Wednesday: The United States signs a civil nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. A “decades-long, multi-billion-dollar partnership,” Washington calls it.

Thursday: The President Trump logs onto social media and reneges — unilaterally slapping on a new condition that was never part of the deal he just signed.

The condition is that Saudi Arabia must sign on to the Abraham Accords and recognise Israel.

• READ MORE: Is the US-Saudi nuclear deal on, or in limbo?
• Other Lim Tean articles

No phone call to Riyadh first. No consultation. Just a Truth Social post, blindsiding the very partner he’d shaken hands with 24 hours earlier.

And here’s the part Washington seems not to grasp: this precondition is dead on arrival.

MBS has said it again and again, most recently as an official rejection just weeks ago — no normalisation with Israel without an independent Palestinian state, East Jerusalem as its capital, full stop.

The Saudi Foreign Ministry has called it “non-negotiable”. Trump is demanding surrender to a position Riyadh has never once wavered from.

Not statecraft
This is not statecraft. This is not deterrence. This is a superpower treating a sovereign signature as a rough draft — and then attaching a condition it knows, or should know, will never be met.

Ask Kyiv. Ask Tehran. Ask now Riyadh: what is an American signature actually worth?

The Legitimacy Principle is simple — power without consistency is not strength, it is liability.

A state that cannot honour its own agreements within a day, and cannot read its own partner’s red lines, cannot lead a rules-based order. It can only bully one, until the world stops showing up to sign.

Washington is agreement incapable.

Trump’s undercutting of the nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia shortly after it was signed by adding the requirement that the Saudis recognize Israel (they won’t) signals everyone including the Iranians that you can’t trust a deal with Trump. https://t.co/8QoDnZdBNF

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) July 26, 2026

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

“If we can’t sell oil, we will make sure you can’t too.”

That is the message Iran’s parliamentary Speaker has just sent to the entire Gulf — and to US President Donald Trump.

The Speaker, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, has delivered the starkest ultimatum of this war.

Responding to Trump’s threat to destroy one Iranian bridge or power plant for every ship attacked in the Strait of Hormuz, Ghalibaf didn’t blink. He went further.

• READ MORE: Trump weighs ‘massive attack’ as Iran’s FM blasts ‘mindless aggression’
• The illegal US war on Iran – and now the economic consequences shock
• Other Lim Tean articles

“The equation of this war is clear: either all or none. In a region where we do not sell oil, no one will sell oil. If our security is not ensured, no infrastructure will be safe,” he said.

“The security of the Strait lies in the absence of American forces. The situation of the Strait will not return to pre-war conditions.”

Read that carefully. This is not a threat to close Hormuz. It is something more sophisticated — and more dangerous. Iran is saying it will hold the entire Gulf’s oil exports hostage to its own.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar — all of them — become collateral in a dispute that is not theirs.

The Strait of Hormuz carries 20 to 21 million barrels a day — a fifth of global oil consumption. Bab el-Mandeb carries another 6 to 9 million. Between them, roughly a third of the world’s seaborne oil now sits under the shadow of a single Iranian sentence.

“They wanted to punish Iran. Punished themselves with triple-digit oil instead. 10/10 strategy,” Iran’s chief negotiator and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said in a post on X.

Live updates: https://t.co/kGUykdVSBy pic.twitter.com/73aiqzxNcu

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 23, 2026

Surged past $100 a barrel
Brent has already responded — surging past $100 a barrel, a six-week high.

This is the Legitimacy Principle playing out in real time. When the dominant naval power — the United States — can no longer guarantee safe passage, the question of who actually controls the Strait stops being theoretical.

Iran is answering it by force of statement, before it even needs to answer it by force of arms.

Will Trump escalate further, or is this the moment Washington starts looking for an off-ramp? Either way, the Gulf states now have every incentive to start talking to Tehran directly — because Washington just showed it cannot protect them from the consequences of its own war.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

Ten nights of bombing. Zero endgame. And now a second chokepoint just slammed shut.

This is what happens when you resume a war without a strategy.

Tuesday brought the clearest proof yet that what we are watching in the Gulf is not a series of isolated flare-ups, but a coordinated strategic encirclement — one I have been calling the “security belt” thesis since Iran’s Quds Force commander first used that exact phrase in June.

• READ MORE: Iran attacks Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan; says 2 tankers in Hormuz ablaze
• Lim Tean: You cannot bomb a strait open – Hormuz, Chabahar and the coming battle for Bab el-Mandeb
• Other War on Iran reports

What happened today?
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps struck US radar and air-defence installations across the Gulf, claiming the destruction of a missile-defence radar and an F-15 sheltered in Jordan, and hitting Amazon’s data infrastructure in Bahrain.

Senior Hamas official Khaled Meshaal has congratulated Khalil al-Hayya on being named as the head of Hamas’s political bureau.

LIVE updates https://t.co/LRy6Ugekjx

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 21, 2026

This is now the 10th consecutive night of US strikes on Iran, launched at the direction of President Donald Trump, with CENTCOM confirming further attacks on Iranian air defence, radar, missile and drone sites.

But the more consequential news is at sea. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy intercepted and stopped two tankers in the Strait of Hormuz it labelled “non-compliant” — language that should alarm every shipowner and P&I underwriter reading this.

Iran is no longer simply harassing traffic through Hormuz. It is asserting a compliance and inspection regime over the strait — a direct challenge to the transit passage rights guaranteed under UNCLOS.

Hormuz is now estimated at roughly 89 percent interdiction under Iranian naval enforcement.

And now, the second door has closed

Yemen’s Houthis announced on Monday a full maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait — the 29km chokepoint linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, carrying roughly 12 percent of global trade and a quarter of the world’s container traffic.

The Houthis frame it as retaliation for the Saudi blockade of Yemen and a strike on Sanaa airport. But the timing is what matters strategically: Saudi Arabia had spent the last four months rerouting the bulk of its crude exports westward through the East-West pipeline to Red Sea terminals — precisely because Hormuz was already closed.

That escape valve is now being shut too.

For the first time in this conflict, Saudi Arabia sits trapped between two blocked corridors. Brent crude has surged roughly 30 percent off its July lows, trading near US$88 a barrel.

The Legitimacy Principle at work
This is the Dual Hegemony thesis made visible: Iran holding the eastern gate at Hormuz, its aligned Houthi forces holding the western gate at Bab al-Mandeb — two actors, one strategic architecture, squeezing the Arabian Peninsula from both flanks regardless of how tightly Tehran and Sanaa formally coordinate operations.

Whether or not the two theatres are directly commanded in tandem, the effect is the same: nearly a quarter of the world’s oil and gas supply now sits hostage to a war that shows no sign of a negotiated off-ramp.

For the war-risk and P&I markets, the signal is unmistakable. This is no longer a single-chokepoint risk to be hedged and rerouted around. It is a dual-corridor structural crisis, and premiums, routing, and insurer exposure will need to be repriced accordingly.

The question now is not whether the world absorbs a Hormuz shock. It is whether it can absorb both at once.

Washington’s self-inflicted trap
But there is a second story here, and it is arguably the more damning one: what this does to Trump’s position.

Trump did not have to resume this war. A Memorandum of Understanding was on the table only weeks ago — his own administration’s negotiated off-ramp. It collapsed because Iran acted to defend the one asset that actually matters to it, control of Hormuz, and Trump’s team, led by Vance’s negotiators, signed language loose enough for Tehran to exploit.

Trump himself complained this week that Iran “always breaks” agreements — an extraordinary line from a president whose own record of walking out on international agreements is well known. He chose escalation. Nobody forced his hand.

BREAKING:

President Trump says Iran always breaks agreements, so the U.S. will strike them hard. pic.twitter.com/waWiTxZW08

— Litest (@Litest) July 13, 2026

Ten consecutive nights of strikes later, American service members have already been killed in Iraq and Jordan, and reporting from inside Washington describes an administration that still cannot articulate what victory looks like.

Trump told Americans in a primetime address that the US is “winning big” without once explaining what winning means or how the war ends. There is no regime-change theory of the case. There is no ceasefire architecture on the table. There is only the tempo of the bombing.

Now Washington’s strategic dilemma has just deepened, whether or not that was the intent. Every American strike that fails to reopen Hormuz makes the war look more like a stalemate Trump cannot afford politically. Every escalation invites further retaliation against the very Gulf infrastructure and shipping lanes the US campaign is supposedly designed to protect.

And a US president who staked his credibility on ending wars quickly now finds himself presiding over a widening one, with rising body counts, a global oil market absorbing repeated shocks, and no visible theory of how any of this concludes.

This is the cost of resuming a war without first answering the most basic question any commander is supposed to answer: what does the end state look like?

Months ago, Trump promised this war would last “four to five weeks at most.” It has now dragged on far longer, and the strategic picture is worse, not better, than when he started.

That is not an accident of geography. That is the price of impulse dressed up as resolve.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

ANALYSIS: By Lim Tean

It is a peculiar kind of defeat — one dressed in the language of victory. Operation Epic Fury was sold to the world as a decisive strike to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat once and for all.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had lobbied Washington for precisely this moment. He got his war. What he didn’t get was the outcome he promised.

The US-Iran MOU is Israel’s strategic nightmare rendered in diplomatic text. And the consequences extend far beyond the terms of any single agreement.

• READ MORE: US strikes Iran after attack on vessel in Strait of Hormuz
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports
• Other Lim Tean articles

Left out of the room
Let us begin with the most humiliating fact. The MOU’s second paragraph mentions Lebanon three times and declares the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts — without once mentioning Israel.

A new deconfliction mechanism for Lebanon has been announced, including the United States, Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar. Israel is excluded from that too.

Think about what that means. The country that triggered this war, that flew alongside American aircraft, that provided the intelligence Netanyahu boasted had been decisive — was not in the room when peace was made.

Washington negotiated Israel’s strategic future without Israel.

Vice-President JD Vance’s message to Israeli critics of Trump and the MOU was blunt: they need to “wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in”. That is not the language of alliance. That is the language of managed irrelevance.

What Iran kept
The nuclear question — the ostensible casus belli for the entire war — remains unresolved.

The MOU suffices with rhetorical promises, deferring the actual mechanics of blocking Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capacity, with no guarantee of agreement on that most critical issue.

Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal? Untouched. The MOU offers no treatment of Iran’s ballistic missile programme or its patronage of regional proxies — leaving Israel to contend with those threats as before.

Iran’s financial position? All US sanctions on Iran have been lifted, giving Tehran immediate and significant financial relief — resources that will flow into rebuilding military capabilities.

Tehran emerged from this war battered but unbowed, its theocratic system intact, its strategic leverage demonstrated to the entire world.

Foreign Policy and The Atlantic described the outcome as a defeat for the United States and Israel. The BBC’s international editor assessed that while US and Israeli air forces scored tactical victories, they were not enough to avoid strategic defeat.

The death of the Abraham Accords
Let me be categorical: the Abraham Accords are dead.

That architecture — the crown jewel of American-brokered Middle East diplomacy, the grand bargain that promised Arab “normalisation” with Israel in exchange for security guarantees and Palestinian deferral — has been buried by the post-war regional reality now taking shape.

The Saudi-Iran reconciliation summit now gathering momentum tells the whole story.

Riyadh is actively convening Gulf states and Tehran around a new regional order. And at the centre of that order sits the Palestinian question — not deferred, not managed, but central.

Saudi normalisation with Israel, once dangled as the great prize Netanyahu sought, is now explicitly conditional on Palestinian statehood in terms his government categorically rejects and always will.

The Abraham Accords were premised on one fundamental assumption: that Arab states could be peeled away from the Palestinian cause by American inducements and Israeli economic partnerships.

The Iran war has demolished that premise. Arab publics watching Gaza, Lebanon, and now Iran have made their governments’ calculations for them. No Arab leader can now normalise with Israel without paying a catastrophic domestic political price.

The Abraham Accords are not merely stalled. They are finished.

Some will argue that normalisation architecture, once built, has institutional momentum that survives political setbacks. This misreads what has changed. It was not merely the political temperature that shifted — it was the foundational premise of the entire enterprise.

The Abraham Accords assumed American power could permanently reshape Arab strategic calculations. The MOU has demonstrated that American power in the Middle East is now conditional, transactional, and self-limiting.

The architecture built on that power has no foundation left to stand on.

The dual hegemony: Iran and Turkey
Most analysts have framed Turkey’s rise as a consequence of Iran’s weakening — the great power stepping into the vacuum left by a damaged adversary. This framing is fundamentally wrong, and it misreads the emerging regional order.

My thesis is this: what this war has produced is not a Turkish replacement of Iranian power, but the consolidation of a dual hegemony over the Middle East — Iran and Turkey together, each dominant in its own sphere, each with its own tools of regional influence, and collectively forming the twin poles around which the new Middle East will organise itself.

Iran has survived this war with something more valuable than military capability — it has demonstrated to every state in the region that it possesses a weapon of genuine mass economic destruction in the Strait of Hormuz, with strategic leverage over both the Gulf region and the world economy that no military strike can eliminate.

Iran will rebuild. Its reconstruction will be funded by sanctions relief. And it will re-emerge as the dominant power of the Persian Gulf and the Shia arc from Baghdad to Beirut.

Battered, yes. Eliminated as a regional hegemon? Absolutely not.

Turkey simultaneously consolidates its own distinct hegemony — Sunni, NATO-anchored, commercially formidable, and diplomatically agile in ways Iran can never be.

Turkey maintains a permanent military base in Qatar. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are among its largest defence clients, with Riyadh reportedly in final-stage discussions to join Turkey’s KAAN fifth-generation stealth fighter programme — which would make it the first Gulf state with a stake in an advanced combat aircraft project outside direct American control.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has already called for the formation of a Middle East security pact to build trust and stability across the region after the war.

Crucially, these two hegemonies are not necessarily in fatal conflict with each other. The restraint that Turkey and Iran have historically shown towards one another, particularly at moments of regional and global crisis, constitutes a managed rivalry — one that involves compartmentalisation, coexistence of competing strategic depths, and mutual calculation that outright confrontation serves neither.

They will compete, yes — in Syria, Iraq, and across the Levant. But they will also tacitly coordinate where their interests converge, above all in containing Israeli power and ensuring that neither Washington nor Tel Aviv can dictate the regional order.

For Israel, this dual hegemony is a strategic nightmare of the first order. It faced Iran as a declared enemy — isolated, sanctioned, and manageable within a US-led containment architecture. It now faces two hegemonic powers operating across every theatre in which Israeli interests are engaged, one of them a NATO member with a domestically built defence industry and deepening Gulf partnerships that Israeli power cannot easily reach.

Israel traded a weakened, contained adversary for two formidable and rising ones.

Netanyahu’s shattered grand design
History will not be kind to Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategic vision. Behind the stated objectives of eliminating Iran’s nuclear programme lay a grander ambition — the consolidation of Israeli regional dominance, the permanent suppression of Palestinian statehood, and the realisation of a Greater Israel stretching from the Jordan River to the sea, secured by Arab normalisation and American military backing.

That project is now in ruins.

Reports cited Israeli intelligence provided by Netanyahu as a decisive factor in Trump’s authorisation of Operation Epic Fury. He designed this war. He lobbied for it. He provided the intelligence that launched it. And the outcome — Iran surviving with its strategic leverage intact, Turkey ascending, a dual hegemony replacing the old order, the Abraham Accords collapsing, and Palestinian statehood returning irresistibly to the regional agenda — is the precise opposite of everything his grand design required.

The Greater Israel project required three things simultaneously: permanent American backing, Arab acquiescence, and the suppression of Palestinian nationhood. All three pillars have collapsed in the same season.

A recent poll shows that 92.1 percent of Israelis, including Jews and Arabs, believe Iran gained the most from the MOU, and 86 percent hold a negative view of the agreement.

Netanyahu faces elections in September or October. He went to war promising existential resolution. He faces the ballot box having delivered existential ruin.

The greatest blow: The loss of the American shield
But the deepest and most consequential damage inflicted by this war on Israel is not the MOU’s terms, not the dual hegemony, not the death of the Abraham Accords. It is something more fundamental.

Israel can no longer be assured of American support in future conflicts.

This is a tectonic shift in the foundations of Israeli security doctrine. Since 1973, Israel has operated on one unshakeable assumption: that the United States would underwrite its military adventurism, absorb its diplomatic costs, and stand between Israel and strategic consequences. That assumption is now shattered.

Trump refused to share a preliminary text of the MOU with Netanyahu, whose judgment he questioned using multiple expletives, while simultaneously describing Iranian interlocutors as “very rational people who were nice to deal with.” Washington did not merely negotiate over Israel’s head — it negotiated against Israel’s preferences, excluded it from the peace architecture, and then told it to accept the outcome.

The lesson every future Israeli government must now absorb is devastating in its simplicity: America will pursue its own interests. When those interests align with Israeli military action, Washington will partner.

When they diverge — as they did the moment the Strait of Hormuz closure threatened the global economy — Washington will deal. And Israel will not be in the room.

This is not a temporary rupture that a change of American administration will repair. It is a structural shift. The United States has demonstrated, in front of the entire world, that Israeli military adventurism carries costs that Washington will not indefinitely absorb. Every future Israeli prime minister will govern in the shadow of that demonstration.

A bleak horizon
Israel enters this new era already deeply wounded from within.

More than 150,000 people have left Israel in the past two years, and more than 200,000 since the current government took office in December 2022. This is not the normal ebb and flow of migration. A Knesset report described it as a “tsunami” — and those departing are disproportionately the young, educated, tax-paying professionals who constitute the backbone of Israel’s high-tech economy.

For the second consecutive year, more people left Israel than arrived — a negative net migration balance unprecedented in the country’s modern history. Population growth slowed in 2025 for the first time in decades, driven primarily by emigration alongside declining fertility rates and war-related mortality.

More than 25 percent of Israelis are now considering leaving. The number of official requests to terminate residency in 2024 was more than double the total requests made between 2015 and 2021.

For a state that defines itself as the ultimate sanctuary for world Jewry, this exodus carries a verdict more damning than any diplomatic agreement. Jews are leaving Israel because of Israel’s wars. The state founded to make Jews safe has become, in the eyes of growing numbers of its own citizens, a state that makes them perpetually and inescapably unsafe.

The economy mirrors the demography. The departure of high-tech workers — the engineers, physicians, and entrepreneurs who drove Israel’s “Start-Up Nation” identity — carries compounding consequences. Capital, talent, and tax revenue leave together. The sectors that remain are progressively more dependent on state subsidies and less capable of generating the growth that underwrites military spending.

A state in permanent war cannot indefinitely sustain a first-world economy, and the numbers are beginning to reflect that truth.

The only path forward: A Palestinian state
There is only one exit from this strategic catastrophe, and it requires Israel to face a truth it has spent 70 years refusing to acknowledge.

Israel’s long-term survival as a viable state — economically, demographically, diplomatically — now depends on a single political act: the acceptance of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

This is no longer a moral argument, though the moral case is overwhelming. It is a cold strategic calculation. The post-war regional order being assembled — the dual hegemony of Iran and Turkey, the Saudi-led Gulf reconciliation, the death of the Abraham Accords — has Palestinian statehood as its non-negotiable foundation.

Every regional power that matters has made this clear. The price of Israel’s reintegration into a workable Middle Eastern order, and by extension the restoration of something resembling normal economic and diplomatic life, is Palestinian statehood.

Without it, Israel faces permanent regional hostility, no prospect of Arab normalisation, a continuing haemorrhage of its most productive citizens, an economy under sustained pressure, and an American patron whose support is now conditional and transactional rather than unconditional and structural.

The Zionist founders understood something Netanyahu’s generation has forgotten: that Israel’s survival ultimately depends not merely on military power but on legitimacy — the legitimacy that comes from being a state that other states and peoples can live alongside.

That legitimacy has been catastrophically squandered. It can only begin to be rebuilt through justice for the Palestinian people.

The reckoning has arrived. And the path forward, however painful, is clear.

Accept Palestinian statehood — with East Jerusalem as its capital — or face a future of accelerating isolation, demographic decline, and strategic irrelevance in a Middle East that has irrevocably moved on.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator on geopolitical affairs. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

An Israeli cabinet minister has named the new Middle East on live radio —  and he named it in alarm.

What Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli called the “Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan axis” is not a threat. It is the architecture of a new regional order.

And once you see its logic, you cannot unsee it. Here is what it means — and what it means for America.

• READ MORE: Lim Tean: Why standing on the wrong side of history cost Germany its UNSC seat
• Other Lim Tean articles

❝What we are witnessing is the rise of a new axis❞

Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli says Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan axis ‘is worrying’, linking three countries to recent US-Iran deal https://t.co/53i0KcwcAR pic.twitter.com/iOVMd6kEDI

— Anadolu English (@anadoluagency) June 17, 2026

The confession in the alarm
When Amichai Chikli went on Israel’s 103 FM radio this week to warn of the rise of a “Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan axis,” he wasn’t making a prediction. He was issuing a confession.

An adversary’s alarm is always the most reliable confirmation that a structural shift has occurred — and what Chikli named in anxiety, we must now examine with clarity.

The old Middle East is gone. What is rising in its place is an architecture that no Western foreign policy establishment has yet fully reckoned with — one in which American primacy has been displaced, Israeli military dominance has been exposed as insufficient, and the two great Indigenous powers of the region, Iran and Türkiye, are emerging as the twin poles of a new order.

The moment the Old Order broke
The proximate event was the US-Iran framework agreement — now signed and in force. Trump signing it at the Palace of Versailles during dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday evening, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signing from Tehran.

But the manner of its emergence is as consequential as its content.

Washington and Tehran reached their temporary truce on April 8 through Pakistani mediation. The framework itself was shaped by Pakistan, Qatar, and Türkiye — playing, as one account noted, “different but complementary roles.”

Qatar hosted senior Iranian officials and maintained communication channels. Türkiye provided consistent diplomatic backing and called repeatedly for a negotiated resolution. Pakistan’s Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir was the crucial bridge, maintaining simultaneous contacts with both Washington and Tehran.

Notice who was absent from this architecture — Israel. Notice who else was absent — the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia. These are the three traditional American-anchored Gulf states that for three decades defined the regional order alongside Washington.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself admitted the scale of his marginalisation. At his first press conference in three months, he conceded he did not know what was actually written in the agreement.

The leader of the Middle East’s most powerful military, possessor of an undeclared nuclear arsenal, was reduced to a bystander while the region’s future was negotiated without him.

Trump, at the G7 summit in France, publicly described Netanyahu as “crazy” and said “without me, there would be no Israel.” Strip away the Trumpian grandiosity and a devastating strategic truth remains: Israel’s security has never rested on its own foundations, but on American patronage. And that patronage is being fundamentally recalibrated.

For American readers, this demands a moment of honest reflection. The United States spent trillions of dollars and decades of strategic energy constructing a Middle Eastern order anchored on Israeli military dominance and Gulf monarchy stability. That order has not been dismantled by an adversary’s military victory. It has been quietly superseded — by diplomacy conducted through channels America did not control, by actors America did not invite, producing an outcome America did not architect. That is a more profound kind of displacement than defeat in battle.

The dual-hegemon architecture
What is emerging is not a successor Pax — not Chinese, not Russian, not any external power’s regional order. It is something rarer and more durable: a regional order anchored by Indigenous great powers.

Iran and Turkey are the twin poles. Between them they possess the military depth, the demographic weight, the geographic centrality, and the independent foreign policy capacity that no other regional actor can match. Iran controls the eastern arc — Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen — through its network of allied movements and state relationships.

Türkiye commands the northern tier, projects power into Syria, maintains NATO membership as a strategic hedge, and has emerged as the region’s most consequential diplomatic broker.

This is not a partnership moving in perfect harmony. Türkiye and Iran are rival civilisational powers with a long history of strategic friction. The more precise framework is managed bipolarity — two hegemons who converge sufficiently on the containment of Israeli expansionism to cooperate diplomatically, while competing for influence across the Arab world’s contested spaces.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made his country’s position unambiguous. Speaking to Parliament, he declared that Israeli aggression in Lebanon and Syria had reached a point where it threatened Türkiye directly, and called Israel the single biggest obstacle to regional peace.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, speaking alongside Russia’s Sergey Lavrov in Moscow — a symbolically charged backdrop — welcomed the US-Iran agreement but crucially called for it to evolve into “a structural and lasting security architecture rather than a temporary period of calm”.

That phrase is the key to understanding Ankara’s ambition. Turkey is not interested in episodic crisis management. It is seeking to institutionalise a new regional order in which it is a permanent rule-setter — the Ottoman inheritance reframed for the 21st century.

Iran, militarily weakened by the six-week Israeli offensive but diplomatically rehabilitated by the agreement, emerges in a paradoxical position of strength. It has traded military confrontation for international legitimacy, secured the rehabilitation of its economy, and — crucially — retained its regional network intact. The agreement has not dismantled Iranian power projection. It has brought Iran back into the international system while leaving its strategic depth untouched.

Pakistan: The nuclear keystone
The actor most consistently underestimated in Western analysis is Pakistan — and yet Pakistan may be the keystone of the entire new architecture.

Pakistan is the only Muslim-majority nuclear power. Its Army Chief personally bridged Washington and Tehran to produce the April 8 truce. It sits at the heart of the Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan diplomatic axis. And it has recently formalised a defence pact with Saudi Arabia.

That last point demands careful attention — and contains a particular irony for American readers.

Saudi Arabia’s strategic anxiety is acute. If American primacy in the region is receding, Riyadh needs an alternative security guarantee. It needs, specifically, nuclear cover. China has been proposed as one possible guarantor. But Pakistan is the more structurally coherent answer — and the answer whose historical roots run deepest.

Saudi money was instrumental in funding Pakistan’s nuclear programme during the 1970s and 1980s. This was never a secret in strategic circles. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s original conception of an “Islamic bomb” was always partly conceived with the broader Muslim world — and implicitly with Saudi Arabia — in mind. The recent Saudi-Pakistan defence pact is not a bilateral footnote. It is the formal institutionalisation of a security relationship whose nuclear dimension has always been implicit.

Here is the American irony: Washington funded, armed, and sustained Pakistan through decades of the Cold War and the War on Terror. American taxpayers financed the Pakistani military establishment that built the Islamic world’s first nuclear arsenal.

That arsenal may now serve as the instrument by which Saudi Arabia quietly exits the American security umbrella — replacing it with an Islamic solidarity framework that carries far greater domestic legitimacy in Riyadh than any guarantee from Washington ever did.

History has a sharp sense of irony. America built the tools of its own displacement.

Lebanon: The proving ground
Lebanon is not a footnote to this architectural shift. It is its most immediate and visible proving ground — the theatre where the transition from old order to new is being tested in real time.

Israel’s continued strikes on south Lebanon, even after the US-Iran framework was announced, reveal the central tension of this transitional moment. Netanyahu, sidelined from the deal and facing devastating domestic criticism, is using Lebanon as the one theatre where he can still project agency. But in doing so, he is accelerating precisely the dynamic that isolates Israel further from the emerging order.

Erdoğan’s response was explicit and historically significant: Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Syria had reached a point where they threatened Türkiye directly, with Ankara’s security now tied to its two neighbouring countries. That is an extraordinary statement from a NATO member — effectively drawing a Turkish strategic red line over Lebanese and Syrian territory.

Under the old American-anchored order, no such red line existed. Lebanon was perpetually sacrificed, a weak state with no regional protector capable of imposing real costs on Israeli operations. That calculus has now changed.

Hezbollah emerges weakened militarily but strategically sheltered. Iran’s diplomatic rehabilitation does not require Hezbollah’s disarmament — it requires Lebanon’s stabilisation as a buffer state within the New Order. The agreement creates pressure for a ceasefire, not for the dismantling of the network that gives Iran its Lebanese strategic depth.

For Israel, this is the core dilemma: military operations in Lebanon that once carried manageable costs now risk triggering a broader regional response that the new architecture makes structurally coherent for the first time.

The coming reckoning: Bahrain, UAE and the Abraham Accords
The states facing the most acute strategic exposure in the new architecture are Bahrain and the UAE — the two Arab signatories of the Abraham Accords most deeply integrated into the Israeli-American axis.

They signed those accords in 2020 premised on a specific geopolitical bet: that American military primacy was durable, that Israeli military dominance was unassailable, and that normalisation with Tel Aviv was the winning ticket to regional security and economic modernisation.

Every one of those premises has now been shaken to its foundation.

American primacy has visibly receded — demonstrated not by any declaration, but by the simple fact that the most consequential regional agreement in a generation was negotiated without Washington in the lead role, and with Washington explicitly sidelining Israel from the process. Israeli military might, while still formidable, has been shown to have strategic limits.

And normalisation with Israel now carries reputational and security costs that were never priced into the original Abraham Accords calculation.

Bahrain and the UAE possess sovereign wealth, infrastructure, and relationships that retain value in any regional configuration. But they are now exposed on multiple flanks simultaneously — caught between an American patron recalibrating its commitments, an Israeli partner increasingly isolated from the new regional consensus, and an emerging order being constructed around axes from which they were conspicuously absent.

Their most likely path is quiet hedging rather than dramatic realignment. Expect both states to begin softening their public identification with Israeli positions, to deepen economic ties with Türkiye and expand back-channel contacts with Tehran, and to use their sovereign wealth funds as instruments of strategic repositioning — investments that signal accommodation with the New Order without requiring a formal rupture with Washington.

Abu Dhabi in particular, will seek to be useful to all sides simultaneously. But the window for comfortable hedging is narrowing. The longer Bahrain and the UAE remain identified with a receding order, the less leverage they will carry when they eventually seek terms with the one that is rising.

Oman and Qatar occupy the opposite end of the spectrum. Oman’s historic role as a quiet back-channel to Iran — it was instrumental in facilitating the early Obama-era nuclear conversations that eventually produced the JCPOA — gives it standing and credibility in the New Order. Qatar’s role in the current mediation, hosting senior Iranian officials and explicitly supporting Pakistani-led diplomacy, has purchased it significant goodwill from Tehran. Both states will navigate the transition with relative comfort.

Saudi Arabia’s inevitable pivot
Saudi Arabia’s position is the most consequential and the most delicate of all.

MBS built his regional vision on three pillars: American security guarantees, economic modernisation through Vision 2030 anchored in Western and Israeli-adjacent investment, and a forthcoming normalisation with Israel that was to be the capstone of the Abraham Accords architecture. That capstone now looks not merely delayed but structurally implausible.

The pivot toward Iran and the new regional order is not a choice Riyadh makes from strength. It is a response to the collapse of the strategic alternative. The 2023 Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran rapprochement was the first clear signal. The new architecture now accelerating around the Iran-Türkiye axis makes the logic of that pivot not merely rational but increasingly urgent.

Saudi Arabia cannot indefinitely maintain a posture of confrontation with Iran while its American patron visibly disengages, while the new regional order is being built by actors — Turkey, Pakistan, Qatar — with whom Riyadh has workable and historically deep relationships, and while its own population’s Islamic solidarity instincts run counter to alignment with an Israel conducting military campaigns across the Muslim world.

The Pakistani nuclear umbrella is what makes this pivot strategically viable without strategic nakedness. It allows Riyadh to reduce its dependence on American extended deterrence without being exposed — and to do so through an Islamic solidarity framework that carries profound domestic legitimacy in a way that a Chinese or Russian guarantee never could.

A Saudi Arabia sheltered by Pakistani nuclear deterrence, reconciled with Iran, and aligned with the Turkey-Qatar axis is a Saudi Arabia that has successfully navigated the transition without catastrophic rupture with anyone.

The pivot will not be announced with fanfare. It will happen gradually — through accumulating diplomatic signals, quiet investment reorientations, and careful distancing from Israeli positions on Gaza, Lebanon, and the broader regional conflict. By the time it is fully visible to Western analysts, it will already be irreversible.

Conclusion: Reading the tide
What Amichai Chikli named in alarm this week, we should name with analytical precision: the emergence of a new Middle Eastern order anchored by Indigenous power, shaped by Islamic solidarity and civilisational assertion, and no longer organised around American primacy or Israeli military dominance.

Iran and Turkey will not always agree. Their rivalry is ancient and will resurface across multiple theatres. But on the foundational question of this historical moment — that the old externally-imposed order must be replaced by one reflecting the region’s own balance of forces — they are aligned.

And that alignment, backstopped by Pakistan’s nuclear capability, lubricated by Qatar’s financial diplomacy, and increasingly accommodated by a pivoting Saudi Arabia, is sufficient to constitute a genuinely new architecture.

For America, the lesson is not that it has been defeated. It is that it has been superseded — which is a more permanent condition. The tools America built, the relationships America cultivated, the arsenals America funded across decades of Cold War and counter-terrorism strategy, have been repurposed by actors pursuing their own civilisational interests.

That is not a betrayal. It is simply how history works when the tide turns.

The states that bet on the Old Order — Bahrain, UAE, and above all Israel — now face a reckoning whose full dimensions are only beginning to become visible. The states that positioned themselves wisely — Türkiye, Iran, Pakistan, Qatar, and soon Saudi Arabia — will shape what comes next.

History rewards those who read the tide correctly. The tide has turned. The only remaining question is who moves with it — and who insists on standing still as the water rises.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

It’s so pathetic watching Elon Musk’s groveling bootlickers fall all over themselves on social media to defend their favorite oligarch from criticism as he becomes the world’s first trillionaire.

They’re like “Don’t be mean to the trillionaire, just become a trillionaire yourself! All you need is luck, connections, wealthy parents, the ruthlessness to step on anyone who gets in your way, and a willingness to cooperate with murderous imperial institutions like the Pentagon and the CIA!”

Elon Musk is a military-industrial complex plutocrat who is balls deep in the US intelligence cartel and recently facilitated the US-Israeli attempted regime change operation in Iran.

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You have infinitely more in common with the average person in Iran, Cuba, Lebanon or Palestine than you have with the world’s first trillionaire.

It’s so gross how many fawning admirers this freak still has. The trillionaire is not your friend.

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People who say “Zionism is just the belief that Jews should have a homeland” are hilarious. Zionism isn’t some abstraction; we can all see its material manifestations with our own eyes. We can all see that Zionism means genocide, apartheid, and nonstop wars and abuse.

This isn’t some kind of theoretical debate where we all get to have our own opinions about what Zionism is and what it entails. It’s 2026, not 1890. The facts are in and the case is closed, kids. This is what Zionism is. This is the only Zionism in existence. What you see is what you get. And what you see is quantifiably one of the most evil things happening on our planet.

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Some guy told me, “Why are you fine with the existence of approximately 50 Islamic nation-states, but the single Jewish one is apparently too many?”

I showed him an illustration of a nail stuck in somebody’s foot and said, “Why are you fine with an entire foot made of flesh, but a single metal spike is too much? The only possible explanation is that you have a seething hatred of metal. It can’t possibly be that you object to a foreign object being violently forced into a region where it does damage.”

He got upset and wound up telling me he hopes I get murdered by Mossad.

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Hasbara is so gross because it’s just Zionists throwing walls of language at you to convince you you’re not seeing what you’re seeing.

You see raw video footage of the most horrifying thing imaginable in Gaza, and then you see them in the replies going “This is actually fine and normal because words words words words words words words.”

You see a news report about Israel doing something astonishingly evil in Lebanon, and there they are underneath it going “There’s actually a lot more to the story because words words words words words words words.”

You see some far right Israeli minister spouting nakedly genocidal rhetoric, and they’re swarming all over it saying “Well this isn’t actually what it looks like because words words words words words words words.”

You see every major human rights group on earth saying Israel is guilty of genocide and apartheid, and they’re running around frantically telling you it’s a giant conspiracy to frame Israel and the truth is that words words words words words words words.

You see more and more mainstream news institutions reporting on the mountains of evidence of widespread rape and torture in Israeli prisons, and they saturate the airwaves claiming it’s an antisemitic blood libel because words words words words words words words.

The idea is to just pound your intellect with a firehose of verbiage until your inner sensemaker has been shredded and you’re too confused to form a coherent picture of what’s actually going on. It’s a disgusting, abusive, and profoundly unethical thing to do to people.

But the good news is it’s not working anymore. Language is immensely powerful, but its power has its limits. Israel’s behavior has become so transparently unacceptable that no amount of word magic can manipulate people into seeing anything other than what’s happening in front of their face.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

In my view, the greatest source of instability in the Middle East today is the increasingly aggressive and expansionary posture of Israel, backed unconditionally by America.

Continuous wars, occupations, strikes across sovereign states, and the unresolved Palestinian tragedy have pushed the region toward perpetual conflict.

Why do you think that Israel does not want Lebanon to be part of any peace settlement in the Iran war? Because, having swallowed Palestine, it now wants a fractured Lebanon which it can also absorb as part of Greater Israel in due course.

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This pernicious desire to devour much of the Middle East is a very real threat, and not some fanciful theory as many Israeli apologists have claimed.

It is no different to Hitler’s idea of Lebensraum (living space) — which describes a central goal of Nazi ideology: expanding German territory, especially eastward into Eastern Europe, to provide land, resources, and food for what the Nazis considered the “Master race”.

Hitler argued in his satanic Mein Kampf that Germany needed more territory to become a great power. Expansion should happen mainly in Eastern Europe. Slavic peoples were racially inferior.

Under this worldview, countries such as Poland, Ukraine and parts of the Soviet Union were seen not as sovereign societies but as territories to be conquered and colonised by Germans.

Operation Barbarossa
Lebensraum was the reason why Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941 and invaded the Soviet Union.

Do you see the similarity between Hitler’s rhetoric and what the war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his bunch of racist and right-wing lunatics such as Itamar Ben-Givr and Bezalel Smotrich advocate?

They see the Palestinians and the Arabs as inferior, and they are on an urgent quest to reclaim the lands which the Jews claim that God promised them in the Bible. Land which only the “chosen people” have a right to, they say.

They are aided in this fanatical quest by disgraceful American politicians such as Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee. These are corrupt politicians who are deeply in the pockets of the Israeli lobby and Miriam Adelson, the widow of Sheldon Adelson, who built Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.

Miriam Adelson gave $200 million for Trump’s 2024 campaign and forced Marco Rubio upon Trump as the Secretary of State. These people swear allegiance to Israel and not America.

I am being entirely fair in my comment because Ted Cruz said his first loyalty was to Israel. Imagine this coming from a US senator and former Presidential candidate. If anyone should be tried for treason, it is him.

And Mike Huckabee, who is now American ambassador to Israel, told Tucker Carlson, it was no bad thing if Israel occupied all the land between the Euphrates and the Nile. So he is fine with Israel conquering Arab lands.

Realistic regional counterbalance
The only realistic regional counterbalance may be a strategic understanding between Turkey and Iran — two ancient civilisational states with the scale, military strength, and geopolitical weight to prevent total regional domination by the genocidal Israeli state.

It is encouraging that countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar have resisted the intense Trump pressure to simply fall into line behind the Abraham Accords without meaningful progress on the Palestinian question.

In my view, there can be no genuine or lasting peace in the Middle East until a viable Palestinian state comes into existence, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Any recognition of Israel by Iran and the Arab world (minus the two Israeli stooges — UAE and Bahrain) must be tied to justice, sovereignty, and a durable political settlement for the Palestinian people.

Many have pooh-poohed the idea of the two-state solution, saying the Americans and Israelis would never allow it.

Well, guess what? The situation has changed and these two warmongers have been soundly defeated by Iran.

The regional equation has changed. America has lost its regional dominance in the Middle East. Support for Israel among the American public has collapsed.

The two-state solution is now not just a possibility, it can become the probability.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Why is US President Donald Trump carrying on with his State visit to Beijing this week on May 14? I wouldn’t if I were him.

It also shows that he is surrounded by incompetent officials. Any competent advisor would advise him against undertaking this trip.

He goes as the leader of a “defeated” nation, against a foe on which the United States has imposed the stiffest sanctions for 47 years. He will be viewed by the Chinese as the President that ended the American empire.

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He thinks he is going as a conquering hero and can wow the Chinese with his empty boasts that America won a huge victory and destroyed Iran. He will be met by President Xi and the Chinese leadership with polite smiles and smirks of the greatest disrespect.

If he has any EQ, he will know that his treatment in Beijing is going to be brutal. The Chinese may even gift him the symbolic white flag of surrender. You will see that in this summit, the US will be very much the junior partner.

Iran will never give this defeated President the satisfaction of a peace agreement which he so desperately needs, and is begging for, before his trip to Beijing. They will make sure he goes to Beijing as a defeated man.

Iran is not after a peace deal, but the total and comprehensive defeat of America as the global hegemon. Iran will see to it that the US gets out of the Middle East totally so that Israel is isolated and the Greater Israel project totally destroyed.

Security architecture shifting
Even as I write, the security architecture of the Middle East is shifting rapidly. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman are shifting their allegiances increasingly toward Iran, Russia and China.

Fifty-five years of being America’s poodles are coming to an end. These countries have realised that the US is an unreliable partner and cannot guarantee their security.

The stupid countries are the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, which still hitch their wagons to the Americans and Israel. They have dug their own graves.

History has never witnessed another event as dramatic as the Iran war, where a global power has lost power and prestige in such a short period of 4 months.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Without understanding the astonishing network of power exercised by the United Arab Emirates you would have no idea why the UAE was hit particularly hard by Iran in recent weeks.

Nor would you know what fuels chaos from Libya to Sudan to Somalia to Yemen.

If you understand the UAE’s business-geostrategic model and how it mobilises warlords, gold, oil, regional logistics and finance — you get much closer to seeing the pattern in the seeming madness.

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Tiny UAE, 1.4 million citizens, wields so much power that Saudi Arabia sees it as a serious threat. In December, Saudi Arabia bombed UAE surrogates in Yemen and told the emirates to exit the country. They didn’t. If the US and Israel hadn’t attacked Iran, more fireworks were in the offing.

Israel is the UAE’s close ally. They collaborate not just on the War on Iran but in many of these various “civil wars” that are both money-making ventures and a series of heartless state-destruction campaigns that give them greater geopolitical weight in the region.

Israel is UAE’s close ally.            Image: Google Earth map

We first need to understand what UAE (United Arab Emirates) really is. Comprising seven emirates — Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al-Quwain, Ras Al-Khaimah, and Fujairah — it is now the hub of an empire that both Iran and Saudi Arabia would like to knee-cap.

The powerhouse is actually Abu Dhabi, the oil giant which is the effective boss of the rest, including Dubai.

Family business with six sons
Abu Dhabi is a family business, run by The Bani Fatima, the sons of Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak Al Ketbi who is the most influential of the wives of the late Sheikh. Today, ultimate power resides with MBZ (Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan) the eldest of her six sons.

MBZ was a long-time buddy of MBS (Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman) but those days are well behind us. In the words of a senior Saudi figure, Ahmed Altuwaijri, Abu Dhabi is Israel’s Trojan horse in the region.

Along with Bahrain, UAE is a signatory to the Abraham Accords which is a US vehicle to bring Israel in from the cold. The other Gulf States oppose this “Israel First” policy and are clear that a resolution of the rights of the Palestinians must come first, although they do little about it.

The Bani Fatimid system works like this: identify a country that is experiencing instability, pick a side (preferably anti-political Islam) and offer not only to finance that militia or warlord of choice but provide the immense logistical support the UAE has, including air freighting weapons, supplies and soldiers, and the complex systems needed to convert, for example, stolen gold into arms or other assets.

Time and again this has resulted in the creation of shadow economies that end up controlling significant resources (gold, oil, agriculture, ports) and creating parallel states. Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen have all been played in this way. It is textbook divide and rule: weakening a state from within to then exert ongoing influence and resource extraction.

Dr Andreas Krieg of the School of Security Studies at King’s College London told The Thinking Muslim channel recently that UAE is far more advanced than Saudi Arabia in establishing powerful, agile networks across a wide zone of influence.

“It’s not about size. Size doesn’t matter in the networked global order that we’re operating in today. It’s about connectivity and who you can mobilise on your behalf — whether it’s in the information environment or armed non-state actors, such as the STC (in Yemen).

“But it’s also the commodity traders, the financiers, the banks, the insurance companies, the other trading corporations, that you can mobilise to generate what strategy is all about: influence and power,” Krieg says.

Libya’s terrible 15-year civil war has been immensely worsened by outside states, including UAE which turned general Khalifa Belqasim Haftar from a YouTube revolutionary into the head of the massively resourced LNA militia that now controls about a third of the country.

With UAE commanding the centre of a hub-and-spoke system, it can move fighters around the region at will, for example from Libya to Yemen where it sent thousands of LNA fighters to support local client militias. By backing the Southern Transition Council (STC) in Yemen, UAE got control over the vital Port of Aden. Similarly, by partnering with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, tons of stolen gold flows into Dubai. You get the picture.

Gold is the prime currency of the Bani Fatima empire (MBZ and his brothers). Dubai is known in the region as The City of Gold, the place where the bulk of Africa’s yellow metal, much of it smuggled, finds its way.

Imagine this: at the very time tens of millions of Sudanese are suffering famine or near-famine conditions, the UAE is facilitating the export to Dubai of tons of gold to fuel the war. This represents billions of dollars that should be held for the benefit of the people but instead is being used for empire building.

In Somalia the UAE has switched sides when economic or strategic advantage could be made. Along with Israel, UAE is backing militias who have declared a break-away state “Somaliland” that borders the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

The UAE has military bases in “Somaliland” and has poured millions of dollars into the port of Berbera. With hundreds of kilometres of coastline adjacent to vital Red Sea shipping lanes, UAE and Israel will be important players in a contest with Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other powers.

In December last year Israel became the first to recognise Somaliland as a state. UAE is understood to be working on the Trump administration to do the same – further trashing the idea of territorial integrity for the sake of advantage. As an aside: Israel hopes to ethnically cleanse Palestinians to Somaliland one day.

All this dovetails with Israel’s strategy of smashing states to control them. For them, an alternative to regime change in Iran is Balkanisation to create several weak statelets thereby enhancing Israeli security and influence.

For those reasons and more, I hope the sovereign state of Iran survives the onslaught. I hope UAE and Israel’s genuinely evil business of fragmenting state after state is defeated. I hope the Western countries look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves: what kind of moral monsters would be allies of Israel and the UAE?

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts solidarity.co.nz

The United States and Israel have, for decades, pursued the destruction of Iran as a sovereign state.

We are now in the opening days of what may be the final, decisive war to determine either the survival of the Iranian state or the expulsion of the US from the Arab lands and the creation of an entirely new security architecture for West Asia.

Sounds implausible? We live in truly unprecedented times and many scenarios are possible.

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There are signals as to what may come next and to help identify them I spoke with US Ambassador (ret) Chas W. Freeman.

Whether intended or unintended, the US and Israel are in the process of severely damaging the economies of the Gulf States. By attacking Iran, they knew full well what the Iranians would do in response — after all, Iran had warned that any further attack on it would lead to a regional war.

Are we witnessing a brazen plan to destroy both Iran and seriously weaken the Gulf States, using Iran as a weapon to do the latter? Could this be a Machiavellian plan to throw a cluster bomb into The Great Muslim Reconciliation between the Sunni states and Shia Iran?

Will the war halt or accelerate the project to create an Islamic NATO which is based around last year’s Saudi-Pakistani defence pact? The Saudis have the dollars; the Pakistanis have the nukes and the troops.

Permanent isolation of Iran
The permanent isolation of Iran was the centrepiece of the US-promoted Abraham Accords — designed to bring the Israeli regime into the circle of love and keep Iran out in the cold.

Anything that runs counter to this is a threat. The war comes at a time when Iran and the Gulf States had taken major steps to mend fences after decades of hostility.

The murder of top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on orders of Donald Trump in 2020 was supposed to kill off a diplomatic rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Soleimani and other officials were killed in a US missile strike at Baghdad airport without the permission of or notification to the Iraqi government. He was, according to Iranian, Saudi and Iraqi sources, including Iraqi PM Adil Abdul-Mahdi, heading for a meeting with his Saudi counterpart to broker a peace deal.

The assassination was successful but the US attempt to kill off the peace process failed.

US sabotages diplomacy
A week before the US and Israel launched their latest attack, Egypt and Iran announced that they had agreed to fully restore diplomatic relations and exchange ambassadors. It was the latest in a series of such moves to bring Iran in from the cold.

As the Middle East Institute pointed out shortly after, “Within days of the Israeli strike, [Pakistan’s] Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif visited Doha in a show of solidarity. Seizing the crisis as an opportunity to elevate Pakistan’s strategic presence in the Gulf and the wider Middle East, its government voiced support for the proposed formation of a joint Arab-Islamic security force.”

The quickly signed Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (SMDA) got a lot of attention in West Asia and was soon dubbed an “Islamic NATO” — an alliance that could one day replace American boots on the ground.

The Gulf States were also slowly coming to the realisation that America was unreliable, Israel was a genuine threat and Iran might be useful as a counterbalance to the US and Israel. A Pakistani nuclear shield and conventional military backup was being discussed as far away as Ankara; there were even whispers Iran might be invited to join.

Now, back to that question of whether the US is, through its war on Iran, deliberately weakening the Gulf States as part of a strategy to keep the Muslim world divided. I asked US Ambassador (ret) Chas W. Freeman and he replied, “I think you give far too much credit to the United States, and more particularly, to Israel, in terms of devious planning to do these things in the Gulf,” Freeman said.

“We’re actually pretty stupid and clumsy at what we do. Look at what we’re doing with the Peshmerga and the Kurds. How stupid do you have to be to do that?”

Ambassador Freeman is highlighting what has been a recurring cycle in US foreign policy – strategic betrayal — in which it uses groups like the Kurdish Peshmerga or the freshly-minted Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan (CPFIK) to attack US enemies only to throw them under the bus the moment they have served their purpose.

Luring Iranian Kurds
The CIA and the White House have tried to lure the Iranian Kurds into the current battle, Trump blurting out how “wonderful” it would be and how the map of Iran would be redrawn. This will only fuel Iranian nationalism.

Ambassador Freeman is numbered among those who believe that the US-Israeli defence shield is running low on interceptors and Iran could strike back hard in the coming weeks. He also surmises that the Iranians will have secretly signalled to the Gulf States that a condition of the war ending — if Iran gets to set the terms — will be the removal of all US military from the Gulf States.

None of us can say with certainty what the respective breaking points for the belligerents are but I certainly believe Iran is very far from out of the fight that the US and Israel has forced on them.

“Prior to the US-Israeli attack, the Gulf Arabs were moving — in their usual incoherent and inchoate way — toward some kind of coalition with Iran to balance Israeli military hegemony in the region,” Ambassador Freeman told me.

“Now Israel and the United States have given an opening to Iran to pursue its long term objective, which is to remove the American presence from the Gulf. Iran has turned a vicious attack on it into a strategic opportunity to force the Gulf States to do a cost-benefit analysis.”

Chas Freeman is probably right: the US didn’t intend to shatter the Gulf States as one of its war aims. That leaves the more plausible explanation: the Americans and Israelis are simply demented and war-crazed.

Either way, the US-Israeli war machine must be stopped for the sake of humanity.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand, and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. This article was first published on his website www.solidarity.co.nz