This frame isn’t gone, exactly. But it has thinned out, and what is emerging in its place is less a new order than the return of an old state of affairs: a truly multipolar contest between regional powers, shielding outside powers, and a Washington that intervenes selectively rather than consistently.
Vacuum that is not empty
It has become a cliché to describe the American cut as leaving a “vacuum”. The metaphor is misleading. Vacuums mean that nothing rushes to fill them evenly; in practice, the space vacated by a retreating hegemon is claimed unevenly, by whichever regional actor has the greatest capacity and clearest interest at the time.
In the post-hegemonic Middle East, this has meant three simultaneous, overlapping races rather than a succession order.
One, a Gulf race for economic and diplomatic supremacy. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have spent the last decade building foreign policies independent of Washington’s preferences and in some cases openly contrary to Washington’s preferences — de-escalating with Iran, hedging with China, buying weapons wherever they are best.
This is not “anti-Americanism”. This is what realist theory would predict for any capable state once a protector’s guarantees become less secure: diversification of dependence.
Second, a struggle for Iran’s regional position, waged less through direct state-to-state warfare than through agents, sabotage, and the occasional overt attack, with the underlying question never fully resolved: does a chastened, economically squeezed Iran shrink to its borders, or does it reinvest in deterrence architecture—less flimsy nuclear lag. attractive?
Three, a realignment of Israel’s regional relations, in which normalization with parts of the Arab world continues simultaneously with the unresolved, perhaps worsening, conflict over the Palestinian issue—a contradiction that outside powers have generally preferred to manage rather than resolve, because resolution was never actually a precondition for continued diplomatic normalization.
None of this required an American withdrawal. It only required that regional actors not assume that Washington’s veto was permanent.
What a post-hegemony does and does not mean
It pays to be precise about what did not happen. The United States maintains more military capacity in and around the region than any other outside power, and has shown, repeatedly, a willingness to use it — carrier groups, airstrikes, sanctions regimes that other economies have yet to fully avoid.
Post-hegemony does not mean American absence. It means the end of the American assumption—the assumption, held both in Washington and in regional capitals for decades, that outcomes in the Middle East ultimately had to be arbitrated by Washington.
The realist critique of the old hegemonic project was never that American power was inadequate to the task.
It was that the task itself—stabilizing a region through permanent forward deployment, endless security guarantees, and periodic wars of choice—generated more instability than it resolved, at a cost disproportionate to any American interests at stake.
Iraq is the textbook case; Libya and the long Syrian entanglement are notes to the same argument. A superpower that ties its credibility to outcomes it cannot fully control ultimately finds its credibility hostage to actors—client states, insurgencies, rival powers—with far more at stake locally than Washington does globally.
Questions of China and Russia, softened
Many American commentators treat the defense of the Gulf against Beijing and Moscow as evidence of a rival hegemonic project that replaces the American one. This overestimates both China’s appetite and Russia’s capacity.
Beijing has shown continued interest in commercial access and energy security, and almost no interest in the security role the United States has played—no infrastructure, no defense treaties, no willingness to adjudicate Sunni-Shiite or Arab-Israeli disputes.
Russia, degraded by its war in Ukraine, maintains influence through arms sales and its Syrian base, but lacks the spare capacity to guarantee anyone’s safety in a crisis.
What both offer regional states is not a substitute protector, but a bargaining lever against the current one – precisely the diversification that a rational middle power seeks as it doubts the viability of an existing protector.
Uunpleasantly realistic ending
The likely trajectory is not a stable new balance, but a stronger, more expensive, more diplomatically improvised regional policy—with wars managed rather than prevented, deterrence relationships that change with each crisis, and external powers, including the United States, drawn in episodically rather than continuously.
This is not a comforting sight. But he may be honest, and candid photographs are a better basis for policy than the nostalgic assumption that American primacy in the Middle East was ever without cost, or that its erosion is a crisis to be reversed rather than a condition to be managed.
The question for American policymakers is not how to restore the old framework. It’s whether Washington can define a narrower set of real interests—nonproliferation, freedom of navigation, denying any exclusive power control of energy flows in the Gulf—and pursue them without reclaiming the guarantor chair for everything else.
This is a more difficult discipline than full withdrawal or full reengagement. It is also, on realistic premises, the only one likely to be sustainable.
it ITEM was originally published in Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is reprinted with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.
