According to the Axios website, the administration of President Donald Trump is working on a new strategy to reorganize the Middle East in the post-war phase following the war with Iran.
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This is not the first major American plan for the region, and it probably won't be the last. Over the past decades, the Middle East has seen many projects aimed at reshaping it, but they have all run up against the reality that the region is too complex to be rearranged from Washington alone.
The potential strategy appears broad and ambitious, including building a regional alignment to contain Iran under American guarantee, securing the next phase of Trump's Gaza plan, reaching security arrangements between Israel and Syria, implementing the agreement between Israel and Lebanon, and ultimately expanding the Abraham Accords to add other countries to the normalization track.
The Trump administration hopes that the Israeli government formed after the upcoming elections will be ready to cooperate in implementing the strategy, but it appears that the American administration does not really see the other countries concerned by the strategy — all that matters to it is Israel and its cooperation, as if the strategy would simply be imposed by force on everyone else, while no one asks: what do the countries of the region themselves want?
This is a fundamental point that previous American projects have overlooked.
Arab states are not a single bloc; their interests and security calculations differ, and their view of Iran does not necessarily match the American or Israeli view. Some states see Iranian policies and Tehran's regional influence as a direct threat to their security, but that does not mean they are ready to join an open regional alliance against Iran, especially if Israel is a central part of it.
The dilemma is that Washington may try to combine two different files: containing Iran and integrating Israel more broadly into the region. Arab and American interests may intersect to varying degrees on the first, but they do not necessarily align on the second.
Any Arab country will ask, before joining a new security arrangement: what will I get out of it? What is the nature of the American guarantees? Against whom will this alliance operate? Will it reduce the chances of war, or will it make the countries participating in it part of a new regional confrontation? And how can a regional security system be built with Israel as one of its pillars, while the Palestinian issue remains unresolved, Israeli policies in the West Bank continue, Gaza remains open to the possibility of explosion, and Israeli tensions with Lebanon and Syria persist?
The problem lies in the belief that integrating Israel into the region can precede addressing the causes of conflict with it. Experience has shown that bilateral agreements can organize relations between states, but they cannot alone produce regional peace if the Palestinian issue continues to worsen, especially since the wider the gap grows between Israel and the Palestinians, the more cautious Arab governments become about going further down normalization tracks, regardless of American pressure or incentives.
The success of any new American strategy depends on Washington's ability to deal with Israel, and if the United States wants a more stable Middle East, creating one axis to confront another axis will not produce stability it may instead lay the groundwork for future wars.
What is needed is a broader regional security system, based on respecting states' sovereignty and non-interference in their affairs, ending the use of armed groups as regional proxies, and guaranteeing the security of the Gulf states, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, alongside serious efforts to address the Palestinian issue and set limits on Israeli behavior that threatens the security of its neighbors.
But if the idea is built on containing Iran and integrating Israel, then demanding that Arab states fall in line within a pre-designed security architecture, it will simply reproduce the same old mistake.
The problem in the Middle East has never been a shortage of American plans rather; it has been that many of these plans started from the question of what Washington wants for the region. Perhaps it is time for any viable project to start instead from the question of what the peoples and states of the region want for their own security and future, and where their interests actually converge.
