How the Iran war exposed Abraham Accords as low-cost US hegemony, outsourced to Israel

Signed on the White House lawn on 15 September 2020, the Abraham Accords reordered Middle Eastern diplomacy by normalising full diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, moving past decades of Arab League policy that had conditioned recognition on a resolution to the Palestinian issue. The accords were designed to forge a regional economic, technological, and security front against Tehran.

For the following three years, Saudi Arabia’s signature was treated as the logical next step: the deal that would transform a series of bilateral arrangements into a genuine regional realignment. Then October 7 changed the calculus. The Israeli campaign in Gaza hardened Arab public opinion sharply against normalisation and stiffened Saudi conditions, effectively freezing the process. It is this stalled diplomatic landscape that Trump is now trying to force open.

His recent ultimatum on Truth Social, conditioning an Iran deal on a mandatory expansion of the Accords, has predictably generated commentary focused on the bizarre composition of his list. Trump named six countries, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan, demanding their immediate signatures. Half already maintain formal ties with Israel. The inclusion of Pakistan is largely a blunt rhetorical squeeze on a country currently serving as the primary mediator in US-Iran peace talks.

Look past this surface clutter, however, and the real target becomes clear: the remaining holdouts of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). While the UAE and Bahrain signed in 2020, Washington is now trying to bring Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman into the fold.

Many commentators have been quick to dismiss this as erratic transactionalism. However, Saudi analyst Abdulaziz Alghashian has put it more precisely: the relentless focus on normalisation suggests the Accords are effectively “the only clear strategy the U.S. has in the region.” That observation raises the right question. Why has one diplomatic instrument come to bear this much strategic weight? The answer lies not in Trump's transactional style but in a deeper structural shift in US strategy, one best described as lower-cost hegemonic management.

The post-2008 structural reality

The origins of this pressure are not in Trump's personal quirks. They lie in the structural shockwaves of the 2008 financial crisis. That moment exposed the fiscal and political limits of large-scale military occupations, just as war fatigue from Iraq and Afghanistan was rising domestically and China was emerging as the central long-term strategic challenge of Washington.

From that point forward, successive US administrations, whatever their rhetorical differences, aligned around a shared objective: reducing the direct costs of military intervention in the Middle East while preserving dominance over its critical energy corridors and security architectures.

This lower-cost hegemonic model relies on two instruments working in tandem. The first is systemic economic coercion: sweeping sanctions and financial pressure designed to paralyse adversarial states without putting boots on the ground. The second is burden-shifting: transferring the frontline military risks of regional containment to local allies.

In the early 2010s, burden-shifting was loosely described as “leading from behind,” a framework that gave the Gulf monarchies considerable operational freedom to police their own neighbourhood. Washington assumed that the Gulf states, backed by permanent US military bases across the region, could stabilise the regional order in the wake of the 2011 uprisings, ultimately aligning it with Western interests.

The limits of that assumption became clear quickly. The war in Yemen was the decisive test. Despite heavy American backing, including weapons transfers, intelligence, and logistical support, the Saudi- and Emirati-led intervention exposed deep structural vulnerabilities. The interests of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi diverged over time, and the campaign fractured into competing local agendas rather than a coherent regional front. What this showed Washington was that the Gulf states were too politically divided and too militarily fragile to absorb a direct confrontation with Iran.

The current war with Iran has both exposed these political divisions, with GCC states taking markedly different positions on the US-Israeli operation, and demonstrated that US bases in the Gulf cannot shield these states from Iran’s security doctrine, one built around exporting costs through asymmetric retaliation.

Tehran has the tools for this: a federation of semi-autonomous power centres under the IRGC, advanced missile and drone capabilities, and the leverage to threaten the Strait of Hormuz. Without the internal cohesion or military depth to absorb that pressure, the Gulf states as a frontline wall threatened to drag Washington back into an open-ended regional war.

Israel as the offshore security node

To preserve low-cost dominance, Washington needed to position Israel as the central military-security node of a US-backed regional order. Unlike the Gulf monarchies, Israel possesses advanced airpower, integrated intelligence, and escalation dominance to act as a genuine counterweight to Iran’s regional architecture. This structural pivot was formalised in 2021, when Israel was officially transferred into the operational environment of US Central Command (CENTCOM), laying the military groundwork for an integrated regional defence network.

Since then, the US has systematically expanded the operational latitude of Israel. That expansion has been consistent across administrations, a structural continuity rather than a partisan fluctuation, culminating in joint US-Israeli operations, including the June 2025 strikes aimed at degrading the nuclear capabilities of Iran and the conflicts that escalated after the 28 February 2026 bombings.

This is the context in which the Abraham Accords reveal their real strategic utility. They are not a vehicle for regional coexistence. They are an operational mechanism for lower-cost hegemony. When Trump defends his ultimatum by saying “those countries owe it to us” and ties an Iran deal to their signatures, he is giving voice to the blunt transactional reality of burden-shifting.

What the strategy is trying to accomplish is what the network of US bases alone could not: outsourcing the day-to-day burden of Gulf security to Tel Aviv. Under this arrangement, the American security umbrella for the Gulf runs through Israel, which becomes the primary guarantor and shock absorber against Iran.

Yet the US push has not met with uniform acquiescence from the Gulf. The GCC is not a monolithic bloc, and Washington’s pressure is running into distinct forms of resistance shaped by divergent national interests. Qatar and Oman have exercised conspicuous independent agency: Doha, which shares the world’s largest natural gas reservoir with Iran and has long maintained open lines with Tehran, Hamas, and the Taliban simultaneously, has little strategic incentive to anchor itself to an Israeli security framework.

Muscat, which has served as a backchannel between Washington and Tehran for decades, is equally reluctant to compromise its carefully cultivated neutrality. Even Saudi Arabia, the crown jewel of any expanded accord, has remained notably cautious, conditioning any normalisation on concrete American security guarantees and a credible pathway toward Palestinian statehood.

The true blueprint of American primacy

Trump’s insistence on tying an Iran settlement to the expansion of the Abraham Accords should not be read as an idiosyncratic diplomatic crusade or a bid for a legacy-defining “deal.” It is the blueprint for how Washington intends to maintain regional primacy on the cheap.

By positioning Israel as the central security node and pressing the remaining GCC holdouts to anchor their security architectures to Tel Aviv, the US is executing a calculated structural pivot, one that protects its core interests in the Middle East, from energy corridors to adversary containment, while insulating itself from the immediate costs of doing so.

The Abraham Accords are not a departure from the modern trajectory of American grand strategy. They are its most developed instrument yet: the mechanism through which a superpower attempts to outsource its imperial burdens to a capable regional proxy, freeing up strategic bandwidth for the competition that actually matters elsewhere. The latest ultimatum from Trump is not a fantasy. It is the post-2008 Washington playbook made explicit.

Kayhan Valadbaygi is a Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam and CEO of Middle East Risk & Reform Advisory.

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