Great Powers in the Middle East

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.

Proponents of the war with Iran have taken recent increases in crude-oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz as proof that the US strategy is finally working. President Trump is so confident in this that he recently rejected a seven-day plan, set forward by Iran’s foreign ministry, to end the war and open the strait. The United States is “winning tremendously,” Trump boasted.

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.

The conventional framing of China’s role in the Middle East in policy discourse centers on a familiar question: what challenge does Beijing pose to US primacy? The answer is often framed as a largely linear story in which expanding economic influence gradually translates into geopolitical leverage.  Yet this view captures only part of the reality.

Europe did not choose the war with Iran, and most European governments still resist describing themselves as participants in it. But six months of military basing, missile-defense drawdowns, energy shocks, sanctions pressure and planning for possible migration crisis have made that distance harder to sustain.

When President Xi Jinping arrived in Cairo this week for his first state visit to Egypt in a decade, trade, investment and geopolitics were inevitably high on the agenda. But Xi also made something else unusually prominent: culture.

In many ways, the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran and the war in Gaza that preceded it seem transformative. After decades of shadow warfare, Iran and Israel have now attacked each other’s homelands directly. And Israel and the United States have joined forces in a genuinely novel way to wage war against Iran.

It is now clear the United States is sinking into the quagmire of its war with Iran with no clear idea of how to get out. More than five months of intermittent bombing of Iran have not brought Tehran any closer to surrender. Recurring threats by US President Donald Trump to launch a massive military campaign against the country aren’t causing Iran to submit to US demands.

As the US-Israel-Iran war enters its sixth month, the conflict has taken a sharp turn. After a brief lull in the fighting, Iran launched a surprise ballistic missile attack on US forces on July 28, and the US and Saudi Arabia struck back at Iran-backed militias in Iraq, marking Riyadh’s entry into the war. MEI Senior Fellow Alex Vatanka joins host Alistair Taylor to discuss the escalation, what may come next, and the state of talks over sharing the Strait of Hormuz.

Sometimes the only thing more frightening than Afghanistan’s problems is the Taliban’s solutions and the recently signed Russia-Taliban military-technical agreement may be the most alarming one yet. The partnership signals that Afghanistan’s security architecture is being rebuilt without the United States, and increasingly by America’s rivals. Washington should pay close attention because the deal hands one of the world’s most repressive regimes a pathway to becoming more capable and deeply entrenched in a regional order where Russian influence is expanding at America’s expense.