The Israel-Iran war has not yet transformed the Middle East

A SINGLE strike took on singular importance. When America attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities last month, both supporters and opponents thought it would have outsize consequences. Critics feared it would plunge the Middle East into a wider war. That doomsday scenario has not come to pass, at least for now: Iran made only symbolic retaliation against America; soon after, a ceasefire ended the fighting between Iran and Israel.

With the 12-day war over, proponents of the strike now speak of a region transformed. Donald Trump believes he can find new signatories to join the Abraham accords of 2020, whereby four Arab states normalised ties with Israel. “I think we’re going to start loading them up, because Iran was the primary problem,” the president told Fox News on June 29th.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, made similar comments, arguing that Israel’s “victory” in Iran “opens an opportunity for a dramatic expansion of the peace agreements”. Yet the mood is less effusive in Arab capitals—even those that have long viewed Iran as an enemy. The fear is that the war was not transformative but merely inconclusive.

That is not to say Mr Trump’s talk of expanded peace deals is a fantasy. It seems plausible that Ahmed al-Sharaa, the interim Syrian president, will sign a pact with Israel in the coming months. If he does, though, it will have nothing to do with the war in Iran. Mr Sharaa wants an end to Israeli attacks on his country, a regular occurrence since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December. He also wants to bolster his standing in the West. A non-aggression pact with Israel would accomplish both.

The situation is more complicated in neighbouring Lebanon, where Hizbullah, an Iran-backed Shia militia and political party, fought a war against Israel last year. Tom Barrack, the American ambassador to Turkey, has also become Mr Trump’s roving envoy in the Levant. Last month he gave the Lebanese government a deadline: America wants Hizbullah to hand over its weapons by November (a year after the ceasefire that ended the war).

Hizbullah was already under pressure to accede. Until it does, no one will stump up billions for post-war reconstruction. Israel will continue to carry out air strikes against the group, and to occupy five hilltops in south Lebanon. And Iran may now be less able (or willing) to send money and weapons to its Lebanese client, because it needs to bolster its own defences.

None of this guarantees that Hizbullah will disarm, though: some members of the group want to stall for time, hoping events will turn in their favour. Even disarmed, it would still have a say in Lebanese politics as one of the main representatives of the Shias. It would oppose normalisation with Israel—as would many other Lebanese. So a peace treaty may not be imminent.

Iran will have to decide which of its allied militias in Arab countries are worth its continued backing. Some Yemeni politicians think this is the moment for a fresh offensive against the Houthis, the Iranian-backed group that controls much of Yemen. They reckon that a weaker Iran will have to trim its military support.

But Saudi Arabia, which has battled the Houthis in the past, is nervous about renewing a war that could trigger new missile strikes on its territory. A loss of Iranian support would be a blow to the Houthis, but the group still has tens of thousands of fighters and steady sources of revenue. It has also figured out how to produce some crude missiles and drones indigenously.

The Houthis are not the only concern for Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbours. They also worry about future Israeli or American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. They seem inevitable without a new nuclear deal, which Mr Trump has shown only limited interest (and less skill) in trying to negotiate. Nor does Iran seem interested in making concessions: On July 2nd its president, Masoud Pezeshkian, ordered Iran to suspend co-operation with the un’s nuclear watchdog.

Iran might conclude that deterring Israel and America requires more, and more accurate, ballistic missiles, and redouble its efforts to build them. It could reach a different conclusion, though: it is hard to deter far-off adversaries with missiles.

In conversations last month, several diplomats in the Gulf mentioned the example of North Korea. The Kim dynasty shielded itself from American attack by pointing lots of artillery pieces and short-range missiles at Seoul, South Korea’s capital. Gulf rulers fear Iran could opt for a similar strategy—deterring Israel and America by targeting Dammam, Doha or Dubai, but not Tel Aviv.

Saudi Arabia is the big prize for Mr Trump: he hopes to persuade the kingdom to normalise ties with Israel, which would probably pave the way for other Arab and Muslim states to do the same. Yet the fear of a cornered, isolated Iran may well make the Saudis more reluctant to do so.

For decades, many Westerners saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the wellspring of the region’s woes: solve it, and you would solve a myriad of other issues. “Linkage”, as the idea was known, was never popular with the Israelis, nor with the sorts of hawkish Republicans who encouraged Mr Trump to bomb Iran. Yet now those same officials insist that a brief war with Iran has paved the way for regional peace—never mind all the political and military obstacles that still exist. Their theory of “linkage” may prove no more accurate than the one they once maligned. ■