No need to overread the Middle East’s marriages of convenience

Not all Middle Eastern partnerships are as they seem. Image: YouTube screengrab There is a familiar ritual in Washington’s foreign policy think tanks whenever two Middle Eastern states sign a memorandum of understanding, launch a joint economic council or hold their first-ever ministerial dialogue: the announcement is instantly upgraded, in the retelling, into a “strategic partnership.” A defense-industry side deal becomes an “alliance.” A trade corridor becomes a “new architecture of regional order.” The vocabulary of grand strategy gets applied to what is, more often than not, a set of transactional arrangements among states hedging their bets in an increasingly unsettled neighborhood. The past several years have produced no shortage of raw material for this narrative. Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic relations under Chinese auspices. The Abraham Accords widened their circle of signatories and, on paper, deepened economic and security cooperation between Israel and its new Gulf partners. India, the Gulf states and Europe unveiled a proposed rail-and-shipping corridor meant to rival China’s Belt and Road. Turkey has been busy repairing ties with Egypt, the UAE and even Israel after a decade of estrangement. Qatar, Oman, and the UAE have each cultivated their own webs of understandings with Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing that owe little to Washington’s preferences. Taken together, these developments are real, and they matter. But the temptation to read them as evidence of a coherent new regional bloc, or as proof that a “Middle East NATO” is finally taking shape, mistakes the symptom for the disease. What’s actually happening is simpler and less tidy: the states of the region are diversifying their portfolios of relationships because they no longer trust any single patron, including the United States, to underwrite their security or their economic future indefinitely. Partnership, in this context, is not the product of shared ideology or a common strategic vision. It is insurance. Consider the logic from Riyadh’s vantage point. The kingdom’s rapprochement with Iran was not a triumph of diplomacy over rivalry so much as a hedge purchased at a moment when Saudi leaders had concluded that American security guarantees were no longer something to bank on without qualification, and that a shooting war with Iran’s proxies was a risk better managed through de-escalation than deterrence. The same kingdom continues to explore a formal defense pact with Washington, continues to buy Chinese drones, and continues to talk to Israel about normalization, not because these tracks are integrated into one grand design, but because keeping multiple tracks open is what a mid-sized power does when the ground beneath it is shifting. This is worth dwelling on because Washington’s foreign policy establishment has a habit of narrating other states’ hedging as either a victory for American diplomacy (when it points toward normalization with Israel) or a strategic defeat (when it points toward Beijing or Moscow). Both readings share the same underlying error: they assume Middle Eastern states are choosing sides in a bipolar contest, rather than doing what regional powers have always done, which is to triangulate among great powers to maximize their own room for maneuver. The UAE’s simultaneous hosting of American military assets, Chinese 5G infrastructure debates and Russian capital flight is not incoherence. It is a rational response to a world in which no single external power can any longer guarantee everything a Gulf state might need. None of this means the partnerships are fake or that they won’t harden into something more durable. Institutions built for narrow purposes – a trade council, a deconfliction hotline, a joint infrastructure fund – have a way of outliving the transactional logic that created them, especially if they generate their own bureaucracies and vested interests. But it does mean commentators and policymakers ought to resist the urge to read every new memorandum as a chapter in a unifying regional narrative, whether that narrative is “the dawn of a new Middle East” or “the end of American primacy.” The region’s states are not building a new order. They are managing uncertainty, one hedge at a time, and the resulting map of overlapping, often contradictory partnerships is less a blueprint than a mirror of just how uncertain that management has become. For Washington, the implication is not that these partnerships should be resisted, but that they should be watched without the reflexive assumption that regional actors owe their choices to American strategic preferences. A Gulf state that talks to Tehran one week and signs a defense annex with Washington the next is not being duplicitous. It is behaving exactly as any state does when it can no longer take its security for granted, and American policymakers would do well to plan for a region that increasingly hedges against them too. This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.