On several occasions this year, US President Donald Trump has suggested that, thanks to his dealmaking prowess, long-coveted ‘peace in the Middle East’ may well be nigh. Yet 2026 is more likely to witness ‘unpeace’ in the region, as the long tail of the Iran-Israel conflict creates further instability and impedes the construction of a more stable order.

‘Unpeace’ is an Anglo-Saxon concept which describes the liminal point between open conflict and stability. The perennial cycle of war and peace that characterised the Early Medieval period would certainly be familiar to those living in the Middle East today. Equally, the Anglo-Saxons would recognise the persistent violence – in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq – that currently plagues Trump’s Middle Eastern objectives.

Indeed, the Middle East – with its transnational social structures, disputed national boundaries, charged sectarian relations and intimate relationship between economic and political power – has long evaded the stability that an order buttressed by widespread legitimacy provides. Its modern history is in fact littered with unsuccessful bids to bring conflicts to an end.

Twenty-seven years of skirmishes between Arabs and Jews preceded the eventual eruption of civil war in 1947. No sooner had that conflict ended than the new Israeli state’s Arab neighbours launched the 1948 Palestine War. So, too, was the Six-Day War of 1967 followed immediately by the War of Attrition, and then, three years later, by the Yom Kippur War. In Gaza, the........

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