At a time of mounting international and regional instability, accelerating shifts in alliances, deepening wars and crises, and the visible erosion of the authority, credibility, and value base of international institutions, the report is a major annual publication offering a rich body of analytical and forward-looking assessments on the strategic transformations shaping both the international and regional orders, as well as the dynamics of internal change in Egypt.
The report appears at an exceptionally sensitive moment. Although its framework was designed in the first quarter of 2025 and its preparation was completed ahead of publication in February 2026, events soon overtook the printing process with the outbreak of the second U.S.-Israeli war with Iran on 28 February 2026. That dramatic development prompted the centre, in a short but critical span of time, to incorporate an additional reading of the conflict and its possible trajectories through 2026, underscoring both the report’s timeliness and its strong anticipatory character.
This year’s edition carries added significance as it coincides with the 40th anniversary of the Arab Strategic Report, the oldest and first annual strategic report of its kind in the Arab world. Since the publication of its inaugural edition in 1986, the Al-Ahram Centre has issued the report on a regular yearly basis, establishing it as a central reference point and an intellectual benchmark for numerous Arab strategic reports that followed, many of them drawing inspiration from its title, structure, and scientific approach.
In many ways, the 2025 edition reaffirms the depth of the centre’s forecasting capacity. Its themes, conceived well before the outbreak of the latest war, reflect a disciplined analytical reading of reality and of the most probable trajectories of crises at both the global and regional levels. Backed by four decades of accumulated institutional experience, the report penetrates to the heart of the structural disorders shaping today’s world and region, identifying the imbalances and vulnerabilities that keep events open to multiple possibilities in a rapidly changing environment.
Nearly 40 experts, researchers, and assistant researchers from inside and outside the centre contributed to the report, reflecting the engagement of the Egyptian strategic mind with transformations unfolding globally, regionally, and domestically. Beyond the more than six months devoted to preparing the substantive chapters, the contributors also spent considerable time refining the report’s overarching conclusions and producing a coherent overall reading that preserves the flow of its three main sections — international, Arab/regional, and Egyptian — within a single unifying thread. That thread is captured in one central proposition: that the state of the world has become more consequential for the region, just as the state of the region has become more consequential for Egypt.
At the international level, the report examines profound structural shifts unfolding under U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, which it describes as having sought to entrench authoritarian tendencies while bypassing international institutions and liberal norms, both within the United States and in its external conduct. In the report’s reading, the international system is moving toward a condition of fluidity that increasingly borders on disorder, as the frameworks that once regulated international relations erode and zero-sum conflict gains ground at the expense of institutionalism, legality, and multilateralism.
Within this context, “Trumpism” is presented as having redefined American global leadership by moving it away from institutional, multilateral management toward direct deal-making and narrow conceptions of interest. In doing so, it has weakened the foundations of the liberal international order and opened the way for more confrontational modes of international interaction. The report argues that domestic transformations within the United States have thus become a structural variable in the stability of the international system, rather than merely a temporary factor influencing U.S. foreign policy behaviour.
The report also tracks China’s continued advance as a rising pole seeking to reshape global balances of power, reflecting a gradual eastward shift in the centre of gravity of world politics. Yet this rise, it notes, has not so far produced a balanced multipolar order. Instead, it has introduced the world to an increasingly sharp and still only partially understood competitive interaction, one whose full dimensions remain in formation.
At the same time, the traditional American role and China’s rise have coincided with an unprecedented test for NATO in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, which exposed notable divergences in threat perceptions and interests between the United States and its European allies. That divergence, the report suggests, has reopened fundamental questions about the future of an alliance established more than seven decades ago.
Parallel to these developments, international institutions have suffered a marked decline in their ability to manage global crises. The repeated use of the veto in the UN Security Council has contributed to a degree of functional paralysis, while the United Nations and its agencies continue to face worsening funding crises amid declining American and broader Western commitment. The politicization of humanitarian action and the erosion of international consensus have further weakened these institutions, while giving greater weight to bilateral and regional frameworks that appear more closely aligned with the national interests of their sponsors.
The report also highlights qualitative changes in international life that became especially visible in 2025. Among them is artificial intelligence, which has emerged as one of the foremost determinants of power in the contemporary international system, reshaping the nature of warfare and military doctrine while opening the door to a new kind of arms race that may deepen global instability. Another key theme is the growing disruption of maritime straits and strategic chokepoints, a development linked to the geo-economic dimension of international transformation. In this new environment, securing supply chains and commercial movement has become inseparable from national security — a reality brought into especially sharp relief by the crisis resulting from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz during the 2026 U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
In a more specific conceptual contribution, the report argues that Trump administration policies in 2025 revealed what it calls a new pattern of colonial behaviour, described as “selective colonialism,” linked to the geography of rare minerals and strategic waterways in accordance with the administration’s particular view of power and control. More broadly, the report concludes that ongoing change in the international system carries the indicators of a structural transformation in which political, military, economic, and technological dimensions are increasingly fused into a complex conflictual pattern that reproduces instability not as a passing transitional phase, but as a defining feature of the new international order.
In that sense, the report sees the world as being pushed by increasingly authoritarian practices toward a wider transformation in its normative framework, legal rules, and institutional foundations. It argues that this condition resembles, and in some respects surpasses, classical colonial patterns, moving into what it describes as a state of international “predation.” The Middle East, in particular, has become one of the clearest arenas in which these tendencies are visible, as the Trump administration has shown marked bias toward one regional actor whose vision, interests, and military gambles it has sought to support — namely, Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The report notes that the authoritarian and highly personalized tendencies evident in Trump administration behaviour have produced assessments that, for some observers, point to the danger of a world war, while for others they signal a broader symptom of American decline that may evoke, in some respects, the trajectory of the British Empire after the 1956 war and the tripartite aggression against Egypt.
At the regional level, the report asks whether the Middle East is moving toward a deeply conflict-ridden order — or even toward the emergence of “two Middle Easts.” No sooner had the Al-Ahram Centre completed the report’s scientific material and prepared it for print than the Gulf was shaken by the outbreak of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran on 28 February 2026. The report reads that the war is more intense and comprehensive in its objectives than previous rounds of confrontation. For Israel, it is framed as the “mother of all rounds,” intended to crown the results of earlier wars and redraw the map of the Middle East. For Iran, it is a war of existence, destiny, regional role, and national dignity. Between Israel, the United States, and Iran, meanwhile, stand the Arab Gulf states, whose stability and prosperity are directly at stake.
The report argues that 2025 had already witnessed a further consolidation of imbalance in the regional strategic order as a result of the repercussions of Israeli wars and Israel’s drive to dominate the region and alter the map of the Middle East in line with ambitions associated with the idea of Greater Israel. This hegemonic tendency, it adds, was accompanied by a fragmenting path led by some regional, factional, and local components within Arab states affected by conflict and crisis, whose interests converged with those of Israel, leaving the Arab world in 2025 exposed to layered and compound fragmentation.
By late 2025 and early 2026, the region had come to appear divided between two axes — or what the report describes as two Middle Easts. The first is an overt axis seeking to employ military superiority to reorder the map of the region. Led by Israel and supported by the United States and some Arab forces, while also intersecting with India, Ethiopia, and a number of smaller sectarian, regional, and local formations, this may be described as the “attacking Middle East.” The report notes that Netanyahu outlined his vision for such a Middle East on more than one occasion in 2025, culminating in a particularly explicit statement on 22 February 2026, when he said Israel was working to create an integrated system akin to a six-way alliance around and within the Middle East, bringing together India, Greece, Cyprus, and Arab, African, and Asian states against what he called the “extremist Shiite axis” and the “emerging extremist Sunni axis,” in a geopolitical arc extending “from India to Cush.”
In contrast, the report identifies the outline of a latent Middle Eastern axis that has neither declared resistance nor embraced radicalism, and has not openly announced itself as being in direct enmity with the Israeli-centred regional axis. Yet it remains in a state of strategic watchfulness and restrained anticipation, animated by a growing sense among some of its components that the region may be facing a successive pattern of Israeli-American targeting driven by a Zionist-evangelical current animated by a civilizational hostility toward the Arab-Islamic East.
The report further argues that 2025 witnessed attempts to invert the facts of history itself, through repeated Israeli efforts to implant new narratives in public consciousness in a process resembling the retroactive cultivation of an “Israeli civilization” in the region. By consolidating the claim that a biblical Israeli civilizational entity had existed for thousands of years, these efforts, in the report’s view, do not simply seek to affirm what Israel presents as its own civilization, but also to negate the original civilization of the region — the Arab-Islamic one — and replace it with a biblical-Israeli construct. This, it suggests, amounts to a form of historical appropriation that exceeds even the geographical dispossession that began nearly eight decades ago.
Within this broader context, the report sees the second Israeli-American war with Iran as an event whose most consequential repercussions may become clearer only months and years after any ceasefire. Although the war began with demands related to Iran’s nuclear programme, ballistic missiles, and regional proxy connections, it may end by opening the door to all possibilities.
The Arab/regional section of the report is structured around a number of major themes, including: the Arab system and how “vacancies of role” are deepening its crisis amid a more “Middle Easternized” order; states suffering compound crises, where frontline conflict has given way to factional conflict; regional neighboring powers and the maps redrawn by changing proxy roles; the idea of “Greater Israel” and the anxiety surrounding the birth of its so-called second version; the Gulf states and the ways disagreements and wars threaten both their narrative and their model; the Iranian الداخل and the indicators of both cohesion and strain under pressure; Syria in 2025 as a transitional phase shaped by regional role-balancing; the digital public sphere as a new measure of Arab relations; the Maghreb states between principled support for the Palestinian cause and divergent normalization paths; the Palestinian narrative and its expanding reach beyond the Global South; and the relationship between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas as both prepare for a widening zone of uncertainty.
The Egyptian section of the report turns to a year of major political, economic, and social change. Some of these shifts were driven by domestic Egyptian developments, while others were shaped by the regional and international environment, which remains full of fast-moving surprises under conditions of war and conflict. In such an atmosphere, the report suggests, Egypt must adapt to a regional environment defined by fluidity and continual change.
On the domestic political front, Egypt in 2025 held elections for both the Senate and the House of Representatives, producing a parliament with distinctive features examined closely in the report. It pays particular attention to the presidential statement issued on 19 November 2025, seeking to interpret the reasons behind the unusually swift and public form of presidential intervention and to assess the impact of that response on the broader electoral landscape. The report also discusses the likely performance of the new parliament in light of the circumstances of its formation and the responsibilities entrusted to it, while underscoring the importance of reforms that would allow political parties to build a stronger presence in public and political life, especially before the state moves toward organizing the 2030 presidential election.
In the legislative sphere, a number of laws were passed that generated broad national debate as part of a broader effort to reorganize the relationship between state and society and to address structural imbalances accumulated over decades. These laws covered sectors including housing and old rents, labour, education, and healthcare. What linked them, the report argues, was a common effort to address entrenched practices and distortions, some of them rooted in loopholes in previous legislation, which had produced economic and social imbalances over time, especially amid the deep transformations Egyptian society has undergone across the decades.
As for the public sphere, the report notes qualitative transformations in both its structure and in the mechanisms through which Egyptian social debate now takes shape. The centre of gravity has shifted from traditional actors such as parties, unions, and newspapers to the digital space, which has become a principal arena for the formation of public priorities. Within that sphere, debate has increasingly opened onto value-laden questions linked to identity, culture, domestic violence, women’s rights, and the limits of digital expression.
Economically, the report records a relative improvement in GDP and sectoral growth indicators during 2025, alongside lower inflation and a higher contribution by the private sector to investment, despite continuing challenges that were reflected in the trade balance. In response, the state launched the “National Narrative for Economic Development” initiative with the aim of redefining policy priorities and strengthening their integration with the government’s broader programme. In connection with the economic file, Egypt also intensified efforts to strengthen the infrastructure of digital transformation and to enter the field of artificial intelligence as one of the prospective pillars of the national economy. Here, the report calls for the preparation of a national strategy to develop local alternatives for digital services, improve responsiveness in times of emergency and crisis, and update the national cybersecurity strategy.
On the military and security front, the report says Egypt continued to develop its defence capabilities while adopting a broader understanding of security that includes economic, informational, and social dimensions. That approach aims to strengthen institutional capacities and raise public awareness of emerging risks in ways that protect national cohesion and alert society to the dangers the state may face.
In foreign policy, the report says Egypt continued to pursue an approach of “strategic balance,” one centred on preserving the independence of national decision-making while deepening strategic partnerships with major powers and international groupings to support national security, advance development and regional integration, and promote diplomatic settlements to conflicts and crises.
Taken together, the Arab Strategic Report 2025 presents not simply a review of developments over the past year, but a broader interpretive framework for understanding a world and a region in accelerated transition. Released at a moment when war, institutional erosion, technological disruption, and geopolitical rivalry are converging with unusual intensity, the report stands as both a record of a turbulent strategic landscape and a warning that the instability now gripping the international and regional orders may no longer be transitional, but increasingly structural.
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