged as a
rising power, Israelis joined hands with Arab states to counter it.
Now that Israel is laying
claim to being the region’s unrivaled power, Arab states and Iran—and also
Turkey—need each other to establish a balance. Among the former are Bahrain,
Egypt, and Jordan, which do not have diplomatic relations with Iran but, like
other Arab powers, have drastically increased their engagement.
Above all, Gulf states
have become Iran’s crutch in pursuing nuclear negotiations with the United
States. The Gulf states understand that, in the rivalry between Iran and
Israel, they are the prize. Israel wants an axis with the Arab world that would
contain Iran, and Iran wants to deny Israel a footprint in the Arabian
Peninsula.
For their part, Gulf
leaders want a regional order that restrains both Iran and Israel while
empowering their own governments. It is this balancing imperative that has
turned Washington’s Gulf allies from erstwhile opponents of a nuclear deal into
strong advocates. As they see it, a new deal between Iran and the United States
would deny Israel a path to war with Iran that could spill onto their shores,
and then only confirm Israel’s unchecked regional supremacy.
In turn, Iran, which is
eager to conclude a nuclear deal to avoid war and boost its ailing economy, has
become increasingly dependent on the Gulf states to manage the Trump
administration and keep the negotiations going. Oman’s foreign minister, for
example, has played a key role in the talks by developing proposals that bridge
differences between Tehran and Washington; Saudi Arabia has embraced the idea
of creating a regional nuclear consortium with Iran to jointly manage uranium
enrichment. The Saudi foreign minister has also suggested that the kingdom is
willing to use its economic muscle to help a final deal take hold.
Iran and the Gulf states
now need each other, and both sides need a nuclear deal. That is a welcome
development. It could build trust between the Gulf neighbors, enabling them to
deepen their engagement to include security cooperation, investments, and trade.
Moreover, reengaging with
Iran does not require the abandonment of normalization efforts with Israel.
Gulf leaders do not want to have to make a Faustian choice between Iran and
Israel. They want relations with both in order to strike a regional balance that
works to their countries’ advantage and ensures the peace and stability that
are vital to the region’s geoeconomic goals.
For the Gulf states, a
nuclear deal would align their strategy with Washington’s Middle East policy,
which could then be consecrated in a formal strategic partnership between the
United States and Saudi Arabia.
Trump’s recent visit to
the Gulf seemed to confirm this expectation. Even before arriving in the
region, his administration set aside Israel’s concerns and concluded a
bilateral cease-fire agreement with the Houthis. At the same time, the
ambitious economic deals that Arab leaders offered Trump served as the backdrop
to US statements on Gaza, Iran, and Syria that reflected Gulf priorities at the
expense of Israel’s preferences.
At every stop on his
trip, Trump reiterated his preference for resolving the Iran nuclear issue
through diplomacy. And on occasion, he seemed to acknowledge Arab concerns over
the war in Gaza, in Abu Dhabi, for
example, he said, “A lot of people are starving in Gaza”—apparently criticizing
Israel’s ten-week blockade on aid to the territory.
But for this realignment
to truly bring regional peace and stability, the United States must give a new
nuclear deal with Iran a broader strategic framing. A deal would need to be
reached in tandem with a push to expand the Abraham Accords, normalizing Israel’s
relations not only with Saudi Arabia but also with other Arab states, such as
Syria.
To resume normalization
efforts with Israel, Riyadh will demand an end to the war in Gaza and a viable
political future for the Palestinians. Yet at another level, the United States
and its Gulf allies must think of normalization as a necessary complement to
both a US-Iranian nuclear deal and the growing Iran–Gulf state axis, with these
three pieces together forming a new regional balance.
Of course, US
negotiations with Iran may stall, and Washington could return to a more
confrontational course with Tehran. Such an outcome would likely prolong
regional conflict and foreclose any possibility of further Arab-Israeli
normalization in the near term.
But if a deal can be
reached, the Gulf states have an opportunity to become the pivot of a new
regional order, with axes running through them to Iran, Israel, and the United
States. After years of war and turmoil, that might finally offer a real chance
to bring stability to the region.
Courtesy Foreign Affairs
