The 22 months that began with Hamas’ horrific attack against Israel’s southern communities on October 7, 2023 and that have led to the 12-day Israel-Iran war in June 2025 have changed the strategic map of the Middle East. Most dramatically, the United States has emerged as by far the most important external player in the region, resulting in a new unipolar moment in Middle East history. In this new regional configuration, America has no significant external competitors. Russia could not even prevent the downfall of Bashar Assad’s regime, despite its huge previous investments in that regime’s defense.

Hence the striking resemblance between this new environment and the Middle East that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and the victory of the US-led coalition in the January 1991 First Gulf War. That first unipolar moment allowed President George HW Bush and Secretary of State James Baker to convene the Madrid Peace conference, to open the successful Israel-Jordan peace negotiations and the less successful Israeli-Syrian negotiations, to create the conditions that allowed the pathbreaking Israeli-PLO Oslo Accords, and to launch the now-forgotten multilateral talks encompassing Israel, the PLO, and 13 Arab governments to address the region’s most pressing issues.

Similarly, the new unipolar moment now allowed US President Donald Trump to dictate a deadline—within 60 days, or else—for Iran to accept his demand that it would abandon its uranium enrichment activities. When Iran failed to commit itself to doing so, Trump gave Israel a green light to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. Some 10 days later, Trump joined the fight directly by sending America’s own B-2 bombers to bomb Fordow and other Iranian nuclear facilities.

Trump’s action was in sharp contrast to the Obama administration’s failure to punish Syria’s President Bashar Assad for the use of chemical weapons against his domestic opponents, despite President Barack Obama’s efforts to dissuade him from doing so. Indeed, Trump’s recent action was now also compared to his own failure to react to Iran’s attacks on Saudi Aramco’s oil facilities in Saudi Arabia five years earlier. Yet Trump now also made it very clear that the United States would not permit Israel to go beyond the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities. Thus, when Israel launched its fighter pilots in retaliation to an Iranian violation of the cease-fire concluded—and as Trump saw that violation as minor and suspected that Israel was adding regime change in Iran to its objectives—he did not hesitate to order Israel to turn its planes around.

Another dimension of the restored US dominance of the Middle East is that its primary military tool for establishing such dominance—the US Central Command (CENTCOM)—has become the region’s most important military organization. Enhanced by the decision in January 2021 to transfer........

© The National Interest