On Sunday night a meeting was called off. Foreign ministers from Iran and the Gulf states were due to sit together on Monday in Salalah, in Oman. It would have been their first meeting since the war began on February 28. The subject was narrow and practical: how to let commercial ships pass again through the Strait of Hormuz. The meeting was postponed with no new date. Bahrain had already refused to attend. Tehran says Riyadh asked for the delay.
That is where the region stands today. The most modest piece of diplomacy on offer — a technical arrangement about shipping lanes — could not survive the weekend. The price is visible in numbers. Brent crude traded between $106 and $108 on Monday, a four-month high, after rising more than nine per cent in a week. Before the war it was near $66. Saudi production has fallen to its lowest level since 1990. On September 11, the kingdom shut the East-West pipeline after drone attacks. That pipeline was built to carry 7mn barrels a day around Hormuz. It was the answer to a closed strait. Now it is closed too. Every route around the crisis has acquired a crisis of its own.
A policy that cannot be read
The question is no longer whether the region can absorb more pressure. It cannot. The question is whether Washington will change course. At present American policy is hard to read. In a single weekend this month President Trump said Iran was “probably” behind the pipeline attack, though neither Riyadh nor Baghdad said so. He refused a request from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for strikes against the Houthis, after two telephone calls. He said the Houthis had telephoned Washington and did not want to fight.
His Secretary of State had already told allies that no major military operation is expected before the congressional elections on November 3. Meanwhile the Treasury sanctioned companies and individuals in Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates — four partners — while leaving untouched the movement that had just seized the Bab al-Mandeb strait.
Governments cannot plan around this. So they buy insurance elsewhere. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a joint defence agreement in Makkah on August 7. Oman negotiated directly with Tehran. India hosted a Brics summit that produced the first text Iran and the UAE could both sign. None of this was designed to exclude the United States. All of it was designed to survive American unpredictability.
There is a second course. It is harder to begin and far easier to predict. A policy with a stated aim and a published method produces outcomes that everyone can see and price. That is its advantage. Markets, ministries and armies can all plan against it. Unpredictability has no such advantage. It buys nothing except the next week.
What the war is costing at home
This region is home to nearly a billion people. Their governments have spent this year doing one thing: managing security. Budgets that were meant for clinics, classrooms and industry have been redirected to air defence, fuel subsidies and emergency payments. Lebanon counts more than 4,300 dead since March and over 340,000 people still displaced. Iran’s inflation runs at 82 per cent year-on-year and 134 per cent on food. Nearly 46,000 Yemenis were displaced in a single week this month.
This is not a temporary diversion of resources. It is a habit. A state that spends a decade prioritising security over productivity does not simply return to development when the shooting stops. It loses the institutions that deliver development, and it loses the argument for its own authority. After decades of tension, the legitimacy of governments across this region is in decline. That is the deepest cost of the present course, and it does not appear in any oil price.
Europe has its own stake. European economies import energy through these waters and sell into these markets. European governments want a role in the world that is larger than crisis management on their southern shore. They cannot have it while the Mediterranean’s eastern end is a permanent emergency. Stability here is not charity towards the Arabs. It is European industrial policy.
The question no one wants to name
Every one of these problems leads back to one place. Palestine is the epicentre of the region’s condition, and it has been for three generations. An unresolved conflict in Israel and the occupied territories has bent American policy in this region for decades. It has decided which governments Washington supports, which resolutions it blocks, and which wars it joins. The United Nations has voted on this question more often than on any other. More than 140 of the UN’s 193 member states now recognise the State of Palestine. Britain and eleven other countries announced restrictions on trade with the settlements on September 8. The Foreign Secretary used the phrase “ethnic cleansing”. This is not the developing world speaking. It is Washington’s closest allies.
The ground has also shifted inside the United States. Gallup reported in February that 57 per cent of Americans now support an independent Palestinian state — close to the highest figure Gallup has ever recorded, first reached in 2003. For the first time since Gallup began asking in 2001, Americans no longer sympathise more with Israelis than with Palestinians: 41 per cent side with the Palestinians, 36 per cent with the Israelis. Among Americans aged 18 to 34, a majority — 53 per cent — sympathise with the Palestinians. Republican sympathy for Israel has fallen ten points since 2024, to its lowest level since 2004. An American president who moved on this question would not be defying his public. He would be following it.
The visible outcome
The outcome of such a move can be described precisely, which is rare in this region. A settlement on Palestine produces a peace agreement between Israel and the Arab and Islamic world — not a series of separate bargains, but one framework. It gives Iran a reason and a route to abandon confrontation with Israel and the United States, because the argument that sustains the confrontation would be gone. It removes the single grievance that every armed movement from Beirut to Sanaa uses to recruit. And it converts more than 140 governments from critics of American policy into supporters of it.
For the US, that is the fastest available repair to its standing in the world, and the cheapest exit from a drift towards wider confrontation. American prestige has not been damaged by weakness. It has been damaged by association with a condition it refuses to resolve. The choices are narrowing. The region cannot make this decision for Washington. But it can stop pretending that the alternative — another decade of managing symptoms while the disease is untreated — is a policy at all.
- Jamil K Mroue is Lebanese writer and previous editor of Al Hayat newspaper in London and The Daily Star in Beirut.