The Lebanese explosion of April 13, 1975, which took the form of a civil war, did not lead to an explosion of the entire Middle East region. Rather, the Lebanese fire remained confined within the structure of the region, resembling more closely a hearth or barbecue grill on the balcony of the regional edifice, where numerous regional and international players would come to cook their dishes or grill their kebabs using Lebanese firewood (and, prior to September 1982, Palestinian firewood as well).
When the Soviet global and regional edifice in Eastern and Central Europe collapsed, and Moscow emerged defeated from the Cold War against Washington in the second half of 1989, the Lebanese fire was extinguished through the Taif Agreement by a tripartite will: Washington–Damascus–Riyadh. The final extinguishing of the last Lebanese ember, represented by General Michel Aoun at the Baabda Palace, occurred two months after the completion of this tripartite agreement, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990.
The Middle East of the post-Gulf War period of January–February 1991 did not lead to new fires but rather to a pacification of the region. The settlement of the Madrid Conference (October 1991) was prepared and programmed—had it materialized—to arrange a new Middle East through the settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, one that would serve as a political-security extension of NATO, as had been designed through the “Middle East Defense Plan” and the “Baghdad Pact” in 1951 and 1955. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher proposed at the NATO summit in April 1990 to extend the alliance’s missions beyond the European continent, a proposal that was subsequently ratified. The “Dual Containment Policy toward Tehran and Baghdad” pursued by the Clinton administration since 1993, followed by the D’Amato Act sanctions against Tehran in 1995, resulted from the absence of Western containment of both powers and from American intentions moving in that direction.
In 2002, Washington abandoned dual containment by involving Tehran in American plans for the invasion of Iraq. Partnership in the invasion of Iraq between Washington and Tehran replaced the previous policy, followed by joint administration of occupied Iraq that began with Paul Bremer’s Governing Council in 2003. This partnership was most prominently represented by the government of Nouri al-Maliki in 2006. Al-Maliki subsequently tilted toward Tehran, placing all his cards in its basket after the American military withdrawal from Iraq at the end of 2011.
The occupation of Baghdad on April 9, 2003 marked the beginning of the region’s fires and subsequently the conflagration of the entire region. In the phase following Baghdad, April 9, 2003, Washington became a Middle Eastern regional power in physical terms, through hundreds of thousands of American soldiers in Mesopotamia. Shortly before the invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that the American objective was “to reshape the region anew.” After the removal of Saddam Hussein, and through its local Iraqi extensions—which were stronger than American extensions—Iran became the most powerful player in Mesopotamia. After the American military withdrawal on the last day of 2011, Iran became virtually the sole player there. The statement made in 2013 by General Rahim Safavi, former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, that Iran is “the regional superpower” is not far from reality, and this was achieved through the “Baghdad gateway.”
It was expected that Syria, situated between the Lebanese fire of 1975–1990 and the Iraqi fire that began in 2003, would be among the first to ignite, having become like land between two burning lands—especially after Lebanon reignited following the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005. That Lebanese ignition was internal, with American backing and in confrontation with Damascus, yet the Syrian ignition did not occur in 2005.
The first fire resulting from the aftershocks of the Iraqi earthquake was the Houthi fire that erupted in June 2004 in Saada against Ali Abdullah Saleh’s Sanaa, leading to six wars. Since the 1990s, the Houthi movement represented an ideological-political break from Zaidi centrism between Sunni and Shia Islam, boarding the ascending Iranian elevator.
The second fire occurred in Beirut in autumn 2004–spring 2005, when Washington moved to make Damascus—which had rejected the invasion and occupation of Iraq—pay a steep Lebanese bill. This led to the collapse of the American-Syrian consensus that began in Lebanon not with the Taif Agreement of 1989, but which dates back to the Syrian military entry into Lebanon in 1976. This resulted in Lebanon’s division between the March 14 and March 8 camps.
The third fire was the summer 2006 war in Lebanon, which was a proxy war between Washington and Tehran after Iran, fortified by its Iraqi gains, moved to break its alliance with Washington that had been established in Iraq in 2003 by resuming its uranium enrichment program on August 8, 2005. Tehran’s distancing from Washington throughout the region led to an imbalance between the March 14 and March 8 camps in Lebanon, and consequently brought Lebanon—with Damascus and Tehran united against Washington in the Land of the Cedars—close to the brink of explosion, as occurred in January 2007 in the Arab University area and its vicinity. Lebanon nearly exploded on May 7, 2008, had it not been for the firefighting efforts that took place two weeks later at the Doha Conference, which led to filling the presidential vacuum. In the phase following May 7, 2008, Lebanon has lived and continues to live in a state of latent fire that international and regional powers do not wish to see ignite.
Between December 17, 2010 and March 18, 2011, five societies exploded through five fires that continue to burn at varying degrees: Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Syria. As a result of the Syrian fire, Iraq reignited after the pacification of 2007–2011 that occurred when Arab Sunnis in Iraq inclined toward participation in the political process and the formation of a tripartite governance arrangement, replacing the Shia-Kurdish duality that had risen through Tehran and Washington in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. This tripartite arrangement was subsequently undermined by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Tehran in favor of Shia exclusivity with the American military withdrawal at the end of 2011. The “ISIS of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi” fire of 2014–2015 was more intense than the “Al-Qaeda of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi” fire of 2004–2006.
In examining the region’s fires and their geographical locations of ignition, one observes that the two largest actors—Washington and Tehran—were the victors with the fall of the Iraqi regime on April 9, followed by other players. The fall of Mosul to ISIS on June 10, 2014 led to a new Iranian-American rapprochement in Mesopotamia, similar to what had existed during 2003–2011, though Tehran had become weaker in Iraq compared to the pre-Mosul period, thus forcing it to abandon and sacrifice al-Maliki in August 2014. When Tehran was emboldened to respond to the Mosul blow with a compensatory strike in Sanaa through the Houthi takeover of the Yemeni capital on September 21, 2014—exploiting Saudi contradiction with the Muslim Brotherhood organization, the Yemeni Congregation for Reform (Islah Party), the main supporter of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi—this heralded a new Yemeni fire of significant intensity, which transformed from March 26, 2015 into a fire with major international-regional dimensions through the war launched by the Saudi-Emirati coalition against the Houthis. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi subsequently diverged on the Yemeni arena since 2020, then collided in southern Yemen in the first month of 2026.
When we examine the mechanisms of fire ignition in the Middle East region, we find the following: fires come in most cases, though not all, as a result of the repercussions of a regional power rising against an international power dominating the region that had supported or cooperated with it in its rise, then clashed with it. Internal and regional fires sometimes result from their convergence and its consequences, and sometimes from their collision. This occurred with Tehran through its alliance with Washington during 2003–2005, which ignited the Iraqi interior against the “New Iraq” as Arab Sunnis—who had ruled Baghdad since 1921—moved to support Al-Qaeda in the post-Saddam Hussein phase. Subsequently, the region ignited in the wake of the Washington-Tehran collision with Iran’s resumption of its uranium enrichment program in August 2005, the outbreak of the 2006 war in Lebanon—which was a proxy war between the United States and Iran—and Gaza following Hamas’s takeover of the Strip in June 2007. The Washington-Tehran consensus in Iraq during 2003–2011 continued before they diverged on Iraq, then reached a truce through the Iranian nuclear agreement of 2015. One of the encouragements and incentives for this agreement was the convergence of Washington and Tehran against ISIS following the fall of Mosul. They then moved toward collision with President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear agreement in 2018, and subsequently collided in the wars of 2025 and 2026 in the Middle East following October 7, 2023.
In the 1950s, this occurred with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser against London, along with Paris, in 1955–1956, when regional polarization took place with Baghdad and Ankara standing with London, and the latter allied with Paris and Tel Aviv to deliver a knockout blow to the Egyptian leader. Washington and Moscow shared an interest in the setting of London’s and Paris’s sun over the upper skies of international relations. Therefore, Abdel Nasser’s victory in the 1956 war was thanks to the White House and the Kremlin, which prevented the translation of the military defeat suffered by the Egyptians in Sinai 1956 into political translations. The rise of Abdel Nasser’s power since the post-Suez War period led to an Egyptian tide throughout the region similar to the Iranian tide in the phase following Baghdad, April 9, 2003.
The White House also began to grow apprehensive of Abdel Nasser shortly after Suez, especially after Abdel Nasser extended to Damascus in 1957–1958, to Amman until April 1957, and to Beirut, whose fire ignited in May 1958 shortly after the Egyptian-Syrian union, and to Baghdad on July 14, 1958, whose government fell through a political-military coalition of communists and Arab nationalists before their clash beginning in autumn 1958.
Then there was the beginning of a regional consensus between the largest international power (Washington) and the largest regional power (Cairo), manifested in the September 1958 agreement that led to the extinguishing of the Lebanese fire by Cairo and Washington, driven by their fears of the rising communist tide in post-July 14, 1958 Baghdad. This was translated into their consensus on electing Major General Fouad Chehab as President of the Lebanese Republic, which resulted in making Beirut the banking capital of the Middle East, though with Egyptian Ambassador Abdel Hamid Ghaleb serving “like the French High Commissioner,” according to the expression of Brigadier Raymond Edde. This subsequently resulted in the February 8, 1963 coup through American-Egyptian effort to overthrow the communist-backed authority of Abdel Karim Qasim in Baghdad.
As for Yemen, the September 26, 1962 coup and the civil war between republicans and royalists—and the “Arab Cold War” it generated between Egypt and Saudi Arabia on Yemeni soil—led to the fracturing of Egyptian-American rapprochement and to new Cairo approaches toward Moscow following Khrushchev’s visit to Egypt in May 1964, after a Soviet-Egyptian estrangement that began in summer 1958. It also led to a Washington-Tel Aviv rapprochement following Levi Eshkol’s visit to Washington in June 1964—the first visit by an Israeli prime minister to the White House—where he signed with President Lyndon Johnson a “Memorandum of Understanding” that inaugurated a strategic alliance between Washington and Tel Aviv that had not existed during the time of Eshkol’s predecessor, David Ben-Gurion (who resigned in 1963). Among its consequences was America’s delivery, through the Israeli proxy, of a blow to the largest regional power (Egypt) through the June 1967 war, which was also a defeat for Moscow, Abdel Nasser’s ally, in favor of Washington, which was suffering in Vietnam.
In the wars of June 2025 and the Forty-Day War of 2026, the largest international power (Washington) collided with the largest regional power (Tehran)… What will be the results of their agreement through the Memorandum of Understanding signed electronically on June 14, 2026?… That is: will its results be like their 2015 agreement and the regional repercussions it generated, during which Washington turned a blind eye to Iranian regional expansion, only for their agreement to be short-lived as occurred with Donald Trump when he moved to confront Iran since 2018, then resumed his confrontation with it upon his return to the White House in those two wars?… This is something we witnessed between Washington and Cairo, when the United States supported Abdel Nasser in the 1956 war, then allied with him against the communists in Syria and Iraq during 1958–1963. However, with his regional expansion reaching Yemen in 1962, Algeria after its independence in 1962, and even Iraq under the rule of Abdel Salam Arif since November 8, 1963, Washington moved to confront him with Israeli assistance since 1964.
As a concluding inference: it is difficult for a great international power to coexist with an independent major regional state in the Middle East region. We witnessed this with Britain and Muhammad Ali Pasha in the nineteenth century, then between America and Gamal Abdel Nasser, and finally from the Americans with Ali Khamenei’s Iran. In most cases, fires arise from their collision.
