When Iran expanded the Israeli-American war by striking Persian Gulf Arab states, many observers assumed this new low in Iran-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) relations would endure for years and drive Arab states closer to Israel. Tehran’s escalation seemed to validate Israel’s argument that the Gulf monarchies needed to align with it against their common Persian threat.
Instead, the opposite appears to be unfolding. Regional states have concluded that containing and isolating Iran not only failed but also produced a disastrous war that exposed both the unreliability and the stunning limits of the U.S. security umbrella. Rather than doubling down on Iran’s exclusion, Arab states are writing a new playbook: pursuing economic interdependence with Iran while incorporating Tehran into a new, region-led security architecture.
When Iran expanded the Israeli-American war by striking Persian Gulf Arab states, many observers assumed this new low in Iran-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) relations would endure for years and drive Arab states closer to Israel. Tehran’s escalation seemed to validate Israel’s argument that the Gulf monarchies needed to align with it against their common Persian threat.
Instead, the opposite appears to be unfolding. Regional states have concluded that containing and isolating Iran not only failed but also produced a disastrous war that exposed both the unreliability and the stunning limits of the U.S. security umbrella. Rather than doubling down on Iran’s exclusion, Arab states are writing a new playbook: pursuing economic interdependence with Iran while incorporating Tehran into a new, region-led security architecture.
“Part of what we are doing now, as regional countries, is to create this regional security framework between us and Iran,” Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, told the Financial Times. “That will hopefully have economic cooperation in the future between all of us—to bring the region back to stability.”
Perhaps more importantly, Saudi Arabia has emerged as the driving force behind this shift. While a date has yet to be announced, Riyadh is preparing to host the GCC states and Iran for talks on a regional non-aggression pact, maritime security, and confidence-building measures modeled on Europe’s 1975 Helsinki Accords, with the goal of establishing regular ministerial and leaders’ meetings on regional security. The broader objective is a new Middle East security architecture rooted more in regional cooperation and less in U.S. military guarantees.
These developments further undermine Washington’s long-standing claim that, absent U.S. military primacy, the Middle East would descend into chaos. Instead, they reinforce the restrainers’ argument that regional states will assume greater responsibility for their own security as the United States steps back. Indeed, rather than shielding the region from instability, the United States has often been its principal source. After all, it was the United States and Israel that launched the last two unprovoked wars against Iran—both while negotiations were underway.
Indeed, if the U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding translates into a final deal that lifts sanctions on Iran and blesses Iran’s regional reintegration, it will further reinforce this process as it will eliminate the key motivation for keeping U.S. troops in the Middle East in the first place: the policy of containing Iran. Much indicates that one of the Trump administration’s motivations for engaging the regional powers so intimately in the negotiations with Tehran is to lay the groundwork for shifting the burden of regional security to these states as part of the deal with Iran.
Yet while Washington should welcome a regional order that shifts the burden of security from U.S. taxpayers and service members to the region itself, the current approach risks repeating an old mistake. Instead of building a genuinely inclusive security architecture—one that is organized against no state and rejects bloc formations—it may simply reverse the region’s fault lines. Iran’s de-containment would be paired with Israel’s re-containment, pushing it toward international isolation. Rather than replacing the Abraham Accords with a more inclusive order, the region risks creating an anti-Abraham Accords organized around containing Israel.
It is often forgotten how isolated Israel was outside of the West before the Oslo Accords took shape. Between 1991 and 1994, Israel normalized relations with at least 36 countries, including China, India, and the Holy See. These normalizations occurred based on the implicit assumption that Israel would allow for the establishment of a Palestinian state, an understanding the Israelis quickly reneged on. Though Israel is not likely to return to its pre-Oslo isolation, given the plummeting of its standing globally the trend may certainly be in that direction.
Of course, Israel has undoubtedly earned isolation through its destabilizing conduct, mass killing of Palestinians, and expansionist policies. Greater regional cohesion to pressure Israel is both justified and necessary. But neither isolation nor pressure alone is likely to fundamentally alter Israeli calculations unless they are paired with a credible pathway to rehabilitation—however remote that prospect may seem today.
It would be a missed opportunity not to pursue a more ambitious vision—one that seeks not only to stabilize the Persian Gulf through Iran’s inclusion but also to harness this shift to achieve Palestinian self-determination.
The Better Order Project has laid out a pathway for this. In parallel with a process to end the occupation of Palestine building on U.N. General Assembly Resolution ES-10/24 and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion of July 2024 that found that “the State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful” and that Israel is obligated to bring that unlawful presence to an end as rapidly as possible, a U.N. Security Council-endorsed process should begin to develop a truly inclusive security architecture. This would be inspired by the Helsinki process, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and based on the principles of collective security, the centrality of states and noninterference in the internal affairs of others (that is, the use of militias), a rejection of containment-based logic, and the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force and the ensuring of equal security for all.
A permanent, formal organization should be set up to facilitate diplomacy and manage the region’s security. Initial steps should focus on integrating more countries into existing economic and political arrangements, such as trade agreements and energy collaboration.
Instead of excluding Israel from this architecture, the door to Israel’s inclusion should be kept wide open but on the condition that Israel fully implements the ICJ ruling and ends the occupation. In return, Israel would be offered something far more consequential than the Abraham Accords ever promised. Instead of normalization with Saudi Arabia alone, it would gain full integration into a regional security architecture. This would also require Iran to accept Israel’s inclusion, which Tehran has previously indicated it would do if a Palestinian state—or another settlement accepted by the Palestinians—were established.
But the price of admission must be clear and uncompromising: not a pathway toward Palestinian statehood or a vague political horizon, but the actual establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines.
The two processes should advance in parallel, but neither should be allowed to hold the other hostage. Israeli resistance to ending the occupation, for instance, should not delay the construction of a new regional security architecture. On the contrary, progress without Israel would gradually create a powerful incentive for Israeli society to choose coexistence over isolation. Israel’s current calculation—that the costs of ending the occupation outweigh the benefits—is likely to shift once a functioning regional security order is in place and Israelis can clearly observe the strategic and economic dividends of a fundamental change in course.
By thinking bigger, the region’s leaders can ensure that the collapse of the old order gives rise to something far more stable and durable. They can seize this moment not only to resolve the principal source of instability in the Persian Gulf—Iran’s exclusion—but also to address the central source of instability in the Middle East: Israel’s continued occupation of Palestine.
History rarely offers great powers the chance to leave a region on better terms than they entered it. This is one of those moments. If the region’s leaders seize the opportunity to build an inclusive security order, Washington’s wisest course will be to encourage rather than dominate the process. For U.S. President Donald Trump, the reward would not be ownership of a new Middle East, but something more valuable: the distinction of being the American president who recognized that the region was finally ready to shoulder its own security—and had the wisdom to let it. Though Trump started this unwise war, he has the opportunity to make an audacious pivot to peace his defining legacy.
