Trump uses Iran war to force Middle East realignment, author says

The Middle East is once again on edge as the US and Israel continue their attacks on Iran’s military infrastructure. Iran responded with missile and drone attacks. Oil markets are up and global shipping lines are under pressure.

However, this is not playing out like a typical war in the region.

Even as the attacks continue, tankers continue to move under restricted conditions in the Strait of Hormuz. Backchannel communications did not crash. Key regional players are not fully committed to escalating or restraining tensions. Instead, they do something much more meaningful: they adapt.

This is the first signal that this is not just a military conflict. This is a system that is under stress and is being consciously reshaped.

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To understand what is happening now, you need to go back to the system before this moment.

For nearly two decades, the Middle East has operated on a controlled balance. Following the Iraq War, three different power structures emerged in the fight against ISIS through the Arab Spring and learned to coexist without resolving the conflicts between them.

Shiite-dominated Iran established an axis known as the “Axis of Resistance” by settling in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. These were not loose agency relationships. These were institutional anchors; militias integrated into state structures, political actors controlling territory and budgets. Iran’s incentive was clear: to expand its sphere of influence without provoking a direct and overwhelming response. Stay below the threshold for full-scale war while steadily increasing your power.

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There was no united front in the Sunni world to oppose this. While Saudi Arabia and the UAE were pushing for a centralized, state-led regional order, Türkiye and Qatar were supporting Islamist political movements that offered a rival model of legitimacy. Their incentive was competition, not harmony. Each camp used regional conflicts to expand its influence without being fully committed to a single strategic bloc.

Meanwhile, Israel stood apart. By the mid-2010s it had unmatched military capacity and operational reach, but remained outside the region’s political framework. His incentive was to maintain this advantage through deterrence; strike when necessary, but avoid becoming entangled in the region’s unstable alliances.

Iranian women raise money for the war effort outside an air raid shelter in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War on May 11, 1988. (Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images)

The USA managed this system rather than solving it. The Iran nuclear deal kept Tehran’s nuclear ambitions separate from its regional behavior. Conflicts like Gaza have followed a predictable cycle of escalation and ceasefire. Stability was maintained, but only by compartmentalizing the underlying tensions.

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This model allowed each actor to work within the system without fundamentally changing the system.

President Donald Trump has rejected this model from the beginning.

Its first major break occurred in May 2018, when it withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sweeping sanctions. This was not just a change of policy on nuclear issues. It was a systematic move. The administration began increasing the cost of maintaining the regional architecture by targeting Iran’s oil exports, financial networks, and transportation.

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Incentives towards Iran have begun to change. Expansion was no longer low risk. Each additional node in its network now carried economic and operational consequences.

This pressure increased further with the designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization in April 2019 and the subsequent attack in January 2020 in which Qasem Soleimani was killed. At the time, these actions were widely described as escalating tensions. In reality, these were consistent steps in a broader strategy: eliminating the assumption that Iran could operate in the gray zone indefinitely.

US President Donald Trump meets with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at a coffee ceremony held at the Saudi Royal Court in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 13, 2025. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Trump has also moved to reshape the other side of the system.

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Abraham Accords in 2020 The Abraham Accords in 2020 broke one of the longest-standing constraints in Middle East diplomacy. For decades, Arab states have linked normalization with Israel to the solution of the Palestine issue. Trump reversed this order. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were the first to normalize relations, followed by Morocco and Sudan.

This created a new set of incentives in the Sunni world. Alignment with Israel was no longer politically forbidden. It has become a path to security cooperation, advanced technology, and closer relations with the United States. States can now act in line with their immediate strategic interests rather than waiting for a final solution.

For Israel, this was a structural change. It no longer operated outside the regional system. It was being integrated into it.

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But adaptation alone did not solve the system’s contradictions.

Saudi Arabia acted cautiously. Türkiye and Qatar continued to maintain their own networks. Iran’s influence persisted through well-established institutions. There were new regulations in the region, but they were not completed.

This is where Trump’s approach evolved from compliance to enforcement.

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During the Gaza war that followed the October 7, 2023 attacks, the United States brokered a phased arrangement that tied the release of hostages to an Israeli withdrawal in early 2025 and tied humanitarian aid to monitoring mechanisms. This was not a traditional ceasefire. It introduced conditionality directly into the structure of the agreement.

This logic continued until 2026 with the development of a US-led reconstruction and governance framework involving Israel and its regional partners. The principle was clear: participation in the system would now be tied to measurable results.

This changed the incentives again. Cooperation was no longer symbolic. It has become transactional and actionable.

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And yet, despite these changes, the system has not been fully reorganized.

Iran’s networks remained intact. Sunni divisions continued. Israel continued to expand its own strategic relations beyond the immediate region. Old structures were weakened but not destroyed.

That’s why the current war is important.

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The attacks, which began at the end of February 2026, are not just about humiliating Iran’s military capabilities. These are intended to make simultaneous adjustments to all three systems.

Iran now faces a different reckoning than at any point in the last two decades. The strategy of gradual expansion clashed with sustained economic pressure and direct military risk. The incentive is shifting from creating impact to maintaining it under constraint.

Sunni states are being pushed out of their comfort zones full of strategic uncertainties. The opportunity for protection between rival blocks is narrowing. As pressure mounts, so do the costs of remaining disconnected, and the incentive to unite around a clearer regional framework grows stronger.

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Israel is positioned not only as a military actor but also as a central node in this emerging framework. Its role is evolving from deterrence to system participation; It connects security, technology and governance among compatible states.

What Trump is doing through this war is not just escalating the conflict. It compresses timelines.

Rather than allowing these systems to evolve gradually, it is now applying pressure to force decisions. Each actor is pushed to reveal his or her position in practice, not in theory.

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That’s why this war seems incoherent on the surface. Since the goal is not a clean military victory, escalation and negotiation occur simultaneously. This is a forced realignment of incentives across the region.

This marks a fundamental break with the model that has defined US policy for decades. The old approach managed instability and accepted unresolved tensions as the price of avoiding larger conflicts. The current approach attempts to resolve these tensions by making the cost of maintaining them too high.

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Whether this will work remains unclear. What is clear is that the Middle East no longer operates under the same rules.

This is not just a war with Iran. This is an attempt to change how the region operates and who will shape it in the future.

This article is a Fox News Digital exclusive from the author’s article. Substack series In different scenes, President Trump redirects Iran War

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