The Middle East is once again being interpreted through the language of blocs. Analysts have begun mapping emerging alignments: a Saudi-anchored constellation including Egypt, Pakistan, Qatar, and Turkey; an Emirati network stretching from India to Ethiopia and Morocco; and a contested middle ground of fragile states — Yemen, Sudan, Somalia — where both powers back opposing actors.
Although schematic, this analytical reading rightly points to a long-brewing Saudi–Emirati rift which is now not only out in the open but also beginning to generate bloc-like behaviour. States are clustering politically, media narratives are hardening, and selective redirection of capital and security partnerships is increasingly interpreted as taking place.
Even if these alignments remain shallow, reactive, and potentially short-lived, they still carry the risk of imposing lasting damage on a region emerging from fifteen years of proxy warfare and attempting to pivot toward economic diversification, foreign direct investment, and stability. Nascent political blocs could distort market incentives, inflame wars, and paralyse much-needed regional coordination, particularly within an already hollowed-out GCC framework.
A region that resists clean alignment
According to classical balance-of-power logic, Israel’s military ascendancy and the effective dismantling of much of Iran’s “Resistance Axis” should have produced a unified regional counter-alignment. The opposite has occurred even if Israel threatened Levantine and Gulf security.
Rather than coalescing around a shared threat perception, the Middle East has entered a phase of heightened fragmentation, with states recalibrating independently and navigating multiple, often contradictory, alignment options.
Despite Israel’s continued pariah status and the IMEC corridor being largely stalled, the idea of an economically integrated Israel has merely been deferred, with the UAE remaining its most consistent proponent. At the same time, growing Hebraic–Hellenic ties have been welcomed by some Arab capitals wary of Turkish “neo-Ottomanism,” while long-standing bilateral rivalries - between Egypt and Ethiopia, or Morocco and Algeria - have re-emerged with renewed intensity.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Islamic Republic, still widely framed as the region’s primary antagonist, is left to decay as most states prefer an unstable status quo to further systemic disruption.
