The Regionally Resentful
Everyone‘s watching for war with Iran. But something deeper is shifting in the Middle East.
Grüezi!
Everyone is watching for war in the Middle East. They’re right to be concerned – but they’re wrong about what they’re seeing.
This isn’t a crisis with an easy off-ramp. Iran will only negotiate a nuclear deal. Washington wants everything.
Turkey’s diplomatic formula might buy time but it can’t bridge a gap that isn’t about terms and conditions but regime survival.
And Saudi Arabia assures Tehran its airspace is closed to attack whilst its defence minister tells Washington the ayatollahs will only grow stronger if Trump doesn’t follow through.
This week will see if the breathing space merely delays the inevitable.
1. The Turkish Off-Ramp
Turkey – along with Qatar and Egypt – is working hard to arrange direct negotiations between Steve Witkoff and senior Iranian officials.
But these regional mediators are not wannabe Nobel Peace Prize candidates.
They’re parties whose strategic interests are served by keeping Iran in place as a counterweight to Israeli regional dominance.
Turkish Foreign Minister Fidan’s advice to Washington – ‘close files one by one’ and ‘don’t turn this into another Venezuela’ – is a reflection of Ankara’s discomfort, not diplomatic altruism.
The 500km Iran-Turkey border now has 203 electro-optical towers, 380km of modular wall, and 553km of trenches. Iran’s collapse could mean millions of refugees heading north.
Turkey is proposing holding on to Iran’s 440kg of 60%-enriched uranium – which is pretty much the 2010 Turkey-Brazil-Iran agreement that Obama rejected.
Trump is unlikely to accept partial solutions that Israel opposes, and Obama rejected.
The off-ramp is Erdoğan’s coalition play to foreclose the Israeli-preferred strike option.
2. ‘Anyone But Israel’
The countries working to prevent or forestall a US attack – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, with Pakistan on the periphery – are not ideological allies.
The June 2025 war confirmed what all of them suspected. Israel’s ability to penetrate deep into Iran’s airspace showed a military capacity they couldn’t hope to match.
Netanyahu’s ability to pressure Trump into bombing Iran, then Israel’s strike on Qatar in September, was a wake-up call for America’s regional ‘allies’ who realised they could no longer depend on the US security umbrella against either Israel or Iran.
Saudi Arabia fears permanent instability derailing its modernisation. Egypt dreads another regional conflagration that would spike energy prices and threaten Suez traffic. Turkey doesn’t want to be relegated to a regional also-ran.
A shared resentment is creating a coalition that is attempting to stave off an attack that it thinks would further strengthen Israel, even as its members privately loathe the Tehran regime.
The US has committed to Israeli hegemony, but the regional cost is friction. And that friction has generated an ‘anyone but Israel’ counter-alignment that might limit American freedom of action.
Trump can attack Iran – but doing so would accelerate the coalition-building that the Abraham Accords were designed to prevent.
3. Massacres Changed the Calculation
The protests that began at the end of 2025 over currency collapse became one of the biggest challenges to the Islamic Republic since 1979 – before being crushed with unprecedented violence.
Death toll estimates range from the government’s grim but precise 3,117 to leaked Revolutionary Guard intelligence reports suggesting 36,500 killed, mostly on 8-9 January when Khamenei ordered his security forces to ‘crush protests by any means necessary.’
The internet shutdown lasted over 400 hours – the longest in Iranian history. Satellite dishes were confiscated. CCTV footage was seized for protester identification.
The crackdown’s viciousness was a reminder that the enemy the regime fears most is its own citizenry.
More significantly, Khamenei called the protests treasonous – ‘sedition similar to a coup’ – effectively shutting down any room for leniency towards those who took part.
And this domestic fragility shapes Tehran’s calculations in strange ways. Capitulating to American pressure could trigger renewed protests or it could buy time. War might rally nationalist sentiment – or it could collapse the regime.
