The war waged by Israel and the United States against Iran and its proxies has decisively altered the distribution of military power in the Middle East. It has not, at least not yet, produced a settled regional order. The distinction is the key to Israel’s position: there is a difference between a change in the balance of capabilities and a change in the terms of regional politics. The first does not automatically produce the second.
By early 2026, Israel had become, by a wide margin, the preponderant military power in its region. Over roughly eighteen months, it degraded or dismantled the network of Iranian allies and proxies that had constrained it for a generation and, together with the United States, struck the Iranian state itself. Yet preponderance is not the same as hegemony. Hegemony implies not merely material dominance but a degree of acceptance—a dominant power whose position others, however grudgingly, treat as the organizing fact of regional life. Israel has achieved the former. Whether it can convert that into the latter is the open question examined here.
A New Distribution of Power
The shift in capabilities is the least contested part of the story. Iran’s regional strategy had rested on a network of allied non-state actors, the Axis of Resistance, designed to deter Israel and project Iranian influence without direct confrontation. That network was substantially dismantled between 2024 and 2026. Hezbollah, the most capable of the proxies, lost much of its senior command to Israel’s September 2024 operations, including its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, and accepted a ceasefire on Nov. 27, 2024. The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria the following month severed the overland route by which Iran had resupplied Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hamas was degraded over the course of the Gaza war that began on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Iranian state itself was then struck directly by Israel. The “12-Day War” of June 2025 culminated in Operation Midnight Hammer, a series of American strikes on the nuclear enrichment facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. A second and larger campaign opened on Feb. 28, 2026, when US and Israeli forces conducted hundreds of strikes in 12 hours, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and much of Iran’s military leadership. Israel had both degraded its adversaries’ capabilities and demonstrated a willingness to use force, thereby re-establishing its deterrent posture across several fronts. The “Ring of Fire” Iran had constructed to encircle Israel was, for the time being, largely inoperative.
Deterrence Restored, Compulsion Incomplete
Restoring deterrence is distinct from compelling an adversary to surrender a capability. Political economist Thomas Schelling distinguished deterrence (persuading an opponent not to act) from compellence (forcing it to undo something already done). On the issue that prompted the war, Iran’s nuclear program, the record is one of deterrence restored but compellence incomplete.
The strikes left Iran’s known enrichment plants, including Fordow, destroyed or badly damaged—but the program’s core was disabled, not eliminated. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) believes the stockpile of highly enriched uranium survived; much of it likely in the tunnel complex at Isfahan: roughly 440 kilograms at 60 percent, a short step below weapons grade and sufficient for several weapons. Even at its weakest, Iran retains this material, a residual missile force, and the remnants of its proxy network.
Whether to address those capabilities through coercion or negotiation remains unresolved as of early June 2026. A Pakistan-brokered ceasefire on April 8, and talks mediated by Qatar and Oman pitted Iran’s asserted right to enrich against an American demand for zero enrichment and missile limits.
The late-May memorandum matured: on June 14 the two sides announced a memorandum of understanding, slated for formal signature in Switzerland, that reopens the Strait of Hormuz, lifts the US naval blockade, and opens a 60-day window for nuclear talks.
Its terms are revealing. On the existing stockpile, the parties set a baseline of on-site down-blending under IAEA supervision, neutralizing the material but keeping it in Iran, while deferring the harder question of future enrichment. Ballistic missiles and the proxies go unmentioned. Vice President JD Vance concedes the campaign “substantially set back” the program rather than eliminating it, and proponents argue a verifiable agreement secures the essential objective at lower cost than indefinite pressure against a state of 90 million people.
The deferral is the point. The hardest questions are pushed to later stages, much as the disarmament of Hezbollah and Hamas has been deferred since their respective ceasefires—deferrals that, in practice, have approached permanence. Tehran’s conduct suggests the concern is reasonable: Iran has agreed in principle to dilute its uranium while refusing limits on future enrichment and insisting the material stay in the country, even as it curtails cooperation with the IAEA. The point is not that one side is correct but that the war altered Iran’s capabilities more than its intentions, but intentions are the harder variable to change by force.
Bandwagoning in the North
The clearest evidence that the shift in power is reshaping regional behavior lies along Israel’s northern frontier, where two states long aligned against it have moved toward accommodation. This is an instance of bandwagoning: the tendency of weaker states to align with an ascendant power rather than balance against it.
In Syria, the government of Ahmed al-Sharaa, who overthrew Assad, has pursued an unprecedented opening. Al-Sharaa became the first Syrian head of state in decades to address the United Nations General Assembly and the first to visit the White House, and he has publicly endorsed disarming Hezbollah after disrupting a Hezbollah cell in Quneitra, Syria, in April 2026. Damascus and Jerusalem, which are still formally at war, have held repeated security talks, with al-Sharaa describing a pact as a “necessity” and invoking the 1974 Disengagement Agreement as a model.
None of this makes al-Sharaa a liberal: the July 2025 massacres of Druze civilians in Suwayda placed his government far from Western human-rights norms. But his appetite for engagement is itself a lever that might, over time, moderate some behavior.
Lebanon has moved along a parallel track, though one that also exposes the limits of bandwagoning when a non-state actor retains the capacity to resist. The government of President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has committed to reestablishing the state’s monopoly on force through a five-phase plan, Dir al-Watan (“shield of the homeland”), to disarm Hezbollah. After renewed fighting and an April 16, 2026 ceasefire, Beirut and Jerusalem opened direct negotiations—the first since 1983—focused on creating “pilot zones” in which the Lebanese Armed Forces would assume control as Israeli units withdrew.
A May 2026 survey found 58 percent of Lebanese supporting Hezbollah’s disarmament. On June 3, 2026, negotiators in Washington produced a further US-mediated ceasefire, which President Aoun called the “last chance” for a comprehensive truce. Hezbollah, which was not party to the talks, rejected it outright. Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, dismissed the negotiations as serving “the enemy’s objectives”—and fighting resumed the next day. The rejection also weighed on the parallel US-Iran negotiations, since Tehran has conditioned any ceasefire of its own on a halt to Israeli operations in Lebanon.
The Lebanese state has bandwagoned with the ascendant power, negotiating directly with Israel for the first time in four decades, while the armed movement it has pledged to disarm continues to fight. Accommodation at the level of governments can coexist with resistance at the level of proxies, but the realignment’s durability depends on persistence. What is clear is that the opening followed not from Israeli concessions but from the defeat of Hezbollah and the fall of Assad, consistent with the proposition that proximate, weaker states accommodate a power whose local dominance has become unambiguous.
The Balance of Threat
The same preponderance of Israeli power that has drawn Syria and Lebanon toward accommodation has produced wariness elsewhere. By the logic of the “balance of threat,” states balance not against power alone but against threat—a compound of capability, proximity, offensive power, and, above all, perceived intentions. As Israel’s offensive power and its willingness to use it have grown, and the Iranian threat that once bound it to the Gulf has faded, the question of how closely to align with an unchecked Israel has divided the Arab world—a divide that one Israeli strike, more than any other, has sharpened.
That strike, on September 9, 2025, hit Hamas’s leadership in Doha, and the two sides read it very differently. Israel and its supporters call it a legitimate counterterrorism operation against a group Qatar has long hosted and financed (by public estimates, $120 million to $480 million a year). Critics, including several Gulf governments, call it an attack on a mediator’s soil and a blow to Israel’s standing. The reaction was not in dispute: the Gulf states closed ranks at an emergency Arab-Islamic summit in Doha of nearly 60 states, condemning the strike as an assault on regional security.
Behavior, however, has diverged from rhetoric. Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates have deepened military coordination with Israel even as they condemned it publicly, a gap between declared and revealed preferences that suggests the recalibration is partial and contingent rather than a settled realignment.
The Saudi Calculation
Nowhere is the hedging clearer than in the stalled question of Saudi normalization, once widely expected to follow the Abraham Accords. Several explanations compete, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first emphasizes reduced urgency: with the Iranian threat diminished, Riyadh has less immediate incentive to align openly with Israel and can afford to wait. A second emphasizes domestic and ideological constraint, what analysts describe as the pressure a leader’s domestic audience exerts on foreign policy. Under this reading, the kingdom’s hardening of its terms, from a “credible pathway” toward Palestinian statehood to a fully sovereign Palestinian state, reflects domestic limits as much as strategy. Hussain Abdul-Hussain of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies advances a sharper version, arguing that Riyadh has subordinated its earlier pragmatism to populist considerations, declining to align with Israel even as it remains wary of Iran.
These readings share an implication: the conditions under which normalization becomes attractive to Riyadh have shifted, and the principal obstacle is no longer Iranian pressure, but the interaction of reduced threat, domestic constraint, and the unresolved Palestinian question. Whatever will shift those conditions, rather than the regional balance of power that currently favors Israel, will likely determine the trajectory of normalization.
Primacy and the Patron
A final fact underscores all of the above: the United States’ centrality. Washington is now the broker and guarantor of the arrangements that define the postwar landscape—the Gaza ceasefire that took effect on Oct. 10, 2025, with its associated “Board of Peace” and international stabilization force; the Lebanon ceasefire; and the emerging Israeli-Syrian understandings. Israel’s freedom of military action and its diplomatic openings alike depend substantially on American support.
This produces a divergence of interest common to asymmetric alliances. A regional power tends to seek decisive, final outcomes; a global power managing many theaters tends to seek stabilization and the closing of files. Israeli officials have generally favored maximal objectives like full disarmament of Hamas and Hezbollah or the complete dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program, while the American administration has signaled an interest in concluding the conflict on terms that reopen the Strait of Hormuz and allow it to characterize the war’s aims as substantially met. A concrete instance came in early June 2026, when, after a reportedly tense exchange, President Trump prevailed on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call off a planned Israeli strike on a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut. Netanyahu conceded that he and Trump “do not always see eye to eye,” highlights the divergence.
The divergence is not a rupture, and the alignment remains close. But it means that the conversion of Israel’s military primacy into political outcomes runs through a partner whose preferences are related to, but not identical with, Israel’s own.
The Conversion Problem
The war thus settled one question and opened another. It settled the distribution of military power, which now favors Israel more decisively than at any point in the state’s history. But it did not settle the terms of regional order—the arrangements, alignments, and understandings through which that power is translated into a stable political settlement. The two are connected but distinct, and the historical record on converting military preponderance into a durable order is mixed. Israel’s own experience is instructive: the decisive preponderance it gained in 1967 did not by itself produce acceptance, and where acceptance came, most durably with Egypt, it followed only after a further war and a sustained diplomatic process.
Now, two uncertainties remain. The first concerns the durability of the military result itself. Whether the Iranian nuclear file is closed or merely deferred will determine whether Israel’s central security problem has been solved or only postponed. The early evidence, a surviving stockpile, a regime that refuses limits on enrichment and resists inspection, weighs toward deferral rather than closure. Additionally, deferral favors the patient party. Iran, though gravely weakened, retains the knowledge, the residual infrastructure, and, on present evidence, the intention to rebuild what it lost, while the surviving proxies will probe the new arrangements at their seams. Regional dominance decays as adversaries adapt, rearm, and learn; a military advantage that is not periodically renewed or converted into a settlement tends, over time, to erode.
The second uncertainty concerns whether that dominance can be turned into an order that others not only accept but also reinforce and build upon. The near-term tests lie in the north and in the Gulf: whether the accommodations with Damascus and Beirut become institutionalized rather than left provisional will determine whether bandwagoning hardens into a durable alignment. Whether the Gulf states convert their quiet coordination into open engagement will determine whether Israel’s preponderance is accepted as the organizing fact of regional politics or merely endured. The durable form of such an order does not require continual re-demonstration. It depends on more than Israeli power: an arrangement underwritten chiefly by an external guarantor remains hostage to that patron’s attention, which shifts with its own domestic politics and competing commitments in Europe and the Pacific. Whether such a conversion is achievable in a region historically resistant to it is the question the coming decade will answer.
Primacy is an achievement; order is a project. Israel has secured the first. The second remains, for now, unfinished—and it is not one that military power alone can complete.
Michael Johnson is the programming director of the Jewish Policy Center.
