When Donald Trump told the world on May 18 that he had called off a strike on Iran scheduled for the following morning, the reason he gave was rather surprising. It was allegedly a request from the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who asked him to back off to clinch a deal with Tehran. The most powerful military on earth stood down because three Persian Gulf monarchies asked it to, he said. OK!

In another weird turn in this odd war with Iran, Israel and its current leadership looks like its own internal enemies are coming to finish them off with a growing chorus of anti-Netanyahu politicians inside Israel circling as the war dies down. In the most insane outcome, people as far away as Europe are suggesting Iran could come out of this war the stronger party, and the much-vaunted Abraham Accords, the framework built to box it in, are now all but worthless. Flabbergasted yet? 

Oddly, the Iran war has produced a full reconfiguration of regional power, with Iran emerging as a significant player not only in the Middle East but in the wider global space, think not flashy Dubai malls kind of influence but clout as well, as far as East Asia, thanks to the Hormuz crisis. Its economy is in tatters, several thousand people, including its former supreme leader Ali Khamenei, are dead, but still the half-century-old Islamic Republic has withstood another head-kicking and come out the other side, shaking the balance of power to its south.

The United States, after requesting support from China and getting rebuffed, is not the winning party; on the contrary, Trump is more disliked at home than ever, and the prospect of global starvation in six months is being squarely pinned on him by developed economies and the so-called “global south” which is likely to face the biggest hit in terms of caloric deficit and social disruption. 

The details of Trump's climbdown support him. This was not a one-off; it is the latest in a long run of deadlines set and then quietly allowed to slide, with the war now past its twelfth week and no settlement in sight. According to Lebanese Al Mayadeen, the May 19 reversal owed less to Gulf diplomacy than to a Pentagon report warning the White House that Tehran had sharply improved its ability to detect and intercept military aircraft. This is not ideal for its enemies and regional rivals.

Those accords

The Abraham Accords always rested on an unwritten promise that the United States would stand behind the bargain, and American power would make alignment with Israel a safe bet for the UAE and others. That has also blown up in their faces in recent days with reports of top Israeli officials meeting with the Emirati royals. The US, as a guarantor whose threats keep getting deferred, is a guarantor whose word loses value each time it is tested. The Gulf states have done the arithmetic. Saudi Arabia has been warming to Iran since 2023, in a rapprochement brokered by China rather than Washington, and last year signed a mutual defence pact with Pakistan. These are the hedges of states that no longer treat American protection as a given.

Israel cannot be called a winner either. The country continues down a road to nowhere, and the accords that several US administrations built as the guarantee of peace with the Arab states will pass into history at great cost to Netanyahu's political legacy and his Likud coalition. Israel will now find itself isolated in the Middle East, Europe (see Spain) and increasingly the US (See Tucker Carlson), this time with a weakened president behind it.

The accords were sold as the scaffolding of a new regional order with Israel woven into a US-aligned bloc that would massage it into normal relations with the Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The Palestinian question parked. Iran was contained by a coalition that, for once, did not have to pretend it was not a coalition. Saudi Arabia was the prize at the end of the process. With disputes between the UAE and Saudi Arabia growing by the week, the GCC now looks in danger of collapsing after Abu Dhabi walked out of OPEC.

Israel's defenders will counter that the war drew the accords closer, not further apart. During the fighting the UAE, Iran's now most-targeted adversary, received Israeli air-defence systems and the personnel to run them and that has only made cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi more exposed than they were before the recent conflict. Leaked CENTCOM files indicate that even Qatar and Saudi Arabia, neither of which has formal ties with Israel, took part in the air-defence plan against Iranian missiles and drones. Real cooperation, conducted in the dark, because doing it in daylight has become politically unaffordable. A regional order that works at the level of generals and seizes up at the level of foreign ministries is not the order the accords promised. It is the opposite of normalisation.

And the wartime alignment was a foxhole, not a peace. Instead, the original vision of a bloc that would expand quickly and align in public is now a much weaker prospect, reduced to cooler normalisation, quieter diplomacy and slower growth. A shared enemy held the signatories together for the length of a war, but now the infighting is out in the open. +

The Gaza war widened the gap between Arab publics and their rulers, and the Iran war deepened the public hostility that now surrounds every act of cooperation with Israel. Arab governments are left maintaining a relationship their own populations reject, hedged against the day it becomes a liability they can no longer carry. Iran understood this better than Washington did, and it set out to prove that the accords could be made too costly to sustain, and the May 19 climbdown is its evidence. 

Trump's hesitation reflects not the requests of partners, but the dead end the United States had reached. The dead end is now visible to everyone. Israel went to war to break Iran and secure its place in the region for a generation. It has handed Iran the strategic win, watched its patron lose its nerve, and emerged in a new reality where the GCC looks like it could collapse if normal service is not resumed soon.