Atlantic Council SCOWCROFT MIDDLE EAST SECURITY INITIATIVE
ISSUE BRIEF JULY 2023
The Minilateral Moment in the Middle East: An Opportunity for US Regional Policy? BY JEAN-LOUP SAMAAN
INTRODUCTION
O
ver the past three years, the Middle East has experienced major intra-regional changes. After a decade of fierce competition between two blocs— one led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the other by Qatar and Turkey—both parties now seem willing to cooperate.
As the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region continues to undergo significant political and socioeconomic changes, the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs are leading the way in providing a forum for informing and galvanizing the transatlantic community to shape a stable and prosperous region. The center has been at the vanguard of MENA current affairs, policies, and shifts for more than a decade. The center works in, with, and on the MENA region, amplifying regional voices and connecting regional stakeholders to their counterparts in the US and Europe. The mission is to promote peace and security and unlock the region’s economic and human potential through the ideas we publish, the solutions we generate, and the communities we influence.
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This new era of de-escalation among regional powers has been felt across the Gulf and the Levant. Relations between Qatar and its Gulf neighbors were restored in January 2021 at the end of a three-year blockade of Doha while Turkey and Saudi Arabia also mended ties. The end of the blockade enabled an unprecedented wave of normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states—namely the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. It also led Gulf states to engage with Iran to restore diplomatic ties and prevent clashes, in particular in war-torn Yemen. This culminated last March with the China-facilitated Saudi-Iran deal, another sign that regional powers in the Middle East are reconsidering their foreign policy arrangements. One of the key features of this new regional environment has been the growth of so-called minilateral initiatives that regroup several countries on an ad-hoc basis. These partnerships, like the Israel-Greece-Cyprus partnership, predated the current trend, but most of them grew in earnest over the past few years. Examples include the launching of the I2U2 group, composed of India, Israel, the United States, and the UAE in July 2022; the Negev Forum initiated by Israel with the contribution of the four Arab states and the United States; and the France-UAE-India dialogue that emerged in the fall of 2022. Powers outside the region also embarked on a similar path of building relationships with countries in the Middle East. Russia’s recent attempt to build a similar framework with Turkey and Iran provides evidence of how minilateralism is increasingly considered an effective instrument of regional diplomacy.1
France 24, “Putin, Erdogan and Iran’s Raisi pledge cooperation against ‘terrorists’ in Syria”, 19 July 2022. https://www.france24.com/en/asiapacific/20220719-putin-to-meet-turkey-s-erdogan-and-iranian-president-raisi-in-tehran
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