No Middle East war---tensions have peaked and rapprochement has begun.

The Middle East is in once again in a state of dramatic flux. The turbulent, post-2011 era of civil wars, adventurism, and proxy rivalries appears to have peaked. Regional insurgent and terrorist groups, namely the Islamic State, have been severely degraded. The strength of transnational political Islam has faded as well and, with the consolidation of power by President Kais Saied in Tunisia, so too has the prospect of democracy taking root and spreading. Meanwhile, the region’s long-standing external hegemon, the United States, has ended its “forever wars,” abandoning its predilection for ambitious, transformative projects in favor of an approach that largely accepts the status quo as it shifts its attention to Asia and, more recently, the war in Ukraine. Previously interventionist Arab states have largely forsaken military means for backroom dealmaking, economic ties, and soft power diplomacy.

A conventional view of this dynamism, especially the trends in de-escalation, posits that developments in Washington, DC, are the underlying catalysts behind it all. The United States is disengaging from the Middle East, the argument goes, and is seen as an unreliable guarantor with a long list of deficiencies. With its unpredictable electoral cycle and its general domestic disarray, Arab partners have long viewed the United States as a fickle and demanding ally. It has imposed irritating conditions on arms sales, courted troublesome nonstate groups such as the Houthis and the Muslim Brotherhood, and naively negotiated with Iran while being slow to defend its Arab partners against Iranian proxy and missile attacks. It is seen as making unreasonable, with-us-or-against-us demands in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while ignoring the hypocrisy of its own interventions in the Middle East.

So, unsurprisingly, Arab partners of the United States in the region are taking matters into their own hands, pursuing their own de-escalation and peace initiatives while also diversifying their partnerships as a hedge against American unreliability. In many respects, this trend is not new: postcolonial regional powers throughout the Cold War were adept at playing great powers against one another, and the trend received new momentum with the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Over the last decade, it was accelerated by the dramatic rise of China, which has surpassed the United States and Europe as the Gulf’s biggest trading partner. For its part, Russia has also been a major player in the region. While it lacks Beijing’s economic clout and has taken a battering from its ill-fated Ukraine invasion, Moscow is still seen as a major vendor of conventional arms for the region with few strings attached and, in the case of Syria and Libya, an active intervener on behalf of wobbly dictators and aspiring warlords.

And yet, this U.S.-centric explanation of change in the Middle East is only part of the story. To begin with, Washington is not really “exiting” the region: it still retains a sizeable diplomatic and military footprint, though policymakers are revising that presence and are consumed with other priorities, not least domestic ones. More importantly, though, there is another factor at work: Arab governments’ perceptions of security, legitimacy, and stability at home. With the demise of the Arab Spring and the tumult that followed, the existential ideational, security, and political threats to Arab regime identity and survival have also diminished. Oppositionists and especially Islamists have been weakened or eliminated through Arab regimes’ brute-force suppression, sophisticated surveillance, and co-option, or due to internal fissues with these dissidents’ ranks. As a result, Arab autocrats are no longer compelled to gravitate into defensive blocs and feel more confident engaging with rivals in the region. Relatedly, Arab regimes’ growing ties with countries like China and Russia have as much to do with their similar outlooks for world order—a vision that is authoritarian, antidemocratic, and antipluralistic—as with their desires to balance their relationships with the United States.

As the essays in this collection demonstrate, this notion of an authoritarian-led consolidation in the region and a durable period of stasis is belied by continuing dynamism and deepening socioeconomic problems within Arab states. Whether and how these afflictions lead to future instability will depend on how regional governments navigate current and looming challenges, especially the transition to the post-oil era, through comprehensive and inclusive reforms. Absent such a governance overhaul, the region could face renewed unrest, especially within weaker and poorer Arab states, potentially causing embattled Arab regimes to once again project their insecurities onto their rivals and neighbors, unraveling the current trend of interstate rapprochement.

ARAB REALIGNMENTS AND DE-ESCALATION—AND THEIR LIMITS

Regardless of their drivers, recent shifts in the regional landscape are certainly significant. At the broadest level, the post-2011 ideological, intra-Sunni, interdynastic cold war between an anti-Islamist bloc of states led by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt against Türkiye and Qatar has ended. This played out in a number of arenas. By mid-2020, a battlefield stalemate in Libya, effected by the intervention of Türkiye and Russia in support of warring local forces, led the UAE and Egypt to dial back and abandon their militarized meddling in favor of dialogue and backroom dealmaking. In tandem, rulers in the UAE, apparently concerned about post-pandemic development challenges and competition with Saudi Arabia, sought to engage Türkiye while recognizing that Islamists across the region were circumscribed by national boundaries and, therefore, less of a threat to the Gulf. This was accompanied by a simultaneous nationalization of the Islamist parties and their internal dissolution and weakening. For its part, by late 2020 and early 2021, Türkiye, a backer of Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood, embarked on new shift in bridge-building, marked by rounds of diplomatic talks and high-level visits with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

Most significantly, though, Saudi Arabia in 2021 lifted its blockade against Qatar, which had been in place since 2017. Very quickly thereafter, Egypt began talks with the Muslim Brotherhood, reportedly brokered by Qatar, while Türkiye and Egypt began intelligence exchanges on the extradition of Islamists and the closure of Turkish pro-Brotherhood media outlets. By the fall and winter of 2022, signs of the warming had become even more pronounced. Egypt’s onetime archrival Qatar deposited $1 billion in the Egyptian central bank, and the sidelines of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar offered further glimpses of remarkable, personalized fence-mending among previously hostile rulers. For example, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi shook hands with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Qatar’s emir cheered the Saudi football team’s victory over Argentina. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman even donned a maroon Qatari national scarf at the opening ceremony. And the famously anti-Islamist ruler of the UAE, Mohamed bin Zayed, engaged in a similarly high-level gesture of rapprochement by visiting Doha during the World Cup—his first visit to Qatar since the imposition of the blockade.

Beyond the Sunni Muslim world, the historic Abraham Accords normalized ties between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain, followed shortly thereafter by Morocco and Sudan. The accords led to an expansion of ties in a wide range of sectors, including trade, transportation, energy, technology, and military cooperation, particularly between the UAE and Israel.

Longtime Arab foes of Iran also began softening their antagonism, beginning with a growing inclination by smaller Gulf states to keep lines of communication open with Tehran and desist from a strictly confrontational approach. As early as 2019—following Iran’s targeting of oil facilities in the Gulf in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawl from the nuclear agreement the previous year—Emirati and Iranian officials began talks on maritime security. By the summer of 2022, the UAE had reinstated its ambassador to Tehran. Similarly, in 2019, Saudi Arabia reached out to Iran via interlocutors in the Iraqi government, and by April 2021, Saudi Arabia and Iran had begun direct talks (hosted in Baghdad with later facilitation by Oman). That paved the way for an announcement in March 2023 that Riyadh and Tehran were formally restoring diplomatic relations and reopening their embassies after a seven-year freeze—a move that surprised the world, especially since it had been secretly brokered by China, a great power that had hitherto refrained from active involvement in the region’s disputes.