President Donald Trump threatened Iran with annihilation at the United Nations this week, while the Kuwaiti crown prince railed against “Iranian aggression” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, facing another tight election, declared that Israel is waging a “battle against the barbarians.” As part of our in-depth coverage of the deepening regional crises, Middle East Policy announces its new double issue, featuring 23 studies—most of them open access—examining the Iran War, Israeli leadership and global recognition of Palestine, justice in the Levant, and Turkey’s challenges inside and out.
The table of contents of our Fall 2026 installment is below. Readers can still access our special publication on the origins of the Iran War as well as our double summer issue. If you find this article useful, please forward it to others you believe will benefit. You can register to receive our weekly updates here. And please follow us on the social media platforms X and LinkedIn.
As Netanyahu struggles to hold power in the fall elections, the journal examines the effects of the prime minister’s actions at home and across the region. Ruth Hanau Santini and Andrea Novellis contend that Israel’s failure to anticipate the October 7 attacks, despite multiple and specific warnings, was driven by assumptions that denied Hamas political agency and discounted its pursuit of Palestinian self-determination. Instead, the prime minister and his government assumed that the group was contained and seeking only economic viability, assumptions that became embedded in the intelligence process.
The authors show how this paradigm shaped the standard operating procedures of the bureaucracy, which neither detected nor prepared sufficiently for the Hamas massacres:
Israeli political and security institutions did not merely receive evidence about Hamas; they classified it through a governing paradigm that made some warnings actionable and others implausible. When a depoliticizing conflict-management frame defined common sense, dissenting interpretations were treated as noise, and anomalies were not interrogated but dismissed.
By contrast, Bulent Aras shows in his new article in the journal, Netanyahu inflated the external threats facing Israel, especially from Iran, which affected both public discourse and military planning. This analysis of a decade of Netanyahu’s speeches and Israeli military actions finds an approximately 24-month lag between peaks in executive threat inflation and subsequent military escalation. “The peaks of executive hostility occurred during the 2023 judicial overhaul and the post-October 7 coalition crisis of early 2024,” Aras writes. “Roughly two years later, the state was in a multifront war with Iran.”
The results of the upcoming Israeli election are not likely to change one aspect of Israeli political culture and behavior: the determination to prevent Palestinian autonomy. However, states across the world, most importantly in Europe, have begun to recognize the state of Palestine. Dalal Iriqat acknowledges that this is not a miracle cure for the ills of the occupation, but the gains to the Palestinians are tangible. “Although recognition alone does not resolve occupation or alter material realities on the ground, it creates the legal and institutional conditions through which such change may become possible,” she observes. “Where recognition remains declaratory, its effects are limited; where it is embedded in concrete policy measures, it becomes materially consequential.”
In a comprehensive study of how the Iran War has altered the regional order, Thomas Juneau contends that American and Israeli actions have eroded their strategic advantages. As a result, he argues, a regional “balance of terror” has been restored. The University of Ottawa scholar lays out his prescription for how Washington can compensate for its strategic blunder.
Despite the chaos and uncertainty in the Gulf, Rory Miller and Şaban Kardaş argue that “the structural obstacles that historically prevented the emergence of an autonomous Gulf security and defense arrangement remain largely intact.” Although key states such as Saudi Arabia are seeking alternatives to the US security umbrella, Miller and Kardaş examine the history of such moves and find substantial obstacles to creating both the capacity and trust required to reduce US influence.
In further analyses of the war, the new issue examines both the opportunities and risks for Russia, whose support for the Islamic Republic has proved to be mostly transactional. Other articles explore Tehran’s imposition of domestic order through digital authoritarianism and how political Islam in Iran is continually reshaped through competition among hard-line authorities, reformers, and everyday practitioners.
The balance of the fall journal illuminates the quest for justice and reconciliation in post-Assad Syria after the horrors of the civil war; the Islamic State’s subjugation of Muslim women; and Turkey’s torturous peace process with Kurdish rebels, narrowly defined but robust commitment to NATO, and relations with key states in the Gulf and the Horn of Africa.
Middle East Policy, Fall 2026—Double Issue!
PROSPECTS AND EFFECTS OF PERPETUAL WAR
Open access!
The Stability-Instability Paradox and the Evolving Balance of Terror in the Middle East
Thomas Juneau
Open access!
Visions of Gulf Security in an Era of Uncertainty: Between External Alignment and Regional Autonomy
Rory Miller | Şaban Kardaş
Open access!
Russia’s Strategic Paradox: Short-Term Gains, Long-Term Risks from the Iran War
Namig Abbasov | Emil S. Aslan
Open access!
Iran’s Gas Sector in Conflict: Infrastructure Vulnerability & Market Implications
Umud Shokri
Open access!
Qatar and Iran: Market Access Under Geopolitical Conflict
Ahmet Hakan Özkan
The Scholar’s Dilemma: Rational Study of Irrational Wars
Annie Tracy Samuel
BREAKING THE CYCLE IN ISRAEL-PALESTINE?
Open access!
Israel’s Netanyahu Trap
Bulent Aras
Paradigm Lock-In and Strategic Surprise: Explaining Israel’s October 7 Intelligence Failure
Ruth Hanau Santini | Andrea Novellis
Beyond Symbolism: The Effects of Palestinian State Recognition
Dalal Iriqat
IRAN’S DOMESTIC ORDER & ALLIANCES
Russia and Iran: The Axis of Transactions Unraveled
Federico Manfredi Firmian
Open access!
Iran’s Revolutionary Situation and Digital Authoritarianism: 1979 vs. 2026
Mohsen Askari
Open access!
Rethinking Political Islam in Iran: Contestation, Authority, and Reform
Nagapushpa Devendra
Social Perceptions in Yemen: Fragmented Power and Everyday Survival
Anef Taher | Ahmed Alduais | Muhammed Al Khayyatt
JUSTICE AND RIVALRY IN THE LEVANT
Islamic State and the Subjugation of Muslim Women
Maha Ghalwash
Transitional Justice in Syria: Prosecuting Bashar al-Assad and Senior Leaders
Mariam Bin Ghaith
GEOPOLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SHIFTS
The Reconfiguration of Sunni Alignments: A Multi-Track Theory
Ahmed Khalfa
Open access!
Gulf Energy Transition: The UAE and Saudi Arabia
Ahmet Hakan Özkan
Saudi Arabia’s Economic Diversification and Geopolitical Risk
Osama D. Sweidan
TURKISH PERCEPTIONS OF THREAT
The Torturous Turkey-PKK Peace Process
Michael M. Gunter
Open access!
Strategic and Discursive Shifts in Türkiye’s Perceptions of NATO, 1952–2020
Melih Nadi Tutan
ANKARA’S REGIONAL PARTNERSHIPS
Open access!
From Competition to Compartmentalization: Rethinking Türkiye-Gulf Relations
Betul Dogan-Akkas
Open access!
Foreign Aid as Statecraft: Muslim Donors in the Horn of Africa
Yunus Turhan
Open access!
The Türkiye-Qatar Partnership: From Ottoman Roots to Strategic Alliance
Ismail Köse | Fatma Alghussein
BOOK REVIEWS
The Wretched of the Earth: Rashid Khalidi, Omer Bartov, and the Palestinian Tragedy
Review essay by Mohammed Ayoob
Cheterian, The 44-Day War: Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Struggle for Nagorno-Karabakh
Reviewed by M. Hakan Yavuz
Manfredi Firmian, War in Syria and the Middle East: A Political and Economic History
Reviewed by Bahram P. Kalviri
Strand, Israel and the Gaza Strip since 1967: A History of Occupation, Domination and Unilateralism
Reviewed by Abdulgani Bozkurt
Walter, Contested City: Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad
Reviewed by Yasir Kuoti
Knudsen and Tobin, Urban Displacement: Syria’s Refugees in the Middle East
Reviewed by Zubair Hussain
Faghih et al., The Persian Gulf: Historical Perspectives, Maritime Silk Road, and Hydropolitics
Reviewed by Ahmed Bux Jamali
Harmon et al., A Daring Enterprise: A US-Egyptian Partnership and the Case for Soft Power
Reviewed by Robert Springborg
Ahmad, Trajectories of Extremism: Child and Youth Radicalization and Recruitment in the Shadow of ISIS
Reviewed by Usman Anwar and Muhammad Atif
Haberman and Swan, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
Review essay by A.R. Joyce