The term “Middle East” reflects the region’s historical centrality to Western powers. Popularized in 1902 by the U.S. naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, it described the lands between Arabia and India, specifically to underscore their strategic importance to British imperial interests.
So it was no surprise that the transfer of global supremacy from Britain to the United States after World War II played out most consequentially in the Middle East, its geopolitical center shifting from London’s colonial mandates to Washington’s Cold War and oil-security interests.
The Middle East was soon incorporated into a U.S.-led order in which Washington provided military protection and underwrote the political conditions for the region’s integration into the global economy. The United States secured maritime trade routes, guaranteed energy flows, and anchored the dollar-based oil market. Oil revenues cycled through Western financial markets, regional economies oriented themselves toward U.S.-led globalization, and U.S. military power served as the ultimate guarantor of stability.
The coherence of that order rested on the fact that its economic and security dimensions were led by the same power. Today, that alignment is eroding as the redistribution of economic power toward China reshapes geopolitics. Whereas the United States now primarily extends influence through military power and security provision, China has expanded its reach through trade, infrastructure, economic statecraft, and increasingly by presenting itself as a predictable actor on the global stage.
The current rebalancing will likely take decades to play out, but rarely have economic dependence and security provision been so visibly concentrated in different hands. For 70 years, the U.S.-led order endured because commerce and security moved together. The Middle East is the first major arena where this coherence is dissolving. Economic and security dependence point in different directions, and the result is not a clean handoff from one hegemon to another but a potential disaggregation of hegemony itself.
For most of the postwar period, China was a marginal actor in the Middle East—a buyer of oil with little political weight or strategic ambition. That changed with the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, which ushered in a new era of cooperation centered on energy and infrastructure.
The scale of the shift is striking: Trade between China and the Arab world grew from roughly $36 billion in 2004 to nearly $400 billion by 2024. China has become the world’s largest crude importer and the Middle East’s largest trading partner. Meanwhile, Beijing has expanded its diplomatic presence across the region, most notably brokering the 2023 rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. It has consistently avoided direct military involvement and maintains no military bases in the region.
By contrast, the United States maintains military installations in at least 19 locations in the Middle East and continues to underwrite Gulf countries’ defenses through carrier deployments and missile-defense systems. It leads counterterrorism operations, arms its partners through tens of billions of dollars in sales, and treats the free flow of Gulf states’ energy as a standing strategic commitment. Since 2019, it has been a net energy exporter that competes with regional producers in international markets.
But while the United States continues to anchor security, it no longer carries the region’s economic weight.
The Iran war threw this inversion into sharp relief. When the conflict choked traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the power most exposed was not the United States, Israel, or Iran—it was China. As the largest importer of the oil that transits the strait, China found its energy lifeline hostage to a confrontation that it had no hand in and no forces to manage. The United States, for its part, leaned on a naval blockade of Iran’s ports as principal leverage, committing military resources to police a choke point with commercial beneficiaries that lie largely in Asia.
This mismatch between where trade flows and where military power resides means that economic interdependence no longer maps onto alliance structures. States sell their oil to one great power while relying on another for protection, and their economic and security partners increasingly operate according to different strategic priorities and threat perceptions.
The strains of this dynamic are already evident: When the United States asked several NATO allies, as well as China, Japan, and South Korea, to help police the strait, they declined—leaving the United States to shoulder a burden whose economic rewards accrue elsewhere.
As Washington’s commitments appear increasingly detached from its economic stake in the Middle East, the result is thinner deterrence, greater risk of miscalculation by adversaries, and a growing tendency toward hedging rather than alignment. States in the region now court China economically, the United States militarily, and Russia or others opportunistically.
With economic and security dependence heading in opposing directions, Middle Eastern states are being pushed toward a self-managed equilibrium. Hedging alone cannot stabilize a region in which external guarantors have divergent interests and uneven commitments. The more diffuse the international order becomes, the greater the incentive for Middle Eastern powers to reduce their exposure to great-power rivalry by managing tensions directly with one another.
What is emerging is not autonomy in the traditional sense, but something narrower and more pragmatic: a gradual shift from externally mediated order toward regionally negotiated coexistence.
The evidence of Middle Eastern states increasingly opting for de-intermediation—engaging one another directly rather than through external patrons—is difficult to ignore. The 2023 Saudi-Iranian rapprochement has survived repeated shocks. Turkey and the Gulf states have moved from open rivalry toward active normalization. Most Arab capitals have reengaged Damascus, ending more than a decade of formal isolation.
Gulf states are coordinating with neighbors on energy infrastructure, transport corridors, and logistics in ways that would have been politically unthinkable a decade ago. Quiet channels between Riyadh and Tehran, Ankara and Cairo, and Abu Dhabi and Doha increasingly substitute for Washington’s good offices.
The U.S.-Iran war might seem to refute this thesis. For now, it does not appear that it will drag on indefinitely, assuming that the current peace deal holds. But the manner of the conflict’s resolution has sharpened the region’s predicament rather than easing it. The United States demonstrated that it could still initiate, escalate, and halt a war, all while the region’s principal economic partner stood aside.
Moreover, even though the war was devastating to the entire region, it was managed on a timetable and terms set bilaterally by the United States and Iran. For Gulf states, the lesson was not that their security patron is unreliable, but that its commitments—increasingly detached from economic interests—have become unpredictable. This exposure is pushing these countries toward more autonomous arrangements.
In May, Saudi Arabia reportedly floated a regional nonaggression pact involving Iran and other states, somewhat modeled on the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which helped reduce Cold War tensions through codified norms and confidence-building measures. European governments and EU institutions encouraged Gulf states to support the proposal as a way to reduce the risk of future conflict while offering Iran limited security guarantees. Its reception, however, has been mixed, reflecting the ambivalence that drives the turn toward self-help in the first place.
Gulf capitals’ fears that the Iran war will leave a weakened but more hawkish leadership in Tehran, still capable of threatening its neighbors, make a regional framework attractive but its durability uncertain. None of this yet amounts to a coherent regional order, but it is the first sustained attempt in two generations to construct one without an external guarantor.
Helsinki rested on two coherent blocs, institutionalized arms-control mechanisms, and a shared if grudging recognition of strategic stalemate—conditions that do not currently exist in the Middle East. But the underlying logic remains relevant: States need not trust one another to agree to bound their behavior, codify their disagreements, and create channels capable of surviving crises.
Success would not require a fully institutionalized regional order. It would require a modest architecture capable of absorbing shocks without immediately triggering external intervention; a credible commitment to halt the cross-border arming of proxies; and a habit of routine, direct engagement.
Past attempts at regional integration—from the Arab League to the Gulf Cooperation Council—have foundered on the same two obstacles: persistent rivalries among the would-be architects and the ever-present option of dialing the United States to underwrite. What is different today is that Washington is less reliably on the line. Its power has not vanished, but its application has become harder to anticipate. And prediction is the foundation on which security guarantees ultimately rest.
Failure to build an architecture capable of fostering integration, however, would leave the region trapped as an arena for great-power competition rather than an actor within it, increasingly dependent on guarantors whose attention and resources are being directed elsewhere. After postponing it for half a century, Middle Eastern leaders now must choose whether to build a regional architecture themselves or remain mired in crises that they are increasingly powerless to control.
