What Future for the Middle East

Valentine M. Moghadam

THAT THE MIDDLE East and North Africa (MENA) region is beset by tensions, rivalries and conflicts is beyond dispute. MENA is arguably the most militarized and penetrated world-region, with high military spending (especially by Algeria, Israel, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, UAE), and a slew of U.S. bases across the region.

Quite apart from the territorial and political legacies of European colonialism and the post-World War I “mandates,” a listing would include the overlong Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the US/UK 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, the 2011 NATO attack on Libya, and the Saudi-led military intervention in Bahrain following the 2011 protests.(1)

More recently, Yemen has been the target of attacks by Saudi Arabia and the UAE in 2022, and by Israel and the United States in 2024 and 2025.(2) In June 2025, Iran was the target of bombing campaigns by Israel and the United States.

Characterized by absolutist monarchies and authoritarian republics, the region also is internally divided and fragmented. Algeria and Morocco, for example, have long argued over post-colonial Western Sahara, with Algeria supporting the Polisario Front independence movement and Morocco claiming the region as its own.

Most recently, Algeria broke ties with Morocco when the latter signed the 2020 Abraham Accords (of which more below.) Despite the recent China-brokered rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, there is limited intra-regional trade and investment.

U.S. economic power is being challenged by China’s rise, and the BRICS+ coalition poses an economic and political challenge to the G7 Western alliance.(3) But America’s military remains the largest and most powerful, with over 800 based across the globe, massive military spending, and significant arms flows to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other allies.

The U.S. footprint in the Middle East is especially large, with more than 40,000 troops stationed in various countries. The purpose is to project U.S. power, maintain access to Middle Eastern oil, and support Israel.

This includes 13,000 troops in Qatar, the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, some 2200 troops in Kuwait, about 5000 personnel in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and two air bases and 3000 troops in Saudi Arabia.(4)

What follows is a list of recent developments and events, to pose the question of how they are related and what they mean for the future of the region.

• Trump’s unilateral abrogation of the 2015 JCPOA/BARJAM and the Biden government’s unwillingness to revive it;

• The Abraham Accords of 2020;

• The 7 October 2023 Hamas/Islamic Jihad attack on southern Israel, followed by the Netanyahu regime’s unrelenting assault on the Palestinian people (which continues as of July 2025);

• The Fall 2022 protests across Iran following the death in police custody of Mahsa Jina Amini;

• The December 2024 victory of the former jihadists in Syria;

• The June 2025 military assaults on Iran by Israel’s military machine, followed by bombardments by the US military;(5)

• Germany’s Chancellor Merz (a former U.S.-based investment banker): “Israel is doing the dirty work in Iran for all of us.”(6)

U.S.-EU Convergence

If the end of World War II saw the emergence of a bipolar world order, that system did not last long in a historical sense. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of a unipolar world system led by the United States, America’s capitalist class and its allies in government were able to expand the breadth of their power.

This was accomplished through a combination of privatization measures imposed on Third World countries followed by investments and trade agreements (via the World Trade Organization as well as the World Bank and the IMF), arms sales to allies, and outright military interventions that the United States enacted on its own (Afghanistan, Iraq) or supported when carried out by U.S proxies (e.g., Saudi Arabia and the UAE in Bahrain and Yemen).

Meanwhile European countries, several of which had opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and even differed with Washington on some trade issues, began to endorse the U.S. agenda of a worldwide imperialist order.

One area of agreement was on the need to contain Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and ensure that only Israel remained as the sole nuclear power in the Middle East region.(7) The Obama government ramped up sanctions against Iran in 2010, forcing the Iranian government to seek a way out.

The Iranian authorities had long argued that their nuclear program was for civil purposes only, meant to develop non-oil energy capabilities and not a nuclear weapon, but they were prepared to agree to a deal that would involve inspections of their nuclear capabilities in return for sanctions lifting and normalization of diplomatic relations.

The Iran nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA), signed with much fanfare in 2015, was virulently opposed by Israel’s Netanyahu regime, which pressured the Trump government to abrogate the agreement, thereby essentially killing the agreement.

European governments initially considered a mechanism to continue trading with Iran, but eventually fell in line with the harsh U.S. “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran and threats of secondary sanctions against entities trading with Iran.(8)

Since then, European states have converged with U.S. foreign policy and assumed ever closer diplomatic, economic, and military ties with Israel, with Germany becoming Israel’s loudest champion.

The 2020 Abraham Accords, which involved Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, were part of Western efforts to “normalize” Israel within the Middle East and the broader Muslim-majority community while further marginalizing Iran. (Egypt under Sadat and Jordan in 1994 had already established diplomatic ties with Israel.) Polls showed, however, that the accords were highly unpopular among Arab citizens.(9)

Suffering from the effects of sanctions as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, and in the midst of working-class protests over unemployment and rising costs, Iran’s government requested financial relief from the IMF in the form of a $5 billion loan, its first in 60 years. The United States, as the IMF’s largest shareholder, vetoed the request.(10)

Throughout this time, the West’s response to the Arab Spring protests and prospects for democratization in the region had been tepid in some cases and malign in others. The 2011 NATO-led bombing of Libya, ostensibly carried out to avert a humanitarian crisis, resulted in crisis and chaos, from which the Libyan people have not escaped as of 2025.

As for Syria, there is evidence of CIA activity there since at least 2006. The Assad government’s harsh response to the protests early on was followed by a more concerted effort by Syria’s enemies to arm the opposition and topple the regime. What emerged was not a valiant democratic movement but Islamization, including a reign of terror by ISIS, which had grown out of the US/UK military invasion and occupation of Iraq.(11)

Iran and Russia, which had come to the Syrian government’s aid, helped defeat ISIS (the United States and its Kurdish allies did the same, albeit without being invited by the Syrian government), but other Islamist groups, such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), remained.

This is the group that eventually topped the Syrian government in December 2024 — at a time when Russia was mired in a war with Ukraine, and Iran had been weakened by years of harsh economic and financial sanctions. Meanwhile, Iran’s regional partners — Syria’s Assad government, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthi, Gaza’s Hamas — have been defeated or are on the defensive.

And what of the Arab Spring’s one democratic success story? Early on, Tunisia was celebrated for its procedural democracy and impressive new constitution, including even more expansive laws for women’s participation and rights. Yet it suffered from terrorist attacks enabled by the chaos in neighbouring Libya, and received hardly any financial assistance from the West.

Indeed, in the 10-year period before its 2021 authoritarian reversal under President Kais Saied, Tunisia received $3 billion from the European Union (including $1 billion in concessionary loans). In contrast, the EU forked over $4 billion to Ukraine in the first five months after Russia’s invasion, and the sums have only gone up.(12)

Returning to Iran, I have written of Iran’s electoral cycles — governments formed by “reformists” versus “hardliners” — and how they align with U.S. pressure. The defeat of the JCPOA, a reformist agenda, was followed by electoral victories by the hardliners, who came to power again after Iran was wracked by working-class protests over economic conditions in 2017/18 and again in 2019.

Mahsa Jina Amini, apprehended by the morality police for improperly wearing a hejab. Her death in police custody ignited the country.

Their reinforcement of the hejab law generated the “women-life-freedom” protests of fall 2022, after the death in police custody of the young Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Jina Amini, who had been apprehended for “bad-hejab.”(13)

In a cynical and perverse display, Netanyahu invoked Mahsa’s name and the zan-zendegi-azadi movement as he gloated over the illegal bombardments of Iran in June 2025 by his own military followed by U.S. bombardments authorized by the Trump regime.(14)

If Netanyahu and Trump, however, were hoping for a spontaneous uprising in support of their bombardments, they were proven utterly wrong.

Meanwhile, Israel continues to bomb countries in the region — and to destroy the one Catholic church in Gaza, along with the Palestinians sheltering inside it — with the seeming endorsement of the United States and EU.

Rulings of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court are ignored if not denigrated outright. State sovereignty and international law are routinely and wilfully ignored.

The UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, appointed in 2022 as the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, and an expert on Palestinian refugees, has been subjected to a smear campaign by pro-Israeli entities and sanctioned by the Trump regime.(15)

International Law and Treaties — Empty Promises?

For all the Iranian regime’s violations and denials of the rights of its own citizens, which are routinely trumpeted in the Western media, there is barely a mention of the long record of the Israeli regime’s assassinations of Iranian scientists, along with Trump’s January 2020 assassination of Iran’s top general Ghassem Soleimani.

Even less well known is the biased nature of the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA), which has criticized Iran and demanded strict compliance of IAEA rules while uttering little to nothing about Israel’s own nuclear arms arsenal and its frequent bombing campaigns of neighbouring countries.(16)

Economic and financial sanctions have their place in international law, but they are often imposed by a powerful state against a weaker one, and they have more deleterious effects on ordinary citizens than on regimes and elites. Sanctions may be viewed as “war by other means,” and the United States has used them against a large number of states.

Years of U.S. sanctions against Iran have adversely affected government revenue, which in turn affects government investments in job creation, healthcare, schooling, childcare and other public services.

UN Rapporteur Alena Douhan, appointed in 2020 to assess “unilateral coercive measures and human rights,” underscored the harm of unilateral sanctions — which she stated contravened “international legal norms and principles” — to ordinary Iranian citizens, especially women, children, the poor, migrants, and the disabled.

One result of the sanctions, as well as the recent U.S. and Israeli bombing campaigns on Iran, has been the expulsion or flight of hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees in Iran, many of them long-term residents.(17)

The sad realities of regional and global politics discussed in this paper have taken place alongside promotion of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, launched in October 2000 through UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, and intended to secure women’s physical security and their participation in peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction.

States-parties are expected to prepare National Action Plans (NAPs), but these have been purely performative or weakly implemented. NAPs exist for only a handful of MENA countries, and all are toothless. Significantly, Algeria, Iran, Israel, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have ignored the WPS agenda — which, in any event, is not intended to condemn or prevent war.(18)

Conclusions: Toward a New World Order?

At this point, it would appear that the Western alliance has won all battles, that their ascendancy is secure, and that the Middle East has been largely reshaped to their liking, with Israel able to conduct military aggression at will.

Iran has been weakened, and factions of the state are debating more defiance of the West versus some compromises toward normalization and stability. What most Iranians will not accept, however, is “regime change” undertaken by an aggressive foreign entity.

It is worth noting that Russia — which has had good relations with Israel, Iran and the Arab states — could have played an effective mediating role had it not been mired in its war with Ukraine and NATO.

China, which also has good relations with all parties, seems more intent on securing economic power than in assuming any major geopolitical mediation or peace-making roles, at least for now.

At the same time, the apparent victory of the capitalist West masks other realities. Its rising militarism — increasing military spending in the next few years to fully 5% of GDP — and the wars that it foments or prolongs are evidence of a fundamental crisis within the world-system’s core states.

The crisis is both political and financial: it encompasses declining legitimacy and moral authority that has accompanied growing authoritarianism and warmaking, along with the likelihood of increased indebtedness and deficit financing to maintain military and public services.

With at least 143 of the world’s states recognizing Palestine, the Israeli regime is increasingly isolated and its expansionism opposed, but its militarism continues as long as the United States, Germany and other Western states support it.

Could this state of affairs lead to a global war that spreads beyond the Middle East and eastern Europe? Or could mass citizen mobilizations for peace and justice force the ruling classes to change course?

Could such mobilizations insist on a multi­polar world order without a hegemon, and through a transformed and more effective United Nations system that regulates peaceful cooperation and socio-economic justice to replace the world-system’s warmaking and profiteering?

Could such mobilizations be endorsed by a more geopolitically assertive BRICS+ coalition? This is all very difficult to predict, although evidence exists for each possible eventuality.

Notes

1. For details on the Arab Spring protests and the aftermath, see Shamiran Mako and Valentine M. Moghadam, After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
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2. On Saudi and UAE strikes on Yemen, see https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/04/18/yemen-latest-round-saudi-uae-led-attacks-targets-civilians. On Israeli attacks on Yemen in 2024 and 2025, see https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/30/israel-hits-yemens-infrastructure-again-what-we-know-and-why-it-matters; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce9xdlxp1x7o. On U.S. strikes on Yemen in March 2025, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c05mvr3j3yro and https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/16/mapping-us-attacks-on-yemen
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3. Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa were the original members, now joined by Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE). China has helped establish several significant intra-group institutions, notably the New Development Bank. The most recent BRICS+ summit was held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2025, where Brazilian president Lula criticized Western states for raising military spending to 5% of GDP while never having achieved the benchmark of 0.7% GDP in international development assistance.
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4. For details on U.S. military presence in the Middle East, see https://www.americansecurityproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Ref-0213-US-Military-Bases-and-Facilities-Middle-East.pdf. See also https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/1/13/us-military-presence-in-the-middle-east-and-afghanistan
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5. On the number of casualties in Iran after the Israeli bombardments, see https://www.en-hrana.org/twelve-days-under-fire-a-comprehensive-report-on-the-iran-israel-war/
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6. https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-merz-says-israel-doing-dirty-work-for-us-in-iran/live-72939104. In the 18 July 2025 interview with the BBC, Merz also said: “We are seeing a big threat, and the threat is Russia. And this threat is not only on Ukraine. It’s on our peace, on our freedom, on the political order of Europe.” Any echoes of Nazi Germany’s assessment of the Soviet Union prior to its 1941 full-scale invasion were surely unintended.
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7. Israel’s nuclear weapons production began in the 1950s with French assistance followed by that of the U.S. Former nuclear scientist Mordechai Vanunu disclosed the program, was kidnapped in London by Israeli agents in 1986, and jailed in Israel for 18 years, 11 in solitary confinement.
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8. For more details, see my article: “The Gendered Politics of Iran-U.S. Relations: Sanctions, the JCPOA, and Women’s Security,” Third World Quarterly, vol. 45 no. 7 (April 2024): 1199-1218, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2024.2314005
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9. The outbreak of civil conflict in Sudan put ratification of the Abraham Accords on hold. Algeria cut ties with Morocco following the latter’s ratification. For analysis of Arab public’s views on normalization with Israel, see “Across the Mideast, a Surge of Support for Palestinians as War Erupts in Gaza,” The New York Times (October 9, 2023). For analysis of Arab Barometer polling data, see Michael Robbins, “MENA Publics and the Future of Normalization with Israel” (January 9, 2025), https://www.arabbarometer.org/2025/01/14619/#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20after%20the%20Abraham%20Accords%20were%20reached%2C,said%20they%20favored%20or%20strongly%20favored%20this%20process
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10. Details of the IMF loan refusal are in Moghadam, “The Gendered Politics of Iran-U.S. Relations” (op cit.). See also https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-to-block-irans-request-to-imf-for-5-billion-loan-to-fight-coronavirus-11586301732
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11. For details on US interventions and destabilization campaigns in Syria, see Mako and Moghadam (op cit.), 206-211. See also March 2016 Los Angeles Times article on the CIA and Pentagon arming of Syrian Islamist groups: https://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-pentagon-isis-20160327-story.html. In what became known as “Cablegate,” Wikileaks released CIA and diplomatic cables showing U.S. covert operations since at least 2006, including funding Syrian opposition groups. See, e.g., Ariel Zirulnick, “Cables reveal covert US support for Syria’s opposition,” The Christian Science Monitor (18 April 2011).
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12. See Moghadam, “Gender Regimes, Polities, and the World-System: Comparing Iran and Tunisia,” Women’s Studies International Forum (vol. 98, no. 3, May 2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2023.102721.
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13. See Moghadam, “Gendered Politics…” (op cit.). See also Moghadam (22 Nov. 2022): The Women-Led Uprising and Iran’s Islamic Republic |Ethics & International Affairs (ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org).
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14. See https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/netanyahu-says-israeli-strike-on-iran-aims-to-bring-freedom-to-its-people/ar-AA1GHhvX
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15. See Associated Press,“US issues sanctions against UN investigator probing abuses in Gaza” (10 July 2025).
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16. See Statement of IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi: https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/statements/statement-on-the-situation-in-iran-13-june-2025
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17. See https://apnews.com/article/afghan-iran-refugees-war-deportation-b58f3772e3e50a722a9f0b17d8ee1f9a; see also https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/world/middleeast/iran-deportations-afghanistan.html
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18. See https://www.unwomen.org/en/docs/2000/10/un-security-council-resolution-1325. For details on the WPS application to the Middle East, see my article, “Women, Peace, and Security in the Middle East: An Agenda of Empty Promises?” In Journal of Peace and War Studies, 5th ed. (Oct. 2023): 36-59. journal-peace-war-studies-5th-edition (norwich.edu)
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September-October 2025, ATC 238