Series: The Israel–Iran Crisis in a Multipolar World (Part 3 of 3)
Part 3: Regional Reckoning and the Future of the Middle East
Editorial Disclaimer:
At Global Realist, our commitment is to clarity, not allegiance. This article is presented through the lens of Existential Imperative Realism (EIR)—a framework rooted in systemic analysis, strategic behavior, and structural truth. We do not moralize geopolitical events, nor do we champion or condemn any specific nation, ideology, regime, or people group. We refuse to collapse into binary narratives of good vs. evil, oppressed vs. oppressor, or West vs. East. Instead, we seek to illuminate the underlying imperatives that drive power, perception, and conflict in an increasingly multipolar world.
Readers are encouraged to approach this content not through personal emotion or ideological reflex, but through sober analysis. Our aim is not to persuade you what to think, but to sharpen how you see.
1. War as Realignment
The war between Israel and Iran is not an isolated conflict, nor is it merely a product of ideological hatred or ancient enmities. It is the living edge of a deeper reordering—a systemic realignment of the Middle East as it adapts to a collapsing global center and the birth of a multipolar world. This is not a war of reaction; it is a war of repositioning. And in that sense, it functions not as a deviation from order, but as its future design being drawn in real time.
For decades, the region’s architecture was held together by the gravitational pull of American hegemony. Israel’s regional dominance, the relative obedience of Gulf monarchies, the isolation of Iran, and the containment of non-state actors all relied upon the stabilizing force of a unipolar order. But that force is now receding. Washington’s influence, though still formidable, no longer determines the shape of reality. Its guarantees are no longer trusted. Its moral authority, frayed by decades of military overreach and internal dysfunction, no longer commands deference. The result is not chaos—but recalibration.
In this new environment, the conflict between Israel and Iran emerges not as a bilateral confrontation but as a structural reordering—where each actor is testing, asserting, and redefining its place within an emerging regional logic. Iran, long treated as an outlier, has repositioned itself as a central node in an alternative order—anchored to Russia and China, tied to regional proxies, and committed to an asymmetric doctrine that contests U.S.-aligned dominance. Israel, in turn, is no longer just a U.S. satellite. It is recalibrating itself as a civilizational state—operating independently, asserting red lines, and seeking finality in the Gaza and Lebanon fronts before the strategic landscape shifts further.
In this light, the Gaza war is not simply an Israeli security operation—it is a declaration of permanence. It signals that Israel intends to resolve its internal threats and secure its civilizational core before the twilight of U.S. primacy fully sets. Likewise, Iran’s growing escalation posture is not just ideological solidarity with Palestine—it is a rational move to entangle Israel, tie down U.S. capacity, and present itself as a credible alternative axis of regional leadership.
This is the essence of war as realignment. What may appear as chaos to the untrained eye is in fact a calculated reshuffling of alliances, postures, and imperatives. The great powers are watching—and responding. Russia senses opportunity to weaken U.S. influence. China offers economic lifelines while remaining officially neutral. The United States attempts to shore up old coalitions through arms, diplomacy, and pressure—but its efforts carry less gravity than before.
From the perspective of Existential Imperative Realism, the Israel–Iran war reveals how systems under pressure do not simply react—they reposition. War, in this framework, is not an aberration. It is a form of strategic expression. Each missile, each red line crossed, each diplomatic rupture is not merely tactical—it is existential. States are reorganizing themselves in accordance with new survival parameters, new centers of trust, and new alignments of power.
This is why the war will not be short-lived. It may have periods of silence, but its logic is enduring. Because what is being contested is not just territory or ideology—it is structure itself. The old architecture is dissolving. What replaces it will be born not through negotiation alone, but through confrontation, assertion, and recalibration. This is the hard truth of the multipolar age: peace is not the absence of conflict—it is the outcome of new equilibrium. And we are not there yet.
2. The Wider Chessboard: Russia, China, and Strategic Realignment
The war between Israel and Iran does not unfold in isolation. It sits atop a larger board, one in which great powers move with deliberate intent, exploiting regional tensions to further their own existential designs. In the age of multipolarity, no regional conflict remains truly regional. Every escalation reverberates outward, entangling actors whose interests intersect not in morality or alliance, but in the logic of power distribution. What we are witnessing, in the heat of Gaza and the shadows of Tehran, is not simply a Middle Eastern crisis—but the sharpening edge of global realignment.
Russia, bruised yet resilient in its confrontation with NATO over Ukraine, has tightened its strategic embrace of Iran. This is not an ideological affinity—it is a convergence of imperatives. Isolated from the West, Russia requires partners that can help it bypass sanctions, maintain energy leverage, and destabilize adversarial fronts. Iran provides all three. The two states, both sanctioned, both embattled, and both unwilling to yield to U.S.-designed order, have forged an alliance grounded not in idealism, but in necessity. Iranian drones fly over Ukraine. Russian oil trades in back channels routed through Persian ports. This is realism without apology—survival by symbiosis.
China plays a more subtle, but equally profound role. Unlike Russia, it does not court overt conflict. Its doctrine is one of embedded presence, economic seduction, and patient leverage. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has quietly entrenched itself across the region—from Iranian energy infrastructure to Israeli ports. Beijing positions itself not as a polarizing force, but as a civilizational power that offers partnership without Western conditions. It brokers deals. It avoids military entanglement. But beneath the surface, it accumulates influence. Its diplomatic balancing—mediating Saudi–Iran rapprochement while maintaining ties with Israel—signals something deeper: China aims not to dominate the Middle East, but to reformat its logic around long-term dependency on Chinese systems—supply chains, infrastructure, digital frameworks, and trade corridors.
The United States, for its part, is neither absent nor fully commanding. Its decades-long preeminence is fading, not due to any singular defeat, but due to strategic diffusion. It still sells weapons, brokers normalization deals, and signals red lines—but it no longer dictates the outcome. The Abraham Accords, once hailed as a masterstroke of diplomacy, now reveal themselves as the foundation of a fragile detente—one that may rupture under the weight of Gaza’s bloodshed or Iran’s maneuvering. Washington’s recent overtures to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, including discussions of defense guarantees and nuclear cooperation, are not signs of strength—they are gestures of anxiety, attempts to re-anchor relationships that now drift toward multipolar temptation.
What emerges from this broader board is not alliance in the traditional sense, but alignment by necessity. The region is no longer organized by the old Cold War binaries. Instead, it is shaped by overlapping imperatives—Russia seeking disruption, China seeking infrastructure dominion, the U.S. seeking to preserve influence, and local actors seeking autonomy. The Israel–Iran war is not peripheral to this—it is a signal event that reveals the fractures of the old world and the contested birth of the new.
Existential Imperative Realism helps decode this phenomenon. From an EIR perspective, these alignments are not conspiratorial—they are structural. Russia leans on Iran not to provoke the West but to ensure systemic survival. China embeds itself in the region not as a moral actor, but as a civilizational system securing access to energy, trade, and future hegemony. The U.S. clings to the Middle East not because of democratic values, but because abandonment would fracture its global legitimacy. And regional powers, from Turkey to the Gulf, maneuver based on this shifting constellation—hedging bets, recalibrating loyalties, and fortifying internal control.
This is the wider chessboard. It does not promise stability. It promises motion. In this game, the players are not bound by treaties but by pressure. And pressure, in a multipolar age, does not relent. It realigns.
3. The Gulf Repositioning: Saudi, UAE, and the Sunni Dilemma
Caught between the shadows of old alliances and the gravitational pull of emerging powers, the Gulf states now find themselves in an unprecedented state of strategic ambiguity. Once reliable pillars of the U.S.-centric regional order, nations like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are recalibrating their posture—not in haste, but with the precision of actors who sense the world shifting beneath their feet. In this fluid environment, existential imperatives—not ideology—are shaping choices. Sectarian identity, for all its potency, is now subordinated to regime survival, technological modernization, and the pragmatic management of power.
Saudi Arabia, the anchor of Sunni Islam and custodian of Mecca, has historically defined its identity in contrast to Iran’s revolutionary Shi’ism. For decades, this theological rivalry was mirrored in geopolitical competition—over Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, and Yemen. Yet in recent years, Riyadh’s behavior has become more complex. The kingdom’s Vision 2030 agenda, launched under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is an implicit acknowledgment that oil-era guarantees are no longer sufficient. To survive the energy transition and maintain internal legitimacy, the House of Saud must secure access to technology, diversify its economy, and reduce exposure to conflict. This necessity has produced a strange dance: rapprochement with Iran under Chinese mediation, normalization talks with Israel (before Gaza reignited the ideological fault lines), and parallel hedging between Washington and Beijing.
The UAE, smaller but more agile, embodies this multipolar orientation even more clearly. Abu Dhabi has pursued deep security ties with the U.S., expanded trade with China, and collaborated with Israel on defense and technology—all while maintaining diplomatic channels with Iran and Syria. Its leadership views ideological rigidity as a liability. Instead, Emirati strategy follows the logic of node-building: being indispensable to all, and subordinate to none.
This hedging posture across the Gulf reflects a deeper shift. The sectarian overlays that once dictated regional alliances have begun to give way to strategic convergence around regime durability, economic modernization, and security autonomy. Iran remains a perceived threat—particularly in Yemen and Iraq—but it is no longer the sole prism through which policy is crafted. The Abraham Accords marked a symbolic turn: Sunni regimes willing to abandon the pan-Arab boycott of Israel, not because of ideological sympathy, but because of a shared imperative to counter political Islamism, contain Iran, and gain access to Western capital and surveillance technology.
But Gaza disrupted the trajectory. The scale and intensity of Israel’s military operations—amplified through social media and pan-Arab television—rekindled the emotional core of the Arab street. Normalization efforts paused. Domestic regimes feared legitimacy slippage. Here, the Sunni dilemma becomes acute: how to balance elite-level coordination with Israel and the West, while managing popular sentiment that identifies with Palestinian suffering. This dissonance between state strategy and popular identity is not easily resolved. In the short term, it fosters ambiguity. In the long term, it threatens regime stability unless carefully managed.
From an Existential Imperative Realism perspective, this is not contradiction—it is coherence. Gulf monarchies are not confused. They are calculating. Their actions reflect a sober understanding that the post-American order demands self-sufficiency, diversified patronage, and ideological flexibility. Survival now hinges on strategic pluralism: cooperating with China on trade, courting U.S. weapons deals, moderating with Iran when conflict looms, and maintaining symbolic loyalty to Palestine when public pressure rises. In this matrix, values bend to the imperative of persistence.
The Sunni world, once seen as a unified bloc, is now fractal. Turkey pursues its neo-Ottoman ambitions. Qatar aligns with Islamist currents. Egypt clings to regime security. And the Gulf states navigate between silence and symbolism. The dream of Arab unity has given way to strategic self-interest. And in the vacuum left by retreating hegemony, realism—not pan-Islamism, not liberalism—guides the hand of the region’s kings and princes.
This is the Sunni dilemma. Not whether to side with Israel or Iran. But how to navigate a world in which old certainties no longer ensure survival—and where every alignment carries risk.
4. Strategic Exhaustion and the Limits of Proxy Warfare
Proxy warfare has long been the strategic lubricant of Middle Eastern geopolitics—allowing states to extend influence, apply pressure, and wage asymmetric campaigns without risking the full exposure of direct confrontation. Iran pioneered the model in its post-revolutionary years out of necessity: economically constrained, diplomatically isolated, and militarily outmatched, it turned to ideological mobilization and surrogate militias. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza—these were not just instruments of regional leverage. They were existential extensions of the Islamic Republic’s survival logic.
For decades, this architecture worked. It kept Israel stretched, Saudi Arabia reactive, and the United States permanently entangled in regional security management. The genius of the model lay in its deniability and diffusion: each actor retained local legitimacy while remaining plugged into Tehran’s wider deterrent grid. But proxy warfare, like any system, has limits. And those limits are now coming into view.
Iran faces a problem of overextension. Its network of regional allies has multiplied, but so have the crises. Lebanon teeters on economic collapse. Iraq’s militias strain against government integration. Syria remains a shattered battleground. The Houthis, though increasingly independent, risk provoking escalation with Gulf neighbors. Even Hamas—nominally backed by Iran—often acts according to its own calculations and constraints. Tehran is discovering that while proxy groups project influence, they do not guarantee coherence. The Islamic Republic has built a web of resistance—but it cannot always control the shape it takes when set into motion.
Domestically, the economic burden of sustaining these networks is mounting. Years of sanctions, currency devaluation, and internal dissent have created a volatile base within Iran itself. The younger generation, raised under the Islamic Republic but alienated from its founding narrative, increasingly questions the costs of exporting revolution. Each regional flare-up risks backlash at home—especially as inflation bites, unemployment rises, and water shortages provoke unrest. The system built to ensure Iran’s external security now threatens to hollow out its internal stability.
Israel, too, is approaching a threshold. While it has mastered precision warfare and targeted disruption, it faces strategic exhaustion on two fronts. First, the Gaza conflict has become a reputational sinkhole. Scenes of destruction broadcast globally have eroded Israel’s image in key Western capitals. Social media—unfiltered and emotionally potent—has shifted international public opinion in ways traditional diplomacy cannot contain. This is not mere PR damage. It threatens Israel’s long-term strategic freedom by constraining allies, fracturing support coalitions, and emboldening adversaries.
Second, the logic of military deterrence is running into diminishing returns. Each operation against Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iranian-backed militias delivers tactical victories but no strategic finality. The actors regenerate. The grievances persist. And the risk of spillover—whether into Lebanon, Syria, or even Iran proper—grows with each escalation. The iron dome shields the cities, but it cannot resolve the contradiction: that Israel must be both a fortress and a democracy, both invulnerable and accountable. The longer the war persists, the more difficult that balance becomes.
Proxy warfare was once a solution. Now it is a trap. For both Iran and Israel, the model breeds perpetual instability without resolution. It consumes resources, produces reputational decay, and risks escalation into direct war. Each side remains locked in a tit-for-tat calculus where every actor seeks to bleed the other without collapsing the system entirely. But systems do collapse—especially when they devour more than they deliver.
From the vantage of Existential Imperative Realism, the persistence of proxy warfare is not a failure of diplomacy or leadership. It is a byproduct of systemic constraints. Iran cannot afford conventional parity with Israel, so it invests in distributed resistance. Israel cannot tolerate threats at its borders, so it strikes before metastasis. Neither actor can fully disengage. Their imperatives are survival, not stability. And the region itself—theaters like Syria, Iraq, and Gaza—become the contested middle ground, where war is managed, not resolved.
But management has a cost. Fatigue sets in. Legitimacy frays. Allies waver. And eventually, the proxy model begins to falter—not from external pressure, but from internal depletion. Strategic exhaustion, once reached, changes the game. It opens the door to direct confrontation, unintended escalation, or systemic transformation.
That is where the region now stands. Not at the peak of proxy power—but at the edge of its breakdown. What comes next may not be more war by proxy. It may be something far more dangerous.
5. The Coming Shift: Toward Regional Civilizational States
The Middle East has long been interpreted as a patchwork of unstable post-colonial nations, where borders drawn by foreign powers fractured ethnic, tribal, and religious continuity. This frame—while historically true—no longer suffices to explain the region's emergent structure. What is now forming is not a revival of nation-states in their old liberal mold, but the rise of regional civilizational states: entities rooted in deeper cultural continuity, existential imperatives, and ideological cohesion. This marks a foundational shift in both regional strategy and global geopolitics.
The war between Israel and Iran is not only a contest of military endurance or territorial friction—it is the catalytic event forcing a tectonic reordering. The traditional system of Western-backed regimes, U.S. military primacy, and norms of liberal diplomacy is fragmenting. In its place emerges a hardened logic: that states must be culturally coherent, strategically autonomous, and capable of enforcing sovereignty without dependence on fragile global consensus.
Iran, for all its domestic contradictions, has long pursued a civilizational strategy. Its self-image is not merely that of a nation but as the vanguard of Shi’a revolutionary identity across the Islamic world. It seeks not regional popularity but strategic influence—projected through culture, theology, language, and asymmetric deterrence. The Islamic Republic’s imperatives do not align with liberal order-building or Western integration. They seek survival through enduring resistance and ideological export. From Iraq to Lebanon, its influence operates not through conquest but through narrative continuity and institutional embedding.
Israel, meanwhile, is undergoing its own civilizational recalibration. The liberal Zionist project, once defined by secular socialism and Western cosmopolitanism, is giving way to a nationalist-conservative paradigm: the One Jewish State model. This vision, championed by figures like David Friedman, insists on exclusivity of sovereignty, coherence of identity, and preemptive defense as the basis of survival. Demography, territory, and security are not negotiable ideals—they are existential anchors. As liberal globalism wanes, Israel no longer seeks validation through international consensus. It seeks permanence through unilateral posture and iron fortification.
Arab regimes, especially in the Gulf, are also recalculating. Saudi Arabia and the UAE—traditionally reliant on U.S. protection—are now hedging their bets, deepening ties with China and Russia, and constructing their own narratives of civilizational legitimacy. For Saudi Arabia, this involves fusing Islamic identity with high-tech authoritarian modernity. For the UAE, it means branding itself as a regional hub of stability, commerce, and tolerance—while consolidating its monarchy with precision surveillance and strategic investment. These are not merely economic choices—they are survival adaptations. The age of ideological mimicry is ending. Civilizational coherence is replacing liberal convergence.
This shift is not accidental. It is driven by the exhaustion of the old model. The liberal international order—once upheld by U.S. force and the promise of universal values—has lost its grip. In its wake emerges a multipolar reality where legitimacy flows not from legality or humanitarianism, but from internal coherence and strategic durability. The civilizational state is not a utopia. It is a fortress. And the Middle East, long used as a proving ground for external ideologies, is now becoming the epicenter of this realist rebirth.
Existential Imperative Realism helps make sense of this transformation. It does not assume that peace is the default or that cooperation is natural. It assumes survival as the baseline of all systems. In this view, actors that align themselves with a coherent internal logic—demographic, strategic, cultural—will endure. Those who defer to abstract ideals or external validation will fragment. Thus, the collapse of pan-Arabism, the failure of Western-imposed democracy, and the disintegration of weak state actors like Syria and Lebanon all fit the pattern. What rises from the rubble is not liberal reconstruction—it is hardened realism shaped by centuries of civilizational memory.
This is the emerging condition of the Middle East. Not a community of peaceful sovereign nations. But a cluster of survival-driven, civilizationally-inflected power centers—Israel, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia—each locked into a new strategic reality. Each shaping its population as infrastructure. Each rejecting universalist templates in favor of native continuity.
And this is not just a regional story. It is the future of global order. The 21st century will not be shaped by the spread of liberal norms, but by the consolidation of strategic civilizations. The Middle East, long treated as a battleground of others’ ideals, is now writing the blueprint of its own future. And that future is not peaceful. But it is structurally intelligible.
6. Conclusion – From War to Structure
What began as a regional confrontation—between Israel and Hamas, between Iran and its proxies—has evolved into something far more consequential. The war no longer exists simply as a reaction to terrorism, to occupation, or to the oscillating failures of diplomacy. It now functions as the crucible of a deeper structural transformation. The Middle East is not descending into chaos. It is reorganizing itself.
In this reorganization, war is not a breakdown of diplomacy. It is the expression of incompatible survival logics asserting themselves in the absence of a shared civilizational framework. And in this context, war becomes not a deviation from peace, but a mechanism through which new strategic equilibriums are forged. It is a grim but stable pattern in history: systems reorder through pressure, not persuasion.
The Israel–Iran conflict—like the broader upheavals around it—is no longer peripheral. It has become the focal point around which multipolar alignments are taking form. Iran’s partnerships with Russia and China, Israel’s tightening ties to India and the U.S., the Gulf’s triangulated diplomacy, and the hesitant recalibrations of states like Turkey and Egypt—all reflect a deeper truth: the world no longer turns around a single pole. It is flattening into fragments. And each fragment is now hardening its defenses, crystallizing its imperatives, and shedding illusions of global consensus.
The liberal international order, with its rituals of multilateralism, human rights discourse, and rules-based governance, has lost its monopolistic claim to legitimacy. In its place, survival systems are aligning not by shared values, but by converging interests and threat matrices. In such a world, peace does not emerge from negotiation tables alone. It emerges when the underlying systems achieve balance—through exhaustion, deterrence, or strategic recalibration. What looks like conflict is often the beginning of structure.
This is why the framework of Existential Imperative Realism is indispensable. It removes the veil of moral mystification. It does not excuse brutality or elevate might above right—it simply clarifies that systems act to survive, and that survival is the axis around which all rational behavior ultimately orbits. In this view, Iran’s proxy war is not irrational—it is friction deployed as asymmetry to compensate for conventional vulnerability. Israel’s hardline posture is not stubbornness—it is doctrine born of diaspora memory and civilizational trauma. Even the actions of regional Sunni states are not betrayals of pan-Islamic unity, but hedging strategies aligned with regime durability.
The failure of past peace efforts—Camp David, Oslo, Roadmap initiatives—is not due to poor negotiation or lack of goodwill. It is due to the misdiagnosis of the conflict’s structure. These were efforts to compromise between actors who define survival in mutually exclusive terms. In such a framework, peace becomes performative unless accompanied by a seismic shift in internal imperatives. And that shift, when it comes, is never rhetorical. It is strategic.
The 21st-century Middle East is therefore not awaiting a peace summit. It is undergoing realignment. It is rejecting foreign templates. It is recalibrating power around civilizational cores. This does not mean war will persist forever. But it does mean peace, when it comes, will not look like the peace imagined by the architects of the liberal order. It will be asymmetrical, regional, deterrence-based—and deeply realist.
In this context, observers must trade idealism for clarity. They must resist the temptation to see each strike, each speech, each protest through the lens of emotion or ideology. Instead, they must see the structure—the logic of systems under threat, the architecture of imperatives being redrawn.