From Penetrated Region to Global Pivot: Middle East Power Politics and the Making of a Multipolar World Order

Throughout the 20th century, the Middle East was theorised as a “penetrated region”, a subsidiary system that was, to a large extent, influenced by outside great powers' Cold War and post-Cold War hegemonic agendas, in terms of its balance of power, alliances and even domestic politics. This paper suggests that the region has since undergone a transition from periphery, penetrated by the world political system, to a pivot, actively engaged in co-creating the new multipolar world. The paper explores this shift through four interwoven developments: the unipolar U.S. primacy that was undermined after the 2003 Iraq War and the 2011 revolts, the rise of China and the return of Russia as rival poles of attraction, the spread of strategic hedging as the prevailing grand strategy of Gulf, Turkish and Iranian foreign policy, and the disruptive effect of the Gaza war from 2023 to 2025 on normalisation trajectories. The case studies of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Iran and Israel clearly illustrate that regional actors have been able to establish agendas, to mediate competing great-power interests and to hedge against overdependence on any one great power through the use of multilateral organizations like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In conclusion the paper suggests that the Middle East path provides a key test case of the multiplex world order theory and that it has deep implications for the energy security of the world, the future of trading in dollars, and the strategic calculation of both Washington and Beijing and Moscow as well as Brussels.