Sometime in the past twelve months, the Middle East’s security architecture quietly stopped revolving around the United States. The shift has no single point of origin, but if one moment clarified it, it was the Israeli strike on Doha, an attack on the capital of a Gulf state hosting the largest American air base in the region, met by Washington with something between hesitation and silence. The message to regional powers was unmistakable. American patronage no longer came with the implicit guarantee of predictable behaviour from its closest ally.
What followed accelerated a realignment that had been building for years. It clarified two things that regional powers had long suspected but were reluctant to act on. First, that the United States was either unwilling or unable to restrain Israel, that American patronage no longer came with the implicit guarantee of predictable regional behaviour from Washington’s closest ally. Second, that with Iran progressively weakened following the twelve-day war with Israel and increasingly unable to sustain its network of proxies, the most significant source of regional instability was no longer the Islamic Republic, but Israel itself and, alongside it, the UAE.
The war in Iran has since amplified that distrust into something more structural. When Iranian retaliatory strikes targeted not American military assets but Gulf states’ civilian and energy infrastructure, Tehran could not have been clearer in its strategic statement that a close relationship with Washington makes you a target, not a sanctuary. The message was received. Estimates suggest that Kuwait and Qatar could see double-digit GDP contractions if the conflict extends into April. For states that had built their security architecture around the assumption that proximity to American power offered meaningful protection, these experiences over the past 12 months have been shattering. What has replaced that assumption is an increasingly shared conviction that American foreign policy has become strictly transactional, focused on short-term domestic returns and largely indifferent to the costs borne by its partners.
Taken together, these events have driven the emergence of two competing regional security triads, neither of which is centred on the United States. On the one hand: Israel, the UAE, and India. On the other: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. These are, for now, convergences of interest rather than formal alliances but they are shaping into a more durable institutionalised arrangement through a series of bilateral agreements and are now visibly competing for influence across the same contested theatres in Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and the broader Red Sea corridor.
The logic behind each alignment is coherent. Israel and the UAE have been the region’s most disruptive actors in recent years, operating through proxies and unilateral actions that have unsettled established orders across Northern and Eastern Africa. The Abraham Accords gave the substantive relationship, mostly based on a shared wariness of Iran, shared interest in containing political Islam, and shared willingness to act outside multilateral frameworks, a more polished and diplomatic expression. India fits naturally into this wider configuration. With over four million Indian nationals living in the UAE, with the Emirates now its primary supplier of natural gas, and with the I2U2 format linking India, Israel, the UAE and the United States already providing institutional scaffolding, New Delhi’s alignment with this bloc serves both economic and strategic interests.
That expansion is the immediate driver of the opposing alignment. Pakistan signed a mutual defence cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia in September 2025. Islamabad is increasing its arms exports to conflict zones (nearly $1.5 billion in military equipment to forces in Sudan, $4 billion to Libya’s national army) and has joined President Trump’s Board of Peace. These are not the actions of a country content at playing a peripheral role. Pakistan, as well as Turkey as we will see, is rapidly becoming the security guarantor of choice for powers seeking alternatives to American patronage. The Iran war has only sharpened this dynamic, with Pakistan seeking to position itself as a major power broker in the conflict, tacitly backed by China, which sees in Islamabad’s influence within the Muslim world a vehicle for advancing its own interests in a region where the decline of American credibility is opening up cracks ripe for exploitation.
Turkey’s role has been similarly elevated by the conflict. Alone among significant regional powers, Ankara maintained a carefully calibrated neutrality, both condemning the initial American and Israeli strikes as well as Iran’s retaliatory strikes in equal measure. That positioning is a reflection of Turkey’s augmented importance. Turkey (along with Pakistan) is now the most credible mediator in any eventual negotiation to end the conflict, and Erdogan’s ability to cultivate productive relationships with both Trump and Tehran makes Ankara an obvious venue for talks. Beyond diplomacy, Turkey’s advanced domestic defence industry is becoming increasingly attractive to Gulf states reassessing their security dependencies. American assets and bases stationed across the Gulf made those states targets of Iranian retaliation. The lesson being drawn, while not being that the US relationship should be severed, is that it should no longer be the only relationship that matters. Turkey is positioned to benefit from that diversification more than any other single actor.
Saudi Arabia and Turkey bring additional motivations to their alignment. Erdogan’s hostility toward Netanyahu, further sharpened by the conflict in Gaza and by Israeli expansionist actions in Syria (where Turkish-backed al-Sharaa now governs) gives Ankara strong incentives to position itself against the Israel-UAE axis. Riyadh, meanwhile, has watched the UAE’s proxy network with growing alarm. Saudi Arabia has consistently viewed Abu Dhabi’s ambitions in the Horn of Africa, in Libya, and in the Sahel as a direct challenge to its own primacy. The Saudi-Pakistani defence pact is, among other things, a signal that Riyadh intends to build a security architecture capable of containing those ambitions.
The Somaliland episode illustrates the broader dynamic with unusual clarity. Israel’s recognition of Somaliland, a territory sitting at the mouth of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints, was understood immediately by regional powers as a coordinated move designed to give the UAE a new platform for projecting influence in the Red Sea. The UAE had long cultivated ties with Hargeisa and was counting on Israeli recognition to trigger a wider wave of legitimising acknowledgements. It did not happen. Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia recognised the play and moved to contain it. While not as consequential in the short term as some feared, the episode demonstrated that both blocs are now operating with strategic coherence, reading each other’s moves and responding in kind.
What is particularly striking about this realignment is what’s driving it. For decades, the security architecture of the Middle East was shaped primarily by external actors. First colonial powers, then Cold War superpowers, then a post-1991 American order that placed US preferences at the centre of every significant regional calculation. What is emerging now is a different regional order being designed by regional powers, according to their own interests, with Washington present but no longer interested in being decisive in shaping long-term dynamics.
This places the United States in a genuinely uncomfortable position. The two triads cut across American interests in contradictory ways. Israel is historically the US’s closest ally and India is Washington’s most important strategic partner in the competition with China, though a recent souring of American sentiment toward Israel could complicate that calculus. Alienating both Tel Aviv and New Delhi by drifting toward the opposing alignment would be costly. However, Turkey is a NATO member and a key counterweight to Russian imperialist tendencies, Pakistan a nuclear state, and Saudi Arabia central to any American interest in oil price stability, none of which America can afford to lose right now. There is no clean choice, because these alignments were not built with American preferences in mind.
That is the deeper significance of this moment. The region is not turning against the United States per se. It is however entering a period in which regional powers are somewhat post-American in their strategic calculus. They have concluded that Washington is an unreliable arbiter and an insufficient guarantor, a conclusion the Iran war has driven home with an economic brutality that no amount of diplomatic reassurance can easily undo.
The region is reorganising itself. For the first time in decades, the architecture being built reflects the priorities of the states that live there. Whether it produces stability or deeper fragmentation remains to be seen. But the era in which Middle Eastern security was ultimately a function of American decisions is ending.
