By: Dr. Adnan Bouzan

The Middle East is no longer experiencing war in the traditional sense, yet it has not entered a phase of peace capable of restoring stability to its states and societies. The region remains trapped in an increasingly dangerous grey zone, where military strikes coexist with negotiations, threats with political messages, and sanctions with attempts to reopen channels of dialogue. States fight in one arena while negotiating in another, while the redistribution of power and influence continues without any final agreement on the shape of the regional order to come. Reducing this complex landscape to a U.S.–Iranian conflict would therefore be an oversimplification of a far more intricate equation. The struggle is not merely about who wins a military or political confrontation, but about the shape of the region, the balance of power within it, and who will possess the ability to influence its future and define its emerging rules.

Since the United States withdrew from the nuclear agreement in 2018, U.S.–Iranian relations have entered a new phase of confrontation that is both open and carefully controlled. Economic sanctions, reciprocal attacks, assassinations, the targeting of interests and military bases, missile strikes, and threats concerning maritime routes have accumulated alongside repeated attempts to return to negotiations through direct and indirect channels. These developments are no longer isolated events; they have become part of a broader pattern for managing the conflict. The United States is pressuring Iran and seeking to contain its influence, yet it understands that a full-scale war could impose enormous military, political, and economic costs. Iran, meanwhile, seeks to preserve its regional influence and its capacity for deterrence and pressure, but it also understands that turning the confrontation into a broad direct war with the United States could become a strategic threat to its survival. Thus, a new equation has emerged: weakening the adversary without overthrowing it, deterring it without destroying it, and exhausting it without reaching a point of escalation that could move beyond everyone's ability to control its consequences. Washington wants to prevent Iran from becoming a dominant power in the Gulf, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, but it does not appear willing to bear the cost of a prolonged war aimed at reshaping the Iranian system from within. Tehran, for its part, seeks to preserve its regional depth, its networks of influence, and its ability to threaten American and Israeli interests when necessary, without sliding into a direct confrontation whose consequences could prove unpredictable.

In this way, hostility itself has become part of a broader system for managing interests. The United States can use the Iranian threat to strengthen its security and military alliances in the region, while Iran uses its confrontation with the United States and Israel to reinforce its political narrative and justify part of its regional policies. Meanwhile, the states of the region find themselves trapped within this equation, bearing the costs of arms and security while recalculating their political and economic strategies according to the possibility of a wider confrontation. What is taking place, therefore, cannot accurately be described as a complete “staged performance,” nor can it be regarded as a continuous full-scale war. Rather, it is a complex form of conflict that combines political pressure, sanctions, indirect confrontation, limited strikes, and negotiations, accompanied by a constant effort by the principal actors to control the level of escalation and prevent it from turning into an open regional war.

Yet the conflict is not confined to the Gulf. The Middle East has become a network of interconnected arenas in which developments in one theater affect the others. In the Gulf, competition revolves around the security of maritime routes, energy, and military influence. In Iraq, questions of statehood, arms, sovereignty, and Iranian and American influence intersect. In Syria, American, Iranian, Russian, Turkish, and Israeli interests overlap and compete. In Yemen, the Red Sea and international trade routes have become part of an equation that extends beyond the boundaries of the Yemeni war itself. In Lebanon, the crises of the state are intertwined with regional power balances. Amid all these conflicts, the Palestinian issue continues to face the risk of slipping down the regional and international agenda whenever other security issues intensify. This is one of the important political consequences of the transformations the Middle East has undergone: some regional relationships have shifted from the traditional logic of confrontation with Israel toward the logic of building security and political understandings in response to other perceived threats, foremost among them Iran and its regional influence. The Palestinian issue has not disappeared, nor has it lost its historical and political importance, but at many moments it has found itself overshadowed by a crowded regional agenda dominated by wars, crises, and security concerns.

Israel also benefits from this strategic environment, not necessarily because it stands behind every conflict in the region, but because continued tensions with Iran provide it with an opportunity to redefine its position within the regional order. As the Iranian threat becomes a central theme of regional security, political space for discussion of the Palestinian issue has diminished in some capitals, while Israel has increasingly emerged, for certain actors, as a potential security partner in confronting Iran. At the same time, Israel views Iran’s presence and its networks of allies across the region as a strategic threat and seeks to weaken that influence wherever possible, particularly in Syria, while seeking to avoid sliding into a full-scale war if its costs and consequences cannot be effectively controlled. From this perspective, continued regional tension does not merely produce military confrontation; it also contributes to the reshaping of alliances and regional relationships, making the struggle over influence part of the broader process of reconstructing the political and security order of the Middle East.

On the other side of the equation stands Turkey, one of the most complex factors shaping the region’s future, particularly with regard to the Kurdish issue. The United States needs to cooperate with Kurdish forces in certain theaters of conflict; Israel recognizes the strategic importance of Kurdish geography within regional calculations; Iran seeks to influence Kurdish forces operating within its regional sphere; while Turkey views any strategic Kurdish development in Syria and Iraq primarily through the lens of its national security. Consequently, any American or Israeli project based on supporting a Kurdish force with broad influence will inevitably have to take Turkey’s position into account. This places the Kurds in an extremely sensitive equation: they are situated at the heart of a geography where international and regional projects intersect, yet they have not succeeded in building a sufficient degree of political and institutional unity to transform this geographic position into independent and sustainable political influence.

Previous experiences have demonstrated that relations with international powers can be a source of strength for the Kurds, but they can also become a source of weakness when they substitute for the development of their own capabilities. When the United States needs a local force on the ground to confront extremist organizations, the importance of its partnership with Kurdish forces increases; when security and political priorities change, however, the nature and limits of that partnership can also change. Moreover, when American interests enter into negotiations with Turkey or other regional powers, the strategic calculations become even more complicated. The fundamental lesson, therefore, should not be to reject international relations or alliances, but rather to redefine them on the basis of mutual interests. There is a profound difference between an alliance and proxy dependence, and between partnership and subordination. An alliance requires a party to possess its own project, objectives, and interests, and then seek international partnerships that can help advance them. Proxy dependence, by contrast, emerges when one party’s political project becomes so closely tied to another party’s agenda that it loses the ability to make independent decisions.

For this reason, one of the greatest dangers facing the Kurdish political movement is the reduction of the Kurdish issue to a security function within the strategies of regional and international powers. The Kurds are not merely a ground force that can be deployed against Iran; nor should they become a security buffer for any state, or a reserve force to be called upon when major powers need them and then sidelined when those powers’ interests change. The Kurdish issue is far broader than a military function. It concerns a people with a history, a homeland, an identity, rights, and political interests, and it cannot be reduced to a temporary security alliance or a short-term military role. If the Kurds seek to move from being a “card” in regional power struggles to becoming a genuine “actor,” the path does not lie in waiting for external protection. It lies in building a more independent political decision-making capacity, stronger and more effective institutions, and a strategic vision capable of engaging with regional and international balances of power from a position of interests rather than dependency.

Yet placing sole responsibility for the Kurdish predicament on external powers would itself be an incomplete reading of the situation, because part of the problem is rooted in the Kurdish political reality itself. Political divisions, competing projects, partisan rivalries, the prioritization of narrow organizational calculations over broader interests, and the weakness of common institutions capable of producing a coherent political position all make the Kurds more vulnerable to external influence. External powers can exploit divisions when they already exist, but they cannot create them out of nothing. The weaker the political center capable of defining interests and negotiating on their behalf, the greater the ability of others to impose their own agendas. Therefore, the Kurdish question should not remain confined to asking: What does America want from us? What does Turkey want? What does Iran want? It must begin with the more important question: What do we want? What political project do we want to build as the foundation for our relations with these powers? And where should we draw the line between benefiting from international balances of power and becoming an instrument in their conflicts?

It is precisely at this point that the Kurdish issue intersects with the future of the Middle East as a whole. The region is moving toward a new regional order, but that order has not yet fully taken shape. The United States seeks to preserve its strategic superiority and prevent any regional power from controlling vital routes and energy resources. Iran seeks to preserve its regional strategic depth and its capacity for deterrence and influence. Israel seeks to prevent Iran from emerging as a dominant regional power while strengthening its own position within the regional security architecture. Turkey seeks to prevent the emergence of a Kurdish reality that it regards as a threat to its national security, while at the same time maintaining a broad regional role. Russia, meanwhile, seeks to consolidate its influence and interests, while China is working to expand its economic and strategic presence without assuming the military costs that the United States has borne for decades. Amid all these calculations, the peoples of the region remain the least capable of determining the direction of events, even though they bear a substantial share of the human, economic, and political costs.

For this reason, the next confrontation may not necessarily take the form of a direct U.S.–Iranian war. It could instead take the form of a series of limited strikes, sanctions and economic pressure, cyber warfare, proxy confrontations, or struggles over energy, water, borders, maritime routes, and political influence. The real danger is that this pattern of conflict could become permanent: a war in which no side achieves a decisive victory and no side suffers a definitive defeat, yet societies and states are steadily exhausted and stability is continually postponed. When limited confrontation persists for years, its consequences can become more devastating than those of a short war, because it transforms the exception into the norm, fear into a daily condition, security spending into a permanent necessity, and the economy into a hostage of political tension.

At the end of this equation, it is not only the major powers that bear the cost of conflict. The Iraqi pays the price of competition over influence, arms, and political decision-making; the Syrian pays the price of the struggle over territory and spheres of influence; the Yemeni pays the price of conflict over the Red Sea and its maritime routes; the Palestinian pays the price of his cause being pushed down the regional agenda by other security priorities; and the Kurd pays the price of geographic location, political division, and repeated reliance on external promises. And every time the major powers speak of security and stability, one essential question remains: Security for whom? Stability for whom? Stability that protects the state while leaving society without rights is not sustainable stability, and security that protects borders while communities remain under the weight of poverty, war, and instability is not complete security.

Breaking out of this cycle will not be achieved simply by changing one government here, signing a temporary agreement there, or striking a deal between two major powers. The Middle East needs to redefine the concepts of security, sovereignty, and political partnership, and to move from managing crises to addressing their underlying causes. Genuine stability cannot be built without addressing questions of rights and political representation. Nor can maritime routes and energy resources be protected while the communities surrounding them remain burdened by poverty and war. Extremism cannot be confronted sustainably without addressing the political and social environments that contribute to its emergence. Likewise, lasting peace cannot be achieved while major national and regional issues remain suspended, awaiting yet another international bargain.

As for the Kurds, they stand at a historic moment that leaves little room for the continuation of old policies through the same mechanisms. They must either remain a force summoned by major powers when needed and then diminished in importance when strategic calculations change, or rebuild themselves politically and institutionally so that their presence and interests become an integral part of any future regional settlement. The next phase will not necessarily belong only to states that achieve military victories; it will also belong to those forces capable of combining geography, politics, institutions, legitimacy, and international relations. Those who lack a clear political project will, willingly or unwillingly, find themselves incorporated into the projects of others.

The Middle East, therefore, is neither at peace nor in a full-scale war; it is living through an open-ended conflict with no clear conclusion. Washington and Tehran confront each other while negotiating at the same time. Israel confronts Iran while also benefiting from the continued Iranian threat as it reshapes some of its regional relationships. Turkey seeks to prevent the emergence of a new Kurdish reality along its borders. Russia seeks to consolidate its influence, while China continues to expand its economic and strategic presence. Meanwhile, the Kurds once again find themselves at the heart of the game without having resolved the most important question: Do they want to be players, or merely cards in the hands of others?

The future will not be determined by missiles alone, nor shaped by sanctions alone, nor decided solely by military alliances. It will be determined by those capable of combining power, politics, legitimacy, interests, and independence in decision-making. For this reason, the most dangerous course the Kurds could take would be to wait for another war in the hope that it might grant them what they failed to build during times of peace. Wars do not automatically grant peoples their rights, and external powers do not build national projects on behalf of others. Those who enter war without a political project may emerge having lost even what they once possessed. Those who enter it with a vision, institutions, independent decision-making, and balanced relations, however, may be able to transform a moment of disorder into a historic opportunity.

Ultimately, the question confronting the Middle East is not merely: Who will prevail in the conflict between the United States and Iran? Nor is it simply: Who will wield influence in Syria, Iraq, and the Gulf? Nor is it only: Who will redraw the region’s balance of power? The deeper question is this: Will the peoples of the Middle East remain merely arenas over which great powers struggle, or will they finally reach the moment when they become genuine partners in shaping their own future rather than victims of other powers’ maps?

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