“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”~ Michael Porter
For the geopolitics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), today is a time of great political and strategic anxiety. With the non-Arab actors engaging in another tense series of regional infighting, peacetime negotiations with wartime stalemate halted the episodic interventions from the Arab counterparts. The MENA high-fliers have moved from their traditional stances of diplomatic arrangements and prioritized defense engagements in the current spiraling crisis. For decades, the dominant challenge for the Arab nations has not been Israel’s aggression nor Iran’s ambitions, but their inability to create a comprehensive coalition structure in existing spaces: military intelligence. The MENA region has seen countless alliances fracturing over the years, resulting in a region without one superpower. If the Gulf states continue to rely on the United States (US) shapeshifting misadventures in the Middle East, only to be replaced with its defense ‘burden-sharers’ in the region, like Ukraine or South Korea, it will end up losing more than its economic potency and military confidence. The inability of the Arab world to sync with its proximate neighbors has weakened the prospects of creating a counterintelligence structure to provide fusion, forecasting, and feedback in regional flare-ups. Decades down the line, is staying mutually vulnerable to modern intelligence operations a mistake worth repeating in traditional alliances?
MENA’s Card: Play it by Ear
To counter Israel’s modern warfare sophistication, the Arab nations of MENA covered it with active defense investments and denial practices. Systematic defense procurements have streamlined their multi-domain operations to prevent entanglements, but out-spying Iran or Israel remains a test of isolated political wills. This defensive architecture still requires an additional protective layer over deterrence: counterintelligence as a counterstrategy. Not synchronizing against a common enemy has met several reasons: domestic fracturing, doctrinal disparities, outdated weaponry, historical distrust, and interoperability gaps. Investing rapidly in modern war equipment has erased the Arab world’s warfighting inferiority, but the mismatch continues to exist in indigenous productions of air defenses, military intelligence, and technical expertise. Despite inter- and intra-regional strategic connections existing as a starting point, the underlying factors of alliance fragmentation have increased. Till now, MENA has been steadily adding new actors, situations, and plots in the geopolitical arrangement, playing it by ear, to say the least.
Consistent strategic differences are an abject reality of MENA’s geopolitical awareness; such fracturing is suppressing the prospects of political reconciliation and strategic retrospection. Facing multiple power projectors, the shared security architecture has reshaped how this geography collaborates during political flare-ups, with no superpower to circle the wagons. MENA’s high-fliers see this geography without one dominating actor: this vacuum is yet to be filled, but complete dominance requires incremental layering, which Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, the UAE, and Iran seek. The Gulf’s current idea to combine deterrence with diplomacy has met some historical, geopolitical tests. From Kuwait (1990) to Bahrain (2011), this geography has had its fair share of regional adventures. The fear of exposing warfighting weaknesses has halted political adventures in MENA, as the Arab world lacks all the chess pieces. Aside from weak engagements in Yemen and Syria and confused performances with Israel and Iran, the strategic nerves provide an occasional silver lining for extensive collaboration. The ongoing crisis demands more than a cohesive bloc from the Gulf. Moving in line with other MENA actors invites multidimensional risks, gambles, and prospects in managing the evolving theater of power. A political chance to rearrange the geopolitical chessboard of a volatile geography requires all MENA actors to lay it on the line for a new arrangement.
Whole-of-Gulf (government) Approach?
Israel’s versatile intelligence ecosystem has refashioned political entanglements for the Gulf. It introduced a hybrid wave of targeted psychological operations (PSYOPS) as a supplemental novelty. The open presence of Israel’s coupled, aggressive hybrid warfare in the Middle East has resulted in its neighbors’ doctrinal fatigue. This ‘eye in the sky’ layering impacted the susceptibility, vulnerability, and recoverability of the Arab’s survivable forces. It pushed the Persian Gulf to enhance battlefield management (systems, sensors, shooters) in three settings: Iran’s predictive intelligence, the Gulf’s threat assessment, and integrated weapons systems. Despite modernizing with precision warfare, the absence of collective standardization of military intelligence and interoperability is glaring. To keep a watchful eye on Israel’s pugnacity and Iran’s influence, the Gulf adopted a threefold approach: formalizing passive defense, security clusters, and proactive diplomacy.
With multiple doctrines, neither the Arab world nor the non-Arab states could succeed in collectively preserving power, let alone projecting it. Be it Iran or Israel, a common pattern in the Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) strategic behavior was observed; It preferred personalized military innovations and investments in high-end defensive systems while securing inter-regional strategic alliances. From the Levant to North Africa, the GCC to Iran, and Turkiye in the broader Middle East, this reality articulated the disconnected objectives. However, the Gulf’s common direction to domestically upgrade remained constant. As crucial actors in MENA, the Gulf could provide joint, coordinated ventures to bridge multiple choices, roles, and responses of their neighbors.
First, become innovative by forming a layered intelligence coalition with regional military sectors in different geographical quadrants. Starting with inter-regional alliances as a blueprint would give a head start.
Second, continue investing in personalized ambitions with ad-hoc security investments before active defense localization is validated in operational domains. In the current situation, this strategy provided the Gulf with ample psychological and operational confidence to smartly integrate other warfare novelties.
Third, use the previous geopolitical arrangements of MENA to create a comprehensive counterintelligence structure, aiming to deter multi-domain threats. The Middle East Strategic Alliance (MESA) was the idea of the Trump administration to bring the Arab states together to fight the battles that the USA never could. Before unifying MESA against Iran, the Qatar blockade and Egypt’s withdrawal entered the equation. Therefore, the prospects of coordination by cross-regional powers as leading actors remain a toss-up for MENA to decide.
Before viewing these options as strategic ‘dreams’ or ‘nightmares,’ a catch arises: the question of who will undertake this, when, where, and how.
Old too Soon, Smart too Late?
In the current scenario, the urgency to upgrade counterintelligence structures is lacking neither incentives nor temptations, but doctrinal retrospection, political acceptability, and defense compatibility. This urgency to innovate in multiple spheres of traditional power is a matter of strategic inevitability. The geopolitics and geostrategy of this neighborhood have given two traditional frames of reference: prisoners of geography and the revenge of geography. In MENA’s case, this political setting has moved from the former and has constructively asserted its geostrategic importance in global politics. MENA has found a cogently balanced geostrategy to maneuver in multidirectional geopolitical dimensions. Natural resources, chokepoints, and trade passages give significant bargaining chips to the MENA region; it has shaped its strategic profile to constructively depend on geostrategic positioning. Using traditional elements of power with natural commonalities and conditionalities grants leverage for alliance building. In a not-so-friendly neighborhood, finding common ground remains an Achilles’ heel, despite the geopolitics demanding it.
Bringing elements of confidence-building from inter-regional lessons for unarmed monitoring, mitigation, and management of collective threats requires a deep consensus. By signing Ukraine as a defense partner, the Gulf states realized the limits of precision defenses in counteracting drone swarming and cluster maneuvering. This development underlines the necessity of change in the Gulf’s security thinking. Egypt, Libya, and Morocco; Cyprus and Jordan; and Türkiye: every geopolitical quadrant of the MENA region has engaged in inter- or intra-regional defense collaborations. With partners stretching from Russia to Pakistan, Greece and the UK, China to South Korea, and now Ukraine, this actor diversification shows a proactive quest for power. MENA has recontextualized strategic alliances; it moved beyond episodic interactions during peacetime and wartime geopolitics. Using collective quests for geopolitical outreach, these strategic proximities offer space for defense coalitions as a hyper-realistic and multi-narrative setting. Integrating extensive domains of counterintelligence disciplines relies on the available strategic spaces in the Arabs’ internal political environment. The Iran crisis could invite more defense investments in the region, broadening MENA’s actor choices, weapons systems, and political strategies.
Surely, with great necessity comes great innovations and adventures. However, a unified sense of direction is a promise rarely made in great multifaceted divisions, despite collectively going through tense regional infighting. Old too soon, smart too late.
