2026-05-26T14:17:33+00:00
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Shafaq News
Six years after the Abraham Accords were signed, the
framework that was supposed to normalize the Middle East has produced four
signatories, stalled at Saudi Arabia, and watched Gaza burn for two years
without adding a single significant Arab power.
US President Donald Trump’s response, delivered on Truth
Social, was to declare the expansion mandatory, encouraging Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, Pakistan, Turkiye, Egypt, and Jordan to sign simultaneously as part of
any deal with Iran, warning that refusal “shows bad intention.” The
announcement was addressed to a region that has spent six years demonstrating,
through its silence and its conditions, that the framework does not fit the
circumstances it was designed to resolve.
The demand triggered a brief silence on a phone call
yesterday with the assembled leaders of those countries. Saudi Arabia and Qatar
stated that normalization requires an irreversible path to a Palestinian state.
Pakistan said it is not committed.
Read more: Trump’s balancing act with Iran tests diplomacy and deterrence
Announcement Nobody Asked For
Haitham Numan, professor of political science at the
University of Exeter, told Shafaq News that what is happening is “closer
to media and political pressure linked to domestic American considerations,
particularly with midterm electoral deadlines approaching,” and that the
real direction of the region “remains unclear.”
Iranian political analyst, Mahdi Azizi, stated to our agency
that Trump “is seeking to present an image of political victory
domestically, even if it is not achieved on the ground,” and that any
understanding with Iran “will be used to market an image of restoring American
balance in the Middle East, even if it does not radically change the
reality.”
In an interview with Shafaq News from Ramallah —the
territory whose future is the condition the region has set for normalization—
Ashraf Akka said the push “reflects complex political pressures inside the
United States and Israel more than it reflects genuine regional
consensus,” and that linking Iran negotiations to a regional reshaping
“will not be completed easily because of the complexities of the conflict
and the rejection by key parties.”
Precondition Trump didn’t List
Firas Ilyas, professor of international relations at the
University of Mosul, told Shafaq News that what the Trump administration wants
is not simply a deal with Iran but “a complete rearrangement of the
regional order so that Israel becomes a natural part of the security and
economic system of the Middle East,” treating the Palestinian question as
a variable to be managed rather than a condition to be met.
That project runs directly into what the region’s most significant
powers have publicly stated. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have both said
normalization requires an irreversible path to a Palestinian state —a
precondition the Accords framework does not address. Gaza has been at war for
more than two years. Lebanon sustained strikes during the regional conflict.
Iran has not moved from its core positions despite the ceasefire and ongoing
nuclear negotiations. The conditions that would make the Accords expansion
viable are further away today than when the original agreements were signed in
2020.
Baghdad’s Impossible Position
Iraq did not choose to be the test case for Trump’s regional
vision. It became one because its internal contradictions mirror the regional
ones at the highest resolution; a state that cannot say yes to normalization
without triggering a domestic political crisis, and cannot say no without
managing pressure from Washington on which its fiscal and security architecture
depends.
Read more: Normalization as a RED LINE in Iraq
The country has no diplomatic relations with Israel, a 2022
law criminalizing any form of ties with it, and 2025 court sentences for
individuals convicted of promoting normalization on social media. Ilyas told
Shafaq News that Iraq represents “the most sensitive link” in the
proposed transformation precisely because of its internal divisions between
forces that reject normalization and those that call for openness.
In December 2025, a statement by Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako
mentioning “normalization” triggered an immediate political crisis in
Baghdad before anyone confirmed what he meant. The Chaldean Patriarchate was
forced to clarify that he had meant internal normalization within Iraq, not any
relationship with Israel. The word alone was enough to ignite a storm, and that
is the distance between Trump’s mandatory framework and the country he is
asking to enter it.
Iraqi Politician Mithal al-Alusi, speaking to Shafaq News,
locates the problem not in normalization as a concept but in the Accords as a
mechanism, “Real peace cannot be immediate deals. It requires direct and
mature dialogue between people and states, including Iraq and Israel.” The
framework is being imposed rather than built, and the transaction being offered
does not address the conditions that would give it legitimacy.
Mandatory for Whom
Numan told Shafaq News that the final verdict on this
initiative “will become clear after the American midterm elections, when
the balance of power within Congress crystallizes,” locating the Accords
expansion exactly where it belongs: not as a regional peace process with its
own internal logic, but as a domestic political project whose durability
depends on American electoral outcomes rather than regional conditions.
The Abraham Accords, as Trump has revived them, are a map of
a Middle East that does not yet exist. The silence, the stated conditions of
Riyadh and Doha, and the criminalization law in Baghdad, all describe the same
thing: a region still living inside the conditions the map was drawn to erase,
and that has not yet been given a reason to move.
Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.
