Three years on, how October 7 redrew the map of the Middle East

Three years after the October 7 attacks on Israel and the launch of Israel's war in Gaza, the Middle East has been reshaped by sustained conflict, economic turmoil and a dramatic upheaval in the regional balance of power. Alliances that once defined the region have fractured, US influence has been diminished, and a new set of actors has stepped into the space left behind. The transformation has been swift, brutal and, analysts say, far from finished.

Perhaps the most striking casualty has been the network of alliances that Iran spent decades building across the region. That structure, long central to Tehran's ability to project power, has been hit hard and severely weakened. Yemen's Houthi rebels remain one notable exception, continuing to act as an arm of Iranian strategy far from Iran's own borders. Much of the rest of the edifice, however, has buckled under sustained Israeli pressure.

Israel has secured tangible military gains. Senior leaders of both Hezbollah, the Lebanese group, and Hamas, the Palestinian group, have been killed, stripping both organisations of experience and command continuity. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was assassinated in February, removing the figure who had for decades anchored Tehran's regional strategy. Israel now occupies most of Gaza, where more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed and much of the enclave has been reduced to rubble.

Yet those gains have come at a heavy strategic price. Israel's military campaign has isolated it from traditional allies and left it globally unpopular, including within the United States itself. The prospect of further normalisation deals between Israel and Arab states now appears remote, at least in the near term. Instead of consolidating peace, Israel continues to launch attacks across the region, crossing previously held red lines — among them a 2025 strike on Doha, Qatar — and leading many governments to view it as the primary source of unrest in the Middle East.

The consequences have been most acutely felt in Washington. HA Hellyer of the Royal United Services Institute noted that before October 7, US policy in the Middle East rested almost entirely on normalising Israel's presence through the Abraham Accords, the landmark deals that brought several Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, into open relations with Israel. "Israel's response to the October 7 attack ended that," Hellyer said, arguing that the strategy lies in ruins.

Rather than presiding over a stable region with Israel at its centre, the United States found itself drawn into a war with Iran this year. Tehran responded by targeting US allies across the Gulf, shattering the perception that the American security umbrella could reliably protect its partners. "There's been a loss of faith in the US as a singularly sufficient security guarantor," Hellyer explained, describing a shift in thinking that has spread well beyond the immediate battlefield.

That loss of confidence has triggered a diplomatic scramble. Regional states are now talking to a wider range of external actors while, in some cases, deepening existing ties with Washington. Hellyer pointed to initiatives such as the Mecca security pact, an agreement signed in August by Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan under which an attack on one signatory is to be treated as an attack on all. Such arrangements, he suggested, reflect a region urgently searching for alternative ways to safeguard its own security.

Alongside this erosion of trust has come a dramatic reordering of alliances and rivalries. Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, observed that the Middle East has always operated on multiple alignments, but that the trend has intensified. External actors have gained fresh leverage: Turkiye has expanded its influence in Syria, while China has inserted itself into negotiations over the end of the war with Iran, prompted in part by fears for its own energy supplies.

Vakil highlighted a striking reversal in the roles of the two principal belligerents. "It's ironic, since October 7, it's Israel that has emerged as the revisionist power and Iran almost as the status quo power," she said. Tehran now appears more focused on recovering the ground it has lost over the past three years than on pushing beyond it — a striking inversion of the dynamic that prevailed before the war began.

But Vakil cautioned against overstating Israeli dominance or casting it as a regional superpower. While Israel may be the preponderant military force in the Middle East, she argued, true power is typically measured by the ability to project stability — something Israel has shown neither the ability nor the willingness to do. Military supremacy, in her analysis, has not translated into the political control that lasting influence requires.

Economic leverage has emerged as an equally potent weapon. Although Israel and the US had hoped February's attacks would swiftly topple Iran's government, they instead opened a new front. Tehran now wields significant economic pressure over Israel, the United States and their partners through the Strait of Hormuz, which borders Iran and typically carries about a fifth of the world's oil and gas, and through Bab al-Mandeb, which is threatened by its Houthi allies.

The economic pain has been unevenly distributed. Western economies, cushioned by alternative supplies, have so far absorbed the shock more easily than others, while energy markets and regional states remain exposed to disruption. Whatever Tehran's ultimate intentions, the message is clear: even a weakened Iran retains the capacity to inflict costly damage on its adversaries by exploiting the world's most critical maritime chokepoints.

Taken together, these shifts amount to nothing less than a redrawing of the Middle East's political map. The order that existed before October 7 — built on US security guarantees, gradual Arab-Israeli normalisation and fear of Iranian power — has been dismantled. In its place stands a fragmented, multi-aligned region, less predictable and considerably more dangerous than the one that existed three years ago.