Research & Commentary Results

Crude oil is flowing out of the Gulf again, but the market is no better prepared for another disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. It has assembled a temporary system for managing one. Crude exports from the Gulf, excluding Iran, returned to pre-war levels in September, while total Gulf shipments reached 15.5 million barrels a day, more than 80% of the pre-conflict volume.

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.

On September 30, the US completed its military withdrawal from Iraq, ending a 12-year-long mission to combat ISIS that began in 2014. The date was also meant to be the deadline for disarming the largely Iranian-backed militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), but Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has now pushed that cutoff back to June 30, 2027. MEI Distinguished Diplomatic Fellow Amb. (ret.) Robert S. Ford joins hosts Alistair Taylor and Matthew Czekaj to discuss what the US military withdrawal means for Iraqi security and the nature of the bilateral relationship going forward. They also speak about what it will take for Baghdad to bring the PMF militias to heel, and how Iraq may navigate the post-Iran war era.

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.

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.

There may be no near-term resolution to the conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran. The cease-fire and memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed on June 18  have broken down, there is little diplomatic engagement, and new flare-ups in early September indicate a further round of escalation. Gulf states may have no choice but to protect their assets and populations while trying to deter Iran by finding mechanisms of both containment and accommodation.

Across the Gulf, views differ widely on how the Iran war can and should end, and what the region will look like once it does. Yet on the crisis over the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the view is near-unanimous that a repeat is not only possible but likely. That expectation, more than any single incident over the past year, is becoming a major driver of decision-making in industry and policy circles alike.

When Iranian drones struck two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE on March 1, 2026, and damaged a third in Bahrain the same morning, many thought this could spell the end of the Gulf’s AI ambitions. Whatever the intent, the attacks highlighted the new reality that data centers have now become targets in inter-state wars.

Egypt, which is not party to the war on Iran, has become a target as well as an intermediary in the conflict. As a result, the war has affected Egypt’s future calculations, particularly in three major areas: its economy, its security, and its regional alliances. 

Apart from the brief honeymoon period between 1961 and 1963 under President John F. Kennedy and President Nazim al-Qudsi, US-Syria relations have never held such optimistic potential as they do today. Today, following the fall of Bashar al-Assad regime and the rise of a new government under President Ahmad al-Sharaa at the end of 2024, a new geopolitical window has opened.

Moroccans head to the polls on September 23 in a parliamentary election that is meant to formally close the chapter opened during last year’s Gen Z 212 protests. The demonstrations, which erupted almost exactly a year ago, drew attention to the mismatch that exists between Morocco’s economic and geopolitical ambitions, and the stark reality of its lagging domestic development.

Although it has been a frustrating summer, Lebanon remains on the right track. My observation after a ten-day visit to Beirut and Jerusalem this month is that leaders in both capitals remain strongly committed to a shared objective.

Though it has fallen out of the headlines because of the Iran war, Syria has had a dramatically consequential summer. Hosts Alistair Taylor and Matthew Czekaj are joined by MEI Senior Fellow Charles Lister to take stock of recent developments: the dissolution of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, Israeli strikes and the friction with Turkey they have exposed, the standoff in Sweida, as well as Damascus’s bid to turn Syria into a trade corridor between the Mediterranean and the Gulf. Is the transition consolidating or fragmenting nearly two years after the fall of the Assad regime?

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), also known as Iraqi Kurdistan, is a semi-autonomous region in northeastern Iraq with a population of approximately 6.5 million. The KRI’s contemporary politics are rooted in a century of Kurdish efforts to achieve self-rule.

North African governments have sought to remain outside the US-Iran conflict, regardless of their differing alignments and preferences. Geography insulates them from the fighting, but not from the consequences. That duality is the region’s predicament: what makes North Africa useful to others is what leaves it exposed.