Twenty-nine months later, the Middle East is almost unrecognizable. The gulf states, including the signers of Trump’s Abraham Accords, are shaken and skeptical of American guarantees. European colonialists put their pencils to a map after World War I to divide up deserts, wadis and mountains, dismantle the crumbling Ottoman Empire and create the modern Middle East. And both are being watched by the gulf states, battered and newly vulnerable, as well as by every capital from Cairo to Pakistan’s Islamabad. The old Middle East had a logic, however brutal: Iran as a disrupter, America as a guarantor, Israel as a contained power, the gulf states as financiers of stability.

Source: Washington Post March 05, 2026 06:59 UTC