Washington and Tel Aviv’s ‘war of choice’ against Iran is now an uncontainable regional conflict. “Death and destruction” are spreading across the Middle East. Unceasing American and Israeli airstrikes have hit over 15,000 sites in Iran. With Hezbollah entering the fray, the IDF has reinvaded South Lebanon and bombed targets across the country, killing more than 1,000. In retaliation, Tehran has showered Israel with missiles, effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz and, for the first time, targeted the Gulf States, those erstwhile havens of autocratic tranquility.

As the Islamic Republic digs in for an asymmetrical war of attrition, the incoherence of Donald Trump’s war aims has become sharply apparent. Is the objective to preempt an Iranian attack? To neutralise Tehran’s nuclear programme? Or is it to force the Islamic Republic’s “unconditional surrender” – even as Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War, claims this is “not a regime change war”?

Whether or not Trump intends it, the Middle East will not look the same when this conflict is over. With American assistance, Benjamin Netanyahu is actively seeking to remake the regional order. His objective is to break the ‘Axis of Resistance’ for good and leave Israel as the region’s unquestioned hegemon – finishing the job he started after 7 October. He has cast this “historic struggle” in civilisational terms: “We have to be more powerful than the barbarians, or they will…crash our gates and destroy our societies.” In Iran, Netanyahu plans to “crack” the regime and “create the conditions” for its overthrow – or, absent these, render it a failed state. To that end, he has ordered the assassination of much of the Islamic Republic’s senior leadership, pursuing the “decapitation” strategy previously adopted against Hamas and Hezbollah. In Lebanon, he wants to “remove the threat” of Hezbollah and force normalisation on Beirut.

Netanyahu may succeed or fail in his stated ambitions, but this war is a death knell for America’s longstanding Middle East policy. Since the 1973 oil shock, American strategists have divided the region, like a diptych, into two distinct parts. In one panel sits the Levant, where the US has pursued normalisation with Israel while endlessly deferring Palestinian statehood. In the other sits the Gulf, where Washington has provided military patronage to the region’s monarchies, who in return cater to the world’s energy needs. By splitting the region, the US sought to prevent the “oil weapon” – as contemporaries called the Arab states’ embargo – from being used to resolve the question of Palestine. American policy, from Camp David to the Abraham Accords, has followed this logic.

Yet the US approach has always rested on fragile assumptions: that the two panels can be kept apart, that Gulf states’ acquiescence can be endlessly counted upon, and that Palestinian statehood can be quietly laid to rest. Since the early aughts, the emergence of Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ has challenged the drive for normalisation. But ultimately, in attempting to destroy the Axis, the US and Israeli have themselves upended the status quo. By disrupting global oil supplies and attacking the Gulf, Tehran has exposed the flaws in Washington’s vision of regional order.

The question is whether Trump and Netanyahu can find a way out of the chaos. Or whether they have set the Middle East on an irreversible path toward entropy and the unravelling of the state system that emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman empire a century ago.

Washington’s bifurcated regional order was born in response to the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, which began with a a coordinated Egyptian-Syrian offensive on Tel Aviv. Israel soon recovered the initiative, thanks to considerable American support: by the war’s end, President Richard Nixon had sent some 22,000 tons of materiel, including 36 F-4 Phantom fighter jets and twelve C-130 Hercules transport planes. Washington’s helping hand to Tel Aviv incurred the wrath of Arab oil-producing states. Abu Dhabi, Libya, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia – who together produced a third of the world’s crude – declared a complete embargo on oil sales to the US and other states supporting the Israeli war effort. The oil shock left Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state, railing against the Arab states. “If one small country had tried in the nineteenth century to do what the Arabs are doing,” he told General Franco’s right-hand man Luis Carrero Blanco, “it would have been occupied.”

Seeking a way to break the deadlock, Kissinger alighted on an approach that would serve as the foundation of Washington’s regional policies for decades to come. In the Levant, he deliberately sidestepped – and sidelined – the Palestinians, abandoning his predecessors’ efforts to secure a comprehensive, multilateral peace deal incorporating a “just settlement” of the refugee problem. In a radical break with precedent, Kissinger instead pursued “step-by-step” diplomacy – a “series of separate, bilateral, and incremental negotiations”, as the historian of American foreign relations Salim Yaqub has described it, intended to pave the way towards normalisation between Tel Aviv and its Arab neighbors.

For this approach to work, Kissinger needed to neutralise the “oil weapon” His solution was to use used America’s military might to prop up the absolutist monarchies of the Gulf, wary of domestic challenges to their rule. Nowhere was this clearer than in Saudi Arabia where, by 1976, the US Corps of Engineers was overseeing projects worth, in today’s money, some $95 billion.

The two parts of the diptych were in place. A new regional order, centered on America’s alliances with Riyadh, Tel Aviv and Cairo, was coming into being.

In March 1979, President Jimmy Carter, building on Kissinger’s efforts, secured step-by-step diplomacy’s first major success: a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Despite Carter’s earnest commitment to a Palestinian “homeland,” Camp David was a victory for Menachem Begin, Israel’s right-wing prime minister. Deferring talk of Palestinian statehood, it spoke only of an interim “self-governing authority.” Kissinger’s policy of protecting Israel by circumventing the Palestinians was bearing dividends.

The following year, against the backdrop of the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter formalised US dominance in the Gulf. “Any attempt by outside forces to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States,” declared the Carter Doctrine. “It will be repelled by the use of any means necessary, including military force.” Carter explicitly linked the Gulf’s security to the pursuit of a “comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement.” Yet, in practice, little was done to articulate the two parts of a regional policy that remained combustible and crisis-prone – as Saddam Hussein showed when he invaded Kuwait and rained Scud missiles on Israel, turning against his American and Gulf backers.

Ironically, Washington’s swift victory in the First Gulf War put the question of Palestine back on the table. In his hour of triumph, President George HW Bush told Congress that “the time has come to put an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Confident in Washington’s hegemony over a post-Cold War world, he coerced both sides into a peace process that began with the Madrid Conference in 1991, where Palestinian and Israeli negotiators sat face-to-face for the first time. Yet the process remained skewed by Israeli – and American – negotiators’ refusal to contemplate discussion of a Palestinian state.

Frustrated with the lack of progress at Madrid, Yasir Arafat made the fatal decision to dispatch his lieutenants Ahmad Qurei and Mahmud Abbas to Norway for secret negotiations with a team of Israeli diplomats. They were systematically outmaneuvered by their Israeli counterparts, who insisted that Palestinian sovereignty, borders, and the final status of Jerusalem were all off the agenda, largely restricting the talks to economic cooperation. Out of this hopelessly off-kilter process would emerge the Oslo accords, which Edward Said famously damned as a “Palestinian Versailles.”

In return for giving up their fundamental claims against Israel, the Palestinians received the mere spectre of sovereignty. Oslo left the structures of occupation in place, imposing a new, stifling “matrix of control” over everyday life in the West Bank and Gaza. By the early 2000s, the Oslo process was effectively dead: George W. Bush’s 2003 “road map for peace,” which never progressed beyond its first phase, proved its funeral orison.

The occupation of Iraq, far from exporting the “Washington consensus” to the Middle East, gave rise to Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance:’ Hamas, Hezbollah, the Assad regime and, after 2014, the Houthis. In Israel, Netanyahu, who returned to power in 2009, took a combative stance toward the Obama administration’s lackluster attempts to resurrect the peace process. Trump vindicated Netanyahu’s radicalism when, during his first term, he recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, ripped up Obama’s Iran nuclear deal and, in 2020, announced the Abraham Accords.

The Accords’ intent was clear: to end the question of Palestinian statehood by securing the Gulf states’ acquiescence in Israel’s occupation. What Kissinger had started, by separating America’s Levant and Gulf polices, Trump would finish by bringing the Gulf States and Israel together – without the bothersome matter of Palestine. Breaking with international law and longstanding precedent, the Accords foresaw the absorption of large parts of the West Bank into Israel – to avoid “uprooting” settlers “from their homes” – and the enshrining of Jerusalem as the “undivided capital” of Israel. The new Palestinian state Trump and Kushner envisioned would be sovereign in name only: demilitarised, non-contiguous, subject to Israeli security imperatives, and without control of its own borders and airspace. Here was the “prosthetic,” mutilated sovereignty of Oslo taken to its logical conclusion – the simulacrum of a state with no control over its own destiny.

Trump’s “deal of the century” was underwritten by improved relations between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain, who both wanted access to Tel Aviv’s tech and defense sectors and shared its sense of Iran as an existential threat. But the deal relied on the assumption that other states, above all Saudi Arabia, could just as easily be won over – and that the Palestinians could once again be circumvented. In launching the October 7 attack, Hamas made a terrible wager: Israel’s retribution would make normalisation a political liability for the Arab states, stopping the process in its tracks.

In his second term, an emboldened Trump has made a concerted effort to capitalise on the gains of Israel’s wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, reshaping the Middle East in ways amenable to Netanyahu’s agenda. The US envoy Tom Barrack, one of the architects of the Abraham Accords, pressured the fragile administrations in Lebanon and Syria, battered by the Israeli war machine and desperate for economic assistance, into making concessions. Before 28 February, this strongarm diplomacy appeared to be yielding the results that Washington and Tel Aviv sought, paving the way toward normalisation and blunting the ‘Axis of Resistance’. In Damascus, Ahmad al-Sharaa – the former jihadi Trump surreally praised as a “tough guy, with a strong past”– responded to Israeli incursions by indicating his readiness to negotiate with Tel Aviv. Nawaf Salam, Lebanon’s seemingly unassuming prime minister, committed to disarming Hezbollah.

With their typical impatience, Trump and Netanyahu didn’t wait around to see the results of this diplomacy, feeling perhaps that only war could force the Arab states to accept Israeli hegemony. In an interview with Fox News, Netanyahu blithely predicted “many more peace treaties” to come after its conclusion. Already, some regional leaders are buckling under the pressure. On 2 March, Salam declared Hezbollah’s military activities “illegal.” A week later, Joseph Aoun, Lebanon’s president, called for direct negotiations with Israel on security arrangements at the border – a statement widely viewed as an overture toward normalisation.

Yet the Gulf Cooperation Council has, so far, proved unwilling to join the war. Netanyahu and Trump’s gambit both overestimated the Gulf states’ appetite for direct confrontation with Iran and underestimated their frustration with Washington and fear of Israel. The anger provoked by the Islamic Republic’s attacks on Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai and other states has been directed not just at Tehran, but also at Washington. One prominent Saudi analyst voiced dismay that the US was “concentrating on Israel, without heed for the countries of the Gulf.” A Bahraini newspaper expressed bewilderment that anyone could fall for the “fairytale” of “American protection.”

Israel’s actions since 7 October, meanwhile, have given rise to a fear that it is a “regional bully that is out of control,” as the Israeli researcher Yoel Guzansky told The New Yorker. Iran’s counterstrikes may have been a “rude awakening,” as the American diplomat Dennis Ross has observed, but that does not mean “that we’re on the brink of normalisation.” The GCC states see Israel’s actions through the prism of the genocide in Gaza and believe that extremist cabinet members Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir – with their calls to “conquer” Gaza, invade Lebanon, and “eliminate” Syria’s leader – “define what Israel will do.”

If the Abraham Accords were an effort to stitch together the two parts of America’s Middle East policy, Trump and Netanyahu’s war on Iran has ripped a tear through the canvas. The question now is whether a victorious Israel will resemble Italy after World War One, when it was allowed to claim the winner’s share from a defeated, motheaten Austria? Or whether it will emerge more like Venizelos’s Greece, given free hand to realize its expansionist “great idea”?

That is: will Israel complete its annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, finally eliminating any faint hope that still remains for Palestinian statehood? Or will it go even further, into Lebanon and Syria? Where does Netanyahu’s Trump-abetted adventurism end? At a time when Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador, can earnestly declare that Israel has a biblical “right” to land between the Nile and the Euphrates, no-one can be sure. In the meantime, the people of the region can only watch as their countries are turned into the “battlefields” of Trump and Netanyahu’s imperial war of choice.