Three Years After October 7, a New Middle East Order Takes Shape

Three years have passed since the October 7 attacks on Israel and the beginning of Israel's war in Gaza, and the wider region that has emerged bears little resemblance to the one that existed before. Conflict, economic turmoil and a fundamental shattering of the old balance of power have come to define a Middle East in which alliances have collapsed, US influence has eroded and new actors are scrambling for position.

Perhaps the most striking casualty of the period has been the network of alliances that Iran spent decades constructing across the region. That architecture, long central to Tehran's ability to project power, has been severely degraded. The one notable exception appears to be Yemen's Houthi rebels, who have retained their loyalty and their capacity to disrupt shipping lanes far from their own borders.

Israel, by contrast, has secured tangible battlefield gains. Senior figures in Lebanon's Hezbollah and in the Palestinian group Hamas have been killed in successive Israeli operations, while Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself was assassinated in February. Israeli forces now occupy most of Gaza, where more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed and large swathes of the enclave have been reduced to rubble.

Yet those gains have come at a steep strategic price. Israel's conduct of the war has isolated it from allies that once treated it as a natural partner, and opinion polling suggests it has become deeply unpopular internationally, including within the United States itself. The prospect of further normalisation deals between Israel and Arab states now looks remote, at least in the near term.

Instead of consolidating a stable order, Israel has continued striking targets across the region, crossing red lines that had previously held. Its 2025 attack on Doha, Qatar, was a case in point, and analysts say repeated strikes have led many governments worldwide to regard Jerusalem as the primary source of instability in the Middle East.

The consequences have been especially severe for Washington's regional strategy. HA Hellyer of the Royal United Services Institute noted that before October 7, American policy in the region had rested largely on integrating Israel through the Abraham Accords normalisation deals, which brought states such as the United Arab Emirates into closer alignment with Jerusalem. The Israeli response to the attacks, Hellyer argued, effectively ended that approach.

Rather than presiding over a settled region anchored by Israel, the United States found itself drawn into a war with Iran this year. Tehran responded by targeting American allies across the Gulf, and the episode visibly shook confidence in the reliability of the US security umbrella that had underpinned regional order for decades.

"There's been a loss of faith in the US as a singularly sufficient security guarantor," Hellyer observed. The practical effect, he explained, is that states in the region are now courting additional external partners even as many of them maintain or deepen existing ties with Washington.

One illustration of that hedging is the Mecca security pact signed in August by Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan. Under the agreement, an attack on one signatory is to be treated as an attack on all three — an arrangement that reflects a desire among regional capitals to diversify the sources of their defence.

Sanam Vakil, who directs the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, framed the shift as an acceleration of an existing trend. "The Middle East has always been multi-aligned. However, now it's even more so," she said, pointing to the growing leverage of external actors, including Turkiye's influence in Syria and China's involvement in negotiations to end the war with Iran as Beijing's own energy supplies come under pressure.

Vakil also highlighted an ironic reversal of roles. Since October 7, she suggested, Israel has emerged as the revisionist power challenging the existing order, while Iran increasingly resembles the status quo power, focused on recovering the ground it has lost over the past three years rather than pushing further forward.

That said, she cautioned against overstating Israel's position. While Israel may be the preponderant military power in the region, Vakil argued, real power is usually measured by the ability to project stability — something Israel has shown neither the capacity nor the willingness to do.

Military supremacy has also failed to translate into economic leverage. The Israeli and American hopes that February's attacks would quickly topple Iran's government have not been realised; instead, a new front has opened. Tehran can now apply pressure on Israel, the United States and their partners through the Strait of Hormuz, which typically carries about a fifth of the world's oil and gas, and through Bab al-Mandeb, threatened by its Houthi allies.

The economic fallout has been uneven. Western economies, cushioned by alternative supplies, have absorbed the shocks relatively well, while other parts of the region remain far more exposed to disrupted energy flows and rising prices.

Taken together, the picture is of a region redrawn by three years of war: an isolated Israel, a diminished Iran, a United States whose security guarantees are openly questioned, and a constellation of middle powers and outside actors each probing for advantage in a landscape with no settled centre.