TANVI RATNA: With one war, Trump is breaking Middle East's old power structure
· Fox News
The Middle East is once again on edge as U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian military infrastructure continue. Iran has responded with missile and drone attacks. Oil markets have surged, and global shipping lanes are under pressure.
But this is not unfolding like a typical war in the region.
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Even as strikes continue, tankers are still moving through the Strait of Hormuz under constrained conditions. Backchannel communications have not collapsed. Key regional players are not fully committing to either escalation or restraint. Instead, they are doing something far more telling: they are adjusting.
That is the first signal that this is not just a military confrontation. It is a system under stress—one that is being deliberately reshaped.
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To understand what is happening now, you have to go back to the system that existed before this moment.
For nearly two decades, the Middle East operated on a managed equilibrium. After the Iraq War, through the Arab Spring, and into the fight against ISIS, three distinct power structures emerged and learned to coexist without resolving their conflicts.
Shia-dominated Iran built what became known as the "Axis of Resistance," embedding itself across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. These were not loose proxy relationships. They were institutional footholds—militias integrated into state structures, political actors controlling territory and budgets. Iran’s incentive was clear: expand influence without triggering a direct, overwhelming response. Stay below the threshold of full-scale war while steadily increasing leverage.
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Across the Sunni world, there was no unified front to counter this. Saudi Arabia and the UAE pushed for a centralized, state-led regional order, while Turkey and Qatar backed Islamist political movements that offered a competing model of legitimacy. Their incentive was not alignment, but competition. Each camp used regional conflicts to expand influence without fully committing to a single strategic bloc.
Israel, meanwhile, stood apart. By the mid-2010s, it had unmatched military capability and operational reach, but it remained outside the region’s political framework. Its incentive was to preserve that advantage through deterrence—strike when necessary, but avoid becoming entangled in the region’s unstable alliances.
The United States managed this system rather than resolving it. The Iran nuclear deal treated Tehran’s nuclear ambitions as separate from its regional behavior. Conflicts like Gaza followed a predictable cycle of escalation and ceasefire. Stability was maintained, but only by compartmentalizing the underlying tensions.
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That model allowed every actor to operate within the system without fundamentally changing it.
President Donald Trump rejected that model from the start.
His first major break came in May 2018, when he withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sweeping sanctions. This was not just a policy shift on nuclear issues. It was a systemic move. By targeting Iran’s oil exports, financial networks and shipping, the administration began raising the cost of maintaining its regional architecture.
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The incentive for Iran started to change. Expansion was no longer low-risk. Every additional node in its network now carried economic and operational consequences.
That pressure escalated in April 2019 with the designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, and then in January 2020 with the strike that killed Qassem Soleimani. These actions were widely described as escalation at the time. In reality, they were consistent steps in a broader strategy: eliminate the assumption that Iran could operate indefinitely in the gray zone.
At the same time, Trump moved to reshape the other side of the system.
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The Abraham Accords in 2020 broke one of the longest-standing constraints in Middle Eastern diplomacy. For decades, Arab states had conditioned normalization with Israel on a resolution to the Palestinian issue. Trump reversed that sequence. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations first, followed by Morocco and Sudan.
This created a new set of incentives across the Sunni world. Alignment with Israel was no longer politically off limits. It became a pathway to security cooperation, advanced technology and closer ties with the United States. Instead of waiting for a final settlement, states could now act in their immediate strategic interest.
For Israel, this was a structural shift. It was no longer operating outside the regional system. It was being integrated into it.
But alignment alone did not resolve the system’s contradictions.
Saudi Arabia remained cautious. Turkey and Qatar continued to pursue their own networks. Iran’s influence persisted through deeply embedded institutions. The region had new alignments, but they were incomplete.
This is where Trump’s approach evolved from alignment to enforcement.
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During the Gaza war following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, the United States helped broker a phased arrangement by early 2025 that tied hostage releases to Israeli withdrawals and linked humanitarian aid to monitoring mechanisms. This was not a traditional ceasefire. It introduced conditionality directly into the structure of the agreement.
That logic carried forward into 2026 with the development of a U.S.-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 outcomes.
This changed incentives again. Cooperation was no longer symbolic. It became transactional and enforceable.
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And yet, even with these changes, the system did not fully realign.
Iran’s networks remained intact. Sunni divisions persisted. Israel continued to expand its own strategic relationships beyond the immediate region. The old structures were weakened, but not dismantled.
That is why the current war matters.
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The strikes that began at the end of February 2026 are not just about degrading Iranian military capabilities. They are about forcing simultaneous adjustments across all three systems.
Iran is now facing a different calculation than at any point in the past two decades. Its strategy of gradual expansion has collided with sustained economic pressure and direct military risk. The incentive is shifting from building influence to preserving it under constraint.
Sunni states are being pushed out of their comfort zone of strategic ambiguity. The ability to hedge between competing blocs is narrowing. As pressure increases, the cost of remaining non-aligned rises, and the incentive to consolidate around a clearer regional framework becomes stronger.
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Israel, in turn, is being positioned not just as a military actor, but as a central node in that emerging framework. Its role is evolving from deterrence to system participation—linking security, technology and governance across aligned states.
What Trump is doing through this war is not simply escalating a conflict. He is compressing timelines.
Instead of allowing these systems to evolve gradually, he is applying pressure that forces decisions now. Each actor is being pushed to reveal its position, not in theory, but in practice.
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That is why this war appears inconsistent on the surface. Escalation and negotiation are happening at the same time because the objective is not a clean military victory. It is a forced realignment of incentives across the entire region.
This marks a fundamental break from the model that defined U.S. policy for decades. The old approach managed instability and accepted unresolved tensions as the cost of avoiding larger conflicts. The current approach is attempting to resolve those tensions by making the cost of maintaining them too high.
Whether that works remains uncertain. What is clear is that the Middle East is no longer operating under the same rules.
This is not just a war with Iran. It is an attempt to change how the region functions and who gets to shape it going forward.
This article is a Fox News Digital exclusive from the author’s Substack series on different theaters President Trump is realigning with the Iran War.