![]() In February 2018, for example, an Iranian drone from a base established to fight the Syrian civil war, launched an incursion into Israel. Syria shows the dangers – a single battlefield there hosts a confusing complex of overlapping struggles. These trends are significantly heightening mutual tensions and reintroducing nuclear competition into febrile regional rivalries. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the nuclear agreement with Iran now risks adding considerable fuel to the fire, particularly given that there are hints the US administration has ambitions for regime change in Iran. As regional battlefields become more numerous and more interlinked, there is a growing risk that a localised spark will set off a direct inter-state conflagration that engulfs the wider region, perhaps even drawing in Russia and the US. But in recent years, their rivalry has metastasised across the region and taken in new allies on both sides. This dynamic is not entirely new: the rivalry between Riyadh and Tehran, played out through a series of proxy conflicts, has been one of the defining characteristics of the region for at least the past decade. The fault-line between the two coalitions has already become the axis on which regional politics turns, and the key to understanding many geopolitical developments in the Middle East. As competition for dominance intensifies, the confrontation between Iran’s network of state and non-state actors, and a counter-front of traditional Western allies – centred on Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel – has become the region’s central battle line. ![]() ![]() Two opposing coalitions in the Middle East define a rivalry that threatens to tear the region apart.
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