Author: Habib Badawi
For most of the last century, the Middle East has been discussed as a prize — a board on which Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Ankara or Tehran move pieces. The 2026 war between Israel and Iran, and the Gulf’s scramble to manage its fallout, might look like more of the same. It is not. The more consequential story is that the region’s own states are no longer content to be moved.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies now describes the Middle East as entering a “hinge moment”, in which local actors are acquiring far more say over their own futures than the old framework of great-power competition allows for. That framing matters more than another round of counting whose air force flew where. The real question is not which outside power will end up dominant. It is whether Riyadh, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Ankara and Islamabad have built enough independent options - enough strategic autonomy, meaning the ability to avoid being cornered into dependence on any single patron - that the region’s trajectory stops being written elsewhere.
Nothing about this makes American power disappear. The Gulf states still need Washington’s military umbrella, and the Iran war has reminded everyone why. But needing American protection and taking orders from Washington are no longer the same thing.
Reuters reported this month that Tehran is signalling openness to talks over Hormuz shipping security even as leaders converge on the UN General Assembly — while Gulf capitals are simultaneously absorbing the economic shockwaves of the war and quietly exploring security arrangements that include Iran, not just against it. That is not confusion. It is hedging: preparing for confrontation and pursuing accommodation at the same time, because putting every chip on one relationship is now seen as the riskier bet.
The clearest proof of this shift is not rhetorical; it is a signed document. On 7 August, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, committing each to treat an attack on any one of them as an attack on all three.
Carnegie’s Diwan has rightly cautioned against reading it purely as an anti-Iran pact — its real significance is that three states with quite different relationships to Washington chose to build a mutual-defence structure with each other rather than simply deepen bilateral ties to the United States. Whether Mecca becomes a genuine institution or a one-off gesture will depend on something that cannot yet be answered with confidence: whether it grows into cooperation on economics and diplomacy, not just deterrence. A pact defined only by what it is against tends to fray once the threat perception shifts; one built on what its members are for tends to last.
This is why “bloc” thinking increasingly misdescribes the region. Saudi Arabia can lean on American security guarantees while deepening ties with China. Qatar can host a US air base and keep a hotline to Tehran open. The UAE can court both Washington and Beijing without having to pick. Türkiye can stay inside NATO while cooperating with Moscow where it suits Ankara. None of this is incoherence - it is multi-alignment: drawing security from one partner, investment from another, technology from a third, and treating exclusive allegiance as a liability rather than a virtue.
The stakes go beyond oil and troop deployments. Ports, data infrastructure, energy corridors and AI investment are becoming the terrain on which sovereignty is contested - a state can keep its flag and its seat at the UN while its economic and technological choices are quietly constrained by whoever controls the infrastructure it depends on. Strategic autonomy today means having enough alternatives that no single external partner can make that call for you.
None of this guarantees a stable outcome. A regional order that permanently locks Iran out risks recreating the very insecurity it is meant to solve; one that ignores its neighbours’ fears of Iran will collapse just as fast. What might work - a “managed multipolarity” in which rival powers compete but are constrained by direct communication channels and shared economic stakes rather than by raw deterrence — is plausible, not guaranteed, because it depends on political choices no single actor controls.
That uncertainty is not a hedge on my part; it is the honest state of a region where Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria all have their own internal fights that no outside power can simply dictate away.
The old question — who controls the Middle East — assumes someone eventually will. The more urgent question is whether the region’s own states can turn the leverage they are accumulating into institutions before the next crisis forces the answer on them.
The writer is a Professor of International Relations, Faculty of Humanities, Lebanese University; Views presented are personal.