Black Boxes and Broken Mirrors: Iran, Israel, and the New Geography of Instability
For nearly half a century, U.S. foreign policy has been conducted through a single prism: Iran is the Middle East’s most destabilizing actor, and containing it is synonymous with securing the region. This logic, born in the twilight of the Cold War and sustained through bipartisan inertia, produced a foreign policy architecture so rigid that it came to resemble a kind of theology — with Iran as the chief source of instability in the Middle East, and Israel as its counterweight — the stabilizer in an otherwise volatile region. This binary has guided every major American decision from the Gulf War to the Abraham Accords.
That theology is now collapsing.
On November 1st at 2025’s Manama Dialogue, addressing both Arab leaders and a large American audience, Oman’s Foreign Minister, Badr al-Busaidi, declared something unthinkable a decade ago: “We have long known that Israel, not Iran, is the prime source of insecurity in the region.” His statement did more than invert a talking point. It exposed how deeply the geopolitical compass of the Persian Gulf has shifted and how far U.S. policy has drifted from the realities of the region it claims to manage.
The implications are enormous. If Washington continues to operate on Cold War reflexes — seeing Tehran as the epicenter of instability and Israel as its stabilizing counterweight — it risks anchoring its strategy to a world that no longer exists.
From Red Lines to Black Boxes
In my Small Wars Journal article, “Red Lines and Black Boxes,” I argued that Iran’s deterrence strategy depends not on transparent red lines but on calculated opacity — the weaponization of uncertainty. Tehran’s approach has always been to manipulate the boundaries of risk and restraint, making adversaries question both its capabilities and its intentions. That ambiguity — the black box — has been its shield against stronger foes.
But the United States, too, has weaponized uncertainty — not to deter, but to justify. Washington’s Iran policy has long relied on a similar ambiguity: a fog of moral clarity masking strategic incoherence. The constant invocation of “Iranian aggression” serves as a catch-all explanation for instability across Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and beyond. It’s an elegant simplification but one that increasingly fails to explain the data.
The reality is that since 2015, Iran’s regional activism has been declining, while other powers — notably Turkey, Israel, and the UAE — have become far more interventionist. A 2020 study by Trita Parsi and Matthew Petti mapped regional interventions over the past decade and found that Iran, once the most active external player, had been overtaken. The black box of “Iranian destabilization” obscured a larger truth: the Middle East’s conflicts had multiplied and diversified, no longer orbiting a single gravitational center.
Badr al-Busaidi’s declaration should be read as a broken mirror moment — a break in the narrative. The Gulf states are not naïve about Iran; they have lived within its reach for decades. But they are also realists. They can see that Israel, emboldened by impunity and enabled by Washington, has launched attacks across at least six countries in two years, while waging what a U.N. commission has called genocide in Gaza. They can see that the instability now radiates not from Tehran’s ideological ambitions, but from Jerusalem’s unrestrained militarism.
This is not a matter of moral equivalence. It’s a matter of strategic arithmetic. The same states once persuaded to normalize relations with Israel as a hedge against Iran now find themselves absorbing the political and security costs of that alignment. When Israeli strikes hit targets in Qatar — a key U.S. partner — the fiction that Israel was a guarantor of regional order became impossible to sustain.
Hence the Omani statement: the finger that once pointed north, toward Iran, now points west. And that reorientation has profound consequences for Washington.
The Strategic Drift
For forty years, America’s Middle East policy has followed the logic of “dual containment.” Under Clinton, both Iraq and Iran were cast as twin threats, with Israel as the lone pillar of stability. That logic hardened into orthodoxy: isolate Iran, arm Israel, and the region would stabilize by default. The Obama administration’s brief détente through the 2015 nuclear deal was the only serious deviation and even then, it was undone before its logic could mature.
The Trump first and second administrations’ Maximum Pressure campaigns and their successor, the Abraham Accords, claimed to innovate but did nothing of the sort. Both rested on the same assumption: that Iran was the region’s lodestar of chaos and that Arab-Israeli normalization was the path to equilibrium. Instead, the Accords produced a brittle coalition of convenience — one that collapsed the moment Israel’s war in Gaza began to consume regional stability wholesale.
Now, Gulf capitals are recalculating. They see that forty years of U.S.-Israel alignment against Iran have not produced security, but addiction — a self-perpetuating dependency on American military presence and Israeli deterrence that has left the region unable to build its own architecture of peace.
[F]orty years of U.S.-Israel alignment against Iran have not produced security, but addiction.
Ironically, the United States now finds itself trapped in the very paradigm it once ascribed to Iran. It no longer knows what the boundaries of deterrence or partnership truly are. It cannot predict whether Israel’s actions will serve or sabotage its interests. Its allies are hedging, its enemies adapting, and its military posture increasingly divorced from political reality.
In strategic terms, this is the ultimate black box: a policy so dependent on inherited assumptions that it can no longer be recalibrated without risking collapse.
Washington has spent decades preaching deterrence through clarity — but clarity has become its own illusion. The region is asking new questions, and the U.S. has no new answers.
The Gulf states’ emerging position — led by Oman, Qatar, and increasingly Saudi Arabia — is not born of sympathy for Tehran, but of exhaustion with perpetual containment. Their message is clear: security cannot be sustained through exclusion. A stable Middle East requires an inclusive architecture that brings Iran, Iraq, and Yemen to the table rather than treating them as pariahs.
In practice, that means returning to a concept once flirted with but never realized: regional integration. The irony is that a less isolated Iran might also be a less dangerous one. Economic interdependence, energy cooperation, and multilateral diplomacy could achieve what decades of sanctions and airstrikes have failed to: a region in which deterrence is mutual, not imposed.
This is what Al-Busaidi was articulating — not an ideological defense of Iran, but a realist appeal for inclusivity. It is a strategic critique, not a moral one.
For Washington, the hardest truth to face may be that the region’s perception of Israel has changed permanently. The image of Israel as the Middle East’s only democracy, the bulwark of stability against the chaos of Arab politics, has shattered under the weight of Gaza. The mirror that once reflected moral clarity now shows moral exhaustion.
For many in the Gulf, the weaponization of uncertainty has simply changed hands.
Israel has become what Iran once was in American discourse — a source of unpredictability and escalation. Its actions are no longer read as defensive but as destabilizing; its deterrence no longer stabilizes but provokes. For many in the Gulf, the weaponization of uncertainty has simply changed hands.
If the United States refuses to adapt to this new perception, it will find itself increasingly isolated — tied to an ally that no longer commands the moral or strategic credibility it once did.
There is still an opportunity here. The U.S. could take Al-Busaidi’s cue and pivot toward an inclusive regional framework — one that emphasizes dialogue, mutual security, and reduced military dependence. Doing so would not mean abandoning Israel or embracing Iran but acknowledging that neither can dominate the region’s future.
It would mean retiring the black-and-white grammar of “good allies” and “bad actors” in favor of something more complex — a grammar of coexistence that treats uncertainty not as a weapon, but as a shared condition to be managed collectively.
In strategic terms, that would be the most profound recalibration of U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War. It would also be the most realistic.
It would mean retiring the black-and-white grammar of “good allies” and “bad actors” in favor of something more complex.
Conclusion: Mistaking Projection for Policy
The Middle East has always been a hall of mirrors and the U.S. has spent decades gazing at its own reflection, mistaking projection for policy. The region, meanwhile, has moved on. The Gulf is no longer asking who destabilized it, but how to stabilize itself. And in that shift, Iran’s black box deterrence and Israel’s black box impunity have become twin symbols of a deeper truth: uncertainty is now the region’s only constant.
The U.S. can either learn to navigate a region defined by shared uncertainty, or remain trapped in a mirror of outdated assumptions.
