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PROFESSOR JUNAID S AHMAD examines how Israel’s recent military actions have accelerated geopolitical realignment in West Asia, reshaping relations among regional powers and challenging the US-led security order.
One must give credit where credit is due: Israel, by behaving with the strategic subtlety of a chainsaw in a porcelain museum, has achieved what diplomats, clerics, monarchs, generals and think-tank acrobats spent decades failing to accomplish. It has helped bury the old Sunni-Shia melodrama as the organising principle of West Asian politics, and it has made the American ‘security umbrella’ look less like an umbrella than a very expensive lightning rod.
This is no small accomplishment. For years, the region was instructed to understand itself through sectarian grammar. Riyadh and Tehran were not merely rival capitals; they were presented as metaphysical opposites, civilisational antagonists, eternal enemies locked in theological combat. Every battlefield was translated into sectarian prose. Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq were all reduced to the lazy vocabulary of Sunni versus Shia, as though history itself had been outsourced to cable-news interns and intelligence cut-outs.
Then came reality, that most impolite guest.
China began the correction in 2023 by brokering the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, assisted by the quieter groundwork of Iraq and Oman. Russia, too, contributed by helping normalise the idea that regional actors could speak across blocs without first asking permission from Washington’s imperial reception desk. But Israel, with its characteristic gift for turning every tactical victory into a strategic ulcer, has completed the process. Its rampage across Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran’s orbit has reminded the region that the primary contradiction is not sectarian identity. It is imperial architecture. It is Zionist violence. It is the American security order that protects both while charging its clients premium rates for the privilege of being endangered.
Whatever one thinks of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt or any of the regimes presently rearranging the furniture of West Asia is, at this point, almost secondary. These are not saints convening a moral congress. They are states, regimes, militaries, monarchies and bureaucracies pursuing survival in a suddenly clarified environment. The significance lies not in their virtue but in their recognition. Israel has forced them to see that the old sectarian game is now strategically obsolete. When the house is burning, one does not pause to ask whether the fire brigade prefers a different school of theology.
The Pakistan angle is especially revealing. To the untrained eye, Islamabad’s deepening role with Tehran may look paradoxical. Pakistan has long been close to Saudi Arabia, dependent on Gulf money, connected through labour, military cooperation and ideological patronage. It is also the only nuclear-armed Muslim-majority state, a fact that gives every Saudi-Pakistani handshake a weight that no communiqué can fully conceal. How, then, does Pakistan become a trusted channel to Iran while remaining Riyadh’s intimate partner?
The answer is almost insultingly simple: because Riyadh permits it, and perhaps now requires it. Islamabad’s friendliness towards Tehran is not a freelance adventure. It is part of a larger Saudi recalibration. The choreography matters: Iranian officials in Islamabad, Pakistani leaders moving onward to Riyadh, Gulf money quietly underwriting political possibility, and the old American monopoly on mediation beginning to look like a colonial antique. Pakistan is not replacing the Gulf; it is being used by parts of the Gulf as a security instrument less compromised by Israel, less exhausted than Washington, and more plausible to Tehran.
This is where Israel deserves its second thank-you note, preferably embossed and delivered with deadpan sincerity. By making American protection look so manifestly dysfunctional, Israel has accelerated the search for alternatives. The United States can still bomb, sanction, threaten, veto, bribe and lecture. It can still move carrier groups around like imperial chess pieces. It can still deploy the sacred vocabulary of ‘stability’, that blessed word under which so much rubble has been produced. But the region has begun to notice something awkward: American protection often means becoming a target on behalf of American and Israeli priorities.
The Gulf monarchies have spent decades living under the American security umbrella. Yet the umbrella now leaks missiles, drones, oil shocks, reputational ruin and strategic dependency. Washington tells its partners it will defend them, then drags them into the blast radius of Israel’s wars. It sells them weapons, then demands political compliance. It promises stability, then sanctifies the most destabilising actor in the region. This is not security. It is hostage management with invoices.
Hence the turn towards Pakistan. Not because Pakistan is pure, democratic, stable or immune to imperial manipulation. Far from it. Pakistan’s ruling establishment has often treated sovereignty as a costume to be worn in public and pawned in private. But geopolitics does not wait for moral perfection. Pakistan has geography, a large military, deep Saudi ties, working channels with Iran, strategic relations with China, and the one credential that still concentrates minds in a brutal world: nuclear capability. That does not automatically mean a formal nuclear umbrella. It does mean that Riyadh and others can imagine a security architecture in which Washington is no longer the only ceiling above their heads.
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The UAE remains the interesting outlier: agile, wealthy, hyper-networked, and deeply invested in normalisation with Israel. But even Abu Dhabi must eventually confront the question haunting every palace in the region: how long can one profit from alignment with an actor whose behaviour generates permanent regional combustion? The Emirati model thrives on logistics, ports, finance, surveillance and ambiguity. But ambiguity is harder to monetise when Gaza is in ashes, Lebanon is aflame, Iran is mobilised, and the Arab street understands normalisation not as modernity but as collaboration with Zionist mass murder.
Israel imagined it was restoring deterrence. In truth, it has demolished the mythology that underwrote the old order. It has shown Riyadh and Tehran that their rivalry is luxurious compared with the danger of a region permanently subordinated to Israeli impunity. It has shown the Gulf that American bases are not shields but magnets. It has shown Pakistan that its strategic relevance may lie less in serving Washington than in helping construct a post-American regional balance. It has shown everyone that sectarianism, while useful for television panels and proxy wars, is a poor guide to survival.
So yes, thank you, Israel. Thank you for overplaying your hand with such operatic arrogance. Thank you for making the unspeakable obvious. Thank you for reminding West Asia that the enemy of regional order is not the neighbour with a different sectarian vocabulary, but the settler-colonial war machine that turns every country around it into either an accomplice, a battlefield or a future target.
History has a wicked sense of humour. The state that sold itself as the indispensable fortress of Western power may become the force that makes the West’s military presence in the region redundant. The regime that exploited Sunni-Shia fracture may become the undertaker of geo-sectarianism. The pyromaniac has accidentally invented the fire brigade.
For that, at least, Israel may be thanked – not with admiration, but with the cold applause reserved for death cults who destroy their own strategy while mistaking the noise for victory.
Professor Junaid S Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID – https://csidpk.org), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
