Levant

In less than two decades, a string of offshore discoveries has turned the Eastern Mediterranean into a significant gas-producing region, making Israel an exporter, twice lifting Egypt into the ranks of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporters, and giving Cyprus finds it has yet to bring to market. This backgrounder explores the potential and challenges of exploiting and managing LNG resources in the region.

A year after world leaders gathered in Sharm el-Sheikh to mark the end of the war in Gaza, Israel controls about 70% of the Strip, Hamas retains its arms, and reconstruction has yet to begin. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, record settler violence and settlement expansion are colliding with a Palestinian Authority on the brink of fiscal collapse. Hosts Alistair Taylor and Matthew Czekaj are joined by MEI Associate Fellow Tahani Mustafa to discuss why the Gaza peace plan is deadlocked, an increasingly emboldened Israel in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas’s postponement of Palestinian elections, the Palestinian Authority’s deepening economic crisis, and what role the US could play.

The Trump administration has done more than any of its predecessors to restore sovereignty for a much traumatized nation, Lebanon. The Israel Defense Forces’ operations in 2024 against Hezbollah decimated that organization, long the “A Team” in global terror.

Brian sits down with author and Emmy Award-winning journalist Kim Ghattas to talk about her new book, The Best Kind of American, which tells the story of the 1984 assassination of Malcolm Kerr, then president of the American University of Beirut. They discuss her inspiration for the project, what Kerr’s murder revealed about the Middle East at the time, and why his story still resonates four decades later.

The Israeli government’s plan to build 3,401 housing units in the 12-square-kilometer E-1 corridor, between Jerusalem’s municipal boundary and the Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, would cut the West Bank in two. Israeli officials are under no illusion about the implications. Announcing the plan’s approval in August 2025, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called it a “significant step that practically erases the two-state delusion.”

In the summer of 2003, King Abdullah II told Bloomberg Jordan sits “between Iraq and a hard place,” a play on words designed to describe the kingdom’s challenging environment to an American audience amid the US-led Iraq war to the east and the lingering Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the west. Jordan is grappling with a much “harder place” today.

Brian sits down with Andrew J. Tabler, the Martin J. Gross Senior Fellow in the Linda and Tony Rubin Program on Arab Politics at The Washington Institute, to trace his unique and distinctive path from Oil City, Pennsylvania, to fourteen years living and working in the Middle East. Tabler discusses his time in Syria under the Assad regime, his service as director for Syria at the National Security Council and as senior advisor to the Special Envoy for Syria Engagement at the US State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in the first Trump administration, and explains how these experiences shaped his perspective and inspired him to found the Drake Energy Forum.

On August 7, 2026, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Défense Agreement, a collective-defense pact widely compared to NATO’s Article 5. This essay argues that the comparison is misleading. Mecca borrows NATO’s language of solidarity without yet possessing NATO’s institutional machinery, and the Houthi offensive against Saudi Arabia in September 2026 provided an early and revealing test of what the agreement actually means in practice. Neither Pakistan nor Turkey automatically entered the fight on Saudi Arabia’s behalf, and Washington, despite an initial reluctance to strike directly, remained indispensable through intelligence support and a major proposed F-35 sale. Drawing on realist alliance theory — Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, Stephen Walt, Glenn Snyder, and Steven David — and on the precedent of the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), the essay contends that the Middle East is not dividing into rival blocs but moving from hierarchy toward a looser, overlapping geometry of hedged partnerships, in which American exclusivity is eroding considerably faster than American primacy.

When Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan agreed to a mutual defense pact in August, it was principally seen as a political commitment. The “Mecca alliance,” as it was dubbed, stipulated that an armed attack on one would be treated as an attack on all three, accompanied by deeper military cooperation.

This article is part of a collection of short essays written by the Fellows of the Middle East Institute to explore aspects of the ongoing war with Iran. The intent of the collection is to help readers see new and unexpected elements of the dynamics and impact of the ongoing hostilities and to think harder, deeper, and broader about the implications of the conflict.

In February 2026, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan suggested that shifting international dynamics could push Turkey to acquire nuclear weapons. That rhetoric, combined with Turkey’s civilian nuclear energy and research programs and its indigenous surface-to-surface missile development projects, has fueled concerns that these capabilities could eventually form the backbone of a Turkish nuclear weapons program.

When the US and Israel launched military action against Iran on February 28, 2026, it set in motion a chain of events that saw violence spread across the Middle East. Yet as the region found itself engulfed in conflict, Syria has experienced its most peaceful months in 15 years, and the government in Damascus appears determined to stay its course toward recovery.

The war with Iran has not yet resolved the contest between Tehran and Washington, but it has already begun to reshape the Middle East — and nowhere as clearly in the United States’ favor as in Lebanon. The challenges in Lebanon have presented the US with a defining test: whether Washington and its partners have the determination to convert Iran’s material losses into lasting strategic change.