Firas Maksad
Foreign Policy / January 27, 2026
The competition between Abrahamic and Islamic coalitions is reshaping the region.
Iran’s recent domination of headlines from the Middle East, amid its violent crackdown on protesters and speculation about possible U.S. military strikes, obscures a more consequential regional shift. Tehran is no longer a principal actor shaping the region’s strategic trajectory. Instead, the Middle East is entering a new phase defined by competition between two emerging blocs: an Abrahamic and an Islamic coalition. How this rivalry evolves—rather than Iran’s next move—will do more to determine the region’s future and the U.S. role in it.
Although still short of formal alliances, these two blocs are increasingly coherent. The first side is centered on Israel and the United Arab Emirates, extending outward to include Morocco, Greece, and even India. This camp is revisionist in orientation, seeking to reconfigure the region through military power, technological collaboration, and economic integration.
Its core members share in the belief that the current Middle Eastern order has failed to stem the tide of militant Islam, whether in its Shiite form backed by Iran or the Sunni variety backed by Turkey and Qatar. Lasting stability, they posit, can be achieved only through intervening in the region’s various conflicts in support of more secular-minded forces. Seizing on U.S. President Donald Trump’s desire to expand the Abraham Accords, these countries prioritize expanding the circle of Arab-Israeli normalization—irrespective of progress toward Palestinian self-determination or Israel’s acceptance of a two-state solution.
This Abrahamic coalition is ascendant. Israel’s military campaigns following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack restored lost deterrence and enhanced its ability to project power. Meanwhile, the UAE, dubbed “Little Sparta,” has continued to leverage its economic influence and diplomatic flexibility to expand its footprint well beyond the Gulf. United Nations experts and international NGOs suspect it of providing arms to the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan, the Southern Transitional Council in Yemen, and Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar.
Greece has emerged as a key partner in the Eastern Mediterranean, cooperating with Israel on military exercises and energy initiatives to counter Turkey, a joint strategic competitor. Farther east, India’s expanding engagement with Israel and the UAE—both bilaterally and through multilateral frameworks such as I2U2 and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor—has given this bloc strategic depth that extends well beyond the Middle East itself.
Opposing the Abrahamic axis is the Islamic coalition, an attempt to counterbalance led by Saudi Arabia, alongside Turkey, Pakistan, Qatar, and—more cautiously—Egypt. These states view the Israel-Emirati axis as deeply destabilizing. They argue that the Abrahamic coalition’s support for separatist forces exacerbates fragmentation in the region’s conflict zones. They perceive the narrative of a pushback against Islamist forces as a self-serving pretext to project power. Their preference is to preserve and work through existing structures, imperfect as they might be. Whether in Yemen, Sudan, or elsewhere, they are supporting weak and broken states that are struggling to exercise sovereignty and maintain their territorial integrity.
In the past year, Saudi Arabia moved to strengthen defense ties with Pakistan, formalizing a mutual security pact after an unprecedented Israeli airstrike on neighbouring Qatar. Its military cooperation with Turkey also expanded significantly, and a more formal defense agreement appears to be on the horizon. Egypt, uneasy with Emirati and Israeli activity in the Horn of Africa, is also in discussions with Riyadh about closer coordination in Sudan and Somalia. Together, these states now form a loose but growing counterweight stretching across the region’s east-west axis.
At the center of this realignment lies the most consequential bilateral rift in the Middle East today: the growing rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Once near-indistinguishable partners, the two Gulf powers are now strategic competitors. Their divergence was underscored recently in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia struck the Port of Mukalla to halt Emirati weapons transfers. Riyadh prevailed, forcing an Emirati withdrawal—but Yemen is only one arena in a broader contest.
Left unmanaged, Saudi-Emirati competition could escalate from proxy wars to direct confrontation. It could devolve into airspace restrictions, border closures, and Emirati withdrawal from Saudi-dominated institutions such as OPEC+. In fact, such threats have already been made by senior officials. These previously unthinkable steps would rattle energy markets, disrupt regional travel, and significantly impact the ability to conduct cross-border business.
To date, quiet inter-Gulf diplomacy has helped contain the clash, but the underlying divergence is structural, not episodic, and not just personal between both countries’ strongmen. It is a core part of and also a consequence of the new regional construct.
Competition between the Abrahamic and Islamic coalitions also complicates one of Washington’s key foreign-policy objectives: Saudi-Israeli normalization. Riyadh continues to see value in a deal that would provide it with a treaty commitment to its security by the United States in exchange for integrating Israel more fully into the regional order. But absent meaningful changes in Israeli policy—particularly on Gaza and the West Bank—the kingdom is likely to continue drawing closer to Turkey and Pakistan and even further away from Israel.
For the United States, its leading strategic challenge will no longer be countering Iran, whose regime appears to be mortally wounded and whose regional axis has been deeply degraded. It is managing damaging competition among its partners in order to prevent further fragmentation. Its task is complicated by divisions within Washington itself, where senior administration officials diverge among themselves and are suspected of having independent business interests in the region. The result has been a hands-off approach rather than any serious effort by the U.S. administration to mediate.
To achieve a historic breakthrough in the Middle East, Trump will need to do two things. First, the president will have to more actively manage rivalries among America’s partners as well as among his own aides. Designating a special envoy responsible for implementing a singular coordinated approach to the region would accomplish both. Second, he will need to maintain a viable pathway toward Saudi-Israeli normalization by shaping political outcomes in Jerusalem after legislative elections later this year. It is imperative for the incoming Israeli government not to be hostage to a radical fringe determined to preclude Palestinian self-determination in service of their messianic beliefs.
Saudi Arabia is the key swing state of the Middle East. Saudi policy, as described to me by one of its senior officials, is pragmatic rather than ideological—guided by “maximum flexibility at a time of maximum uncertainty.”
If Trump can succeed in delivering Saudi-Israeli normalization before leaving office, he can still steer Riyadh and the region off its current rivalrous path. He can fold the Abrahamic and the Islamic coalitions under America’s large Middle Eastern tent and stabilize the region’s post-Iran order under U.S. primacy for decades to come.
Firas Maksad is Managing Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Eurasia Group; he is also an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Institute
