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Tom Hussain

Amid the rubble of the US-Israel war on Iran, a new Middle East appears to be taking shape as a constellation of regional powers jockey for a seat at the table.
Led by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the grouping stretches from the Gulf across the Caucasus to Central and South Asia, binding together countries with overlapping interests, interlocking partnerships and a shared conviction: that the post-war order should not be dictated exclusively by the US-Israel alliance or Iran and its battered but unbroken “Axis of Resistance”.
“Fear of US abandonment is pushing states to build more diplomatic mass, even if they cannot yet build an integrated military bloc,” said Andreas Krieg, an associate professor of defence studies at King’s College London who previously advised Qatar’s armed forces on behalf of the UK defence ministry.
“A mixed system” was emerging, he said – one in which multilateral formats “increasingly handle the grand strategic questions” while the hard security balance would still be dominated by Washington and whatever survives of Tehran’s proxy network.
The most consequential of these new groupings is the so-called regional coordination framework, comprising Nato member Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt – the Arab world’s largest military power – and nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Together, the four are pressing hard for a negotiated settlement to the Iran war, with Islamabad playing the dual role of mediator between Tehran and Washington, and a trusted representative for its regional partners: above all Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia signed its defence pact with Pakistan last September, after witnessing neighbouring Qatar endure air strikes from both Iran and Israel.
These attacks – which targeted a US military base and Hamas negotiators, respectively – were delivered with a brazen impunity that sent a chill through the Gulf monarchies.
Riyadh responded by shoring up a relationship with Islamabad it now regards as a strategic insurance policy.
That insurance has since proved prescient. Despite exhaustive efforts to avoid being drawn into a conflict stretching back to Hamas’ attack on southern Israel in October 2023 that sparked the Gaza war, the Gulf states have found their economic infrastructure repeatedly targeted by Iran in the latest conflagration, which the US and Israel launched on February 28.
Amid the fallout from the war, the United Arab Emirates has absorbed more Iranian drone and missile strikes than any other country over the past two months.

Antalya alliances
Pakistan, meanwhile, has emerged as a pivotal broker of power and peace in the ongoing regional realignment.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif met Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in Doha on April 15, with the two leaders exploring “ways to further strengthen ties, particularly in the fields of security, defence and energy”, according to a statement from Sharif’s office.
Two days later they met again in Turkey, where they held talks with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, fuelling speculation that a defence pact between Islamabad and Doha was in the works – potentially extending Pakistan’s role in the Gulf.
At that same conference in Antalya, Erdogan and Sharif also met Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, reflecting a trilateral partnership that has emerged as a secondary fault line in the South Caucasus by dint of the latter country’s border with Iran and its close ties with Israel.

Azerbaijan came under Iranian attack early in the latest conflict as Kurdish fighters massed in northern Iraq ahead of a prospective invasion of Iran: a move ultimately “ruled out” by US President Donald Trump.
Relations between Baku and Tehran have since seemingly stabilised, with Azerbaijan even reportedly sending humanitarian aid to Iran.
Erdogan also used the Antalya gathering to host a summit of the Organisation of Turkic States, whose members include Azerbaijan and several Central Asian nations.
Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev attended, asserting the weight of the region’s largest economy, while Sharif’s presence prompted calls for Pakistan to seek membership of the grouping: a development that would further deepen the web of connectivity underpinning these emerging groupings.
None of these overlapping frameworks is on course to become a Nato-style regional security alliance, however. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan was unambiguous on this point in Antalya, pouring cold water on talk of the coordination framework acquiring a military dimension.
“We aren’t like Israel. They established a military alliance with Greece and Cyprus against the Muslim countries,” Fidan said. “We, unlike Israel, try to end the conflicts in the region, stabilise it.”

According to Krieg, these groupings “will carry real weight, but in a different way” to the US-Israel partnership or Iran’s proxy network. Their value lies not in raw firepower but in political leverage, “shaping diplomatic outcomes, setting red lines and organising regional positions when Washington looks unreliable”.
An Arab-Islamic Nato in the “strict, treaty-bound sense” was unlikely to emerge, however. The region “is too divided on threat priorities and too wary of automatic mutual defence commitments” to countenance such an arrangement, Krieg said.
The UAE’s exasperation with its fellow Arab League and Gulf Cooperation Council members underlines this point.
Abu Dhabi, which views Iran – rather than Israel – as its primary threat, has grown increasingly frustrated with the seeming paralysis of both groupings.
Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE’s president, did not mince his words at a press conference on April 17 in Dubai, calling the GCC’s response “weak on the political and security fronts in light of what we have witnessed over the past days of blatant Iranian aggression”.

Marketing and muscle
A realistic structure for the region to adopt, according to Krieg, would be a two-layer model combining a web of bilateral defence pacts to “do the real work underneath” with a “looser multilateral political umbrella that looks like a security architecture” above.
Joint statements, exercises and periodic planning sessions “marketed as collective security” were likely to result, he said.
But the actual military muscle would reside in partnerships like the Saudi-Pakistan defence pact and purpose-built small-unit coalitions that are nimble and functional in ways that grand multilateral structures cannot match.
For the region’s so-called middle powers, this would still represent a meaningful change. They were not about to match the US-Israel alliance for “raw military power”, Krieg said, nor could they replicate Iran’s asymmetric reach.
But they are, with increasing coordination and conviction, insisting on making their voices heard in what comes next.


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(From left) Foreign Ministers Badr Abdelatty of Egypt, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, Ishaq Dar of Pakistan and Hakan Fidan of Turkey meet to discuss regional de-escalation in Islamabad, Pakistan, on March 29. Photo: Turkish Foreign Ministry/Reuters

A man looks at smoke billowing from an explosions in Doha’s capital Qatar on September 9, 2025 after an Israeli air strike. Photo: AFPTV/AFP/Getty Images/TNS

Plumes of smoke rise after debris from an intercepted Iranian drone struck an oil facility in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates on March 14. Photo: AP

(From left) Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Antalya, Turkey on April 17. Photo: Xinhua

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan speaks to the reporters at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Antalya, Turkey on April 19. Photo: Reuters

Smoke rise from an area near the Dubai International Airport after a drone attack hit a fuel tank on March 16. Photo: Reuters

Japan’s Middle East oil habit gets an Iran war reality check

Storage tanks are seen at an oil refinery in Yokohama, Japan’s Kanagawa prefecture, as Mount Fuji looms in the background. Photo: AFP

Fuel prices are displayed at a petrol station in Tokyo, Japan, last month. Photo: EPA

An All Nippon Airways aeroplane flies past an oil refinery as it approaches Tokyo’s Haneda airport in Japan on March 17. Photo: Reuters

A tanker sits anchored in Muscat, Oman, as the traffic is down in the Strait of Hormuz amid the war on Iran. Photo: Reuters

US President Donald Trump greets Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi during a dinner at the White House on March 19. Photo: AP

Tepco’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in Japan’s Niigata prefecture. Earlier this year, the company began restarting the facility that had been closed in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Photo: Kyodo

Iran war escalates as Houthis threaten to sever Saudi oil exports

Armed Houthi loyalists attend a rally in Yemen last month demanding a resumption of attacks against Red Sea shipping. Photo: Xinhua

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian (right) meets Pakistan’s army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir in Tehran on Thursday. Photo: Inter-Services Public Relations/Reuters

Smoke rises from the Fujairah oil industry zone in the UAE last month following the interception of a drone by Emirati air defences amid the US-Israel war on Iran. Photo: Reuters

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‘Fear of US abandonment’ is helping forge a new Middle East – but don’t expect an Islamic Nato just yet


‘Fear of US abandonment’ is helping forge a new Middle East – but don’t expect an Islamic Nato just yet.


The Middle East’s new power brokers? Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt unite

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}‘Fear of US abandonment’ is helping forge a new Middle East – but don’t expect an Islamic Nato just yet

‘Fear of US abandonment’ is helping forge a new Middle East – but don’t expect an Islamic Nato just yet