The Middle East’s old order is breaking apart.
Iran’s network of Shiite proxies has been weakened. Israel has taken its confrontation directly to Tehran. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan have created a collective-defence pact in Mecca. Behind Pakistan stands China, whose economic and strategic influence is advancing towards the Persian Gulf.
What comes next will not be a simple contest between Iran and Israel, or between Sunni and Shiite powers. Three rival visions are competing to shape the region.
The first is the surviving Islamist order that has trapped the Middle East in proxy wars for nearly half a century. The second is an Iranian-Israeli renaissance built around the proposed Cyrus Pact. The third is an emerging Sunni security bloc centred on Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, and connected indirectly to China.
Whichever vision prevails will determine who controls the region’s energy routes, trade corridors, military alliances and political future.
The Order That Devastated the Middle East
Geopolitics is larger than markets and ordinary statecraft. A geopolitical actor does not stop at the fixed borders of a national map. It seeks de facto influence: the power to draw other states and peoples into its own political order.
The more brittle and contested the region, the more geopolitics matters. That is why the Middle East remains one of the most consequential arenas on Earth.
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 pushed the region into an era of ideology-driven geopolitics. The Islamic Republic fused Shiite political doctrine with hostility towards Israel, often expressed through explicitly antisemitic rhetoric. The “liberation” of Jerusalem and destruction of Israel became central objectives of Tehran’s regional project.
Anti-American religious nationalism, Tudeh communism and other revolutionary currents amplified that project. They treated Israel as the pillar of the American order in the Middle East. That helps explain why parts of the regional and global Left continue to align themselves with a fundamentalist regime.
Western strategic thinking also helped create the conditions for what followed. During the Cold War, some policymakers regarded political Islam as a possible barrier against Soviet expansion. The West did not deliberately set out to create today’s Islamic Republic. It expected that it could tolerate a conservative Islamist government if it remained useful against communism.
Instead, the region entered a prolonged game of terror. Iran built an expanding network of armed proxies and political movements. Sunni extremist organisations, and states supporting Muslim Brotherhood networks and later takfiri and jihadi currents, were given room to operate in response. Their purpose was to contain Iran’s Shiite advance and trap the region in a grinding intra-Islamic conflict.
The opposing camps disagreed over theology and leadership of the Islamic world. But many shared hostility towards Israel, democracy and modern political life. This “balance of terror” did not create stability. It produced mass killing, proxy warfare, bankrupt states, environmental devastation and decades of lost investment.
After Saddam Hussein fell, Tehran gained unprecedented influence in Iraq and a strategic route through Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon. It attempted to reproduce the model of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij throughout the region. The Syrian war brought the Shiite–Sunni balance of terror to its peak and eventually drew American forces into the fight against ISIS. The territorial caliphate receded, but the potential for Salafi violence remained. Shiite proxies continued manufacturing crises, while Qatar and Turkey supported competing Sunni organisations.
Syria, Iraq and Lebanon were broken. Iran’s national wealth was diverted to finance militias and foreign wars. Failed states remained, while the region was pushed away from international energy routes, trade corridors and economic development. Israel and the Iranian nation were among the first to recognise the source of the problem.
From Iran came the chant: “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I give my life for Iran.” It expressed a simple demand: Iran’s wealth should serve Iranians rather than militias fighting the regime’s ideological wars. In Israel, the corresponding conclusion was that the danger did not begin with Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza. The head of the snake lay in Tehran. Both nations understood the same mechanism.
The rise of extremist political Shiism also gave Sunni Islamist organisations and their state sponsors room to act. Both Islamist camps wanted Jerusalem. Both sought an uncompromising Islamic political order. That project stands in direct conflict with the deeper historical memory shared by Iranians and Jews.
The Iranian-Israeli Alternative
A practical starting point for the new order is October 7, 2023. For Iran, however, a corresponding date came earlier: October 28, 2016, when large crowds gathered at Pasargadae to commemorate Cyrus the Great. Cyrus already represented a historical connection between the Iranian and Jewish peoples.
After October 7, Israeli leaders began moving from a long war of survival against Islamist organisations towards a confrontation with their source in Tehran. The extremist arms in Gaza were weakened. The principal Shiite fortress in southern Lebanon was struck. On June 13, 2025, the war reached Tehran.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House accelerated the change. The Iranian nation forced the issue again on January 8 and 9, 2026, when millions entered the streets and thousands of freedom-seekers were killed. That uprising fed into the war that began on February 28, 2026.
The struggle now continues on two fronts: external war and internal revolution against the Islamic Republic, the source of the old balance of terror. From this crisis comes the possibility of an entirely different Middle East: an Iranian–Israeli partnership built not on revolutionary Islamism, but on national history, mutual security and economic development. Its proposed political expression is the Cyrus Pact.
Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has presented the idea as an extension of the Abraham Accords. Its symbolism reaches back to Cyrus the Great, the Persian ruler remembered in Jewish history for permitting the exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple. That memory is not incidental. Iranians and Jews are two ancient peoples whose histories long predate the ideological movements now fighting across the region.
The rise of Islam gave great political and cultural power first to Muslim Arabs, whose language and rule spread as far as the Atlantic and Andalusia, and later to Muslim Turks, who entered the Middle East across the Iranian plateau and eventually built the Ottoman Empire. Two ancient peoples paid heavily: the Jews, in Arabia and the Land of Israel, and the Iranians, who were forced from Sasanian power into conversion, exile or tribute.
Shared suffering, ancient ties, a common attraction to secularism and democracy, present geopolitical interests and an existential threat from extremist Islamism have made Iranians and Israelis natural partners. A Cyrus Pact could offer an end to centuries of pressure. If it succeeds, it would also strengthen the Abraham Accords and replace the ideological balance of terror with economic cooperation.
An Iranian–Israeli order could widen the space for democracy, open energy and trade routes, contain Turkish and Qatari support for Muslim Brotherhood politics, limit the growing influence of Pakistan and China, draw Saudi Arabia towards a more stable system and ease the Arab–Jewish conflict.
In a region of genuinely free political choice, no people other than Iranians defend Israel’s existence from such deep historical and civic foundations. Iranian history, the demand for democracy, the cost of Khomeini’s campaign for Jerusalem and the break with the anti-Israel Left make the Iranian nation Israel’s only natural regional partner.
The new order would replace proxy warfare with economic cooperation: destroying terrorist organisations at their source, encouraging regional development, opening markets and allowing capital to move between states.
From the Iranian plateau to the eastern Mediterranean, the region faces water shortages, food insecurity, desertification and the threat of mass environmental migration. If the present destruction continues, parts of the Middle East may cease to be habitable.
Oil revenues, regional geography and Israeli technology could finance the reconstruction that decades of violence have prevented. New energy routes could also weaken Russia’s grip over Europe and prevent Turkey from becoming the region’s only gateway. One route could carry Iranian and Persian Gulf oil and gas through southern Iraq to Jordan and Israel, and then to Europe through specialised Israeli ports. A stable Iran working with Israel, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and other partners could allow the United States to reduce its military burden in the Middle East and concentrate on its larger strategic contest with China.
This is the most hopeful scenario. It is not the only one.
The Rise of the Mecca Order
Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan also reject the Islamic Republic’s regional expansion. But they are uneasy about an Iranian–Israeli renaissance that could make Israel an ordinary regional power and diminish their own strategic leverage.
In Syria, Turkey once used Sunni Islamist militias, with Qatari and wider Arab support, against Tehran and Bashar al-Assad. After Assad’s fall and Ahmad al-Sharaa’s rise to power, Ankara no longer needs those forces for precisely the same purpose inside Syria. It nevertheless continues to tolerate Islamist influence in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank as a means of pressuring Israel.
Turkey is consequently changing direction: distancing itself from Qatar, building alliances with official Sunni states, rolling back Tehran’s proxies and promoting an energy corridor from the Persian Gulf through eastern Jordan and Syria into Turkey. The older Davutoğlu doctrine remains visible. Syria and northern Iraq are to be incorporated into Turkey’s strategic depth. It is economic statecraft following a neo-Ottoman route. The project requires Sunni partners and a military guarantee for a regional system that sidelines both Iran and Israel. Hence the Mecca Pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Saudi Arabia faces a different calculation. It remains the public centre of the Islamic world. Religion continues to structure Saudi life, while normalisation with Israel remains tied to the unresolved Palestinian question. A regional system visibly initiated from Jerusalem is therefore politically difficult for Riyadh to embrace. A Sunni security mechanism that depends upon neither Israel nor the Islamic Republic offers another option. Independent Saudi sea routes, combined with a land corridor dependent upon Turkey, may appear safer to Riyadh than an Israeli-centred design.
Pakistan is the crucial third component. Long allied with Washington, it has developed an increasingly close strategic partnership with Beijing. Through the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, Beijing gains access across Pakistan towards Gwadar and the Arabian Sea. It also gains another means of pressuring India and extending its influence towards the Persian Gulf. Pakistan’s enormous population, experienced military and nuclear arsenal make it valuable to both Riyadh and Ankara. It forms the third side of the Mecca Pact: Saudi money, Turkish technology and Pakistani force. China is transforming Pakistan into a pillar of a Chinese geopolitical system, while Israel remains a pillar of the American order. Pakistan’s official hostility towards Israel belongs to that wider strategic map.
The Mecca agreement is not formally Chinese. China is not a signatory, and Beijing does not publicly control it. But China’s influence over Pakistan, its infrastructure investments and its dependence on Persian Gulf energy give it an indirect connection to the emerging Sunni bloc. China will not welcome unchecked Shiite expansion from Tehran. But neither will it welcome a successful Iranian–Israeli alliance tied to the United States. The Mecca order therefore offers a rival route: a Sunni security bloc connecting the Arabian Peninsula to Turkey through Pakistan’s military weight and China’s economic reach.
Who Will Write the Next Middle East?
The old Shiite–Sunni balance of proxy warfare is breaking apart. What replaces it may be decided by the competition between two emerging alternatives.
The Cyrus order would unite a post-Islamist Iran with Israel and potentially extend the Abraham Accords into a wider system of energy, technology, trade and security cooperation. It would be aligned primarily with the United States and built around a renaissance of the region’s ancient nations.
The Mecca order would unite Saudi capital, Turkish ambition and Pakistani military power. It would not formally belong to China, but Beijing would possess considerable influence through Pakistan and its economic position in the Persian Gulf.
The contest will determine more than military alliances. It will shape the Middle East’s energy corridors, commercial routes, political institutions and relationship with Europe. Iran and Israel possess the foundations of a natural partnership: shared historical memory, common enemies and territories suited to major economic cooperation. The path into this new order requires continued Iranian–Israeli solidarity. It also requires Israeli support for Iranians seeking to reclaim their sovereignty and organise on the ground until the source of Islamist terror falls, and until another externally imposed system is prevented from taking its place.
Israeli support should therefore be directed towards the Iranian nation rather than separatist organisations or ethnic parties seeking to dismember Iran. Replacing the Islamic Republic with another externally imposed order would reproduce the same instability in a different form. The Shiite–Sunni balance of terror, born from the Islamic–Marxist revolution in Iran in 1979 and then exported across the region, is reaching its end. The question is what will replace it.
Will China, operating indirectly through Pakistan, extend its influence across the Arabian Peninsula and towards Europe through an increasingly assertive Turkey? Or will Israel and the United States support the Iranian nation in building a secular, democratic and economically integrated order, one capable of defeating extremist Islamism and limiting the ambitions of Muslim Brotherhood politics and neo-Ottomanism?
The old Middle East is collapsing. The struggle to write the next one has already begun.
