Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early part of the 20th century, the Middle East has been marked by conflict, violence, political instability, foreign interference, the rise and consequent decline of regional powers and economic hardship. Much of that remains today, but much has also changed. Some for the better, some not. What has not is that the region remains as full of opportunity as it is fraught with external and internal political tension and conflict. Some of the region’s struggles are as far from resolution as they’ve ever been.

Economies are in flux. The oil-rich Gulf States have joined the ranks of some of the most developed nations in the world, leveraging their oil wealth to move into areas like artificial intelligence, hydrogen fuel, widespread solar energy and mega sporting events. Outside the Gulf, however, the economic picture is less rosy as nations and their societies wrestle with high unemployment (especially among youth) and underemployment (especially among women), low growth, corruption and low domestic and foreign direct investment.

The most significant change has been the region’s overall balance of power. It has clearly shifted over the last 18 months. The United States is still the Middle East’s preeminent outside power, though not without competitors near and far. Without question, Israel is the most powerful regional state though very much dependent on the continuing support of the US. Regional powers — Israel, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — play a much more active role than in the past, for better and for worse. Looking ahead at the opportunities and threats the region faces, these factors lead to much uncertainty.

The good 

The conflict provoked by the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel triggered several strategic changes in the region. It bears out the adage known to generals and diplomats that war is inherently unpredictable for both aggressors and victims. In this case, Israel’s superior military prowess, technology, intelligence and firepower paired with indispensable support from America produced positive results across the region: the destruction of Hamas as a governing organization in Gaza and a greatly weakened military organization (accompanied by incalculable devastation in Gaza), the effective neutralization of Hezbollah, the first full-fledged government in Lebanon in more than two years, the devastation of Iran’s air defenses and ballistic missile factories and fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria.

All of this meant that the strength of one of the region’s major powers, Iran, has been significantly diminished while that of another, Israel, has been elevated. Beyond the deterioration of its internal defenses, Iran has lost a number of its external proxies, e.g., Hezbollah and Hamas, and a vital ally in the region, Syria. Moreover, Russian influence in the Middle East has declined immensely as a result of its war of aggression in Ukraine.

From the perspective of the West and its moderate Arab allies, all of this is good news. With a reduced threat from Iran, countries might be able to redirect more of their resources to the economic and social challenges they face. But this is the Middle East — changes in the strategic balance don’t always provide anticipated benefits.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the weakening of Iran has presented Israel and the US with a strategic opening. Israel reportedly had proposed attacking Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. US President Donald Trump apparently nixed the plan for now, preferring the diplomatic option. The US and Iran have conducted at least three negotiating sessions with more promised, including those at the all-important technical level.

Had the two sides not opted for diplomacy and resorted to war, the outcome might have been prolonged, greater violence in the region, even if Iran’s nuclear capabilities were neutralized. Yet the possibility of war against Iran remains real. Should negotiations fail or one side withdraw, it is almost inevitable that Israel, with the likely assistance of the US, will attack the Islamic Republic.

For now, however, the ongoing negotiations between Tehran and Washington are an unambiguous good, which all nations can and should applaud.

The bad 

Despite this good news, at least from the perspective of some quarters, the region remains unstable. Publics remain dissatisfied with their governments, almost none of which are accountable to their people. Governments, having witnessed the instability of the Arab Spring in 2011–2012, look suspiciously on their people, accounting for their stepped-up repression, including through greater use of electronic surveillance and artificial intelligence. Respect for human rights in the region remains distressingly low.

Continuing concerns about the future of Iran, the Gaza War, Syria’s future direction, Turkey’s increasing regional interests and the actions of the great powers gazing on the region’s resource wealth have meant that Arab governments must still devote considerable budget resources to military forces and their hardware, and less to the economic and social demands of their people. We should not expect this picture to change a great deal in the near- to medium-term future. Change comes slowly in the Middle East.

Internal political forces pose their own set of challenges. That is no more evident than in the Middle East’s lone democracy, Israel, which has seen right-wing factions rise to unprecedented influence in the Knesset. Despite being a distinct minority, these parties have managed a hammerlock on the government. The government too often ignores settler violence in the West Bank and, in some cases, has supported it. And it still seeks to diminish the power of Israel’s otherwise steadfastly democratic judiciary. Much of this is due to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is unwilling to concede power and must, therefore, make repeated concessions to his ever more ambitious right wing.

Regime change in Syria handed the region an unexpected opportunity for change. While the results of newly installed interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s plans are far from realization, it would be naïve to think that the nation will become a stable democracy. Its history clearly suggests otherwise. Nevertheless, moderate Arab states, the US, Europe and even Israel should not miss the opportunity to move Syria in the direction of a nation at peace with itself and its neighbors with a stable economy. In addition, they could ensure with appropriate and much-needed aid and investment that the region’s troublemakers, e.g., Iran, Russia and the Islamic State, do not return. That should mean concerted action now.

Similarly, in Lebanon, an extraordinary opportunity has been handed to Israel, the Middle East, the US and the West. If that nation is to ensure that the elements of the Israel–Hezbollah ceasefire are fully met and Hezbollah is disarmed, the Lebanese Armed Forces will need help, and lots of it. Additionally, years of economic decline and political disarray have led to a near-catastrophic economic state. Aid and investment are immediately needed to set that country on the road to stability, prosperity and success.

To date, nations that would stand to benefit from stability and peace in Syria and Lebanon haven’t reacted sufficiently quickly. This is more than unfortunate. Restoring stability in these nations would mean an unquestionable change in the region’s political fortunes and reduce chances of greater conflict. Action is needed now to prevent autocratic backsliding in Syria — historically the nation‘s default position — and fitful, lackluster progress in Lebanon.

Then there is Yemen and the Houthi question. The country has been mired in ten years of civil war, political instability and unrest since the early days of the Arab Spring. The Houthis, an extremist Shia Islamist organization with its own version of regional and global jihad, seized power in a 2014–2015 coup and now control about a third of the country, some two-thirds of the population, the capital of Sana’a and the country’s major port of Hudaydah. The Houthis declared a state of war on Israel — and effectively the US — following the October 7 attacks. Under former US President Joe Biden, the US and a handful of its allies launched sporadic attacks against the Houthis who had begun attacking tankers and other commercial shipping traffic transiting the Red Sea. Under current President Trump, those attacks have escalated but the Houthis continue to threaten shipping through one of the world’s major maritime choke points.

While internal opponents to the Houthis exist in southern and eastern Yemen, they lack the unity and firepower to seriously threaten the Houthis at this time. Moreover, no external power is contemplating dispatching ground forces to challenge the Houthis. The Egyptian experience in the 1960s and the Saudi experience first in the 1930s and again in 2015 serve as abject lessons of ground wars against indigenous rebels in this highly tribal country.

Any hope of persuading the Houthis to back off from their campaign against global shipping traffic in the Red Sea may lie in the ongoing US–Iran negotiations. Tehran wields considerable, though hardly commanding, influence over the Houthis and could be persuaded to exercise that influence in the event Washington and Tehran can come to some understanding. That would not necessarily preclude Russia, which shares intelligence, weapons technology and other support with the Houthis, from finding ways to incentivize the Houthis to continue their war against the West. For now, the mini-war at the southern end of the Red Sea shows little prospect of ending soon.

The tragically ugly

Turning to the most depressing issues of the Middle East, there are two conflicts that cry out: Gaza and Sudan. Sadly, neither shows much prospect for resolution soon.

At the start of the year, a ceasefire in Gaza held slight hope for an ultimate end. But barely eight weeks later, the fighting resumed. Though lacking the ferocity and intensity of 2024, the toll on the Gazan civilian population is horrific. The death toll is now estimated at north of 50,000, though that figure is unconfirmed by any impartial entity, has been subject to change and likely includes an estimated 20,000 Hamas combatants. But the devastation on the territory itself — the near total destruction of schools, hospitals, mosques, businesses, residences and infrastructure — is readily apparent from numerous publicly available satellite imagery.

It will take decades to rebuild the ravaged territory, and that assumes there is an end to the conflict, and humanitarian aid and investment are able to flow into the strip. An Arab plan advanced in March 2025 estimated the cost of reconstruction at $53 billion, but that will likely rise once the conflict ends and a true, on-the-ground evaluation can be done.

But ending the war is the challenge now. Neither side is willing to bend. Israel insists on the release of all remaining hostages, estimated at 59 with 35 likely already dead, and the complete disarmament of Hamas. Hamas, while willing to release remaining hostages, is unwilling to surrender its arms. It has also agreed to turn governing authority to an independent Arab/Palestinian entity.

Hamas’s arms are the apparent obstacle to the end of this war. In fact, Hamas’s unwillingness to recognize that it has suffered an overwhelming defeat and has no chance of ever realizing its far-fetched goal of eliminating the State of Israel, if it ever did. This is a fact accepted by the rest of the Arab world beginning with Egypt in the 1979 peace accord with Israel. Its stubborn and hopeless resistance has meant inestimable suffering for the people of Gaza and Palestinians at large. For now, however, there seems little chance of the two sides reconciling the Hamas arms question, absent unanticipated external pressure on Hamas. The aforementioned Arab Plan, while calling for a government in Gaza that excludes Hamas, makes no mention of disarming Hamas, effectively rendering it an empty plan.

Israel and Netanyahu bear their own share of the responsibility. Their stubborn opposition to even acknowledging the possibility of an independent state is unsupportable. Accepting the inevitability of a Palestinian state, as more than 100 foreign governments already have, would dramatically alter the political landscape, positioning Hamas and its extremist supporters as the enemies of peace.

The corollary to all this is the woeful state of the Palestinian Authority (PA). It is unfit to govern, and polls of Palestinians bear this out. This disenchantment, especially toward PA President Mahmoud Abbas, may have led to the latter’s recent decision to anoint a successor, Hussein al-Sheikh, the current secretary-general of the PLO Executive Committee. Barring genuinely free and fair elections in the Palestinian Territories (to include Gaza), however, no PA institution is likely to win much favor or trust among the Palestinian people.

Lost amidst the war in Gaza, Russia’s continuing war of aggression in Ukraine and the global financial crisis provoked by the Trump administration’s trade tariff scheme, is the ongoing civil war in Sudan. Now moving into its third year, it has produced an estimated 150,000 deaths, 14 million displaced Sudanese (including over three million refugees in neighboring countries) and 30 million in need of humanitarian assistance. The United Nations has called it “the world’s largest hunger crisis.”

The two opposing sides — the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — are nowhere near resolving their issues, which boil down to who will govern Sudan. The leaders of the two warring factions, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the SAF and Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo of the RSF, were briefly allies but could not agree on who would rule Sudan or how their respective forces would be integrated. The RSF is a reconstituted force from the Janjaweed, the barbarous militia responsible for the genocide of African Sudanese in Darfur in the early two thousands. The SAF has recently retaken territory, including the devastated capital, Khartoum, but the RSF maintain firm control in the western part of the country: the large, resource-rich Darfur region.

The military standoff is further complicated by the external powers supporting one or the other side. Those include the UAE, Ethiopia and Eritrea on the side of the RSF, and Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt and Iran with the SAF. Russia has backed both sides at various times. The support of these nations has prolonged the war and contributed to the rising death toll and growing humanitarian crisis. Mediation efforts variously carried out by the African Union, the United Nations, the US, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Turkey and Libya have so far failed.

At present, a military solution hardly seems possible, as with the continuing external support, the two sides appear fully committed to pursuing war. Diplomacy has not reached its time yet and shows no sign of doing so soon.

The future

True to its modern history, the Middle East presents a conflicting portrait of hope and despair, opportunity and desperation.

This July will mark the 25th anniversary of another moment of hope and optimism in the Middle East, the Camp David II summit between Israel and the PA and hosted by then-US President Bill Clinton. Israel offered what was its most ambitious proposal (then and since) to the Palestinians, who, under the leadership of then-PA President Yasser Arafat, rejected it. Arafat rejected a subsequent and even more attractive plan advanced by Clinton, though the Israelis had accepted it.

The Second Intifada, which followed Camp David II, destroyed what hope there might have been for a peace between Israelis and Palestinians, a tragedy that only grows with time. The author’s own experiences in dealing with the Israelis and Palestinians from Israel, Jerusalem and the West bank lent justification to claims that many Palestinians regret having walked away from Camp David without even attempting to continue negotiations.

Today, the region’s conflicts are indeed manifold. Clear opportunities for peace, or least the absence of war, are apparent in some cases and much less so in others. But as the experience of Camp David in 2000 showed, the dangers of walking away from diplomacy and compromise when they are available only condemns the region to greater instability, violence and tragedy.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.