The Middle East has undergone epochal change since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. The period between this attack and the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran in June 2025 was a transitional phase in which a new order began emerging in the Middle East, the contours of which are gradually becoming discernible. The most important events of this period of almost two years were Iran's defeat in a direct conflict with Israel and the temporary end of the Islamic Republic's expansion. On top of this came the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, which not only weakened Iran but was also a major success for Turkey.
The conflicts of 2023 to 2025 were primarily fought between the regional powers Israel and Iran (and Iran's allies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis); the United States only intervened significantly when Israeli firepower was insufficient to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. However, that should not obscure the fact that the era of American hegemony in the Middle East is coming to an end and being replaced by a multipolar order in which the US is still exerting considerable influence on events, but as the same time is seeking to distance itself more and more.
Instead, the initiative is passing to regional powers that are preparing to shape the next phase of Middle Eastern history in their favor—but which are all too weak on their own to impose their visions of order on others.
Iran the Loser
In the years following the Arab Spring of 2011, Iran became increasingly powerful. In its quest to become a regional superpower, the Islamic Republic focused on a military nuclear program, the mass production of rockets, cruise missiles, and drones, and the expansion of a network of allies that Tehran called “the Axis of Resistance.”
When the US and Iran agreed their nuclear deal in 2015 that halted Iran’s military nuclear development at least temporarily, Tehran concentrated on the Axis of Resistance to pursue its hegemonic ambitions. Its most important allies were the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Yemeni Ansarallah (also known as the “Houthis”), Shiite militias in Iraq, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories. The alliance was held together by money and weapons from Iran, but also by a shared ideology that was based partly on Shiite Islamism but mainly on the common denominator of left-wing extremist anti-imperialism that also won over Sunnis such as Hamas. Syria was a particularly important component of this alliance because it was Iran's only state ally and the Islamic Republic had been working closely with it since 1980.
However, with the start of protests in Syria in 2011 and the ensuing civil war, the Assad regime became a burden for Tehran. In the summer of 2015, Iran and Russia had to send troops to prevent the overthrow of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. But the Islamic Republic also exploited the weakness of the Assad regime to pursue its own goals. Starting in 2017, Iranian and pro-Iranian troops and militias began securing a “land bridge” across large parts of Syria, through which personnel, weapons, and equipment could be transported from Iran via Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, where they were made available to Hezbollah.
In addition, Iran worked with Hezbollah in southern Syria to establish a “second front” from which it could threaten Israel with missiles of all types, as it did from southern Lebanon (the “first front”). Tehran wanted to bombard Israel with missiles from Lebanon, Syria, and the Gaza Strip in the event of a conflict and overcome Israeli air defenses through the sheer mass of projectiles. Starting in 2017, Israel's air force flew well over a thousand airstrikes against Iranian and Iranian-loyal units in Syria, thus preventing the second front from becoming a reality.
These attacks continued after Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7, inflicting heavy losses on the Iranians. Throughout 2024, Tehran suffered one defeat after another. First, Hamas was almost completely wiped out in the Gaza Strip, and the head of its Political Bureau, Ismail Haniya, was targeted and killed in Tehran in July. Then, in September and October, Israel took out Hezbollah's top leadership and destroyed large parts of the organization's military infrastructure. Direct attacks by Iran on Israel in April and October showed how small a threat it posed to Israel, while the counterattacks became demonstrations of Israeli superiority.
The fact that the Assad regime collapsed almost without a fight in December 2024 under the onslaught of the jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) was another serious setback for Iran, because it meant the Axis of Resistance had lost its central link without which it became virtually impossible to support Hezbollah with large weapon systems. It was almost a logical consequence for Israel to respond by attacking the now almost defenseless Iran in June 2025 with the aim of destroying its nuclear program in a bid to eliminate this threat too, as permanently as possible.
Israel the Victor
With its success in the Twelve-Day War in June, Israel emerged, at least seemingly, as the resounding victor in the conflict with Iran. In politics and public opinion, this success was widely compared to that of the Middle East wars of 1967 and 1973. In addition to its victory over Iran, Israel had been able to massively weaken Tehran's allies such as Hamas and Hezbollah between 2023 and 2025. The fall of the Assad regime was also the result, to a considerable extent, of Israeli attacks on militias of the Axis of Resistance in Syria since 2017, which were intensified again in 2024. The air campaign contributed significantly (but unintentionally) to Iran, Hezbollah, and pro-Iranian militias being unable to assist their Syrian brothers in arms against the HTS attack at the end of 2024.
The Twelve-Day War underscored Israel’s position as the number one military power in the region. It attained a position it had last held in the 1970s, when Egypt, then its strongest adversary in the region, sought peace with it. Nevertheless, some developments have cast Israel's successes in a less favorable light.
The most important was the war in Gaza, which began with the Hamas attack and was not over as of August 2025. The declared goal of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government was to crush Hamas and free the Israeli hostages. Although the Israeli military succeeded in killing the most important leaders of Hamas and (according to Tel Aviv) around 20,000 fighters, the government seemed to have no concept for a post-war order—and no answer to the question of who should replace Hamas as ruler of Gaza. As a result, the terrorist group was able to continue fielding thousands of fighters and maintained control wherever there was no Israeli military presence.
While Israel waged this endless war, tens of thousands of civilians died in the Gaza Strip as a consequence. Due to widespread outrage in the Arab world, Israel ran the risk of maneuvering itself into political isolation in the region. This was particularly dramatic because it had achieved some spectacular diplomatic successes in the years prior to the war. These included, above all, the agreements with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Morocco in 2020, known as the “Abraham Accords,” which had normalized relations and had seemed to signal an end to Israel's regional political isolation. One reason for this was the shared hostility of the pro-Western Arab states and Israel toward Iran.
The logical next step would have been peace with Saudi Arabia, but negotiations between the kingdom, the US, and Israel ended on October 7. Instead, months later, the Saudi crown prince spoke of a “genocide” committed by the Israelis against the Palestinians and demanded a Palestinian state as a precondition for a peace agreement—knowing full well that Netanyahu has been trying to prevent such a state since the beginning of his career in the 1990s.
Turkey the Beneficiary
Turkey kept out of the conflict between Israel and Iran but benefited greatly from the weakening of the Islamic Republic. This was particularly evident in Syria, where Iran lost its only state ally in December 2024 with the fall of the Assad regime, while Turkey gained one with the new Syria under President Ahmed al-Sharaa. The regime change amounted to a regional political earthquake, massively weakening the Iranian camp and benefiting Tehran's opponents.
Since 2015, the conflict between these two groups of states and their allies had dominated the region’s politics and was primarily fought out in the civil wars in Yemen and Syria. But there was also a third, much smaller camp consisting of Turkey and the Emirate of Qatar. Since the turmoil of the Arab Spring in 2011 and 2012, Ankara and Doha had jointly supported Islamists of various stripes in their struggles for power in Syria, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere. Turkey and Qatar evidently hoped that their allies would take power and then rely on close relations with their former supporters. In this way, Turkey and Qatar sought to become leading powers in the Middle East.
From 2013 onwards, it looked as though the two states would fail to fulfil their ambitions in this regard because the military in Egypt staged a coup against the Muslim Brotherhood, which was supported by Ankara and Doha, and Islamists were also unable to gain the upper hand in Syria and Libya. Qatar suffered a particularly strong setback when Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt imposed a land, air, and sea blockade against the emirate in 2017. One reason for this was Qatar's support for the Muslim Brotherhood, which the four states saw as an existential threat to their regimes. With help from Turkey and others, Doha was able to stand its ground, and its neighbors lifted the blockade in early 2021.
Meanwhile, Turkey strode on with its expansion in the region. It went through a brief period of weakness after the failed coup attempt in 2016 but quickly recovered and focused on theaters and conflicts such as the eastern Mediterranean, where it competed for rich offshore gas reserves, Libya, where it intervened directly in 2020 and became the guardian of the western Libyan government in Tripoli, and the Caucasus, where it played a decisive role in strengthening Azerbaijan in its war against Armenia in 2020 and 2023. In Syria, Turkey occupied three large areas in the north of the country between 2016 and 2019 to prevent the Syrian Kurds from expanding the autonomous zone they controlled.
From 2017 onwards, Turkey also supported HTS, which gained control of the last area held by Syrian rebels in the province of Idlib in northwestern Syria. By 2020 at the latest, Idlib was a Turkish protectorate, and the powerful Turkish intelligence service MIT had become HTS' most important ally. The fact that the organization and its Syrian allies succeeded in overthrowing the Assad regime in December 2024 is therefore also and above all a success of Turkey’s policy in the region. It is Turkey and Qatar that are benefiting from the fact that Sunni Islamists have conquered one of the core countries of the Arab world.
Saudi Arabia on Hold
Saudi Arabia is also among the winners of the conflict between Israel and Iran, because Tehran's defeats work in its favor. The kingdom has been in conflict with the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution and is threatened by Tehran's expansionist ambitions. As the Axis of Resistance expanded its positions step by step after 2011, a veritable cold war developed between the two regional powers.
The leadership in Riyadh was already concerned about Tehran's advances in Iraq and Syria, but it saw the main threat coming from the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who had been forming ever closer ties with Iran since 2014. The Houthis captured the Yemeni capital in September 2014, prompting Saudi Arabia and the UAE to enter the civil war on the side of Yemen's internationally recognized government. This intervention proved to be a disastrous failure, as the Houthis even began attacking targets deep inside Saudi Arabia with Iranian missiles in 2017.
When Iran too destroyed Saudi oil facilities in the east of the kingdom in September 2019, the Saudi leadership sent signals that it was interested in ending the conflict. It took until 2022 for Tehran and the Yemeni rebels to agree to a ceasefire that led to a sustained end to hostilities. But by then a fundamental change in Saudi policy had already taken place: Saudi Arabia wasn’t only focusing on easing tensions with Iran but was also distancing itself from the US and seeking closer ties with Russia and China.
Since 2019, Riyadh has frequently stated that the kingdom is committed to peaceful solutions to conflicts in the region and will not take sides in a new bloc confrontation between the US and China. One consequence of this was an agreement with Iran in March 2023 in which the two rivals agreed to resume diplomatic relations and normalize ties – and which was brokered by China. Even after Hamas' attack on Israel, Saudi Arabia often adopted positions that opposed Israel and the US. This had an impact, for example, in the Red Sea, where the Houthis attacked international shipping from the end of 2023 and the kingdom—despite having an existential interest in the security of sea lanes—refused to participate in US or European Union naval missions. Riyadh also voiced opposition to Israel’s attack on Iran and the US intervention.
Despite its new zero-problems policy, it became clear in Saudi Arabia’s negotiations with the US on peace with Israel that the kingdom is preparing for future conflicts with its neighbors. The talks were initiated by the Biden administration and were reportedly close to completion in September 2023. In exchange for agreeing to a peace deal, Riyadh had demanded a formal security guarantee from the US, the delivery of modern weapons systems, and access to nuclear technology. This shows that, despite all the rhetoric about détente and non-alignment, the Saudi leadership was intent on remedying its own weakness in relation to Iran with the help of the US, and on ramping up its military capabilities. In addition, Riyadh is understood to be planning to follow suit if Iran does obtain nuclear weapons.
The US in Retreat
The withdrawal of the US has been the main factor enabling the four regional powers to shape events in the Middle East so profoundly. This shift began almost two decades ago, when many Americans grew weary of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The force of this domestic political shift is highlighted by the fact that presidents as different as Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden all believed that the future of American global politics lies in the Pacific and in the rivalry with China. All three concluded that the wars in the Middle East had to be ended as quickly as possible to free up resources for the conflict further to the east. The withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 was one consequence, the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 another, and President Trump has made no secret of his desire to bring back many more troops from the Middle East.
The fact that the US countered this trend by intervening in the Twelve-Day War and bombing Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan shows how difficult it is for the US to disengage from the Middle East. Domestically, it was a very tough political decision for Trump, who quickly gave assurances that this was a one-off move that would be followed by new diplomatic initiatives. This long-held American desire to withdraw became apparent to the players in the region at an early stage, prompting countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, Israel, Turkey, and even tiny Qatar to try to fill the gaps left by the Americans.
The impact of the American “Pivot to Asia” was particularly evident with Saudi Arabia. Since 1945, the ruling family there had relied on the US being on standby to protect the kingdom from its enemies in the event of conflict. However, after Iran attacked the heart of the Saudi oil industry in September 2019, the Trump administration failed to respond militarily. This prompted the Saudi leadership to distance itself from the US and pursue its own regional policy.
The trend toward greater independence for the local powers will intensify in the Middle East if the US decides to withdraw more troops. A withdrawal from Syria or Iraq, for example, could lead to new conflicts in these countries and a resurgence of Islamic State (IS). Should the US one day also pull out of its large bases in Bahrain or Qatar, this would have even more dramatic consequences for the regional power structure.
New and Old Conflicts
What all the four major regional powers have in common is that none of them is strong enough to impose its will on the region or even on part of it. This suggests there will be continued conflict in an increasingly multipolar Middle East, which—depending on its nature and its scale—could again draw in the US and, one day, China.
Perhaps the most far-reaching of such potential conflicts would be one between Turkey and Israel. Relations between the two countries have deteriorated sharply over the past decade and a half. One important reason for this has been Ankara's support for Islamists in the region. In addition, Turkish politicians, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, repeatedly make headlines with statements that are hostile to Israel and anti-Semitic. Turkey has provided massive support to HTS since 2017 and the group owes its success primarily to Turkish assistance, so it is likely that the new Syria will form a close alliance with Turkey. Israel, however, regards an Islamist and pro-Turkish government in Damascus as a threat and is therefore already trying to keep the new rulers' troops away from the Israeli border.
The second and perhaps more immediate conflict, because it has been going on for so long, is that between Israel and Iran, which is far from over despite Israel's victory in June 2025. Iran remains an important regional power, and since the Axis of Resistance has been greatly weakened and Iran's missile arsenal was not sufficient to deter Israel, Tehran is faced with the question of whether, despite all the obstacles, it should arm itself with nuclear weapons.
Although such an attempt would likely provoke renewed Israeli attacks, it is completely unclear whether the US would again be prepared to destroy well-protected and soon-to-be decentralized Iranian facilities in the future. Rather, it is to be feared that the Islamic Republic will one day succeed in building a nuclear bomb and in protecting itself from its enemies in that way. This will usher in a whole new era in the Middle East, in which several regional states are likely to arm themselves with nuclear weapons.
This applies primarily to Saudi Arabia, which is already showing interest in a nuclear program that closely resembles Iran's and is also likely to serve military purposes. Despite the détente of recent years, the conflict between revolutionary, republican, and Shiite Iran and conservative, monarchical, and Sunni Saudi Arabia continues. There was already a prolonged period of détente between the two rivals in the 1980s, but this was followed by renewed tensions in 2002 because Iran was seeking nuclear weapons. The current period of détente is likely to end in a similar way, because as long as the Islamic Republic in Iran and the monarchy in Saudi Arabia continue to exist, the systemic rivalry between the two powers will keep on triggering conflicts of interest. — Translated from the German by David Crossland
Guido Steinberg is a specialist in Islamic Studies at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin.
