In the mid-1960s, Malcolm Kerr published The Arab Cold War, a book that, at the time, imposed counterintuitive analytical discipline on a region habitually read through the narrow lens of a single totalizing conflict. Against the prevailing tendency to treat the Arab–Israeli conflict as the primary engine of Middle Eastern politics, Kerr reconstructed the region as a system in which Arab states competed—openly and ruthlessly—for primacy, legitimacy, and the authority to define the regional political agenda. The conflict with Israel was often mediated by, subordinated to, and often an effect of, intra-Arab rivalry; it functioned as a source of symbolic capital and strategic leverage in contests among Nasserists, Ba’athists, monarchies, and revolutionary republics.
It is time to update our view and recognize the renewed dynamic of competition for hierarchy that is driving regional politics.
That realistic way of seeing the region largely disappeared as subsequent pressures mounted. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, the rise and institutionalization of transnational Islamist movements, and the gradual entrenchment of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a permanent global cause reorganized policymaking, activism, and scholarship. Over time, two frames crowded out most others and came to dominate regional analysis. The first was the strategic and sectarian contest between Iran and the Arab states, which reframed regional politics as a struggle between competing security architectures and rival claims to ideological leadership. The second was the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which hardened into a durable moral and diplomatic axis around which international opinion, domestic mobilization, and alliance politics repeatedly revolved. Against these two gravitational fields, inter-Arab rivalry came to fade into the background.
It is time to update our view and recognize the renewed dynamic of competition for hierarchy that is driving regional politics.
For more than a decade, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates functioned as the central axis of what was called moderate Arab politics. They coordinated on Yemen, jointly confronted Qatar, underwrote counterrevolutionary reaction after 2011’s Arab Spring, and presented themselves to Washington as the region’s most reliable Arab partners. Now, Saudi Arabia is changing this course and is repositioning for regional primacy in a Middle East it believes will soon look very different.
Read the full article at The Abrahamic Metacritique.
Published originally on January 12, 2026.
