It was a warning shot when US President-elect Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on 2 December that “there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East” if the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza are not released prior to his inauguration on 20 January 2025.

Many commentators in the region took Trump’s firebrand remarks to heart as a declaration of his plans for the region when he takes office next month amid expectations of a coming realignment in the Middle East.

Facing major challenges and enormous risks, the fragile region is already bracing for Trump’s second term as the dynamics of chaos and uncertainty continue and threats of escalation in its ongoing conflicts loom large.

Just as 2024 was drawing to a close, the Middle East witnessed a “seismic moment” when former Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad fled his country on 8 December, bringing to a dramatic end more than 60 years of Baath Party rule in Syria.

The conflict in Syria began to heat up as a broad coalition led by Turkish-backed armed opposition groups began a daring blitzkrieg on 27 November to take the country’s largest cities. In just over ten days, it had captured the capital Damascus, forcing Al-Assad to flee.

But as Syria breaks out of Al-Assad’s oppressive rule, numerous questions are being raised not only about Syria’s survival as a united country but also about what comes next for the Middle East, which is experiencing the most important transition in its post-colonial history.

The stunning fall of the Al-Assad regime has woken the entire region, already reeling under the weight of disastrous conflicts, political instability, and major socioeconomic challenges. It was an indication that a shift in the balance of power is taking place that could undermine the shaky regional order.

Without question, the sudden collapse of the Al-Assad regime will scramble the dynamics of power in the Middle East, impacting Syria’s neighbours, regional powers like Iran and Turkey, and major international players such as Russia and the US.

Seemingly Israel, which facilitated, and most likely engineered, the end of the Al-Assad regime by greenlighting and even masterminding the rebel onslaught, will be the biggest beneficiary from the tectonic change resulting from the regime’s collapse.

Since 2011, when revolutions swept the Middle East, the Syrians have been trying to topple Al-Assad, but their endeavour stalled because many key players argued that an intact, but weakened, Al-Assad regime would be preferable for the country and the whole troubled region.

In 2005, former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon opposed former US president George W Bush in his desire to topple Al-Assad after the ouster of former president Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Israel now seems to have upgraded its goals from keeping Al-Assad’s Alawite regime in power in Syria to toppling it in line with a new strategy to break the rising influence of Iran and its Shia allies in the region, which has been blamed for unleashing the “Axis of Resistance” against it.

The idea of ending Iran’s regional project, what is called the “Shia Crescent,” started with weakening Hizbullah in Lebanon in order to enforce a ceasefire deal that secured a halt to nearly a year of tit-for-tat attacks that started after Hamas’ incursion into Israel on 7 October 2023.

Israel’s aim was to neutralise Hizbullah permanently, and in order to do so it needed to cut off a key supply route from Iran to the Lebanese Shia Party through Syria and Iraq.

However, in order to defeat Hizbullah and decimate other potent Shia proxy forces, Israel also had to get rid of the Al-Assad regime, an objective which resonated in Turkey, long a key outside power supporting Al-Assad’s opponents.    

Israel did not waste any time in the event, and even as Al-Assad was fleeing Damascus earlier this month the Israeli Army captured the buffer zone between Syria’s Occupied Golan Heights and Israel and established itself in several points and almost reached the southwestern outskirts of Damascus.

It also carried out hundreds of attacks on air and naval bases, weapons depots, and army installations across Syria, destroying helicopters, planes, tanks, naval vessels, and several military research centres.

At the same time that it has taken advantage of the devastation of Hizbullah and the disarray in Syria, Israel has continued its war of genocide in Gaza, where it has expanded demographic and topographic changes to ensure the Strip will stay under its control after the war.

The war in Gaza, which began after Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on 7 October 2023, has so far left 45,000 Palestinians killed, vast areas of the coastal Strip destroyed, and 90 per cent of its population displaced by a combination of blockade and bombing.

Even if the incoming Trump administration’s diplomatic push to help reach a Gaza ceasefire and hostage-release deal succeeds, and a new civilian administration for the post-war period is created, the debilitating conditions in the enclave will make it unlivable.

Israeli demolition and displacement policy suggests that it is systematically removing Palestinians from the Strip, raising speculation about its intention to impose military control and pave the way for renewed Jewish settlements.

If Trump accepts Israel’s endgame in Gaza and ignores its threats to annex the West Bank, which would trigger the forced displacement of its population, he will definitely frustrate the prospects for a two-state solution and ultimately Middle East peace.

The cyclical escalation of violence and chaos in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria will likely unleash a chain of events and possibly multi-front confrontations in countries such as Iraq and Iran with far-reaching implications for the region’s shaky order.

In Iraq, the demise of Al-Assad’s Alawite regime in Syria and the weakening of the Lebanese group Hizbullah could bring many challenges to Shia rule that many Shias, including those in power, fear could become an existential threat as a result of Sunni empowerment in Syria.

Iraq will be in the eye of the storm if Syria descends into renewed civil war amid divisions among its communal groups over the crisis in their western neighbour. A broader communal conflict in Syria will complicate the situation for Iraq’s own sectarian and ethnic divide in unimaginable ways, even if Iraq is not directly involved in Syria.

The other major Middle East hotspot is Iran, which has been exploiting such conflicts as a way to re-impose itself in the region. Iran has supported the Al-Assad regime, Hizbullah, Hamas, and proxies in Iraq for years in order to expand its influence across the region.

The loss of Syria could be fatal to Iran because it deals a crushing blow to its expansionist policy in the Middle East. Fears of a possible domino effect from Syria have prompted Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to lash out at Israel and the United States as being behind Al-Assad’s collapse.

Responding to speculation that Iran and its Shia allies will be weaker as a result of the takeover in Syria, Khamenei vowed in a televised speech on 11 December that “the scope of the resistance will encompass the entire region more than ever.”

But even if the Islamic Republic does not cave in as a result of the partial defeat of its “Axis of Resistance,” a weakened Iran may seek to insulate itself by acquiring a nuclear weapon, causing a wider wave of proliferation across the region and posing a fundamental challenge for the new Middle East order emerging from the ongoing chaos.

As the crisis in Syria began to unfold, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Tehran would begin enriching uranium with thousands of advanced centrifuges at its main nuclear facilities, raising fears over the Islamic Republic’s programme as it enriches the material to near weapons grade.

As the Middle East in turmoil awaits Trump, he was reportedly weighing options for stopping Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon, including the possibility of preventive airstrikes, a move that would break with the longstanding policy of containing Tehran with diplomacy and sanctions.

The crisis in Syria, largely due to Turkey’s support for Al-Assad’s opponents, has also showed that Ankara is competing to become a regional power and a key partner in reshaping the Middle East.

Ankara armed and organised a collection of Syria’s rebels, and by condoning their ascent to power, it is hoping to have a say in Syria’s future and be able to join the dominant Middle East powers that are seeking to reshape the region’s future.

Turkey has already started expanding its reach into Syria, seeking to establish a foothold in the country, destroy the political structure in the Kurdish enclave in the north of the country and extend a security zone along its 928 km southern border.

While Trump characterised the rebel ouster of Al-Assad as an “unfriendly takeover” by Turkey, Western countries and Arab powerhouses fear Ankara’s involvement in Syria signals its increasing appetite for a bigger regional role.

Given the trajectory of turmoil in the interconnected region, large scale conflicts in the Middle East are increasingly likely to escalate if the ongoing state of crisis cannot be reversed.

Taken together, these conflicts, marked by intricate alliances, ideological confrontation, and geostrategic rivalries, will likely keep the region in a near-constant state of tension, sparing no part of its geopolitical landscape.

In addition to the internal conflicts, military escalation, and geopolitical competition in the above-mentioned flashpoints, several other issues may also impact other countries that are threatened with the prospect of becoming fragile or failed states.

The Arab countries face significant socioeconomic challenges, including the persistent issues of growing poverty rates, high unemployment, mounting debt, fiscal constraints, poor education, and a deteriorating environment.

The most obvious pitfall is associated with deepening regional inequality and the increasing gap between the haves and have nots in the region that threatens political and social stability and is seeing a shift in the regional balance of power to the oil-rich countries in the Gulf.

Other major risks facing the Arab world are the lack of good governance, weak political participation, and the deficiency in democracy and various freedoms, and these are also contributing to political instability and the ongoing conflicts.

As the political turmoil escalates and socioeconomic challenges continue to create mounting pressures on domestic political orders with worsening income disparities and marginalisation, there is an unmistakable geopolitical spectre looming over the Middle East, constituting a chilling perspective which is absent from public debate.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 December, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly