Why Iran Is So Nervous: The West Is Set To “Reorder” The Middle East For Trade Routes

-Analysis-

Major changes are afoot in the Middle East, driven by diplomatic and military efforts by the West, and especially Israel and the United States, to ‘reorder’ the region. As Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said more than once, a “new order” is taking shape with little scope or space for Islamist militancy or the Shia crescent envisioned by the Iranian regime and its proxies of the self-styled Axis of Resistance.

We may consider here the region’s prospects and whether or not Israel and the United States will indeed forge ahead with a restoration of a friendlier, business-oriented Middle East that can also act as a commercial gateway between India and Europe.

In recent years, the United States has sought to redefine its role in the Middle East, taking stock of its immensely costly interventions in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. Its aim today is to maximize its influence at a minimum cost in men and money, through diplomacy and strategic ties. Such ties are best exemplified by its relations with Israel but also conservative Arab states like Saudi Arabia, and received an essential, long-term boost in 2020 with the Abraham Accords. This, among other things, is a pact to counter Iran’s revolutionary regime as the chief threat to the United States and its regional allies.

Iran’s influence has expanded since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and especially in the 1980s thanks to the militias it helped create and stronger allies like the Assad regime in Syria. Tehran has long sought to dominate a vast swath of territory known as the Shia crescent, which would extend from Iran to the whole of Levant into Lebanon, passing through Iraq and Syria and connecting Shia Muslim populations in those lands.

Just as Tehran’s Axis was meant to thwart the Western and especially U.S. presence in the Middle East, the Abraham Accord and Israel’s more aggressive regional role constitute a reactive counter-axis, perhaps the first since the Iranian revolution, that would push back if not eliminate the wave of zealotry born of Iran’s revolution. Alongside diplomacy, long-standing economic sanctions have weakened Iran’s economy and its regime’s ability to finance militias.

So if the United States and Israel were indeed envisaging the end of the Islamist regime in Tehran, the question remains whether this is probable, or even imminent?

Cup of poison 

The October 7 attack in Israel and the subsequent war has ultimately curtailed Tehran’s mischief, though at terrible human cost. Beyond two missile volleys that had little impact on Israel’s relentless progression, the Iranian regime has barely managed to back its militias. Today, it may be forced to sign another agreement to survive — or “sip at another cup of poison” as its late leader the Ayatollah Khomeini said of the UN-brokered ceasefire to end the Iran-Iraq war in 1988.

Arab states are showing a marked preference for the West

The regime’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has been traveling the region to win a little goodwill, in the midst of Iranian threats against those same neighbors. But he hasn’t made much progress. Because the Arab states are showing a marked preference for the West, as recent meetings in Brussels and London with Western partners indicate.

So much for Iran’s own confused efforts at normalization in recent years. We know something fundamental is changing when the European Union takes a stand on a relatively irrelevant but prickly affair, coming down on the Arab side: namely the dispute between Iran and the United Arab Emirates over three islands in the Persian Gulf.

Clout or bluster?

It is a signal of increasing pressures on Iran’s regime, for its conduct in so many areas. Yet Iranian opposition groups should also take note that certain pressures – like those concerning Iranian territory – concern an entire nation regardless of politics or regional interests.

Still, for now in any case, the general picture is of an Islamic Republic gradually losing its regional clout and influence, in spite of its bluster.

Will Iran be a new trading corridor?

The purported new order envisages turning the region into a land link with India, in a major boost for Western trading interests not to mention its strategic position vis-à-vis China. It would fast-track commerce between India and Europe by allowing shipping between ports on the Persian Gulf and those of the Mediterranean, effectively turning the Middle East into an extended Suez canal. It poses the question of the future leadership of Iran, itself the perfect corridor, given the country’s present alignments with China and Russia, though also to an extent, India.

Israel has been developing infrastructures like the port of Haifa or rail links to Jordan, in anticipation of this horizon. But could this ever emerge without broader regional collaboration, or with the presence of militias and persistent threat of war?

Will a new order turn the region into the trading corridor it was in the age of ancient and medieval empires? There could be an answer sooner than we may otherwise expect.