There’s no shortage of valuable commentary on Israel’s devastating military attacks on Iran, Iran’s far less devastating response, and the potential for wider war. Rather than seek to add directly to this commentary, I want to share some resources that both help explain what just happened and provide context about what this may mean for the political future of the Middle East.
First, the International Crisis Group has this great explainer on the immediate situation and how it can be de-escalated:
The statement covers what happened, what may happen next, and what can be done to avert disaster:
In the early hours of 13 June, Israel launched a series of airstrikes and covert operations in Iran targeting nuclear sites and scientists, as well as military facilities and senior government officials. Operation Rising Lion, as Israel dubs it, came on the heels of days of mounting speculation that such an attack was impending and days before nuclear talks between Iran and the U.S. were due to resume. The 13 June barrage is reportedly the opening act of what may be a campaign running at least several days. Iran has thus far responded by launching drones and several volleys of ballistic missiles toward Israel, whose own air defences are being supplemented with U.S. assistance. For now, it seems that both countries will continue to escalate, though in neither case is the endgame entirely clear. Whether an open-ended war plunges the entire Middle East into the abyss will depend largely on what U.S. President Donald Trump does next. Trump’s initial statements paint Israel’s strikes as useful leverage for nuclear talks, but to see them that way is a mistake. Instead, he urgently needs to press Israel to stop ramping up its campaign and offer Iran incentives to stand down, while making clear to Tehran the ruinous costs of not doing so.
The next resources are quite different, as they come from an edited volume published several months earlier and have more of a scholarly orientation (specifically international relations theory) than a policy orientation. However, they are highly valuable for understanding the regional and global context of the current round of conflict, and for gaining a sense of the conflict’s longer-term dynamics.
These resources all come from this edited volume by the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) about American primacy in the Middle East in the wake of the post-2023 Israel-Gaza war:
Marc Lynch’s introduction sets out the central fault-line of the debate among international relations and area studies scholars over what the Gaza war means for American power:
How has America’s support for Israel during its brutally destructive war on Gaza affected American primacy in the Middle East? It is possible to tell two very different stories. By one narrative, America’s policy towards Gaza has done irreparable harm to its standing in the region, stripping away all moral legitimacy and exposing its disregard for human rights and international law as well as its contempt for Palestinians and for the Arabs who identify with them. By another narrative, the United States has managed to navigate the crisis effectively and strengthened its position in the region, showing its willingness to pay costs to support its ally Israel while maintaining or even improving almost all of its core alliances in the region and revealing China’s impotence. By the first account, Gaza may herald the endgame for America’s Middle East, by the other it has opened up new opportunities to promote Arab-Israeli normalization and to prevent global rivals such as China from gaining any further foothold in the region.
These narratives map on to very different theories of international order. America’s stance on Gaza, and the broader long-running debate about emergent global multipolarity and American retrenchment from the region, open up a critically important window into the policy implications of different theories of international order. Those questions, already central to evaluations of the Biden administration’s regional policy, take on great urgency as Donald Trump returns to the White House with unclear ambitions for the region. In September 2024, POMEPS and the Mershon Center for International Studies at the Ohio State University convened a workshop with regional experts and international relations theorists to debate the nature of American primacy in the Middle East. The papers in this collection range widely over theoretical approaches and empirical examples to bring out the assumptions and implications of different perspectives. The discussions were shaped by the shadow of Israel’s war on Gaza, in all of its moral and strategic dimensions, with sharp disagreements over the extent to which this represented a fundamental break with or continuity with prior trajectories.
Israel’s most recent direct attack on Iran will strengthen the position of those who argue that continued support for Israel strengthens America’s influence over the Middle East’s future. These accounts emphasise the damage inflicted on Iran’s “axis of resistance” since October 2023: the weakening of Hamas, the decimation of Hezbollah, the fall of Assad in Syria, and the humiliation caused by the Iranian military’s inability to defend its own territory. Iran’s proxy warfare or “grey zone” strategy looks like a miserable failure (despite the enduring strength of its partners in Iraq and Yemen), while America’s unrelenting support for Israel appears to have paid off.
However, many contributors to the volume make compelling arguments about the distinction between raw military power and meaningful political influence. I particularly recommend three papers.
Stacie Godard’s paper argues that changed international circumstances mean that the “hypocrisy” critique of American power has greater potential for counter-order mobilisation now than it during earlier conflicts. She highlights questions that this raises about American hegemony:
The organs of international law have weighed in on this war, with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that Israel’s actions plausibly fit the definition of genocide and the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (as well as several Hamas leaders). Some argue that the ongoing conflict threatens the international order as well. U.S. support for Israel’s operations and defense of its ally against the ICJ and ICC, even as it flouts rules governing conduct of war, have fatally undercut the legitimacy of the “liberal international order” (LIO), the series of rules and norms that have guided international relations since at least the end of World War II. In particular, scholars suggest that, while application of the order has always been problematic, the scale of U.S. hypocrisy in Gaza has irrevocably undermined the order’s legitimacy and, as a result, the U.S.’s position as a hegemon in world politics.
This argument is plausible, but it raises a number of theoretical questions. Why and how does legitimacy matter to hegemony and international order (if it does at all)? Theoretical skeptics would argue that legitimacy has very little impact on order, and that U.S. hegemony rests more on its material power and interests in the region, rather than any commitment to abide by liberal rules and norms. Even for those who place greater weight on legitimacy, other questions arise: if legitimacy does matter, why does it matter now? This is certainly not that this is the first time that the U.S. has acted against its professed rules and norms. Why would hypocrisy bear costs now? Finally, if this is a moment of delegitimation, what does this mean for U.S. hegemony and the future of the LIO?
While acknowledging that “hypocrisy” is a long-standing (and likely unavoidable) feature of “liberal international order”, the piece contends that the critique is now proving more politically consequential than in earlier decades. One example she gives is that:
Moreover, the U.S. is in a situation where it is attempting to simultaneously legitimize its support for both Ukraine and Israel. Evidence suggests that these efforts raise significant questions about significant inconsistencies within the rules-based order. As Israel began its campaign in Gaza, one Middle Eastern official pointed to U.S. inconsistency, arguing that “If you describe cutting off water, food and electricity in Ukraine as a war crime, then you should say the same thing about Gaza.” “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” said one senior G7 diplomat. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”
Taking a different approach, Gregory Gause’s paper argues that the United States post-Cold War role in the Middle East never amounted to hegemony, only unipolarity. He argues that because America was never truly a hegemon in the region (hegemony being a situation where the lower orders buy into the legitimacy of a system and help to enforce it), it makes no sense to argue that the Gaza war has led to the unraveling of American hegemony:
Unipolarity is a much better theoretical lens than hegemony to explain both how the United States came to be so involved militarily in the Middle East during a period in which it had no peer competitors on either the global or the regional levels, and why the United States was such a failure in being able to change the regional status-quo to conform to its own preferences. Unipolarity helps us understand why a supposed hegemon would use military force to change the regional circumstances of its own hegemony. The Islamist challenges in the region to the ideological elements that underpinned the American liberal order elsewhere in the post-Cold War period – democracy and free market economics – help to explain the failure of American military efforts to reconfigure the politics of the region.
He nonetheless argues that we are seeing a decline in American power in shaping the Middle East’s future, but for more for realist reasons than questions of legitimacy:
While the Gaza War is yet another indication that American hegemony in the Middle East never actually existed, it also serves as a leading indicator of the decline in America’s unipolar position in the region. Even as it is hard to see either Russia or China right now as a peer competitor to the U.S., Middle East actors are beginning to hedge their bets about where great power competition is heading. It is no surprise that Iran is developing a deeper strategic relationship with Russia, even supplying Moscow with weapons for its war with Ukraine. Tehran was always the leading opponent of an American-organized Middle East. What is more interesting is that a range of American regional allies, including Turkey, Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are all seeking good relations with Russia for their own purposes. None have signed on to the American-led bloc opposing the Russian war in Ukraine. Saudi Arabia sought out Chinese mediation to lessen tensions with Iran, leading to the restoration of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 2023. China’s role as the world’s leading importer of energy has tied all the Persian Gulf oil exporters’ prosperity as much, if not more, to Beijing than to Washington.
In a world where the United States wants other countries to choose between its camp and the camp of the burgeoning China-Russia front, even America’s closest Middle East partners are seeking to hedge. That fact might be less about existing power realities and more about the states’ perceptions of where global power realities will be in coming decades. Regardless, perceptions about power are themselves a power reality. If Middle Eastern leaders believe that American regional unipolarity is crumbling, the edifice will decline all the faster. This suggests that the coming years will see great power competition and regional state maneuvering that might resemble the early years of the Cold War in the Middle East, though without the strong ideological element characteristic of that period. That kind of regional flexibility will test an American foreign policy establishment (and Trumpian counter-establishment) that is used to (mostly) getting its own way in the Middle East.
However, my favourite is Dan Nexon’s paper, which outlines recent advances in political science theories of hegemony and international order, and then applies them not only to the Middle East’s post-2023 regional dynamics but also to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the infrastructure that traditionally legitimised American power.
There’s a lot of value in his piece, but most of all I could not agree more with Nexon’s call for studies of international order to pay more attention to transnational movements:
The role of Hamas and Hezbollah in the struggle over order in the Middle East harkens back to something that I noted earlier: traditional hegemonic-order theories completely ignore transnational and substate actors, even though both can play crucial roles in the politics of international order. This is not just a matter of “nuance.” Once we start taking nonstate actors seriously, it turns out that we have misunderstood classic cases of hegemony. For example, Habsburg Spain is perhaps the archetypal case of hegemonic overextension: of a preponderant power getting pulled into peripheral conflicts that it cannot afford to fight. But one of the chief causes of their “overextension” was not foreign wars per se but having to deal with uprising and rebellions. The most important of these, the Dutch Revolt, would have failed—and might not have happened at all—in the absence of the organizational infrastructure created by the Reformed Church and without substantial support from protestants outside of the Netherlands. In modern parlance, we are talking about “transnational religious networks.” Any similarities with the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq are completely coincidental.
Finally, the older literature on hegemonic orders almost completely ignores anticolonial movements, even though they drove arguably the single most important change in international order of the last century. More broadly, revisionist states don’t just fall from coconut trees. They often result when counter-order (revisionist) political movements take control of a government. Fascism and communism, the two great revisionist forces of the interwar period, began life as political movements with important transnational dimensions
These arguments fit well with Gause’s argument that the strength of transnational Islamist movements helps to explain why America’s post-Cold War role in the Middle East never truly amounted to hegemony. However, Nexon’s emphasis on the “infrastructure” of international order, including norms, sits better with Godard’s arguments about the Gaza war making it harder to legitimise American power in the region (whereas a strict reading of Gause’s paper would see legitimacy as less consequential). The three papers combined, along with the other papers in the volume, give a great sense of the contours of scholarly debate over America’s role in the international politics of the Middle East.
Unlike the International Crisis Group statement, all of these POMEPS papers adopt quite a high level of abstraction (being primarily focused on theoretical debates within the political science sub-discipline of international relations), which can make it hard to draw inferences from them about what may lie ahead following the recent escalation between Israel and Iran. Much will necessarily depend on whether the latest violence leads to a larger war.
However, my main take-away from the papers is that while Iran’s “axis of resistance” has been dramatically weakened by the damage inflicted by Israel with United States backing, the result will not necessarily be a net benefit for American power in the region. I share the view that ideas and institutions, not just interests and material power, matter greatly for the shape of international order. So despite Israel’s undeniably impactful military attacks on Iran and its partners, the difficulties of translating military effects into desired political ends remain formidable, particularly given the legitimacy costs sunk into the conflict as a whole.
Instead, this may all create more space for regional powers who are willing to hedge, like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt. Moreover, transnational movements unbeholden to either Iran or the West will continue to play a major role in shaping the region’s political future. The “post-jihadist” experiment in Syria, which does not fit neatly into any current camp, will be particularly important to watch.
The Murphy Raid 