Home|Managed Instability as the Strategy: Iran, US, and the Middle East’s Emerging Order
By Nima Korami
Hormuz remains effectively shut as strikes have continued in bursts throughout July and August, even though indirect talks between the US and Iran continue to take place. Iran and Oman have reached the technical stage of a temporary shipping arrangement but Tehran ties any real reopening to a lengthening list of US concessions, ranging from sanctions relief and troop withdrawal to compensation and frozen-asset release, among them, while Washington rejects anything resembling Iranian oversight of the Omani lane.
Regionally, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement on August 7. Two days later, Iran’s Supreme Leader installed a hardliner-dominated security command, instructing new IRGC chief Ahmad Vahidi to prepare for offensive operations. Houthis have carried out strikes inside Saudi Arabia and against Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces, prompting Riyadh, which has separately signed a US civil nuclear cooperation deal in July, to allege that those attacks are being directly coordinated by the IRGC. And inside Iran, the blockade’s economic toll, already severe, continues to compound, and political jockeying for influence intensifies.
The clearest, yet by no mean perfect and/or identical, precedent for where this has settled is the containment regime Washington ran over Iraq through the 1990s: no-fly zones, sanctions and periodic strikes that boxed Saddam Hussein in for over a decade without removing him or resolving anything underneath. Something similar is forming here albeit less by design than by default. Both governments gain from restraint but each fears that restraint simply hands the other time to improve its position. As such, each keeps the option to defect – that is, the ability to resume limited or targeted strikes – within reach rather than commit to peace.
Seen this way, it is reasonable to suggest that for both sides, the strategy, for as much as one can talk about strategy in the true sense of the word, especially with regard to the US side, is managed disorder. And if managed disorder is genuinely the operative equilibrium, it argues for a longer planning horizon than most corporate risk models currently assume. This is so simply because the current incentive structure, which produced each new cycle of calm-strike-calm, is unlikely to change for the remainder of Trump’s presidency.
Regionally, the Mecca pact may prove more consequential than its immediate military purpose. It is an early institutional marker of a regional order in formation; one in which the United States can no longer assume that it will remain the partner of choice. Washington’s reputation has been damaged, its ability to guarantee security is being questioned, and the strategic architecture it built around the Abraham Accords now looks severely weakened, if not effectively hollowed out. The emerging alignment is not yet a coherent bloc, but its contours are becoming clearer. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan share concerns about both Iran and Israel, while Israel, the UAE and, to a degree, India occupy an opposing strategic constellation. Iran and its network of proxies sit between these groupings.
It is too early to map this order with confidence, and the alignments should not be mistaken for fixed alliances. However, two conclusions appear relatively certain. First, the United States will have to compete for regional relevance and partnership in a way it has not had to for decades. Regional states are becoming more willing to diversify their security relationships, hedge against American unreliability and extract concessions from competing powers rather than simply align themselves with Washington. If, and this is a big if, the Iranian regime does not overplay its hand, secondly, it has an opportunity to move from being the object around which regional security is organised to a participant in that security architecture. Tehran, in other words, could eventually seek accommodation with the Mecca grouping and help construct a more indigenous regional defence structure. The result would not necessarily be a more harmonious Middle East, but it could be a Middle East in which the principal powers increasingly determine the terms of their own security without Washington acting as the indispensable intermediary.