The Middle East Is Being Rewritten, But the Kurds Must Not Be Left Out

Kurds rally in Amed in June 2011 during Turkey’s general elections in support of the pro-Kurdish rights | Photo Credits: Kamal Chomani

The Middle East is entering yet another historic turning point. Since  7 October 2023, actors in the region have been rearranging themselves with a speed and decisiveness unseen in decades.

As Vladimir I. Lenin once observed, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”  For example, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s forty years of investment in regional hegemony—and more than one decade of coordinated Russian and Iranian support for the al-Assad regime in Syria—collapsed in a matter of days.

Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been slowed, its missile network weakened, and its non-state allies—once its most strategic assets—are increasingly constrained. Israel’s quiet humiliation of Qatar has sent a clear reminder to every regional capital: no state in the Middle East is fully sovereign, and all remain vulnerable to Israel’s military and financial reach. This fear has sped up the Turkish-Kurdish reconciliation and forced Qatar and Saudi Arabia to seek guarantees from the U.S..

Behind these events lies a deeper structural truth. For years, the U.S. has guaranteed Israel a “Qualitative Military Edge,” prohibiting Washington from selling advanced weapons to Middle Eastern states if doing so erodes Israel’s military superiority. Yet, successive American presidents, particularly Donald Trump, have tested the boundaries of that doctrine. Trump has promised to sell F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia and did approve them for the UAE, despite Abu Dhabi’s incomplete normalization with Israel and its military cooperation with China. The Biden administration halted the sale, fearing that advanced U.S. technology would fall under Beijing’s reach.

Saudi Arabia today has neither nuclear weapons nor F-35s. What it does have is ambition and an urgent need for American protection. International relations are not governed by moral principles or international law. They are governed by power. And Riyadh knows it must extract maximum value from Washington, finding especially in Trump a golden opportunity, while simultaneously pursuing nuclear capability and long-range deterrence technologies. A Saudi–Pakistani security partnership, once dismissed as symbolic, now carries an unmistakable message to Jerusalem.

This dynamic is not new. On a February day in 1945, aboard the USS Quincy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz struck a now-legendary bargain: U.S. security guarantees in exchange for Saudi oil. The U.S. may not rely on Saudi oil anymore, but it does need Saudi money. That pact anchored American influence in the Middle East and cemented the dollar’s dominance over global energy markets. Eight decades later, one of Abdulaziz’s descendants, Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman, is preparing to sign another sweeping agreement with a U.S. president, one that could redefine the balance of power for another generation. Albeit, this redefinition won’t go without being challenged by regional and global powers with strategic interests in the region.

But the region in 2025 is not the same as the region of 1945. China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, and a landscape of non-state actors complicate every move. Rearmament is accelerating from Tehran to Tel Aviv. By the early 2030s, when Saudi Arabia is expected to receive its first F-35s—should the U.S. Congress approve the deal—the Middle East could face a destabilizing arms race unless a new strategic balance emerges among the regional powers.

Amid these tectonic shifts, the Kurds cannot remain an afterthought. The Kurds have never been as strong as today. Yet, they are divided, with many lacking a vision and understanding of these regional and global geostrategic changes.

Turkey, a NATO member, has no sustainable path other than peace with its Kurdish population.

Turkey, a NATO member, has no sustainable path other than peace with its Kurdish population. The current peace process between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has created hopes for the people in Turkey; however, this should not be treated as a tactical approach from Ankara, it should be treated as a historic opportunity, as described by both PKK leader Abdullah Öcalanand Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli. Iraq’s Kurds remain influential but strategically disoriented and internally divided as the political elite and the ruling parties cannot overcome their narrow family and party interests on one hand, and decades of distrust and rivalry and bloodshed on the other. In Syria, the Kurdish-led Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES) faces its most delicate phase yet, its future tied directly to whether Turkey chooses negotiation over confrontation. In Iran, the Kurds have political potential but lack unified leadership and vision.

Iran possibly cannot survive as a unified country unless it redrafts a new social contract with its people, in particular with the Kurds.

Iran possibly cannot survive as a unified country unless it redrafts a new social contract with its people, in particular with the Kurds. Turkey, Syria, and Iran should learn a lesson from Iraq that sharing power with the Kurds never weakened the country; on the contrary, it helped the country to thrive.

All in all, the new Middle East cannot be shaped without the Kurds. Every state that is weakened internally will feel pressure from regional powers seeking dominance.

For decades, several Kurdish political actors have allowed personal rivalries and party interests to overshadow national strategy. But there is  hope as recently seen in  how the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) leadership, especially Prime Minister Masrour Barzani, historically hostile to the PKK and the DAANES administration, received Mazloum Abdi, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) General Commander and Elham Ahmad, co-chair of the Department of Foreign Relations of the DAANES, in Duhok at the Middle East Peace and Security forum at the American University of Kurdistan. Beyond constituting merely a public relations gesture, this should lead to a new understanding among Kurds to become a political force in the four countries they inhabit, to secure not only their own security, but also a regional peace and security.

All in all, the new Middle East cannot be shaped without the Kurds. Every state that is weakened internally will feel pressure from regional powers seeking dominance. Conflict with the Kurds brings no strategic benefit to Turkey, Iraq, Syria, or Iran. Peace does. The Kurds, in the meantime, should also further abandon their ethno-nationalistic separation rhetoric—as they have done—to create stronger trust within these countries.

In the coming months and years, as Turkey takes steps toward a new phase of dialogue, the region will decide whether the Kurds are included as partners or treated once again as obstacles. This time, the stakes—for the Middle East and for the Kurds themselves—are far higher than before. If peace does not win, the Middle East’s changes won’t bring meaningful regional stability and prosperity.

In Hamit Bozarslan’s words, “the Middle East will only change if it leaves behind what I call the cult of Thanatos—the politics of death, sectarianism, and conservatism—to imagine another future.”

The time is due. It is never too late to change path and imagine another future.