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.
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........