With US distracted by Russia's Ukraine war and China, economics and an emboldened Iran drive Middle East powers to redraw alliances
The Russia-Ukraine war has intensified efforts by the Middle East's competing powers to arrive at a detente with each other and common rival Iran as the United States' interest in the region wanes.
The blunt refusal of all of Washington's allies in the Middle East to join the Western diplomatic alliance against Moscow reflects their urgent need to prevent Iran from filling the geopolitical space being vacated by the US, analysts said.
With Tehran on the threshold of reaching an agreement with the West in Vienna to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, America's allies in the Middle East are deeply concerned that the prospective lifting of many economic sanctions would embolden Iran.
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These concerns will take centrestage at an unprecedented Israel-hosted conference on Sunday, with the foreign ministers of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in attendance.
It was preceded on Saturday by an informal meeting in Jordan between King Hussein, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the UAE, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi and Saudi cabinet minister Prince Mohammed bin Fahd bin Abdulaziz.
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its allies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen have targeted Tehran's rivals with ballistic missiles and explosives-laden drones.
The IRGC claimed direct responsibility for a March 13 volley of missiles fired at targets in Arbil, the administrative centre of Iraq's northern Kurdistan region. The IRGC said the missiles targeted an Israeli intelligence facility and were launched to avenge the killing of two IRGC soldiers in a recent Israeli air strike in Syria.
The Kurdistan regional government denied the allegation, but the US and Israeli media reported that Israel had used Arbil as a staging post to launch a covert operation which last month destroyed a military drone production facility in western Iran.
The IRGC's Houthi rebel allies in Yemen jolted Saudi Arabia last weekend with another barrage of Iranian-made ballistic missile attacks against oil and gas facilities in the kingdom. The Houthis suspended the missile strikes for three days as of Saturday, after a missile struck a fuel storage facility in Jeddah on Friday as the Red Sea port city hosted qualification rounds for the Formula 1 Grand Prix.
Riyadh blamed Tehran for the attacks, which caused no lasting damage, but held the West responsible for any shortfall in oil production caused by future Houthi attacks.
The US, Britain, France and Germany have declined to reinstate their designation of the Houthis as a terrorist group.
The West has also been slow to deploy military assets as a deterrent to the IRGC and its allies, partly because prized US air defence systems are in great demand in Eastern Europe because of the Nato-Russia face-off.
Instead, the Western powers have reportedly agreed to Iran's demand that the West's terrorist designation of the IRGC be withdrawn as part of an agreement for the US to rejoin the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to prevent Tehran from making nuclear warheads.
In return, the US sought guarantees from Iran that it would de-escalate its activities in the Middle East and not attack Americans, a diplomatic compromise that drew Israel's ire.
Istanbul-based political analyst Yusuf Erim said the accelerating wave of reconciliation unfolding since 2020 between US allies including Israel, Nato member Turkey, and Sunni Muslim-majority Arab states across the Middle East is fuelled by shared perceptions of the future.
"Countries in the region understand that the United States is not going to be around in the next decade or two," he said, because of its preoccupation with China in the Asia-Pacific region and Russia in Eastern Europe.
This has created a scenario where these Middle Eastern countries have to solve their problems themselves, he said.
"They don't want to compete with each other and they see cooperation - or at least less escalation - as a more positive way forward," Erim said.
The US has striven in recent years to create a new security and economic infrastructure for the region through minilateral partnerships with Washington at its centre, such as the Abraham Accords.
Signed in September 2020, the accords normalised relations for the first time between top US ally Israel and four Arab states - Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates.
The US also encouraged Israel and Turkey to revive their once close diplomatic and security relationship.
Despite deep differences over the Palestinian issue, Israel and Turkey backed the same side, Azerbaijan, in the 2020 war with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the Caucasus.
But cautious attempts at a diplomatic rapprochement between Ankara and Jerusalem did not make much progress until Russia invaded Ukraine.
The visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog to Turkey on March 9 for talks with Recep Tayyip Erdogan was proclaimed as the "restart" of relations.
Rather than throw their weight behind the West's campaign to isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, Erdogan and Israel's prime minister Bennett have led diplomatic efforts to mediate an end to Russia's invasion.
Similarly, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have rebuffed efforts by the US and its allies to increase oil production so as to mitigate the impact of Western sanctions against Russia on international energy prices.
Instead, the competing camps of US allies in the Middle East have coordinated their diplomatic efforts to remain neutral over the Russia-Ukraine war.
"Countries such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel have deepened relations with Russia quite a bit in recent years and these regional actors do not want to burn bridges with Moscow to please Washington, which some of them have come to see as increasingly fickle," said Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Gulf State Analytics, a Washington-based political risk consultancy.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi hosted an unprecedented trilateral summit meeting on Tuesday with Israel's Bennett and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the UAE at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
It came soon after the UAE rolled out the red carpet last Friday for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's first overseas trip outside Iran and Russia since the Syrian civil war erupted a decade ago, infuriating Washington.
Analysts believe other US allies in the region will soon issue invitations to Assad as part of an initiative to readmit Syria into the Arab League and lessen the pariah regime's dependency on Iran.
The day before Assad landed in Dubai, UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan flew to Moscow for talks with Russia's Sergey Lavrov.
Since militarily intervening in Syria in 2015, Russia has encouraged Arab states to accept the Assad regime as a geopolitical reality.
In part, analysts said, this is because Moscow also wants to reduce Damascus' reliance on Tehran - as reflected by its tacit approval of Israeli missile strikes on IRGC facilities in Syria.
Assad's visit to the UAE "underscores how Abu Dhabi's foreign policy in relation to many sensitive issues in the Middle East and North Africa is far more aligned with Russia's interests in the region than those of America," Cafiero said.
Istanbul-based analyst Erim said the "drivers" of Middle East powers had changed over the last couple of years.
During the last decade, they sought to expand and project power by choosing allies on the basis of shared political and sectarian ideologies.
Turkey and Qatar backed the Sunni Islamist parties at the heart of the Arab spring in the early 2010s, in a manner which echoed Iran's support of Shia-led governments like Assad's in Syria.
Arab monarchies, meanwhile, backed relatively secular authoritarian leaders like Egypt's el-Sisi, who led the military coup that overthrew the elected Muslim Brotherhood government which briefly ruled the country in 2012.
Similarly, the rival regional blocs backed opposing sides in the Syrian civil when it erupted in 2012, with Turkey supporting militant Sunni Islamist factions and the UAE supporting secular US-backed Kurdish-led rebels.
Likewise, Turkey and Qatar supported the Tripoli-based government in Libya's civil war, while a rival administration was backed by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Russia.
This ideological rivalry resulted in the Saudi-led bloc imposing a three-year air, sea and land embargo on Qatar which was lifted in January last year.
"Now we are seeing a return to realpolitik in the Middle East, which has downgraded the importance of non-state actors and brought sovereign-to-sovereign relations back as the top priority of foreign policymaking," Erim said.
In turn, this reflects the prioritisation of economic growth and regional trade and investment by all Middle East nations.
The Gulf Arab states are investing heavily in the diversification of their economies in anticipation of a global transition from fossil fuels to renewables.
Struggling regional economies like Egypt and Turkey can no longer sustain costly proxy warfare, and are bracing for price shocks for politically sensitive food commodities like wheat and sunflower cooking oil usually imported from Russia and Ukraine.
"Controlling Iran and [some] independence from US policies might be bonus gains, but I believe the economic advantages for all sides are the main factor here," said Waqar Rizvi, a Middle East policy specialist at the International Team for the Study of Security, based in Verona, Italy.
Iran's government needs sanctions to be lifted to overhaul its outdated oil and gas industry and increase public spending to assuage public opinion.
Tehran also wants to quickly integrate the Iranian economy with those of its neighbours so as to insulate it against any future reimposition of crippling US sanctions.
Because of sanctions imposed on Iran after the US withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018, Tehran's allies "have known that they need to stop looking for handouts", Rizvi said.
"For the Iranians to be strengthened would mean they'd like to regain some of the control they've lost over their allies' decisions," he said.
"But I'm not sure they can walk that back as easily, as even the UAE is sweeping in and befriending Assad, for example."
Yemen's Houthis have also been invited to Gulf Cooperation Council-led talks on Yemen, "though for now they've said no".
Iraq is already unhappy at being the setting of a continuing "Israel/US versus Iran cold war", while Lebanon's Hezbollah is preoccupied with domestic politics because of the country's economic upheaval, he said.
"The Iranians may find that their leverage has weakened," Rizvi said.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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