Global Power Impact on the Middle East Region: The Abraham Accords and the Changing International System

This article examines the Abraham Accords as an evolving diplomatic and strategic process shaped by renewed great power competition in the Middle East. Using structural realism, balance-of-power theory, soft balancing, and the security spiral as analytical lenses, it argues that the Accords emerged from the redistribution of power following the erosion of US regional hegemony and Washington’s shift toward a lighter, partner-enabled posture. The study uses process tracing to assess how the USA, Russia, China, Israel, and key Gulf states recalibrated their regional strategies from 2011 through the period preceding the 2026 US–Israel war on Iran. It finds that US sponsorship of Arab-Israeli normalization reflected an effort to preserve regional influence through burden sharing, defense coordination, economic integration, and infrastructure connectivity, especially in response to Iranian regional activism and Chinese and Russian advances. At the same time, China’s economic statecraft and selective diplomacy, Russia’s retrenchment and alignment with Iran, and Gulf hedging strategies complicated the Accords’ trajectory. The article contends that the Abraham Accords function both as an instrument of US-anchored regional balancing and as a site of intensified strategic competition.